How America Became Antifascist
In fiction, spoiler alerts exist to protect the reader experience, premised on the idea that knowing a story’s outcome will reduce momentum and suspense. In historical writing, it’s just the opposite. Works of history gain energy from the fact that readers know where the narrative is going, especially when it’s going nowhere good. Books on the origins of wars tend to rely on a tragic arc, with the reader aware of the shoals ahead while the books’ subjects blithely reassure one another that the coast looks clear, that diplomacy will win the day, that any conflict will be short and easy.
Within this literature, no decade is more doom-laden than the nineteen-thirties, when misguided hope and willful blindness led the world’s democracies to grossly underestimate the threat of Fascism. In the standard story, the United States, Britain, and France stood by, wringing their hands and straining for appeasement while the Japanese stampeded through Asia and Nazi Storm Troopers ran roughshod over Europe. The result was the greatest cataclysm in modern history: seventy million dead, the genocide of European Jews, the bombing of once magnificent cities. The reader, aware of this outcome, is left with the literary equivalent of shouting at the screen: Don’t do it! Act now! Watch out—they’re coming for you!
The historian William I. Hitchcock’s excellent new book, “A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II” (Simon & Schuster), leans into this sense of foreboding. In the course of nearly six hundred pages, Hitchcock describes how Fascism spread across the globe, beginning with Mussolini’s rise in the battered, destabilized Italy of the nineteen-twenties and ending in 1941, when Hitler occupied most of Continental Europe. A Pulitzer finalist and a professor at the University of Virginia, Hitchcock has written several books about the Second World War, each with an emphasis on the European theatre. This time, he wants to explain why U.S. policymakers, especially F.D.R., failed to act or even to fully comprehend what was happening until it was almost too late.
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Unlike most coming-of-war narratives, though, “A Shadow Over the World” offers a happy ending of sorts. Hitchcock lays out a harrowing chronology of self-interested decisions, missed opportunities, and moments of cowardice as U.S. government officials debated how to meet the Fascist threat. Yet his main question is not why they failed to counter it but how, in the end, they succeeded. “In these pages,” he writes by way of introduction, “we will see an imperfect nation and an imperfect leader strive to do good after a long stretch of doing nothing in the face of fascist persecution.” What’s amazing about the era, he suggests, is not the hope, cherished by so many Americans, that war might be avoided. It’s that the nation eventually rose up and dedicated the full force of its industrial, ideological, spiritual, and military might to banishing Fascism from the earth.
To suggest that the United States in the mid-twentieth century was, at its heart, an antifascist nation is no small claim these days. In the decade-plus since Donald Trump descended his golden escalator, historians have been busy excavating what a Roosevelt aide described as the “latent Nazism” in American life. Recent books have explored Americans’ embrace of eugenics and racism, anti-egalitarianism and antisemitism, nativism and illiberal politics. They have also explored the literal Fascism that took root in the U.S. during the thirties, when avowedly pro-Nazi organizations held mass rallies at Madison Square Garden and Henry Ford cozied up to Hitler.
This work has helped make our own backlash moment more comprehensible: despite the myth of liberal progress, the reactionary and quasi-Fascist strains of American society have long been there. But the scholarly trend has obscured something that once seemed obvious—during the defining crisis of the century, the U.S. fought Fascism with everything it had. Hitchcock declares this struggle an “inspiring story of America,” with all the necessary caveats. In 1941, the aviator Charles Lindbergh may still have been praising Hitler’s air power and railing against undue Jewish influence. The federal government, though, was securely in the hands of committed antifascists. Foremost among them was Roosevelt, who maintained that democracy and Fascism could not coexist.
In Hitchcock’s telling, Roosevelt is both hero and antihero: the man who refused to heed warnings of a looming disaster—until, in the nick of time, he did. Born into a wealthy and storied political family in New York’s Hudson Valley, Roosevelt grew up expecting an easy life. For years, those expectations held firm. Though the region where he grew up leaned Republican, Roosevelt joined the Democratic Party and rose swiftly through state government. Just before the First World War, with a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, in the White House, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the same post that his legendary cousin Theodore once held. In 1920, at the tender age of thirty-eight, he won a spot on the national ticket as the Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate. Although it turned out to be a Republican year, Roosevelt emerged as a rising star and a Democratic standard-bearer.
