Very true purely in general. The old Left would have explained FDR as progressive in the context of his times, because they were animated by a theory of history in which new classes supplanted old ones - landowners, merchants, industrialists, manual workers. The new Left's favoured groups - women, blacks, gay men, indigenous peoples, migrants, blacks again, trans can be placed in no such sequence and the dark ages are a perpetual day before yesterday.
Re post Pearl Harbor hysteria, in the wonderful 1943 military adventure film, Air Force, Howard Hawks posits that 'three vegetable trucks' came out of Honolulu and rammed flight line of American P-40 fighters as the Japanese attack began.
<i>Enoch Powell observed, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”</i>
See also: Musicians. There are so many of them that we idolize precisely because they were cut down around their peaks.
Mathematicians peaking young and becoming less productive with age isn't a "failure" in the same sense as a "failure" of a politician introducing a catastrophic policy or being caught in a corruption probe.
It is just aging of the brain.
Few would call a 60 y.o. Usain Bolt a "failure" because he wouldn't be able to repeat his performance from his twenties.
Of course FDR and Churchill knew exactly what was happening when it was happening. Sigint was good enough for tracking submarines - the encryption Einsatzkommandos used never reached that level. However, it was politically advantageous to do nothing, because they were already accused of being in the war for the sake of Jews. So not saving Jewish lives was obvious proof that they were not in the war for saving Jews. In the end, FDR could turn even Antisemites like Lindbergh to endorse the war.
It seems to be a perpetual feature of leftist politics that heroes turn into insufficiently revolutionary figures with the passage of time. In this case it's especially absurd considering how consequential FDR was across all fronts.
However, the issues identified as modern disappointments are essentially race and identity issues and reflects the shift of the political left from being primarily concerned with economic fairness to being largely concerned with what it considers racial justice. To me this is one of the biggest political inflection points in our history. It meant that our oldest and most powerful political party went from pursuing policies that largely dealt with economic incentives in an effort to move the needle between broad income-based classes to being obsessed with trying to engineer racial class outcomes against the 1,000 MPH headwind of human biodiversity.
How much did the increase of state capacity during the New Deal help the war effort? Maybe it didn’t work as intended economically but did it have the happy byproduct that American manufacturing was able to switch smoothly to making the necessary machines of war in 1940-41 with lots of handy three-letter agencies to coordinate them?
My impression is that in Britain in the 1930s the Tory-Liberal government kept the state pretty lean until Chamberlain began rearming in 1938 (in the face of Labour opposition), so that the RAF was just about able to squeak by with enough Spitfire fighter planes in summer 1940. (Rearming earlier wouldn’t have been much good as planes built in the mid-30s would already have been obsolete.) If Coolidge-Hoover economic orthodoxy had prevailed in 1932, might an Allied victory have been delayed by another year or two?
It did not take us long to produce arms for WW1, starting with a smaller government than Hoover's. It helped that private industry was already selling to the Allies for 2 years before we declared in both wars.
War effort was driven by competent managers and US had them all the way to the top. But hey, Soviets had competent managers too. Really competent ones. It takes quite an effort to relocate industry from Ukraine and W Russia to the Urals and Central Asia and start production within 3-6 months! The interesting thing is that the Germans, even though they had all of Western, Central and big part of Eastern Europe at their disposal, couldn't make hay out of it. So much for the German racial superiority!
Soviets killed about 80% of German Soldiers. US hardly any, and even then only from 1944 a year after theh war was pretty much over (after Stalingrad). Likewise some 90% of the US assistance in goods and weapons only arrived after Stalingrad. US backed the winner only after it was clear who had won. US only entered the war to get non-Soviet forces to arrive in Berlin (E Germany) at the same time as Soviet forces did.
(Yeah I know most newspaper stories and opinion pieces assure you the opposite and even some history books. I think readers of Steve's column know why.)
Not really true. Most Soviet arms production was in the conquered west. They did move some plants to the east but without American aid in trucks, planes etc they would never have been able to mount the Stalingrad counter attack.
