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

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It is Friday, the 11th of September, 2026, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. Lots of chatter in the media about ending the post-9-11 forever wars. In fact, yesterday, we did a show imagining the American War in Iran as America's new forever war. Wars are, of course, extremely unpleasant. And my guest today is all too familiar with that, William Hitchcock's The Bitter Road to Freedom, The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II, was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning finalist, but sometimes wars are necessary. In Hitchcock's new book, A Shadow Over the World, Franklin Roosevelt, The Rise of Fascism and The Making of America's World War II, is out next Tuesday. William Hitchcock, Bill is joining us from Charlottesville, where he teaches history at UVA. Bill, congratulations on the new book. Sometimes then, war is necessary. Is that a simple condensation of this new book, A Shadow Over the World?

William Hitchcock (1:58)

Well, there's a long process that you have to go through to get to the point where there are no alternatives. So I would like to stress that this is not some claim that war is the answer to our problems. But in 1940, 1941, the American public and Roosevelt finally converged on an argument that stopping fascism was not only important or morally right, it was the only way American democracy itself could survive.

So, yes, in this case, it was a just war, one that Americans reluctantly committed themselves to. But I want to stress that I'm not suggesting that somehow war is always the answer. And quite the opposite, as we've known since the post-1945 World War has brought untold suffering and has often been unnecessary. But 1940, 1941 is a different period.

Andrew Keen (2:50)

So the conventional view, Will, as I know you take on in the book, is that Roosevelt was an uncomfortable isolationist or at least forced into isolationism by the general fear of war in the United States, having experienced the First World War, and that he did everything he could to stay out of the war until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which made war inevitable? You take on this argument in the book. Is that fair that he was never much of an isolationist and was tiptoeing, so to speak, into recognizing the inevitability of war even before Pearl Harbor?

William Hitchcock (3:39)

Look, there's libraries of Roosevelt biographies that basically converge around the idea that Roosevelt was hamstrung. He was constrained by an isolationist American public, and that because the public was so isolationist and wanted to have nothing to do with Europe or Asia, Roosevelt's hands were tied. But personally, he deeply opposed fascism, and personally he wanted to act, and personally he was looking for ways to assist the European democracies. The reality is exactly the opposite. Roosevelt did not want to have anything to do with European and Asian affairs in 1933, all the way up really to the Munich Conference in September of 1938 But the American public was far more engaged with what was going on in Europe.

And I have done an enormous amount of what I think is fresh research into the periodicals, the publications, the radio speeches, the films, the plays of American political culture in the 1930s. Americans hated fascism, and it's not that they wanted to pick a fight with Hitler or the Japanese, but they wanted to do something. And it was Roosevelt's gift to find a way to do something short of war before Pearl Harbor. So I want to emphasize that I think we have the 30s wrong. The 30s is a cautionary tale, like let's not go back to that terrible time when Americans buried their head in the sand. Actually it's a time, much like our own, when we were having an argument about what's the right role for America in the world.

Andrew Keen (5:07)

I got the title for the show.

We got the 30s wrong. Why?

William Hitchcock (5:14)

That's a good question and there are two explanations. One is that Roosevelt, once he became committed to a policy of aiding the democracy, sending millions of dollars of weapons and aid to Britain, to Russia and to China even before Pearl Harbor, he began to vilify the isolationists and he turned them into a kind of toxic political brand.

Appeasement became the great sin. And this was then doubled down on in the early Cold War. In the early Cold War, the worst thing you could ever call anybody was an appeaser. Nobody wanted to be Neville Chamberlain, etc. etc. So it became a kind of absolute ironclad rule of international relations that appeasement, conciliation, negotiation, those were bad things. The world was black and white. You were either with us or you were against us.