Roosevelt Administration Research Articles

“A Fight between Two Systems of Thought”: Gerald B. Winrod and the Kansas Senate Race of 1938

One evening in June 1938, the Wichita evangelist Gerald Burton Winrod made a campaign speech before an audience of approximately 450 people in Fremont Park in the city of Emporia, Kansas, as part of his bid to become the Republican nominee for the Senate. Although “Onward Christian Soldiers” blasted from a sound truck before he began, his address focused on the failures of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to redress the economic devastation of the Great Depression. The crowd was enthusiastic: “I'm a Democrat, but I want to vote for you in November,” one listener told him afterward. Asked what he thought the chances were for a Republican to unseat the incumbent Democratic senator George McGill in 1938, Winrod replied, “I see a rising tide of reaction against the New Deal in Kansas. It is evident everywhere I go. Although this is an off-election year, it is going to be...

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

The Democratic-CIO Alliance: The Benefits of Friendship

The Democratic-CIO Alliance: The Benefits of Friendship

The POLLS—REVIEW

Abstract Presidential job approval is arguably the most important time series in US polling history and likely the most well-understood public opinion measure in popular American culture. This article examines the history of the measure going back to its origination during the Roosevelt administration, the value of presidential job approval in assessing the timeline of US history, the life cycle of presidential approval within administrations, and the relationship between presidential approval and incumbent reelection. The evidence indicates increasingly rigid partisan politicization in presidential-approval ratings, suggesting less variation in approval in the future, fewer so-called rally events, and the possibility that job approval may become more of a measure of party loyalty than actual presidential performance assessment.

In Search of the Virtuous Propagandist: The Ethics of Selling War

ABSTRACT Before they can commit their states to war, leaders who believe that war is necessary must first secure public commitment to collective action and sacrifice. The chief instrument for achieving this is propaganda, an activity generally understood as morally problematic. Yet if we concede that some wars are morally permissible or even morally required, must we not also concede that propaganda campaigns orchestrated to marshal the public will to fight those wars are likewise morally permissible or required? Focusing on the content of presidential speeches and the strategic context in which they were delivered, I seek to isolate the morally blameworthy aspects of propaganda in two campaigns: the George W. Bush administration’s effort to marshal public support for the Iraq War and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s attempt to draw the US into the Second World War. I conclude by offering a sketch of conditions under which propaganda may be understood as morally permissible.

‘Royal diplomacy: British preparations for the State Visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States, June 1939.’

ABSTRACT This article explores the preparation made by the British government, primarily the Foreign Office, for the state visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States three months before the outbreak of the Second World War. It considers the dynamics of the relationship between the officials in Whitehall, the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, the agenda of the Roosevelt administration and the role of the British royal family as ambassadors in their own right. Lindsay’s role was also pivotal because he was a personal friend of the King and was also on much respected and influential figure in Washington. The article does not discuss the course of the state visit, although there is discussion of the literature that relates to it. However, it does reveal that securing a concrete alliance with the United States was not the priority of the British government in the summer of 1939; that the focus of the Foreign Office, in particular, was on the growing diplomatic crisis in Europe. Lastly, the article argues that in the months leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War, the Foreign Office was confident in its own ability to lead the formulation of British foreign policy; that it was not eclipsed by Neville Chamberlain’s very personal involvement in appeasing the fascist dictators.

The Impact of the New Deal on Economic Liberties During the Great Depression

The Great Depression is among the most consequential periods in American history. The collapse that began in 1929, and the economic, social, and political consequences of the subsequent decade, have been an enormously popular subject for historians and economists. Yet, despite this significant scholarly achievement, curiously little research has been advanced at the intersection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and economic liberties. Through a review of the economic history of the Great Depression, and in the context of the contemporary political environment and legal framework, this paper seeks to understand the impact of FDR’s interventionist economic policies on economic liberties, principally freedom of contract and private property. The Roosevelt administration used deliberately crafted war analogies to draw upon and expand pre-existing emergency powers for political and economic aims. This expansion of a national security justification into the economic realm clashed with a decades-long period of heightened protection for economic liberties. The result was a significant increase in centralized and arbitrary executive power outside of the wartime environment at the expense of economic liberty. Furthermore, the exercise of these policies established and expanded political and legal precedents that governments would not hesitate to use in the future—and continues unabated today.