Then, in 1921, the first great tragedy of his life struck. One day in August, he came down with a fever and numbness throughout his body; by the next morning, he could not move. The culprit turned out to be polio, a dreaded disease of the pre-vaccine twentieth century. Despite the best therapies, he never regained the ability to walk unaided. Like many biographers, Hitchcock sees this physical ordeal as a turn of events that deepened Roosevelt’s character. But “A Shadow Over the World” is not primarily a biography of Roosevelt. Instead, the book offers a collective account of the “colorful, angry, tumultuous years” of his Presidency, when “chaos, fear, and profound human insecurity ruled” the globe.
For Roosevelt’s generation, no historical experience carried more weight than the First World War—or, as it was commonly known until 1939, the Great War. As Hitchcock notes, it is impossible to understand the thirties without that earlier war as a reference point: a grand cautionary tale about what to do and what not to do in response to European conflict. By the time Roosevelt became President, in 1933, most Americans viewed the war as a huge mistake. Progressives mourned the death of reform amid patriotic jingoism. Conservatives shuddered to think how close the country had come to permanent entangling alliances. Americans across the political spectrum agreed that the bloodshed had been a colossal waste of money and human life. Meant to be “the war to end war” and to make the world “safe for democracy,” it had instead produced instability, economic catastrophe, and imperial rivalry.
The war also gave new force to two powerful ideological movements, Soviet Communism and European Fascism, both of which seemed hellbent on destabilizing, then remaking, the global order. “A Shadow Over the World” is especially effective at describing the rise of Fascism in the twenties, first in Italy and then, more haltingly, in Weimar Germany. It was Benito Mussolini, not Adolf Hitler, who created the Fascist playbook: fomenting a national crisis through “political terrorism,” turning “angry young men” into thuggish enforcement agents, attacking the legitimacy of the existing government, and then demanding a new government in its place. In discussing such techniques, Hitchcock studiously avoids comparisons to the present, though one can’t help but wonder whether certain details were chosen for their current resonance. “I am in top form. Huge crowd,” Germany’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary in 1933 after leading a book-burning rally.
Such moments are chilling to read about, in part because we know where they will lead. At the time, however, the meaning of Fascism wasn’t so clear. Though we now tend to view antisemitism as the ideology’s molten core, many Americans, well into the thirties, associated Fascism mainly with anti-Communism, which had its own powerful constituency. “Their chief object is to fight socialism, communism, and anarchism,” the New York Times wrote in an early article about Italy’s Fascisti. The Hearst newspaper chain’s first profile of Hitler made no explicit mention of antisemitism, emphasizing instead his hatred of the Bolsheviks. Even in the mid-thirties, the Chicago Tribune quoted one Fascist supporter in Spain explaining that “what Spaniards mean by fascist is a government that keeps order. That is what they want—that, and to destroy the Marxists.” To many Americans, early Fascism sounded less like a foreign menace than like a familiar form of anti-Communist politics.
In any case, the nation’s approach toward Europe was not to meddle in its internal affairs but, rather, to avoid another terrible Continental war. Throughout the Western world, the twenties were a period of high hopes and big thinking about global peace; the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by more than sixty nations, including the United States, intended to outlaw war altogether.
Once the Great Depression hit, there seemed to be even less reason to get involved in Europe’s mess. The statistics are familiar, but they bear repeating: between 1929 and 1932, the U.S. stock market lost roughly ninety per cent of its value, and unemployment reached twenty-four per cent. No wonder most Americans favored dealing with things at home rather than worrying about Europe. Some even called for a national dictator who could take the crisis in hand and get the economy functioning again. Instead, the country elected Franklin Roosevelt, who, in Hitchcock’s words, “offered them not dictatorship but democracy.”
