How We Got the Thirties Wrong: William Hitchcock on FDR,…

About this episode

“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-thirds of Americans against Lindbergh’s views. The German American Bund, swastikas in Madison Square Garden notwithstanding, was small. Far more dangerous was Father Coughlin, the radio priest with millions of listeners undermining Roosevelt at every turn. The deeper discomfort: fascism was popular in America later than we like to admit — elites welcomed Mussolini in 1922, dictatorship carried no stigma, and Studebaker sold a sedan called the Dictator until 1937. (“Roth missed the trick,” Andrew noted. It should have been a Ford.) As for the New-Deal-as-fascism charge, leveled then and since: Roosevelt’s own answer — he was saving capitalism by making it fairer — holds, because fascism is not an economic program but war on enemies at home and abroad.• The Sheriff and the Same Tree. The South’s paradoxes, which deserve a book of their own. In Congress, southern Democrats — including Carter Glass of Virginia, among the most racist senators of a racist era — were ardent interventionists, not least because rearmament dollars flowed to southern military bases. Meanwhile African Americans were the first to recognize fascism, because they already lived under it: “he’s right here in our courthouse… He’s the sheriff. He’s the mayor” — Jim Crow and fascism, branches of the same tree, as the Black press argued years before Pearl Harbor. Hence A. Philip Randolph’s high-stakes poker in 1941: threatening a million-man march he might not have mustered, he extracted the executive order barring segregation in federally funded defense plants — the first federal lever of the modern civil rights era. The enduring puzzle Hitchcock presses on his disbelieving students: America fought and won the great war for democracy with a segregated army. And civil rights remains, in his verdict, one of the biggest stains on FDR’s reputation — Eleanor’s Black Cabinet notwithstanding.• The Making of a World Power. The trail of tears first: Abyssinia invaded, and America wouldn’t even embargo oil; Spain’s elected government denied weapons while the fascists poured in guns; the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Munich — nothing. The switch, Hitchcock argues, came at Munich: Roosevelt grasped that American military weakness was itself the problem — nothing could deter Hitler’s testing — and by early 1939 the Neutrality Act was being unwound, billions were flowing into a new Navy (even isolationists loved a picket fence around the hemisphere), and 1940 brought peacetime conscription. The supporting cast makes the chapter: Martha Gellhorn’s letters from Spain — “a dress rehearsal of the coming conflict” — reaching FDR through Eleanor; the loathed Chamberlain (“there’s one thing Roosevelt couldn’t stand — condescending Europeans”); the Stalin gamble that made him look a fool at the pact and a prophet at Lend-Lease; and Dorothy Thompson, the Republican journalist expelled by the Gestapo, whose Herald Tribune columns FDR’s speechwriters lifted by the page. And then Hollywood’s convergence: Casablanca — written after its playwright visited Vichy France to rescue his wife’s Jewish family — with Rick as Roosevelt, hesitating in a cafe called White House until he joins the fight, in theaters just as GIs landed in North Africa.• Not at Midnight Yet. The 2026 lessons, delivered from Charlottesville — Exhibit A, where 2017’s riot was “the kind of thing you could have seen in Weimar Germany.” First: normalization is the danger — the salami tactics of fascists mean “if they can get away with a little slice, they’ll keep slicing,” and the thirties’ sin was depicting Mussolini as harmless. Second: the demonizing instinct should be resisted — pressed on Susan Neiman’s forthcoming Ca...