Crowded and Dirty Working Conditions

“It did not help staff morale [on Wendell Willkie’s campaign train] that working conditions were crowded and dirty in what newspapermen termed ‘The Squirrel Cage,’ and [a campaign aide] called ‘a traveling equivalent of Andersonville’” (a reference to a former Confederate prisoner-of-war camp). In “the cramped staff car, the plumbing rarely worked, and compartments doubled as offices and bedrooms.

“Everything related to physical order and cleanliness, including laundry, was a nightmare,” according to one campaign aide. “Some of the wildest tales of the Willkie train are stories of lost laundry which never caught up with the men who had left their shirts in a town which seemed to have slunk off the map when anybody tried to connect with it again,” she said.

Source: Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie (New York, Doubleday, 1984), 150–151