As Hitchcock observes, Roosevelt’s personal motivations and deepest convictions are notoriously difficult to parse. As President, he often told people what they wanted to hear, not necessarily what he thought. He spent little time writing reflections or elaborating on his decision-making. Because he died in office, he left behind no retrospective summaries or grand narratives of his Presidency. His Secretary of War Henry Stimson likened conversing with Roosevelt to “chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room.” Historians can sympathize. Among the most persistent questions about Roosevelt is whether he possessed a coherent world view or just a topnotch set of political instincts.
Hitchcock believes that there was a there there—a few fundamental ideas and commitments that guided Roosevelt’s actions. One was the notion of interdependence, in both domestic politics and foreign affairs. “It is literally true that the ‘self-supporting’ man or woman has become as extinct as the man of the Stone Age,” Roosevelt declared, as the governor of New York. “Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.” In Hitchcock’s account, Roosevelt eventually extended this analysis to the fight against Fascism.
It is impossible to read “A Shadow Over the World” without wondering what happened to the thoughtful, generous style of political leadership that Roosevelt embodied. Educated as a man of the world, he spoke both French and German. He devoured approximately a dozen newspapers every day, divided between morning and evening rounds. To Hitchcock, the indelible feature of Roosevelt’s Presidency was his desire to protect democratic norms and processes amid crises, even as critics accused him of being a power-mad dictator or a Communist sympathizer. “Here in America we are waging a great and successful war,” Roosevelt told the nation in 1936. “It is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.” Hitchcock calls those words “the thesis of the rest of his presidency.”
One question Hitchcock poses is why Roosevelt did not act sooner to confront the threat of Fascism or try to protect that “great and precious form of government” in places such as Spain, Austria, and France. Despite Hitchcock’s admiration for Roosevelt, “A Shadow Over the World” is largely an account of the President’s confusion and undue caution vis-à-vis European Fascism. The repetition can grow tiring, but that frustration is precisely the point. If Roosevelt really believed what he said, why did he wait so long to act on it?
One reason was the Neutrality Act, first passed in 1935 with Roosevelt’s reluctant support and then, in various iterations, renewed year after year, even in the wake of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, Kristallnacht_,_ and Hitler’s seizure of Austria and the Czech Sudetenland. The laws constrained the United States from selling weapons to any government actively engaged in war—an appealing idea, perhaps, but one with perverse effects. The U.S. could not sell arms to the valorous Republican government in Spain, but it was free to sell oil and grain and machinery to the Nazis (who were not, technically, at war for most of the thirties).
The laws reflected mainstream American opinion at the time: Europe’s problems were Europe’s problems. So did U.S. immigration policy, which was generally hostile to newcomers, especially Jewish ones. Despite impassioned lobbying and organizing efforts, Roosevelt kept his distance from the plight of European Jews—he was willing to express sympathy but not to open the gates. In the spring of 1939, when nearly a thousand Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis, a German steamer, reached American waters, U.S. officials sent them back to meet their fate in Hitler’s Europe.
Even as President, Roosevelt did not single-handedly have the power to defy the Neutrality Acts or to upend the nation’s restrictive immigration laws. Still, Hitchcock wonders, couldn’t he have done more to show which side the U.S. was on? From his first moment in office, Roosevelt enjoyed overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. His repeated electoral victories were landslides of a sort that has become unthinkable in the twenty-first century; in 1936, he won more than sixty per cent of the popular vote and a whopping ninety-eight per cent of the Electoral College. Thanks to the New Deal, he presided over a vastly expanded administrative state that was responsive to executive direction. He also had a well-organized grassroots constituency. While Hitler was dismantling independent labor unions in Germany, Roosevelt was championing them in the U.S., which gave him a wide base of support for New Deal initiatives.
In short, Roosevelt was a strong President who showed, time and again, that he could lead the country in unlikely directions. That political power, however, came with limits. He may have had a Democratic majority, but it was a fractious one, dominated by Southern Democrats committed to preserving Jim Crow. And, as Hitchcock writes, antisemitism “coursed through the bloodstream of American public life,” including the blue-blooded foreign-policy establishment. At the White House, Roosevelt’s inner circle urged him to stay focussed on the Depression and the New Deal, the defining issues of his Presidency. Within the diplomatic corps, advisers suggested that the real global threat was the Soviet Union and the “militant left,” not whatever was happening in Italy or Germany.
