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  • A Time of Darkness: The Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt Revisited
  • Benjamin E. Varat (bio)
Lynne Olson. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939–41. New York: Random House, 2013. 548pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $30.00.
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman. FDR and the Jews. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. 433pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

Franklin Roosevelt. We cannot get enough of him. A quick peek at Amazon brings up a half-dozen titles about him released in the last few months. Back in February 2009, Russell Baker, in the New York Review of Books, reviewed “three—three!—fresh histories of Roosevelt’s first hundred days in the White House” along with a “new full-length (888 pages) biography.”1 Historians continue to mine every seam of Roosevelt’s twelve years in power in order to better understand this period of unprecedented misery, violence, destruction, and, at times, remarkable heroism. Two new works, Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939–1941 and Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews, make fine additions to this voluminous scholarship.

Those Angry Days is a fun read. With a keen eye for anecdote and the perfect quote, Olson, well-known for other World War II–era histories, vividly reconstructs America’s internal battle over how to respond, if at all, to the Nazi victories across Europe. In Olson’s rendering, isolationists and intervention-ists struggle ceaselessly and often unscrupulously to determine the course of American policy. Heroes and villains abound in Those Angry Days; some are main players and others have one dramatic moment to their credit. Olson excels at dramatizing this complicated multi-act play in a lucid, exciting narrative that holds the reader’s attention throughout. Nonetheless, Olson has several missteps, most notably her decision to make Charles Lindbergh the central figure of the isolationist movement and her relatively hostile treatment of [End Page 324] Franklin Roosevelt. These choices do not end up fitting logically and detract from what is otherwise a compelling story.

The seminal battles between interventionists and isolationists prior to Pearl Harbor—for example, Destroyers-for-Bases and Lend-Lease—provide the structure for the story. Olson argues that while the intensity of the debates increased as the United States moved closer to war, they largely played out with a single script. In the first act, German threats and subsequent military victories lead Roosevelt to make a dramatic speech announcing some major new initiative to help the antifascist forces. Isolationists immediately raise a hue-and-cry about Roosevelt’s dictatorial tendencies and desire to get American boys killed overseas. A cowed Roosevelt assures everyone that he had no intention of entering the war and then either does nothing to support his own initiative or moves forward with it at a glacial pace. Meanwhile, frustrated interventionists mobilize public opinion through rallies, editorials, and speeches. Isolationists do the same, their side buttressed by Lindbergh’s highly publicized speeches. Ugly verbal and occasionally physical attacks escalate as Roosevelt dithers. In the final act, under intense pressure from interventionists, Roosevelt overcomes his fears and makes good on his promised policy.

Olson handles this repetition with aplomb, making each clash into a cliffhanger even though the outcomes are well known. For example, one of the last major debates before World War II, the extension of conscription in August 1941, shows Olson at her tale-telling best. The crisis arose at this point because the original bill, passed the previous September, allowed for only one-year terms of duty and then the men had to be sent home. Olson sets the debate against a backdrop of frustrated, bored conscripts wanting to go home, a hesitant Roosevelt, frantic interventionists who feared the disbanding of the U.S. army on the eve of war, and isolationists who saw dwindling opportunities for keeping the United States out of war. As time ticked away, the Army chief-of-staff, General George Marshall, told aides that the country was “in a very desperate situation,” and failure to extend conscription “would...

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