How America Became Antifascist – The New Yorker

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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.

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.

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