Some Americans saw things differently, and their prescient warnings form the backbone of Hitchcock’s body politic. First among them is the newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, who secured an interview with Hitler in 1931 and spent the rest of the decade sounding the alarm about what she described as the Nazis’ “peculiar mixture of Nordic myth, antisemitism, militaristic tradition, desperado nationalism and moronized socialism.” Thompson was widely celebrated in her day as the “First Lady of American Journalism.” (She was also the wife of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, whose book “It Can’t Happen Here” stoked worries about homegrown Fascism.) As Hitchcock puts it, she was “almost Roosevelt’s alter ego,” the Cassandra who saw what was coming when the President couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
Thompson had her share of allies. “A Shadow Over the World” brings to life the vibrant antifascist “network” around Roosevelt, filled with journalists and policymakers and civic leaders desperate to make the White House listen. Their ranks included luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, the Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes (“the most outspoken antifascist in the cabinet”), and the rabbi Stephen Wise, all of whom deployed their public influence to spread the word about Nazi atrocities. Hitchcock also gives due credit to the many women at the forefront of that same effort, including the Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the reporter Martha Gellhorn (who later married Hemingway), and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. On this issue, as on so many others, Eleanor was out ahead of her husband.
Hitchcock’s point in mapping this network is not just to provide a contrast to Roosevelt. He argues that the antifascist opinions and strategies developed in such circles provided a framework for national opinion and policy once events drew the U.S. into war. Given Hitchcock’s interest in this broader civic context, it is surprising that he does not pay more attention to the Popular Front, the uneasy coalition of Communists, socialists, liberals, and progressives that defined left-wing politics in the late thirties. Though Popular Front groups took on domestic issues such as labor and civil rights, antifascism was their raison d’être. Indeed, it was the Stalin-dominated Comintern that called for such a coalition in 1935 to oppose the urgent threat of global Fascism. Years later, during the Red Scare, American Communists joked that their greatest crime was to have been “prematurely antifascist” in an age when few Americans were prepared to face reality.
Although the antifascist left may have been vindicated by history, the widespread association of antifascism with Communism helps explain why Americans, including Roosevelt, came so late to the cause. During the thirties, anti-Communism was at least as powerful as antifascism in the U.S., and many Americans expressed skepticism about any political movement associated with Moscow. In 1938, when the Texas congressman Martin Dies, Jr., became chairman of a House committee tasked with investigating “un-American activities,” his putative aim was to go after Communists and Fascists equally. The Communist Party did itself no favors the following year when, in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, it performed an about-face on Fascism. The pact was a disaster for the Popular Front, but the severing of the ideational link between Communism and antifascism probably helped the antifascist cause at home. After 1939, it became possible—and necessary—to envision an antifascist politics that could be defined as truly American.
According to Hitchcock, Roosevelt always “instinctively hated fascism.” But not until 1939 did he start to embrace the idea that a literal war against actually existing Fascist powers would be both desirable and inevitable. The title “A Shadow Over the World” comes from a speech Roosevelt delivered that September, just weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, launching the Second World War. “I should like to be able to offer the hope that the shadow over the world might swiftly pass,” he told Congress. “I cannot. The facts compel my stating, with candor, that darker periods may lie ahead.”
At last, he sounded more like Dorothy Thompson, unflinching and resolute. Even so, it would take more than two years for the U.S. to enter the war. Hitchcock thinks that putting the right ideas in place was a necessary first step; without Roosevelt’s early articulation of aims, it would have been impossible to mobilize American society on the epic scale required for total war. Over the past half century, Americans have grown accustomed to regional conflicts fought by specialized professional troops, in which the support of Congress or the American public seems more or less irrelevant. The Second World War demanded mass buy-in; every factory, every worker, every young man, every housewife had to play a role. Hitchcock maintains that persuasion had to come first—that, for a democracy to fight, its citizens must know what they are fighting for. “The Second World War was at its heart a war of ideas,” he concludes.