‘Returning to Normalcy?’: The United States Now

‘Returning to Normalcy?’: The United States Now David Holloway ‘Returning to normalcy’is a phrase one hears a lot in the United States today. That is understandable, given the continuing, surging Covid-19 pandemic. The prospect of putting that behind us and recovering from its effects is appealing to people everywhere. But for the majority ofAmericans the phrase expresses a different hope as well: that the end of the Trump Administration will mean a return to a more civil politics and more competent government. What are the prospects for such an outcome? American society is deeply divided, as Joe Biden acknowledged in his Inaugural Address. How does that affect the role of the United States in the world? Can there be a ‘return to normalcy?’And should there be? The question of world order There has been a broad sense in recent years that the existing world order is changing, even if it is not clear where that change will lead. The trends to which people point – the rise of populism; the roll-back of democracy; growing trade protectionism; the weakening of international organisations; the rise of China – suggest that something fundamental is under way. This renewed interest in world order pre-dates the election of Donald Trump as US president, but his term in office has deepened the sense of uncertainty and anxiety about the future. The origins of the present world order are commonly traced (in American studies at least) to the Second World War and the Roosevelt Administration’s ideas for avoiding a repetition of the economic and political disasters of the inter-war period. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful state in the world, in a stronger position than any other to define the shape of the postwar order. It would engage with the world, not isolate itself, and it would encourage open trade and political democracy. The Atlantic Charter, the United Nations Charter, and the Bretton Woods agreements were among the most important products of this effort to create a new world order. Studies • volume 110 • number 437 17 Before long, however, the two competing models of the Cold War partially supplanted this vision. The United States and the Soviet Union dominated a bipolar world. Both were committed to economic and political principles that they wanted to extend to the whole world, and each was deeply hostile to the principles of the other side. It was not force of arms that brought the Cold War to an end, but the failure of the Soviet system. Its collapse was a milestone in international relations comparable to the end of a world war, though thankfully without bloodshed on the same scale. For many Americans, the period after the Cold War was a ‘unipolar moment’, in which the United States was not only the most powerful state in the world but also embodied the kind of economic and political order that other countries would aspire to emulate. It was the end of history, in the sense that the great ideological struggles of the twentieth century had been decided: fascism and communism had been defeated; liberal democracy was now anointed by history as the best system of government not only for political freedom, but for economic prosperity as well.1 Instead of competing models, there would now be just one model, which would extend eventually to the whole world. Market economies and democratic politics would become the norm. Barriers to globalisation would diminish. The ‘democratic peace’ theory gained popularity: a democratic world would be a peaceful world, because democratic states do not go to war with one another. Programmes to foster democracy and even, in certain circumstances, the imposition of democratic rule, would further the cause of international peace.This world later came to be described, by its supporters, as the liberal or ‘rules-based’international order, in which American dominance would be maintained – but also constrained – by an open trading system, democratic politics, and multinational organisations.2 There was a large element of hubris in this vision, even though events seemed for a while to unfold as predicted. The collapse of communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe gave a...

G.I. BILL OF RIGHTS: ВПЛИВ НА ФОРМУВАННЯ ОБРАЗУ ВЕТЕРАНА У СУСПІЛЬНІЙ СВІДОМОСТІ

The article explores the incipience of veterans' policies in the United States of America during 1940-1956. This period is notable in veterans' history. This is caused not only by social realities after World War II but by the implementation of brand-new fundamental principles in process of forming veterans' policies. These principles opened a new page in interactions between the government and the veteran community. The article analyzes drafting the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, as well as public discussions around it initiated by President Roosevelt's Administration. One of the main actors of the process was American Legion, influential conservative veterans' organization. The law presented by Legion was passed by Congress. The Act took effect on June 22, 1944, and lasted until 1956. G.I. Bill of Rights guaranteed numerous benefits for veterans in variable spheres of social policies, including medical care, education, housing and business loans, unemployment compensations. The most significant effect had educational programs of G.I. Bill. About 8 million American veterans, including women and African Americans, exercised their right to attend schools, colleges, and universities. Educational programs had great implications both for the veterans' population and social affairs, especially the educational system in the United States. Higher education became more widespread and democratic after the implementation of the G.I. Bill. World War II veterans had the opportunity to realize their potential in different fields, in particular in the political area. G.I. Bill of Rights had a great impact on forming the image of the veteran in the USA. The Act demonstrated the new role of veterans' policies in the context of government activities. Besides, thanks to the educational programs of the G.I. Bill veteran community became a proactive social group that played an important role in the US policy-making in the second half of the 20th century.

