One World is a manifesto and a travelogue written by Wendell Willkie, a liberal Republican, about his seven-week, 31,000-mile tour, and originally published in April 1943. It advocates for an end to colonialism, World Federalism, and equality for non-whites in the United States. One World inspired the One World movement and the World Federalist Movement — which included among its supporters Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru —and advocated strong and democratic super-national institutions. That wave of thinking gave birth to the postwar international order, including the United Nations System, but was also very critical of the postwar order and the UN, claiming it is insufficient to avoid another world war. Willkie was accompanied on his tour by, among others, the publisher and editor Gardner Cowles, Jr., who ultimately assisted Willkie in the writing of One World.
Content of the book
It is a document of his world travels and meetings with many of the Allies' heads of state as well as ordinary citizens and soldiers in locales such as El Alamein, Russia, and Iran. The main idea of the book is that the world became one small inter-connected unit and Isolationism is no longer possible: "There are no distant points in the world any longer." What concerns "myriad millions of human beings" abroad, concerns the Americans. "Our thinking in the future must be world-wide." To win the peace, "we must now plan for peace on a world basis" and "play an active, constructive part in freeing and keeping" this peace. By "peace on world basis" he meant: Willkie emphasized that across the world the "reservoir of goodwill" towards the United States is much larger than towards other contemporary powers: The world, he argued, is ready for this sort of world government. Willkie anticipated military and economic integration of West Europe after the war: "The re-creation of the small countries of Europe as political units, yes; their re-creation as economic and military units, no, if we really hope to bring stabilization to Western Europe…" He sought to extend the Atlantic Charter beyond West Europe to all world. "That was one of the reasons why I was so greatly distressed when Mr. Churchill subsequently made his world-disturbing remark, 'We mean to hold our own. I did not become His Majesty's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.'" Willkie opposed Colonialism in general, including the American: "The British are by no means the only colonial rulers." The French, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians are in the list. "And we ourselves have not yet promised complete freedom to all the peoples in the West Indies for whom we have assumed responsibility." He warned on the Soviet rule over East Europe: "The failure of Mr. Stalin to announce to a worried world Russia's specific aspirations with reference to Eastern Europe weighs the scales once more against the proclaimed purposes of leaders." Willkie was also critical of the disparity between the Atlantic Charter and the domestic American racial and anti-Semitic policies—a phenomenon he labeled "domestic imperialism." Especially emphasized is the position of China in the world after World War II; involved in a civil war between Nationalists and Communists, Willkie prophesies that whichever power achieves victory will make China a force to be reckoned with. It is the duty of the United Nations to make sure that the power is friendly to American and other Allied interests but also that it is powerful enough to help the Chinese, the world's most populated nation.
Popularity
One World "became the greatest nonfiction bestseller to date in US publishing history." It spent four months atop the New York Timesbestseller list beginning in May 1943 and selling over 1.5 million copies during those four months. Harold Urey wrote of it, "Wendell Willkie left a monument more enduring than granite in the words ‘One World’…” The title One World could influence the title of the famous trilogy One World or None, implying that this is the alternative in the atomic age.
