A SHADOW OVER THE WORLD: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II, by William I. Hitchcock
In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the protagonist, Robert Jordan, proclaims his uncompromising worldview early in the story. Beside a campfire in a cave amid the pine-covered hills, Jordan is asked whether he is a communist.
“No,” he replies. “I am an antifascist.”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
Nearly a century later, tragically, we all understand fascism and its evils. But how much do we truly know about the origins of its concomitant, antifascism? This is the question that propels William I. Hitchcock’s sly, corpulent new book, “A Shadow Over the World.”
A historian at the University of Virginia, Hitchcock was a Pulitzer finalist for “The Bitter Road to Freedom,” his chronicle of the human toll of the liberation of Europe in the Second World War. In “A Shadow Over the World,” he seeks to remedy another neglected feature of the conflict: antifascism’s legacy in global affairs. Its ideologies, he asserts, are ultimately tied up with everything from domestic politics to race relations to our modern-day crusades for democratic reforms abroad — “like a genie let out of its glowing lantern.”
“A Shadow Over the World” is packaged like a standard-issue, tub-thumping popular history, complete with cover portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt looking stern and prepared to battle his fascistic-minded foes. It is structured around Roosevelt’s decisions to confront the Axis powers and his efforts to build a coalition around the defense of democracy abroad. “Was he ready at last to cast aside irresolution and unequivocally join the struggle against the fascist threat?” Hitchcock asks, melodramatically, at one point.
Ultimately, however, the book is full of nuanced analyses of some of the most contentious debates in modern diplomatic history. There are endnotes in this book — on the uses and abuses of the word “isolationism,” for instance — that are nearly as long as this review.
To begin with, Hitchcock challenges the conventional portrait of Roosevelt as a president who, through his formidable gifts of leadership and rhetoric, commands the antifascist vanguard. Instead, Hitchcock portrays the president as more of a follower, swept along by the tide of swelling internationalist currents in academia, the government and the news media. “He came only slowly and quite grudgingly to the realization that fascism and American democracy could not coexist,” Hitchcock writes.
But if fascism and democracy could not coexist, neither, really, could the various strains of antifascist thought. Hitchcock is at his best when he writes about the profound contradictions that rent the orthodoxies of these modern-day crusaders. Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, for instance, helped galvanize Black Americans in their support of the antifascist cause. But many Black leaders viewed antifascism as a battle against both European imperialism abroad and American segregation at home. For Roosevelt, the leader of a Democratic Party that included “virulent racists” as well as ardent internationalists, drawing these antifascist energies into his camp required a delicate balance.
In China, too, the notion of the Allied powers as righteous liberators did not always sit easily. As Japan’s invasion of China intensified in 1937, atrocities like the bombing of a Shanghai railway station horrified Americans. Hearst papers published a lurid photo of a screaming child amid the rubble. But plenty of others, recalling the long history of Western meddling and domination in East Asia, viewed the European powers as oppressors and the Japanese as freedom fighters. Japan, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, represented “a country of colored people run by colored people for colored people.”
Hitchcock’s book is also particularly compelling when it serves to illuminate what fascism is not. Roosevelt’s political enemies derided him as a dictator — for his support of government interference with industry in the creation of the National Recovery Administration, for instance — but such initiatives did not make the president a fascist. Some of his biggest foes — like the populist U.S. senator Huey Long and the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin — could certainly be classified as intolerant demagogues. But they were not really fascists in the mode of Hitler and Mussolini, either.
All this subtle inquiry is refreshing. But after a while, the narrative detail and color with which Hitchcock surrounds it begins to grate. This book is too long. Over the course of 700 pages (including end matter), Hitchcock repeatedly violates William Strunk Jr.’s iron dictum: “Omit needless words.”
It is as if, in the age of artificial intelligence and shrinking attention spans, Hitchcock has decided to throw everything possible into his stew to differentiate it from the daily slop. But it is hard to imagine the reader who needs Hitchcock to revisit, for instance, Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” speech — and then quote it at length. He could have trimmed 200 pages and managed to convey the same basic information.
There is another thing I disliked about this book. Hitchcock’s “The Bitter Road to Freedom” challenged the triumphalist mythology around the Allied victory in Europe. This new volume, despite his rigorous historical exegeses, too often indulges in the kind of jingoistic prattle about the fight for freedom and democracy that becomes meaningless if you examine it too closely.
It seemed to me as if Hitchcock, his résumé safely burnished with his previous work, was now doing his best to try to sell some books. But anyone who has spent any time around a war knows how fluid and elusive abstractions like “freedom” and “democracy” can be.
Hemingway knew. Hitchcock quotes from his journalistic dispatches on the Spanish Civil War, urging Washington to wake up to the threat of fascism: “The fascist nations act, while the democratic nations talk, vacillate, connive and betray.” Yet in novels like “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Hemingway displayed far less moral certainty. Antifascists could be heroic, but they also sometimes threw their enemies off cliffs. Hitchcock’s new book is most persuasive when it teases out those kinds of ambiguities, rather than papering them over.
A SHADOW OVER THE WORLD: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II | By William I. Hitchcock | Simon & Schuster | 700 pp. | $35
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