I looked it up the last time someone mentioned it and according to a chatGPT scan of the web the consensus among historians is that the Soviets would have won. It might just have taken longer.
Was France particularly desperate to be liberated? AJP Taylor had a sardonic anecdote:
Another of my French friends was, I suspect, more typical. He had a house on the coast not far from Coutances, itself not far from the front line. I asked him if the battle did not disturb him. He said only that no trains were running and that he had had to bicycle from Paris to the coast. Once there he spent his days sunbathing on the sands and swimming when the tide came up. One day someone ran down from the village to say that troops were passing through. My friend slipped a towel round his waist and ran up to the village. Some German troops marched through, accompanied by German tanks. There was then a break. Then there appeared American tanks and along with them American infantry. My friend removed the towel from his waist and waved it in the air. Then he returned to the beach. “And that,” said my friend, “is how I was liberated.”
I think Steve has posted a theory about existentialism growing out of how Sartre and Camus saw that the German occupation wasn’t particularly irksome for many of their peers.
Sartre and Beauvoir. Camus was a bit more to the Resistance. However, it were Sartre and Beauvoir who defined Existentialism - longer life and all that. And of course, they were also friends of the Heidegger Nazi.
Nonsense. When did US supply the first 100 planes and trucks?
When did Stalingrad happen? (ended Feb 2nd 1943)
When did the first US Division fight against Germany (from 1941 to 1943, 200 German divisions were fighting Soviets).
There is this weird idea that US won the war with a fall back position that Russia would have lose with US supplies. Totally delusional. Explains why nato got into such a clusterfuck in Ukraine - delusions of power. And why it took so long for US to give up on trying to defend Taiwan against an imaginary Chinese attack.
The Pacific war was different and a real US involvement.
I believe that many of the tanks and other transport units were crucial for Operation Uranus during the Battle of Stalingrad.
Even by 1943 much of the Luftwaffe was defending against US and British bombing and could not be used in the eastern front.
Hard to say whether Russia could have won the war without our aid and the the air war. Maybe. But even with it, the war was a close run thing. Without our assistance Stalin may have decided to negotiate or alternatively, been able to conquer all of Europe. Either way not a great outcome.
So late 1942 and Stalingrad was over Feb 2nd 1943.
Thanks you for that.
In contrast to your interpretation, I conclude this was all far too late to make a difference. So do most istorians (but not most writers of newspaper columns strangely)
Unfortunately most people seem to think that WW2 happened only after the Yanks arrived.
The other thing to point out is that Stalingrad is 2000km from the pre-war German border. Germany had similar supply problems as the Soviets and less to supply. It wasn't US that gave that advantage to the Soviets, it was Germany's inability to comprehensively defeat them in 1941.
Some argue that Germany was really lost already in 1941.
The only close run thing in WW2 was who would get to Berlin first.
Besides, with the war in the Pacific still ongoing, the US didn't want to alienate the Russkies. They only changed their mind AFTER the successful Trinity Nuclear test, that coincided with the Potsdam conference in July 1945. By that time, Germany was already vanquished and partitioned.
The US supplied over 400,000 trucks to the commies. Built, paid for, and shipped. That’s just trucks. The Commies who were allied with Hitler for the first 22 months of the war. We should have left them both to slug it out.
But after Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941, after invading Russia in June, it would have been strange to let him mop up Eurasia and join up with his far eastern ally, with whom you also happen to be at war.
Germany and Japan weren't really allies, except in Western propaganda.
They happened to be fighting some of the same enemies, but they had no treaties of alliance.
Japan did have a treaty of neutrality with Germany's primary enemy, the Soviet Union, and Japan allowed US supplies to the Soviets to transit the Pacific even while the US was at war with Japan.
After Hitler declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor it would have taken a politician of even more than FDR’s ability to broadcast to the nation, “You see, Germany and Japan aren’t *really* Allies…”
Of course they had treaties of alliance. Remember the Anti-Komintern Pact? Besides, the rapid declaration of War by Germany on the US, within 3 days of Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese strongly suggests that Adolf knew of it before hand. And agreed to it, plus reassured the Japanese that he would do that - effectively giving them the green light.
