In fiction, knowing the ending ruins the story. In history writing it powers the story — we read the 1930s knowing what is coming, shouting at the page while the democracies reassure each other that diplomacy will hold. Beverly Gage’s review of William I. Hitchcock’s A Shadow Over the World takes that dread as its baseline, then flips the usual question: not why the United States failed to stop Fascism, but how a hesitant, self-interested country eventually fought it with everything it had.

That claim — that mid-century America was at heart an antifascist nation — is a provocation after a decade of scholarship excavating the “latent Nazism” in American life. Hitchcock keeps the caveats and still argues the case.

  • Through most of the thirties, the US press framed Fascism mainly as anti-Communism: the New York Times on Italy’s Fascisti (“their chief object is to fight socialism, communism, and anarchism”), the Hearst chain’s first Hitler profile silent on antisemitism, a Chicago Tribune source in Spain calling “fascist” simply “a government that keeps order.”
  • The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by more than sixty nations, proposed to outlaw war altogether. Then the Depression hit: the market lost roughly ninety per cent of its value by 1932, unemployment reached twenty-four per cent, and some Americans openly wished for a dictator. They elected Roosevelt, who offered “not dictatorship but democracy.”
  • The Neutrality Acts, renewed annually from 1935 through Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, Kristallnacht, and the seizure of Austria, barred arms sales to governments at war — so the US could not arm the Spanish Republic, while oil, grain, and machinery flowed freely to the Nazis, who were not technically at war.
  • In spring 1939, the St. Louis carried nearly a thousand Jewish refugees to American waters and was sent back to Hitler’s Europe.
  • Roosevelt had landslides (1936: over sixty per cent of the vote, ninety-eight per cent of the Electoral College) and a vast administrative state, but his majority rested on Southern Democrats committed to Jim Crow, his inner circle wanted New Deal first, and antisemitism “coursed through the bloodstream of American public life.”
  • Ahead of the president stood the antifascist network: Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed Hitler in 1931; Harold Ickes, “the most outspoken antifascist in the cabinet”; Rabbi Stephen Wise; Frances Perkins; Martha Gellhorn; Eleanor Roosevelt.
  • The Popular Front — the Communist-socialist-liberal coalition the Comintern called for in 1935 — gets short shrift in the book. Its members later joked their greatest crime was being “prematurely antifascist.”
  • The turn is late and incremental: the “shadow over the world” speech in September 1939, the Four Freedoms in January 1941, Lend-Lease that March, the Atlantic Charter in August — against the America First Committee. The US did not declare war on Germany until December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, and only after Hitler declared first.

The uncomfortable lesson runs both ways for anyone on the left. Anti-Communism was at least as powerful as antifascism in the thirties, and Roosevelt’s restraint was sustained by a coalition that included the segregationist South; the eventual mobilization came less from idealism than from geopolitical reality. And the antifascism that followed the war coexisted with Washington’s friendships with Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal once anti-Communism became the organizing principle.

Gage’s closing caution is the useful one. Yes, listen to the Dorothy Thompsons — but “the difficulty is knowing which Dorothy Thompsons to listen to,” since history is full of confident warnings that proved wrong. Roosevelt’s hesitation, pragmatism, and self-interest may be the better model than the Greatest Generation myth: what made him effective was that he watched, listened, and changed his mind while there was still time.