What would expect a war paper to do to a national hero?
"‘Those Angry Days’ by Lynne Olson" by Jordan Michael Smith | March 30, 2013
Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,’’ imagined a world in which the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940. Roth’s inspiration for the novel, he said, was the autobiography of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who noted that some Republicans wanted Lindbergh to run against President Roosevelt. As it turns out, that same autobiography provided the title and spirit of Lynne Olson’s new book, which is also about Lindbergh and the 1940 election.
“Those Angry Days,’’ however, is a factual account of America’s years immediately preceding World War II. No fictional characters are included, and none are needed. Schlesinger was a man who saw the violent political debates surrounding McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, but he called the quarrels from 1939 to 1941 the worst he ever saw.
In one corner was Lindbergh, the man whose 1927 trans-Atlantic flight jetted him to everlasting fame. “Lucky Lindy’’ was the de facto leader of the isolationists — those who believed that America should stay out of Europe’s war and negotiate a peace between Great Britain and Nazi Germany. Prominent isolationists included Henry Ford and Joe Kennedy Sr. Politicians included Senators Burton Wheeler, Robert Taft, Gerald Nye, and Representative Hamilton Fish.
Politicians and figures that would all be described as anti-semitic.
Related: The Nye Committee
Yes, people of peace and those who know what war i$ really about must be called isolationist in my war paper.
Supporting them was a grass-roots organization called the America First Committee, born at Yale University and of the national student antiwar movement. These students were “frankly determined to have peace at any price,” according to a Harvard Crimson editorial quoted by Olson. Members and supporters of America First included a young John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, and Sargent Shriver.
Isn't that something? I was under the impression that those were only a phenomenon of the 1960s.
In the opposing corner were the interventionists — those who believed the United States needed to support Britain and defeat Germany....
What would today be called the neo-cons.
The interventionist counterpart of America First was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Headed by newspaper editor William Allen White, the citizens’ group employed writer Robert Sherwood and lawyer Adlai Stevenson to blanket the country with radio and newspaper ads, organize speeches, and influence public opinion.
Oh, Adlai! No wonder the Jewish prism of history adores the guy!
And really, readers, how rich is it that even back then newspapers were promoting wars?
In government, the interventionists were supported by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Roosevelt. Olson maintains, however, that FDR was far more timid than is commonly remembered. In contrast to Roosevelt’s boldness in leading the New Deal, “he was notably cautious and hesitant in the two years before the Japanese attack on American soil,” Olson writes.
In Olson’s telling, the most skillful American politician ever was “on the sidelines” of the 20th century’s roughest political debate because he was afraid of congressional isolationists, of men he defeated at the ballot box on four consecutive occasions.
The best evidence against Olson’s thesis is found in the very pages of “Those Angry Days.’’ There we learn that “[j]ust plain, common, ordinary hatred of Roosevelt is a factor in isolationism,” as a contemporaneous report in Life magazinehad it. Roosevelt had seen Woodrow Wilson’s failure to persuade Congress to join the League of Nations, which led to the very backlash against foreign engagement he was trying to undo.
Such a sanitized version of what really happened.
By engaging in what historian Steven Casey called a “Cautious Crusade,” Roosevelt achieved two things of priceless value. First, once Americans got into war, they did so with unity and determination. “[T]hey coalesced as never before in history,” Olson writes, seemingly unaware that had FDR led a strongly isolationist country into war without public opinion on his side that very unity would have dissolved.
All due a similar type of false flag attack such as 9/11, folks.
When the war was going badly in 1942, few Americans called for surrender or indulged in partisan acrimony — all because FDR had waited to be attacked by a foreign country before making war.
Related: PEARL HARBOR: MOTHER OF ALL CONSPIRACIES
Yes, even respected historians are saying it was a LIHOP.
And our generation received a New Pearl Harbor. Hmmmmmm.
Second, Roosevelt’s decision to permit isolationist sentiment to be undermined by world events rather than presidential decree encouraged the United States to assume global leadership after the war. Isolationism, so prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, was so discredited by reality that it still hasn’t made a comeback.
That is such an amazing pos statement it is hard to respond. Have they forgotten all the antiwar protests since, including Iraq in 2003? I suppose I should expect nothing less from a war paper that has been itself discredited.
Lindbergh, in Olson’s hands, was an obstinate, cold-blooded man who was wrong on the defining question of the 20th century.
Oh, that was the defining question of the 20th century, huh? Says who? I suppose it was in the sense of whether or not the world would continue to be run by international banking cartels and their governmental lackeys or by nationalist fascists free of private central banking and the Ponzi scheme of usury.
At first the greatest exponent of antiwar sentiment, the icon’s public anti-Semitism — he called the Jews a “danger to this country” in an infamous speech — eventually made him not just a social pariah but someone who “did incalculable harm to the cause of isolationism,” writes Olson.
Well, the dual nationals sure have done a job on us over 60 years later. This government is now a $lave to Israel's every whim.
Olson notes at one point that “the national debate over the draft, drawn-out and contentious as it was, helped awaken the American people to the need to prepare themselves for a war that was drawing steadily closer.” Exactly.
And we don't have that debate now because they don't want the war-weary American people, the damn isolationists, getting all riled up over lies in the name of global conquest and Israeli hegemony. So let the women serve in combat, let the gays come out of the closet, promise the immigrants amnesty if they will serve, quietly continue to use those private contractors, and if all else fails f*** 'em on jobs so they will join the service.
Similar debates over the 1941 Lend-Lease law, which allowed the United States to supply materiel to the Allies, and peacetime conscription also had the effect of forcing Britain and the Soviet Union to bear much of the financial and human burden of defeating Germany while the United States rearmed.
That's true.
As a result, the United States suffered comparatively few casualties and its economy boomed. When the war ended, America stood unchallenged as the world’s superpower, a position it has yet to relinquish. Not bad....
They forget about the Cold War?
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Also see: Sunday Globe Special: Book Review
‘The Sleepwalkers’ by Christopher Clark
War paper sure likes the war books, 'eh?
