Dilemmas of World-Wide Thinking: Popular Geographies and the Problem of Empire in Wendell Willkie's Search forOne World

Abstract

This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller,One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered auniversalview of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial powercontested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial powerobscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour fromOne World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.