It's not uncommon not to find a written record. For example, the best that could be found for a Führerbefehl on Holocaust is a rather enigmatic letter from Goehring to Heydrich in July 1941.
It's the same today. Not only did Iran greenlighted the Hamas war start on October 7, 2023. But Iran itself had a greenlight from PR China. That's why they went with it... They also had a long discussion about the extent Hizbollah should participate - do nothing, full blown infantry attack on Northern Israel, or just missiles. In the end, they decided on just missiles.
haha - we (US and UK did). No US or UK troops in Europe from 1941 to after Stalingrad - by which time it was clear Soviets would win and the race was on to get to Berlin soon after Soviets did.
UK/US did nothing to win the war - but everything to be there at the victory parade (which they declared a day early out of spite for Moscow).
The decision to inter Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor may appear disgraceful in retrospect, but it prioritized the security of the nation over solicitude to a suspect group. Which makes more sense--the Japanese internment, or George W Bush after the 9/11 attack declaring Islam "a religion of peace" and doubling the number of Muslim immigrants? A sane nation would have put an immediate moratorium on Muslim immigration and perhaps deported most of those here. As severe as that would have been, it would have been far less cruel and pointless than our disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. We have lost the will to make the hard choices that a civilization needs to routinely make in order to survive--look at the resistance to the deportations of illegal aliens, even those who are criminals.
Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon recommended Hoover do nothing after the Crash. Instead, he and Congress doubled the top tax rate from 25 to 50% and raised & renewed some tariffs. I'd like to know how much the likely and then actual election of FDR soured business confidence further, leading to bank failures and the worst of the Depression. But we didn't yet have the bureaucracy to measure that.
"Germany the real threat."
They were the ones invading his subordinates' Soviet friends.
FDR's deprecation on the Left is simply the local effect of the general shift of the Left away from championship by economic class to championship by racial and sexual identity.
Modern Leftists don't know what the economic "means of production" are, never mind wanting to seize them. But they do know all about artificial vagina dilators and are only too happy to seize those.
I'd make that trade. Unfortunately a couple decades of that has left the young people feeling hopeless about their prospects as the boomers pulled the ladder up after them. That will lead to more extremism unless some leaders pick up on the desire for lower corruption and more opportunity.
> "the Japanese, whom FDR rightly saw as less central than the Nazis"
Neither Japan nor Germany was a threat to the US until FDR and Churchill went out of their way to make them such.
It's too big a subject to address here, but Buchannan's "Unnecessary War" is a decent primer.
> "As for the Holocaust, it’s not clear that the Allies could have done all that much other than what they did do: crush every square inch of the Nazi regime."
If they really wanted to prevent the Holocaust, not starting a general war would have worked wonders.
Hitler didn't need to conquer France, Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries to kill Eastern Europe's Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Communists. But would he have attacked the USSR with a free France at his back? Maybe if Chamberlain hadn't grown a spine.
I'm not sure how much credit FDR deserves for beating Hitler. The industrial might of the island fortress of America beat the Axis powers but how much of that is due to FDR is moot. What is much less controversial is FDR's complete bamboozlement by Stalin. FDR allowed a tank car of heavy water to be shipped to the Soviets and sold out eastern Europe for the dubious returns of Soviet cooperation. Cooperation that proved entirely ephimeral after VE day. FDR seems to have been a crypto-communist of the type that was all too common among his class and would come to define the post-war era in America: the priviliged children of the capitalists that built the industry that won the war becoming anti-capitalist and anti-American. More and more it begins to seem like letting Stalin and Hitler bleed each other white would have been a better strategy.
