Word: elwood
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Wendell Willkie's acceptance speech was behind him, the judgments on it were made and sealed, when he next faced a crowd in Indiana. The judgments were that the Elwood speech was a great deal better than its delivery, that its content would be remembered after its slurred syllables were forgotten. The next crowd Wendell Willkie addressed was not the exacting, sweating multitude which he had numbed and thrilled at Elwood. Before him last week, in the Memorial Park near his wife's home at Rushville, were 10,000 townsmen and countryfolk who simply wanted a look...
...home of Mary Sleeth, his farm manager, in nearby Rushville. There was no place for the crowd to sleep-the 48 rooms of the only hotel, the Sidwell (Sleep well at the Sidwell), had been taken weeks before. First-comers moved peacefully into the private homes of Elwood, renting the rooms as the homeowners slept on the living-room floor or out on the grass in the backyard. Late arrivals drove straight to Callaway Park, where the speech was to be delivered, to be on hand for good seats in the morning, to sleep safely under blankets, under the maples...
...when the heat of the day began, the crowd had grown to 60,000, though the speech was still seven hours away. Downtown the special trains were unloading at the Nickel Plate and Pennsylvania stations; the crowd shuffled through sweltering side streets into the river of humanity that filled Elwood's main Anderson Street from curb to curb-a river that emptied, after a crooked mile, into the surging sea at Callaway Park...
...precedents." But how could it do more than dutifully applaud when he heavily promised a campaign on principles-"not on the basis of hate, jealousy, or personalities?" And Wendell Willkie seemed to have lost the buoyance that had marked his whole campaign and that had brought the thousands to Elwood...
...Elwood went back to normal, it was plain that what politicians and writers thought of the speech meant less than what was thought of it in the homeward-bound cars that were fanning out over the highways. The talk that counted was the talk that went on behind the golden headlights that danced over the white pavements - the talk of the crowd, of people who were a long way from Washington, a long way from editorial offices, the crowd that rose to a challenge, the crowd that had never heard of the decline of western civilization and would...