The Image of FDR in the Post–World War II Polish Emigrant Press (1945–1956)

Abstract

Abstract The article analyzes how the press of the post-Yalta Polish emigration portrayed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his foreign policy. It focuses on the period between 1945 and 1956 and draws on articles, news items, reviews, and documents published in Polish newspapers, which, alongside an organizational structure and personal contacts, played crucial role in the creation and maintenance of the network formed by emigrant communities in their countries of settlement, with the main center in London. The press and other publications helped to shape political awareness and collective identity among Poles who refused to return to their Soviet-dominated homeland as well as reflected their political and ideological attitudes. The evolution of the Roosevelt’s image in the examined press reflects Polish emigrants’ political and ideological values and opinions, as well as their expectations and disappointments over U.S. policy epitomized by Roosevelt. Polish authors pointed to his and his advisers’ ideological and political assumptions, misguided visions, intellectual limitations, and flaws in character as well as ignorance of the Soviet Union and communism, combined with futile hopes of close cooperation with the Soviet leaders in the jointly created and run postwar international order. In Polish eyes, FDR personified a general failure of the United States to rise to the occasion and carry out its mission as the leader of the democratic world threatened by the Soviet challenge.