But ideas go only so far. If the Second World War was an ideological war, it was also an economic and bureaucratic one, fought for control of the world’s raw materials and industrial capacity. When it came to the practicalities of mobilization, administrative competence proved at least as important as high-flown rhetoric. So did the capability to manufacture vast quantities of airplanes, tanks, and bullets. Hitchcock believes that Roosevelt’s New Deal vision blended seamlessly with his war aims; both emphasized democracy, collective action, and global interdependence. New Deal experiments also helped build the bureaucratic infrastructure that made the war effort possible.
In the end, it was neither ideas nor organization—neither Thompson nor Roosevelt—that persuaded the U.S. to enter the war. The Japanese did that, when they attacked Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941. As a historian of the European theatre, Hitchcock devotes only a single chapter to Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia during the thirties. He also ends his book before Pearl Harbor, arguing that the essential features of the American war effort, including the national commitment to fighting Fascism, were in place by then. For Hitchcock, the turning points came earlier, in 1940 and 1941, as Hitler blitzed his way through Continental Europe. Moved more by geopolitical reality than by idealism, Roosevelt began to insist that the U.S. would have to aid Britain—and fight Fascism—or face the extinction of democracy.
By the fall of 1941, much of the country had come to agree with him, though influential groups, such as the isolationist America First Committee, mounted fierce opposition. Hitchcock highlights key moments of escalating national commitment: Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, on January 6, 1941, with its rousing statement of war aims; the creation of the lend-lease policy that March, with its promise of virtually unlimited arms for Great Britain; and the release of the Atlantic Charter, in August, 1941, jointly issued by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, which envisioned a postwar order characterized by free trade, democratic rights, economic security, and territorial stability. The implication is that the U.S. would have entered the war and fought the good fight even without Pearl Harbor. But it’s worth remembering that the U.S. did not declare war on Germany until December 11th, four days after the Japanese attack. Even then, Hitler was the first mover. Only after Germany declared war on the U.S. did the U.S. respond in kind.
After the war ended, of course, anti-Communism became the guiding principle in U.S. foreign policy, bringing Washington into friendly relations with Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and military dictatorships elsewhere. But antifascism remained a vital part of Americans’ self-conception, as if entering the war and winning it had always been America’s destiny. Hitchcock’s book restores a sense of contingency to that story, even as it tries to draw lessons from the nineteen-thirties. One might conclude from America’s halting embrace of antifascism during that decade that we should listen to the Dorothy Thompsons of the world, who warn that the unthinkable—global war, societal collapse, genocide—really can happen. The difficulty is knowing which Dorothy Thompsons to listen to. False certainty is common enough in political life, and history is crowded with confident warnings that proved wrong. Roosevelt is arguably the more useful example, precisely because of his hesitation, pragmatism, and self-interest. What made him a great President, in Hitchcock’s view, was his willingness to watch and listen, and to change his mind as events unfolded.
“A Shadow Over the World” describes Roosevelt’s “evolution from an anti-war pacifist, a nationalist, and an American exceptionalist to a man who embraced a stunningly ambitious global task: the safeguarding of democracy in a world that had fallen under the shadow of fascism.” But Roosevelt did not abandon American exceptionalism, even as he made his case for global war. Instead, he sought to transform what it meant—not the land grabs of Manifest Destiny or the imagined security of isolationism but a commitment to defending democratic ideals and basic human welfare in the face of global tyranny and immiseration.
Roosevelt’s blind spots and foot-dragging are worth remembering as a counterpoint to the self-congratulatory Greatest Generation myth. But, as Hitchcock notes, the remarkable thing is that he changed his mind at all, and that the nation followed. For the rest of the twentieth century, America’s role in combatting Fascism helped define its national identity. At a moment when that self-conception seems to be waning, “A Shadow Over the World” makes a vigorous case for antifascism as a central inheritance of the modern American political tradition. ♦