From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt's America and the Origins of the Second World War (review)

This is a splendid little book that will appeal to undergraduates, general readers, and specialists alike. Although the book does not contain original research or freshly unearthed material, all readers will benefit from the analytical synthesis that Reynolds brings to these crucial years.

Reynolds keeps the reader's eye firmly fixed on big themes in each chapter. For example, he reminds us that at the time of the Munich Conference most Americans felt estranged from the outside world. Even those who did not believe that America had lost its "nerve," as Reynolds puts it (p.31), were skeptical of the country's ability to reshape the globe. This perspective is a useful corrective, especially to a generation accustomed to taking for granted the U.S. colossus that resulted from the Second World War and the Cold War.

But it was not these two struggles that began this fateful transformation. The key was Franklin Roosevelt. Reynolds makes clear that he is no Roosevelt revisionist who sees a man of overweening ambition leading an American public into global war through deception and trickery. On the contrary, Reynolds's portrait of FDR is among the most subtle, balanced, and sophisticated one can find even in far longer studies. The Roosevelt in this book is first and last an American politician. Roosevelt's strengths are not of ambition or even vision so much as a keen appreciation of the role of psychology in politics. The president understood that whatever the outcome of the Munich crisis it revealed that Hitler had achieved psychological dominance over Britain and France (another way to put it might be that the democracies had lost their nerve). Under such conditions Nazi Germany's ascendancy in Europe was likely, and threats to the Western hemisphere were possible.

Although Roosevelt responded by building up American power, he was even more interested in seeming powerful. This led him to emphasize naval and especially air power, with the creation of an Atlantic squadron in late 1938 and the promotion of a huge (and to all of his advisers completely unrealistic) plan to expand aircraft production.

Power came in other clothing too, as Roosevelt well realized and Reynolds well describes. Roosevelt seized on the Nazi Kristallnacht to invite the British royals to America and to highlight the freedom of religion permitted in the West. Acutely aware that Britain did not enjoy a favorable image before the American public— another vital point that Reynolds takes pains to emphasize—Roosevelt urged London not to sacrifice the moral high ground by bombing German cities once war broke out in September 1939. He also consistently championed the cause of free trade, specifically Secretary of State Cordell Hull's Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 and its renewal in 1940 and 1943. Free trade might seem, at first glance, an odd arrow in Roosevelt's quiver, but it was a useful one in helping to forge a new domestic coalition as the New Deal consensus broke down in the aftermath of some presidential miscues in 1938 and the overseas pressures that would eventually lead to American belligerency. Free trade was popular in the pro-British South. Some Anglophobic Midwestern Republicans saw it as a way to weaken the British Empire. Free trade also seemed a natural bridge to business executives on the East Coast, a bridge more fully established in the Lend-Lease program of early 1941.

By that time the American public had a vastly more favorable view of Britain. In large part this shift was the product of the Battle of Britain the previous summer, a battle waged by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as much for American support as to resist Germany. But, as Reynolds keenly observes, the shift was also partly due to Roosevelt's...