I often discuss my work as historian with my barber.
"What do you remember about Wendell Willkie," I asked him recently."He lost," Harold replied, not missing a clip and turning quickly to basketball, a subject more promising than politics in a small Indiana town.
This time Harold had only part of the story, and the least important part at that.
True, Willkie did lose the U.S. presidency to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
That fascinating campaign to keep FDR from a third term is what most Americans old enough to remember think of when Willkie's name is mentioned.
But the centennial of his birth this month occasions an argument that Willkie's significance for our time is found not as Roosevelt's opponent, but rather in the four years of his life that followed the 1940 election.
Most beaten presidential candidates slump into obscurity.
Willkie became more influential than many winners because, in defeat, he developed a vision of America and the world that was unusually fresh and compelling.
Willkie's enduring claim to greatness rests in his farsighted understanding of the larger role demanded of the United States, not only in the world of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini, but the postwar world as well.
His most forceful statement for internationalism came in late 1942 when he made a trip around the war-torn world, stopping in North Africa, the Near East, the Soviet Union and China - this in a day when political figures seldom ventured beyond their national borders.
Willkie described his trip in "One World." This delightfully written book became a best seller: a million copies sold within seven weeks of publication.
"There are no distant points in the world any longer," Willkie argued.
Condemning colonialism and its denigration of peoples of color, he asserted that only a new international cooperation built on justice and freedom could effect a lasting peace.
In one of the mysteries of the human heart, this Republican businessman from Indiana came to understand that racism was the mocking paradox of the nation.
Two decades ahead of most Americans in advocating civil rights, Willkie challenged racial stereotypes in Hollywood films, argued that all Americans had a right to decent housing (federally subsidized if necessary), and energetically and visibly supported the NAACP.
Willkie's vision of one world, of the possibilities of justice and equality across national boundaries and across color lines, was dismissed as "sucker-bait" by some and as naive electoral suicide by others.
He never won an election.
Republican pros had always mistrusted him and turned their backs after 1940.
He died in 1944 at the age of 52. Memories faded quickly. An iron curtain replaced one world. Cries from colonial peoples abroad and African-Americans at home met delay and compromise.
Willkie lost, but only in the short run. Fifty years later it is clear that he was right. His vision of America and of the world puts to shame most of his contemporaries and many of ours.
(James H. Madison is a history professor at Indiana University.)