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When Wendell Willkie Went Visiting: Between Interdependency and Exceptionalism in the Public Feeling for One World

In April 1943, Robert van Gelder, the New York Times book editor, used his regular column, “Speaking of Books,” to hail a recent bestseller. The book, One World (1943), by the 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, had provoked an unprecedented sensation. Ten days after it appeared, the little volume was jumping out of the stores like no book before it in the history of publishing. The story of Willkie’s journey around the world in late 1942, One World would eventually reach millions of Americans. Willkie enchanted them with the story of his encounter with the people of the world, from a Baghdad shopkeeper and a Soviet factory superintendent to Charles De Gaulle, the Shah of Iran, Joseph Stalin, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, while also challenging readers to embrace the new spirit of global connection and interdependence he claimed to have discovered everywhere he went. A certain kind of sophisticate, van Gelder noted, discounted Willkie as a wide-eyed hick from Indiana who had just “discovered the world” (BR2). But a much wider and deeper audience responded to the sense of “a world opening up,” and to the way that Willkie himself heralded new sentiments of connectedness that opening invited. Between late 1942, when he embarked on the trip, and his untimely death in October 1944, he gave the high abstractions of