Willkie's Early Adulthood

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Willkie’s early adulthood years were characterized by diverse experiences that perhaps demonstrated a slight reluctance to follow his parents’ footsteps and become a small town lawyer. By all accounts, Willkie had an enjoyable college career at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was fully engaged in campus social life and student politics. Following his graduation, he taught history for a year at a high school in a small southeastern Kansas town. Only after a stint as a chemist in Puerto Rico with his brother Fred did Willkie return to IU to get his law degree. He then returned to Elwood in 1916 to practice law in the family firm.

College

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By the time Wendell arrived at Indiana University in January 1910, IU had already become a Willkie family tradition. Wendell’s brother Fred had arrived a year earlier and his sister Julia was doing graduate work in Classics. His brother Robert had just graduated and was teaching at a high school in Bloomington. Together, the four Willkie siblings rented a house near the campus whose atmosphere soon came to resemble that of the Willkie household in Elwood: full of boisterous debates on the topics of the day that raged at all hours.

Willkie at Indiana University

Soon after his arrival, Willkie became involved in campus politics. He was dismayed, however, that the fraternities and sororities thoroughly dominated the campus social and political scene. Willkie rejected the Greek system as undemocratic and elitist, and so in numerous campus elections, he organized non-fraternity and non-sorority students to vote as a bloc against the Greek candidates. There is evidence that this strategy occasionally succeeded, but on the single occasion that Willkie himself was a candidate for a campus-wide elected office, he lost by good margin. (The position Willkie sought was one of the two paid positions on the IU yearbook staff.)

While at IU, Willkie became known for his eagerness to argue with his professors. In part, this was because Willkie had a stubborn streak in him and more than a little disrespect for authority, but most of the time (according to his classmates), Willkie ended up engaging his professors in vigorous debate because he was a free thinker who held fast to his convictions. Willkie channeled this intellectual energy into a natural extra-curricular activity when he joined the well-respected IU debate team.

When Willkie was running for president in 1940, his enemies spread the myth that he was a campus radical who tried to propagate Socialist ideas among the faculty and students. This was a gross exaggeration, but the tale arose out of an incident during Willkie’s junior year when he took an elementary economics course. During the course, Willkie was exposed to the ideas of Karl Marx, and in particular Das Kapital. Willkie was intellectually excited by the ideas in the book, and he asked the chairman of the Economics Department to offer a course on Socialism. The chairman said he would if Willkie could get commitments from at least ten students to take such a course. Willkie got ten students to commit, but to do so he had to "buttonhole almost everyone in the university" (he later recalled). In the midst of a bitter and contentious presidential campaign, it’s easy to see how such a story could be twisted and magnified into one casting Willkie as a campus radical recruiting converts to the Socialist cause.

Most of Willkie’s campus activities, however, were much less controversial, and do not reveal a lot about his personality except that he was a “joiner” who liked to be involved in a variety of activities. He was president of the Boosters’ Club, on the Executive Committee of the Student Council, a member of the Interclass Athletic Committee, a member of the Jackson Club (which staged mock Democratic National Conventions), a Student Marshal (marshals were students who kept order at IU functions) and President of the Board of Traditions. The Board of Traditions was responsible for ensuring that IU freshmen upheld campus traditions, which included wearing green beanie caps. Thus, it is somewhat curious that Willkie, who cherished intellectual freedom of thought, would be involved in such a group. Also, by his senior year, Willkie’s anti-fraternity stance had disappeared, and he joined the Beta Theta Pi chapter -- but only after receiving an ultimatum from his girlfriend who was very active in her school’s sorority system.

Despite his many extra-curricular activities, when Willkie graduated in June 1913 he had finished so many pre-law courses that he needed just one more year of credits to earn a law degree. But no Willkie child ever received post-graduate support, so in the summer of 1913, Willkie set out to find a job that would pay for a year of law school.

High School Teacher

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With the help of one of his IU history professors, Willkie got a job as a high school history teacher in Coffeyville, Kansas, a small town in the southeastern corner of the state near the Oklahoma border. When Willkie arrived in Coffeyville in September 1913, the town was in the last stages of its transformation from a wild frontier town into a stable middle-class town with a farm-based economy. Willkie stated later that his year at Coffeyville played a special role in his transition into an adult. “It was my first real adventure in standing on my own feet,” he recalled.

