Targeted

“Several rocks broke the window of the [Wendell Willkie’s campaign] train’s dining car and showered glass on Philadelphia Inquirer reporter William Murphy,” Steve Neal wrote in his biography of Willkie.

“Willkie’s press corps kept a daily running count of the missiles thrown at the candidate, which included telephone directories, chairs, ashtrays, stones, oranges, eggs, and tomatoes. ‘He had more assorted sizes and kinds of vegetables thrown at him,’ said Time, ‘than anyone since the old Mississippi showboat days.’ Washington Post correspondent Robert C. Albright told his colleagues on the train that working conditions would no longer be hazardous, because it was the last week of the tomato season.

“President Roosevelt, calling the attacks on Willkie ‘reprehensible,’ urged the swift prosecution of his attackers. National Chairman Flynn denounced the hecklers as ‘hoodlums.’ Willkie cracked that New Deal supporters made so few hits that they must be declining as baseball players. In a display of sportsmanship, he wired Pontiac school officials and asked them to lift the suspension of a young man who had thrown the egg on the grounds that he had probably been influenced by older persons. Later, it developed that some Chicago schoolchildren had been paid to throw missiles at the Republican candidate.”

Source: Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie (New York, Doubleday, 1984), 164