This piece vastly underestimates the consequences of the Communist penetration of the FDR administration. Diana West in American Betrayal makes a convincing case that the Soviets steered the Allied effort for their own benefit. The US never helped the anti-Nazi resistance, including ignoring German officers who wanted help with deposing Hitler in exchange for an early end to the war via conditional surrender. Stalin and his agents also helped stall the Italian campaign because it threatened Stalin’s plans for Eastern Europe. The Communists push for an invasion of France instead of a full push from Italy arguably lengthened the war. Much of the Holocaust could have been avoided if the war had ended in 1944 or even earlier.
FDR was unpenetrated, canny and humble enough after already winning three elections to listen to his party and appoint an anti-communist senator as his VP in 1944, knowing that he likely wouldn’t survive the four year term.
My impression is the Italian campaign was a Churchillian sideshow. Churchill feared an invasion force across the channel might be wiped out. But mountain warfare in Italy was always going to be slow and treacherous, an unlikely way into Germany. He seems to have failed to update his strategic priors to the age of the tank.
I didn't know this; fascinating. Your essays are always worth reading even when I disagree with them.
"Warren Harding seldom gets the credit he deserves for restoring “normalcy” in the early 1920s by statesmanlike acts such as pardoning the imprisoned antiwar socialist Eugene Debs and inviting him to dine at the White House."
FDR is criticized for not acting like a 2020 progressive by people who assure us America was a Dark Ages country in 1940
2020 Progressives have a problem with history.
Very true purely in general. The old Left would have explained FDR as progressive in the context of his times, because they were animated by a theory of history in which new classes supplanted old ones - landowners, merchants, industrialists, manual workers. The new Left's favoured groups - women, blacks, gay men, indigenous peoples, migrants, blacks again, trans can be placed in no such sequence and the dark ages are a perpetual day before yesterday.
Re post Pearl Harbor hysteria, in the wonderful 1943 military adventure film, Air Force, Howard Hawks posits that 'three vegetable trucks' came out of Honolulu and rammed flight line of American P-40 fighters as the Japanese attack began.
<i>Enoch Powell observed, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”</i>
See also: Musicians. There are so many of them that we idolize precisely because they were cut down around their peaks.
Or mathematicians like Galois.
Mathematicians peaking young and becoming less productive with age isn't a "failure" in the same sense as a "failure" of a politician introducing a catastrophic policy or being caught in a corruption probe.
It is just aging of the brain.
Few would call a 60 y.o. Usain Bolt a "failure" because he wouldn't be able to repeat his performance from his twenties.
Of course FDR and Churchill knew exactly what was happening when it was happening. Sigint was good enough for tracking submarines - the encryption Einsatzkommandos used never reached that level. However, it was politically advantageous to do nothing, because they were already accused of being in the war for the sake of Jews. So not saving Jewish lives was obvious proof that they were not in the war for saving Jews. In the end, FDR could turn even Antisemites like Lindbergh to endorse the war.
It seems to be a perpetual feature of leftist politics that heroes turn into insufficiently revolutionary figures with the passage of time. In this case it's especially absurd considering how consequential FDR was across all fronts.
However, the issues identified as modern disappointments are essentially race and identity issues and reflects the shift of the political left from being primarily concerned with economic fairness to being largely concerned with what it considers racial justice. To me this is one of the biggest political inflection points in our history. It meant that our oldest and most powerful political party went from pursuing policies that largely dealt with economic incentives in an effort to move the needle between broad income-based classes to being obsessed with trying to engineer racial class outcomes against the 1,000 MPH headwind of human biodiversity.
Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2B4bsqYxwo0
I remember my 1970s-era leftist history teacher singing that in one class.
A chicken in every pot!
An ice pick in every Trot!
How much did the increase of state capacity during the New Deal help the war effort? Maybe it didn’t work as intended economically but did it have the happy byproduct that American manufacturing was able to switch smoothly to making the necessary machines of war in 1940-41 with lots of handy three-letter agencies to coordinate them?
My impression is that in Britain in the 1930s the Tory-Liberal government kept the state pretty lean until Chamberlain began rearming in 1938 (in the face of Labour opposition), so that the RAF was just about able to squeak by with enough Spitfire fighter planes in summer 1940. (Rearming earlier wouldn’t have been much good as planes built in the mid-30s would already have been obsolete.) If Coolidge-Hoover economic orthodoxy had prevailed in 1932, might an Allied victory have been delayed by another year or two?
