The Revolution of 1940: America’s Fight Over Entering World War Two

[DonViejo]

Jun 23, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Not since the Civil War had Americans voted in such a high stakes presidential election as the unprecedented 1940 race. Two new books and several others recently published relive that tumultuous period before Pearl Harbor—a time much like our own.

We may pledge allegiance to “one nation under God,” but from the start American society has been anything but “indivisible.” The America Revolution split families and pitted neighbor against neighbor before it launched a nation; the Civil War that nearly broke it asunder was, well, a civil war. And let’s not talk about slavery and the brutal subjugation of Native Americans. Between the open battles, we mostly just shout at each other across political lines like now. Yet the great national commitment to victory in World War II stands out as a singular shining moment of cohesion and unity. The afterglow of that massive war effort and the Allies’ great victory hides a darker reality of the political storm that swept the nation right up to the very day of the Pearl Harbor attack.

The fight between isolationists and interventionists over America’s future role in the world, a fight that turned into a political and sometimes real brawl for the presidency in the 1940 election, proved lower and even more vicious than what passes for political discourse today. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1940 election to an unprecedented third term—breaking a 150-year national taboo—marked a true revolution in American determination to take on global responsibility in a world at war and, often to our regret, ever after.

Overshadowed by the Second World War and the prior Great Depression, relatively few books have been written about the pre-war period, despite its supremely high stakes for the nation’s and world’s future. It’s a period well worth study, with high drama among the remarkable people involved in the clashes, such as aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, plutocrat U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain (and father of a future president) Joseph P. Kennedy, Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, movie mogul Jack Warner, publisher Henry Luce, and the ever-calculating, Sphinx-like FDR. Several recent books, including two new histories of the 1940 race for the presidency, fill some major gaps.

Just published, Susan Dunn’s 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election amid the Storm delivers a richly detailed Making of the President-style look back at the 1940 race. I also got an early look at Richard Moe’s more engaging and nuanced Roosevelt’s Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War, due out this fall. Both books remind us how grave a decision the nation faced in choosing a president with global war raging just over the oceanic horizons and just how close America came to abandoning its traditional democratic allies to the seemingly unstoppable forces of totalitarianism and nationalistic hatred.

full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/23/the-revolution-of-1940-america-s-fight-over-entering-world-war-two.html