Willkie was a very popular teacher, as evidenced by the many letters his former students sent to him after he had achieved national fame. Although he taught a civics class, English history was Willkie’s specialty, and he faced the same challenge that all history teachers face: how to make events of the past interesting and relevant to young students. Letters from his former students praised Willkie for his ability to get his students to visualize historical figures in action and to become engaged with the subjects of their study. The letters also attest to Willkie’s constant efforts to get his students to connect the ideas of the past to current events.

Besides being a capable and well-liked teacher, Willkie also endeared himself to students by being an enthusiastic school booster. Willkie coached the boys’ basketball team, but by his own account he was mediocre at the task. There is a well-documented story that Willkie once took his basketball team to a town in Oklahoma only to discover when he arrived that he had inadvertently scheduled his team to play against a football team.

Despite his success as a teacher and his fondness for his students and the community, Willkie still thought of teaching as a way to earn enough money to finish his law degree. But then, as now, teachers were paid low wages, so when Willkie’s brother Fred offered him a higher-paying job as a chemist for a Puerto Rican sugar company, Willkie took it. And so in November 1914, Willkie said his farewells to his Coffeyville students and colleagues and set out on the next phase of his working life.

Puerto Rico

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The Puerto Rico job did not begin right away, so Willkie headed to Oberlin College in Ohio where his younger brother Ed had just started school. At Oberlin, Willkie took a few classes to brush up on his chemistry, but when he finally arrived in Puerto Rico in January 1915, he found that his job title was deceiving -- his job had very little to do with chemistry. Essentially, Willkie watched over a crucial step in the sugar refinement process by taking regular samples from the tanks and running a simple test to determine its starch to sugar ratio. If the ratio was outside a certain range, he was to notify his superiors. It was a monotonous job that required a certain level of conscientiousness, but little else.

According to Willkie’s biographers, his stay in Puerto Rico had a profound effect on his social and moral development. While on the island, Willkie saw the abject poverty of the native Puerto Ricans side by side with the luxurious lifestyles of the owners and managers of the sugar cane plantations and refineries. Willkie’s stay coincided with a brief and very violent peasant uprising, and he witnessed several acts of brutality inflicted on the peasants by the island’s economic masters. He later told an interviewer that his Puerto Rico experience kept him “from thinking like a typical American millionaire.” This self-assessment rings true. Although Willkie’s fame and fortune gave him certain freedoms and privileges not available to everyone, he never reduced his efforts to promote civil rights and civil liberties for all elements of society.

Law School

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Willkie left Puerto Rico and returned to IU in the fall of 1915. Although he had been gone for just two years, the social and political activities that so occupied Willkie as an undergraduate were of little concern to him now. He concentrated on his law studies, and resumed just two of his undergraduate extra-curricular activities: the Jackson Club and the debate team.

Willkie received two honors for his work in law school. One, his designation as “best all-around student,” came with a 43-volume law encyclopedia. The other, his selection as class orator, came with the opportunity to speak at the law school graduation ceremony. Willkie used the occasion to deliver, according to the IU President, “the most radical speech you ever heard.” In the speech, Willkie called many aspects of the Indiana State Constitution outdated and suggested ways in which it ought to be reformed. One account of the speech (no text exists) has Willkie including a few unflattering comments about the law school and its faculty.

The law school faculty and the justices of Indiana’s Supreme Court sitting in the audience were visibly shocked by Willkie’s words, and as a result, Willkie was privately reprimanded for his performance by the law school administration. Some biographers assert that Willkie did not receive his diploma on the stage that day, instead receiving it several days later in private (along with the reprimand). In any case, it’s clear that the speech strained the relations between Willkie and the law school: Willkie listed no law professors as references when he applied for his first job as a lawyer (for the Firestone Company in Akron, Ohio).

Post-Graduation

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Willkie was 24 years old when he graduated from law school in June 1916, and he immediately returned to Elwood to join the family law firm as his brother Robert had done. Everyone in the Willkie family knew that Wendell had no intention of staying long in Elwood, for he had made it clear that he was interested in politics at the state level. For a while though, he was content to gain legal experience handling the types of cases that typically occupy small town attorneys. No records from this time period show that Willkie had any cases that could be called major or even moderately interesting. There is an account, however, of Willkie and his brother Robert winning a good judgement for the victim of a car accident, but little else in the record stands out.

Whatever Willkie’s ultimate career plans were when he returned to Elwood, they were interrupted after less than a year when the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917. Wendell and his older brother never hesitated in making their decision whether to fight in this war -- the brothers joined the Army as soon as the U.S. Army opened up a recruitment office in Indianapolis.

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