It did not take us long to produce arms for WW1, starting with a smaller government than Hoover's. It helped that private industry was already selling to the Allies for 2 years before we declared in both wars.
War effort was driven by competent managers and US had them all the way to the top. But hey, Soviets had competent managers too. Really competent ones. It takes quite an effort to relocate industry from Ukraine and W Russia to the Urals and Central Asia and start production within 3-6 months! The interesting thing is that the Germans, even though they had all of Western, Central and big part of Eastern Europe at their disposal, couldn't make hay out of it. So much for the German racial superiority!
of course. hes similar to the founding stock of the country so he must be a hater.
FDR defeated Hitler?
You are reading the wrong history books.
Soviets killed about 80% of German Soldiers. US hardly any, and even then only from 1944 a year after theh war was pretty much over (after Stalingrad). Likewise some 90% of the US assistance in goods and weapons only arrived after Stalingrad. US backed the winner only after it was clear who had won. US only entered the war to get non-Soviet forces to arrive in Berlin (E Germany) at the same time as Soviet forces did.
(Yeah I know most newspaper stories and opinion pieces assure you the opposite and even some history books. I think readers of Steve's column know why.)
Not really true. Most Soviet arms production was in the conquered west. They did move some plants to the east but without American aid in trucks, planes etc they would never have been able to mount the Stalingrad counter attack.
I looked it up the last time someone mentioned it and according to a chatGPT scan of the web the consensus among historians is that the Soviets would have won. It might just have taken longer.
Would that have liberated France? Don't know.
Was France particularly desperate to be liberated? AJP Taylor had a sardonic anecdote:
Another of my French friends was, I suspect, more typical. He had a house on the coast not far from Coutances, itself not far from the front line. I asked him if the battle did not disturb him. He said only that no trains were running and that he had had to bicycle from Paris to the coast. Once there he spent his days sunbathing on the sands and swimming when the tide came up. One day someone ran down from the village to say that troops were passing through. My friend slipped a towel round his waist and ran up to the village. Some German troops marched through, accompanied by German tanks. There was then a break. Then there appeared American tanks and along with them American infantry. My friend removed the towel from his waist and waved it in the air. Then he returned to the beach. “And that,” said my friend, “is how I was liberated.”
In the absence of the enemy wanting to exterminate you it only depends on how much it irks you to be ruled by another government.
I think Steve has posted a theory about existentialism growing out of how Sartre and Camus saw that the German occupation wasn’t particularly irksome for many of their peers.
Sartre and Beauvoir. Camus was a bit more to the Resistance. However, it were Sartre and Beauvoir who defined Existentialism - longer life and all that. And of course, they were also friends of the Heidegger Nazi.
So, kinda like now...
He probably ate better after liberation and certainly had better cigarettes.
Nonsense. When did US supply the first 100 planes and trucks?
When did Stalingrad happen? (ended Feb 2nd 1943)
When did the first US Division fight against Germany (from 1941 to 1943, 200 German divisions were fighting Soviets).
There is this weird idea that US won the war with a fall back position that Russia would have lose with US supplies. Totally delusional. Explains why nato got into such a clusterfuck in Ukraine - delusions of power. And why it took so long for US to give up on trying to defend Taiwan against an imaginary Chinese attack.
The Pacific war was different and a real US involvement.
Here are the numbers from Grok:
Year Aircraft Armored Transport Food Petroleum
(units) (units) (units) (1000s tons) (1000s tons)
1941 3 0 0 0.001 0.01
1942 2,097 2,000 80,000 0.153 0.13
1943 4,758 3,000 113,000 0.655 0.20
1944 4,864 4,000 274,000 1.198 0.80
1945 2,281 3,300 11,000 2.458 1.53
Total 14,003 12,300 478,000 4.465 2.67
I believe that many of the tanks and other transport units were crucial for Operation Uranus during the Battle of Stalingrad.
