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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.1 | The History Cooperative
103.1  
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March, 2007
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Reviews

Five Days in Philadelphia
The Amazing 'We Want Willkie' Campaign of 1940 and How it Freed FDR to Save the Western World

By Charles Peters
(New York: Public Affairs Books, 2005. Pp. 256. Illustrations, index. $26.00.)

Charles Peters, founder of the liberal magazine The Washington Monthly, thinks something magical happened to American politics in 1940. The Republican party's nomination of native Hoosier Wendell Willkie for president, he argues, allowed the American people "to rise a notch or two above the usual limits of human nature" (p. 5). Without Willkie's support for Franklin Roosevelt's destroyers-for-bases deal and his tacit approval of the peacetime draft, Peters believes that the United States would have been, at best, even less prepared than it was for the Second World War. At worst, the victory of an isolationist Republican would have led to a nightmare, perhaps resembling the homegrown fascism described in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004). Unfortunately, Peters's book is an unsatisfying synthesis of potted history and reform tract, and it paints a misleading portrait of Willkie. . . .
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