Deja Vu
by Adam Reed
Barbara Branden's biographical essay on Ayn Rand in "Who is Ayn Rand" (New York, Random House 1962) tells us that "By the fall of 1940," Ayn Rand "had only seven hundred dollars left. It was under these circumstances that she took three months off from writing, using the last of her savings, to work for the election of Wendell Willkie." .... "The worst disappointment was the disintegration of Willkie throughout the campaign, as 'me, too' became his unstated motto." .... "On the night of the election, when Willkie made his concession speech, Ayn Rand had the desolate feeling of having fought in a battle that had been doomed - and worse: in a battle that had been betrayed by its own generals."
Willkie's passive betrayal was something of an enigma to me until Senator Zell Miller's speech at the recent (2004) Republican Convention. Miller said:
In the summer of 1940, I was an eight-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley.
Our country was not yet at war but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could.
President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America "all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger."
In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee.
And there is no better example of someone repealing their "private plans" than this good man.
He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.
And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.
Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between "here lies a president" or "here lies one who contributed to saving freedom", he would prefer the latter.
So now we know.
John Kerry is a patriotic altruist, just as Wendell Willkie had been. Other parallels are too obvious to list. I now expect John Kerry to throw the election of 2004 to George W. Bush, just as Wendell Willkie threw the election of 1940 to FDR. I have no stomach either for Bush's theocratic aspirations and platform, or for the wacky pacifism of Badnarik and company. I still expect to vote for Kerry, who for all his mixed premises remains a symbol and embodiment of secular rationality, and of the courage to change one's mind with evidence and context. But I am not an altruist, and I will not march in the army that General Kerry has already begun to betray.
Between now and the election I will concentrate on writing technical papers in Information Systems. And use my understanding of the present, ominous parallels to plan the rest of my life accordingly. In 1940 Ayn Rand was 35. I am 58 in 2004, and ought to be wiser.
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