Even by 1943 much of the Luftwaffe was defending against US and British bombing and could not be used in the eastern front.
Hard to say whether Russia could have won the war without our aid and the the air war. Maybe. But even with it, the war was a close run thing. Without our assistance Stalin may have decided to negotiate or alternatively, been able to conquer all of Europe. Either way not a great outcome.
So late 1942 and Stalingrad was over Feb 2nd 1943.
Thanks you for that.
In contrast to your interpretation, I conclude this was all far too late to make a difference. So do most istorians (but not most writers of newspaper columns strangely)
Unfortunately most people seem to think that WW2 happened only after the Yanks arrived.
The other thing to point out is that Stalingrad is 2000km from the pre-war German border. Germany had similar supply problems as the Soviets and less to supply. It wasn't US that gave that advantage to the Soviets, it was Germany's inability to comprehensively defeat them in 1941.
Some argue that Germany was really lost already in 1941.
The only close run thing in WW2 was who would get to Berlin first.
Besides, with the war in the Pacific still ongoing, the US didn't want to alienate the Russkies. They only changed their mind AFTER the successful Trinity Nuclear test, that coincided with the Potsdam conference in July 1945. By that time, Germany was already vanquished and partitioned.
The US supplied over 400,000 trucks to the commies. Built, paid for, and shipped. That’s just trucks. The Commies who were allied with Hitler for the first 22 months of the war. We should have left them both to slug it out.
But after Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941, after invading Russia in June, it would have been strange to let him mop up Eurasia and join up with his far eastern ally, with whom you also happen to be at war.
Germany and Japan weren't really allies, except in Western propaganda.
They happened to be fighting some of the same enemies, but they had no treaties of alliance.
Japan did have a treaty of neutrality with Germany's primary enemy, the Soviet Union, and Japan allowed US supplies to the Soviets to transit the Pacific even while the US was at war with Japan.
After Hitler declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor it would have taken a politician of even more than FDR’s ability to broadcast to the nation, “You see, Germany and Japan aren’t *really* Allies…”
Of course they had treaties of alliance. Remember the Anti-Komintern Pact? Besides, the rapid declaration of War by Germany on the US, within 3 days of Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese strongly suggests that Adolf knew of it before hand. And agreed to it, plus reassured the Japanese that he would do that - effectively giving them the green light.
It's not uncommon not to find a written record. For example, the best that could be found for a Führerbefehl on Holocaust is a rather enigmatic letter from Goehring to Heydrich in July 1941.
It's the same today. Not only did Iran greenlighted the Hamas war start on October 7, 2023. But Iran itself had a greenlight from PR China. That's why they went with it... They also had a long discussion about the extent Hizbollah should participate - do nothing, full blown infantry attack on Northern Israel, or just missiles. In the end, they decided on just missiles.
haha - we (US and UK did). No US or UK troops in Europe from 1941 to after Stalingrad - by which time it was clear Soviets would win and the race was on to get to Berlin soon after Soviets did.
UK/US did nothing to win the war - but everything to be there at the victory parade (which they declared a day early out of spite for Moscow).
The decision to inter Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor may appear disgraceful in retrospect, but it prioritized the security of the nation over solicitude to a suspect group. Which makes more sense--the Japanese internment, or George W Bush after the 9/11 attack declaring Islam "a religion of peace" and doubling the number of Muslim immigrants? A sane nation would have put an immediate moratorium on Muslim immigration and perhaps deported most of those here. As severe as that would have been, it would have been far less cruel and pointless than our disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. We have lost the will to make the hard choices that a civilization needs to routinely make in order to survive--look at the resistance to the deportations of illegal aliens, even those who are criminals.
But in Hawaii USG imprisoned no Japanese
But I have to wonder how much of that was because the Haolies couldn't really tell the ethnic Japanese from the native Hawaiians?
And the Chinese, and the Filipinos...
