{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-essay-in-coolidge-review-the-outsider-who-took-on-fdr/", "Young Essay in Coolidge Review: The Outsider Who Took on FDR", "2026-07-31", "2026", "2026-07", "Republican", "Senate", "IN", "Todd Young", "Y000064", "www.young.senate.gov", "toddyoung", "https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2014 The following essay by U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) was published by the Coolidge Review on July 31, 2026.\n\nTHE OUTSIDER WHO TOOK ON FDR\n\nBy Todd Young\n\nOn the campaign trail in 1940, Wendell Willkie makes his case against Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal\n\nOn a September evening in 1940, a torchlight parade marched through the streets of Rushville, a small town in east-central Indiana. Led by the local high school band and accompanied by an elephant named Meena, thousands of well-wishers arrived at the Baltimore & Ohio Station and gathered to hear a Hoosier speak from the rear platform of a railcar.\n\nThe speaker wasn\u2019t just any Hoosier. He hailed from Rushville himself. And he was the Republican Party\u2019s nominee for president.\n\nWendell Willkie was launching his campaign for the White House, about to depart on a journey to America\u2019s Pacific Coast that would see him traverse more than seven thousand miles.\n\nFrom the platform at Rushville, Willkie discussed his opponent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.\n\nThe Republican candidate denounced Roosevelt\u2019s class war, which he called a doctrine of \u201ceconomic sabotage.\u201d The greatest compliment Willkie could give the president was: \u201cHe does not understand the laws of economics, government finance, or the forces at work in the world today.\u201d\n\nWith that, fireworks streaked in the sky, spelling out two phrases.\n\nThe first: \u201cGod Bless America.\u201d\n\nThe second: \u201cWin with Willkie.\u201d\n\nAN UNLIKELY REPUBLICAN\n\nWe spend a great amount of time discussing the presidency and the men, no matter how obscure, who have held the highest office in the land. But we can also learn from some of the people who hoped to win it but never did. Chief among them is Wendell Willkie.\n\nWillkie was not your run-of-the-mill Republican. His parents were both lawyers, and it was said that the Willkie family\u2019s library in his hometown of Elwood was the best in Indiana. His father, Herman, read Shakespeare to young Wendell before bed.\n\nHerman Willkie was a progressive supporter of William Jennings Bryan. As a student at Indiana University, Wendell was a leftist himself. He was a delegate to the 1932 Democratic National Convention and eventually supported FDR.\n\nHow, then, did Willkie come to run against Roosevelt eight years later?\n\nIn part because he left Indiana, launching a successful corporate career. Willkie served as a lawyer for Firestone in Akron, Ohio\u2014where, it should be noted, he fought to keep the Ku Klux Klan off the city\u2019s school board. Then he moved to Manhattan, where he became counsel and then president of Commonwealth and Southern, a utilities holding company.\n\nBy the end of the 1920s, utilities had electrified cities, replacing kerosene lamps with electric lights. Amity Shlaes has called it a \u201cmiracle industry.\u201d\n\nBut as the decade ended, the stock market crashed. The Great Depression came, and, in 1933, FDR arrived in the White House. An era of \u201cbold, persistent experimentation\u201d began. The primary subject of this experimentation was business.\n\nAnd New Dealers singled out one business for torture: utilities. The Justice Department pursued utility leaders in court, Congress passed legislation to divide up their companies, and the government directly competed with utilities by establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration.\n\nWillkie at first assumed he could work with government. His negotiations with David Lilienthal, one of the TVA heads, disabused him of this idea. So did clashes with Roosevelt in the White House.\n\n\u201cMr. Willkie, I am one of your customers,\u201d the president said during one meeting.\n\n\u201cWe give you good service, don\u2019t we?\u201d Willkie replied.\n\nAs time passed, the New Deal experimentation grew more radical, and Roosevelt doubled down on his assault on American businesses. In many instances, the Supreme Court sided with the experimenters. So Willkie\u2019s Commonwealth and Southern eventually surrendered and sold part of itself to the TVA.\n\nBut Willkie, now a Republican, wouldn\u2019t be silenced.\n\nIn 1938 he appeared as a guest on the national radio program America\u2019s Town Meeting of the Air. He used the opportunity to speak out against the New Deal. Willkie told listeners, \u201cFor several years now we have been listening to a bedtime story.