It’s interesting that there has been no Republican attempt to rehabilitate Hoover in recent years. Coolidge and even Harding have been the subject of such revisionism but Hoover, like his successors Landon and Wilkie, is a non-person in current GOP hagiography.

Being so long in the past has nothing to do with it, since FDR is still a major bogeyman to Republicans, with the Birchers especially having an elaborate demonology around him.

Wendell Wilkie is probably my favorite 20th century Republican, even more so than Eisenhower. Eleanor Roosevelt said later that she and FDR admired Wilkie more than they did any other Republican, and more than most other Democrats. After his defeat in the 1940 election, Wilkie offered his services to FDR in the crisis building up to US participation in World War II. FDR accepted, and Wilkie traveled all over the world as a kind of roving ambassador. He wrote a visionary book, One World, on the basis of those experiences. Its theme, international unity, would have present-day Republicans turning purple, foaming at the mouth and rolling on the floor in terminal fits of rage.

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.