There was an incident where a Japanese pilot crashed on a small island, and a Japanese-born resident helped him after learning about the attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%CA%BBihau_incident
But all of Hawaii was under martial law in 1942, so it was kind of like one big internment camp for everybody.
I don't think there were any, or many, critical targets not on military bases, unlike SoCal.
Treasury Sec. Andrew Mellon recommended Hoover do nothing after the Crash. Instead, he and Congress doubled the top tax rate from 25 to 50% and raised & renewed some tariffs. I'd like to know how much the likely and then actual election of FDR soured business confidence further, leading to bank failures and the worst of the Depression. But we didn't yet have the bureaucracy to measure that.
"Germany the real threat."
They were the ones invading his subordinates' Soviet friends.
FDR's deprecation on the Left is simply the local effect of the general shift of the Left away from championship by economic class to championship by racial and sexual identity.
Modern Leftists don't know what the economic "means of production" are, never mind wanting to seize them. But they do know all about artificial vagina dilators and are only too happy to seize those.
I'd make that trade. Unfortunately a couple decades of that has left the young people feeling hopeless about their prospects as the boomers pulled the ladder up after them. That will lead to more extremism unless some leaders pick up on the desire for lower corruption and more opportunity.
> "the Japanese, whom FDR rightly saw as less central than the Nazis"
Neither Japan nor Germany was a threat to the US until FDR and Churchill went out of their way to make them such.
It's too big a subject to address here, but Buchannan's "Unnecessary War" is a decent primer.
> "As for the Holocaust, it’s not clear that the Allies could have done all that much other than what they did do: crush every square inch of the Nazi regime."
If they really wanted to prevent the Holocaust, not starting a general war would have worked wonders.
Hitler didn't need to conquer France, Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries to kill Eastern Europe's Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Communists. But would he have attacked the USSR with a free France at his back? Maybe if Chamberlain hadn't grown a spine.
I'm not sure how much credit FDR deserves for beating Hitler. The industrial might of the island fortress of America beat the Axis powers but how much of that is due to FDR is moot. What is much less controversial is FDR's complete bamboozlement by Stalin. FDR allowed a tank car of heavy water to be shipped to the Soviets and sold out eastern Europe for the dubious returns of Soviet cooperation. Cooperation that proved entirely ephimeral after VE day. FDR seems to have been a crypto-communist of the type that was all too common among his class and would come to define the post-war era in America: the priviliged children of the capitalists that built the industry that won the war becoming anti-capitalist and anti-American. More and more it begins to seem like letting Stalin and Hitler bleed each other white would have been a better strategy.
In almost every Jap household, because of elderly relatives, there hung a portrait of Hirohito, Emperor of the Japanese Empire.
This piece vastly underestimates the consequences of the Communist penetration of the FDR administration. Diana West in American Betrayal makes a convincing case that the Soviets steered the Allied effort for their own benefit. The US never helped the anti-Nazi resistance, including ignoring German officers who wanted help with deposing Hitler in exchange for an early end to the war via conditional surrender. Stalin and his agents also helped stall the Italian campaign because it threatened Stalin’s plans for Eastern Europe. The Communists push for an invasion of France instead of a full push from Italy arguably lengthened the war. Much of the Holocaust could have been avoided if the war had ended in 1944 or even earlier.
FDR was unpenetrated, canny and humble enough after already winning three elections to listen to his party and appoint an anti-communist senator as his VP in 1944, knowing that he likely wouldn’t survive the four year term.
My impression is the Italian campaign was a Churchillian sideshow. Churchill feared an invasion force across the channel might be wiped out. But mountain warfare in Italy was always going to be slow and treacherous, an unlikely way into Germany. He seems to have failed to update his strategic priors to the age of the tank.
I thought Churchill wanted to go up the Balkans, which might have been even more difficult than Italy.
I didn't know this; fascinating. Your essays are always worth reading even when I disagree with them.
"Warren Harding seldom gets the credit he deserves for restoring “normalcy” in the early 1920s by statesmanlike acts such as pardoning the imprisoned antiwar socialist Eugene Debs and inviting him to dine at the White House."