\u201d The New Dealers, he said, have been \u201ctelling us that the men who hold office in Washington are, by their very positions, endowed with a special virtue, that they are men of far vision and of exceptional ability and character.\u201d\n\nWillkie had previously called the TVA \u201cthe most useless and unnecessary of all the alphabetical joy-rides.\u201d He also quipped that the federal government\u2019s Tennessee Valley program \u201cwaters five states and drains the nation.\u201d\n\nNo other foe of the New Deal had spoken so powerfully on behalf of economic freedom as Willkie. And none warned so eloquently about the dangers of reckless government intervention.\n\nA VOICE FOR FREE ENTERPRISE\n\nAs Willkie shared this message, he gained traction. A former Democrat who had never held elective office, he became a dark horse candidate for the 1940 Republican nomination. A surge of support at that summer\u2019s party convention\u2014\u201cWe Want Willkie,\u201d demonstrators chanted\u2014earned him the GOP nod.\n\nDuring the fall campaign, Willkie argued that free enterprise, not central planning, would revive America\u2019s fortunes. The first brought prosperity. The second amounted to \u201cgovernment above the people, without the people, and despite the people.\u201d\n\nWillkie moderated his stance over the course of the election, even declaring his support for a New Deal institution, the National Labor Relations Act. Still, he presented a clear alternative to FDR. He argued against the New Deal\u2019s class warfare and burdensome government programs. He argued for freedom, opportunity, and individualism.\n\nCOUNTRY BEFORE PARTY\n\nWillkie\u2019s message did not carry the day, but it won over millions of Americans. In an election he lost, he received more votes than any Republican before him, even Herbert Hoover in 1928. He ran more than eight percentage points better than 1936 GOP nominee Alf Landon, who had offered voters a watered-down version of the New Deal. Willkie brought debate back to the center of American life.\n\nMore than that, Willkie demonstrated statesmanship. By the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone in the fight against Nazi Germany. The Neutrality Acts forbade the United States from exporting weapons to a nation at war, but President Roosevelt devised a plan to get American destroyers to Britain in exchange for British naval bases. Roosevelt\u2019s advisers understood that the deal could hurt him in the election, given widespread isolationist sentiment. So FDR reached out to Willkie through intermediaries, trying to get his opponent\u2019s support for the deal. The GOP candidate indicated that he favored sending the ships, though he said he wouldn\u2019t lobby congressional Republicans on the president\u2019s behalf. FDR felt \u201creassured that Willkie would not make the destroyer-bases deal a major campaign issue,\u201d writes historian David M. Kennedy.\n\nDespite pressure from isolationist elements of his party, Willkie did not publicly condemn sending ships to Britain. The GOP nominee did, however, criticize the method FDR used to make the deal. When the president first sought Willkie\u2019s endorsement, he had said he would work with Congress. But Roosevelt ended up making the trade by executive order.\n\nAfter the election, Willkie supported Lend-Lease, another Roosevelt program that provided much-needed aid to Winston Churchill and cash-strapped Britain. Willkie\u2019s statesmanship afforded Roosevelt the opportunity to fortify America\u2019s allies, build the arsenal of democracy, and eventually save Western civilization.\n\nThese positions cost Willkie, angering some people in his own party. He sought the Republican presidential nomination again in 1944 but proved an also-ran.\n\nA HOOSIER MAKES HISTORY\n\nAs Willkie stood on that train platform in September 1940, he told his fellow townspeople, \u201cI am coming back to Rushville, and I think I will come back as president of the United States.\u201d\n\nThis did not come to pass, of course. But something else Willkie said from the back of that train stays with us. He told the crowd, \u201cIt has come to the lot of a boy born in Indiana to carry the burden which may result in changing the course of the history of mankind.\u201d\n\nWendell Willkie did change that course, by changing the discourse. With Willkie\u2019s commonsense words ringing in their ears, Americans after World War II showed less tolerance for the kind of extreme anti-business policies they had accepted during the Depression.\n\nAnd we should be forever grateful for that.", 1, "2026-09-02T09:19:58Z", "2026-09-02T09:20:51Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-essay-in-coolidge-review-the-outsider-who-took-on-fdr/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 420.9613539278507, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}