A SHADOW OVER THE WORLD

How Franklin D. Roosevelt “came only slowly and quite grudgingly to the realization that fascism and American democracy could not coexist in the world.”

Hitchcock, author of The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (2008), concentrates on Europe and the U.S. between the wars. He stresses that the 1918 Armistice left Germany and Italy impoverished, poorly governed, and violent. Italy discarded its democracy in favor of fascism and Mussolini in 1922; Germany pulled itself together for a decade, but the Depression proved a disaster, bringing Hitler and the Nazis to power. Readers will be shocked to learn that American media outlets fawned over Mussolini as a handsome, charismatic, leader who made the trains run on time and returned his nation to greatness. Hitler’s rhetoric was off-putting, but American diplomats, the author writes, “tended to see Hitler and the Nazis as a second-tier threat to the German Republic when compared with the militant left. They socialized with the Nazi leaders, spoke with them in regular interviews, and found them compelling, in a way.” Hitler took office in early 1933. Almost immediately, members of the American Berlin diplomatic corps, as well as a minority of advisers, peppered him with denunciations of Nazi behavior, but he seemed to ignore them. Only one government proclaimed hatred of fascism. Unfortunately, that was Russia, a pariah among nations. Scholars still scratch their heads over Roosevelt’s recognition of the USSR eight months after taking office. Hitchcock maintains that Roosevelt hated fascism and understood the democracies, including his own, were dithering but that Russia was a possible ally. FDR, he writes, “feared that his New Deal coalition would be rent apart by any adventures overseas, and he remained neutral and passive on the world stage because he was so active at home.” That approach ended in the summer of 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR, when the U.S. finally offered material support to those fighting the Axis.

A gripping account of FDR’s maddeningly hands-off policy toward fascism.