How We Got the Thirties Wrong: William Hitchcock on FDR, Fascism & America’s World War II

“We’ve taken our democratic functioning for granted, and we’ve forgotten what it looks like to actually have to fight for it.” — William Hitchcock

 

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, and there’s a lot of sombre talk about the forever wars triggered by the attack. But sometimes, fighting evil might be necessary. So argues William Hitchcock, whose A Shadow Over the World is a major new history of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rise of fascism, and the making of American involvement in World War II.

 

We got the thirties wrong, Hitchcock says. The conventional view is that an interventionist FDR was hamstrung by an isolationist American public. Thus the US’s tardy entry into the war. The truth, Hitchcock argues, is the opposite. Judging from the period’s magazines, radio, films, and plays, he finds that most Americans hated fascism and wanted to act, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe until after Munich. Having become an interventionist, FDR managed the propaganda war with such trademark sophistication that “isolationist” and “appeasement” became the nastiest insults in Washington DC. So insulting, in fact, that American policy makers still deploy them today, with every adversary a new Hitler, every negotiation a new Munich.

 

Because the isolationists ended up as history’s villains, Hitchcock says, we’ve back-projected a narrative in which the 1930s public had its head in the sand and FDR was the lone farsighted interventionist. So the real thirties — featuring a vibrant public conversation about America’s role in the world, with the public actually more anti-fascist than the president — has gotten buried under FDR’s own accomplished myth-making.

 

And then there’s the F word. Are we back in fascist times? Is the 2020s a repeat of the 1930s? The UVA professor lives in Charlottesville, so it’s a particularly timely question for him. Hitchcock sees fascist behavior, he confesses, but not a fascist country. In the face of authoritarianism, he notes, America remains a vibrant democracy. Maybe that’s what the 2020s, with its public resistance to authoritarianism, has in common with the 1930s. History doesn’t repeat itself, as the line attributed to Mr America himself, Mark Twain, has it — but it rhymes.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Got the Thirties Wrong. The book’s revisionist core, against libraries of Roosevelt biography: the standard story — an interventionist FDR hamstrung by an isolationist public — is backwards. From fresh research in the periodicals, radio speeches, films, and plays of 1930s political culture, Hitchcock finds an American public that hated fascism and wanted to do something, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe or Asia from 1933 all the way to Munich in September 1938. His gift, once converted, was finding ways to act short of war — and then vilifying the isolationists so thoroughly that appeasement became the great sin — insults American policy makers still deploy today, with every adversary a new Hitler and every negotiation a new Munich. The thirties Americans were more sophisticated than the caricature: they struggled to fight fascism while avoiding war. The decade, Hitchcock insists, was not a cautionary tale of heads in the sand but “a time much like our own,” when Americans argued about the right role for their country in the world.

•       Coughlin, Not Lindbergh. The corrective to Philip Roth: The Plot Against America is a wonderful novel that overstates its villain. Lindbergh came late — speaking out only in 1940, joining America First in spring 1941, by which time “the table was set” and Roosevelt had won the war of ideas; polling showed two-t