The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America by David S. Koffman

Reviewed by: The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America by David S. Koffman Jonathan Schorsch (bio) The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America. By David S. Koffman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 276 pp. Considering the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the period of peak US expansion and national consolidation, Koffman sets out to understand encounters between Jews and Native Americans. [End Page 300] "How did American Jews make use of Indians, both real and imagined, as their ambitions in America as both Americans and Jews transformed? How did American Jews understand the place of Native Americans in their own quests for integration and advancement or for helping ensure justice and equality in America? How did Jews, a newly arrived 'clannish' group in a country celebrated for its diversity, openness, and meritocracy, see themselves as related to, distinct from, or refracted by those other quintessentially 'tribal' Americans? [H]ow did Jews put Indians to use in their efforts to remain Jewish or recreate Jewishness in America"? (3). Chapter 1 looks at "pioneer" Jews who moved to the western US, seeing themselves "as colonial whites and their own settlements, hardships, and accomplishments as heroic contributions to the winning of the American West." They "acted as unabashed agents of colonialism as a way of combatting anti-Semitic stereotypes that criticized Jewish men for lacking brawn or not pulling their weight in the nation's military operations…Western Jews cast themselves as recapitulations of the original pilgrims, clearing the path for commerce and settlement through their efforts at both engaging Indians in productive capitalism and subduing them through acts of violence. They viewed Indians as both impediments to and vehicles of their participation in the march toward civil progress" (15). In Chapter 2 Koffman discusses Jewish attitudes toward land, arguing that "immigrant Jews absorbed and fueled America's quest for imperial acquisition in the West, helping form part of its potent vision of expansionism and an equally martial vision of manhood. Nineteenth-century Jewish desire to feel existentially rooted in the new land fueled much of what Jews worked through in their imaginations of and encounters with Native Americans" (15). Chapter 3 presents Jewish merchants and the economic encounter with American Indians, the most prominent manifestation of face-to-face meetings between members of the different groups. Jews who "went west primarily as small businessmen to pursue wealth…constructed meaning out of their roles as traders and linked this Jewish occupational profile to the nation-building process," in which "Indians provided an intimate foil for Jews keen on having petty trade recognized as beneficial for expansion." One intriguing subset of the Jewish-Amerindian commercial interaction comprised the "Jewish Indian 'curio' dealers…who positioned themselves between red and white worlds as half Indian, half ethnographer experts, representing the Indians whose 'Indianness' they sold in the form of cultural objects" (16). In Chapter 4 Koffman turns to the "acculturated, enfranchised Jews of the urban east who devoted considerable efforts to justice for Native Americans" in the early twentieth century's climate of rising xenophobia (16). "American Jews and Native Americans fretted over their exclusion [End Page 301] from the mainstream American body politic; both feared that white America's assimilatory aspiration for them would lead to their cultural obliteration." Amerindians "provided Jews with a useful and malleable rhetorical tool for confronting tensions around assimilation and disappearance, naturalization, citizenship, and the idea of 'adoption' versus naturalization" (17). Chapter 5 describes a "cadre of Jewish pro-Native activists" in and beyond Washington, DC (17). Acting out of "Jewish enlightened self-interest," this set of "Jewish bureaucrats, lawyers, and philanthropists […] worked on behalf of Indian causes," finding "power and influence in the federal government for the first time in America under the Roosevelt Administration," playing a fundamental role in "drafting, passing, and implementing the 1934 [Indian Reorganization Act], consolidating federal case law on Indian affairs, and promoting Indian cultural, economic, health, education, and political interests" (17–18). At the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Jews "consistently linked Indian uplift with an articulation of minority rights and cultural pluralism within the United States and on international stages that went beyond Indian...

CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL CHALLENGES IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

AbstractFollowing the Roosevelt administration’s implementation of New Deal programs in the 1930s, the federal courts began to interpret the Constitution in a way that accommodated the rise of the “administrative state,” and bureaucratic policymaking continues to persist as a central feature of American government today. This essay submits, however, that the three pillars supporting the administrative state—the congressional delegation of Article I powers to the executive branch, the combination of powers within individual administrative entities, and the insulation of administrators from political control—might be reconsidered by the courts in the near future. After showing that the constitutionality of the administrative state has come under recent judicial scrutiny, the essay turns to the administrative law principle of deference, and argues that a reassessment of the Chevron doctrine seems imminent. Finally, the essay examines federal courts’ heavy use of “hard look” review as a means of curtailing agency discretion during recent administrations, and concludes that this judicial practice stands in uneasy tension with republican principles.

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles

Reviewed by: Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles Andrew J. B. Fagal Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry. Patrick J. Charles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-63388-13-0. 539 pp., cloth, $28.00. In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court case finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep a handgun within the home, historians have produced a number of books, peer-reviewed articles, and law reviews reinvestigating the origins of the Second Amendment and the broader place of firearms in American history. Patrick J. Charles's Armed in America joins this recent trend by providing an intellectual history of gun rights in the American imagination from the colonial period to today. In detailing the changing history of how Americans thought about firearms, and their role in society, Charles makes several important contributions to this ongoing discussion. First, Charles gives historians and legal scholars a broad understanding of how thinking about firearms changed over time in American society. In this, he agrees with most other historians of the Second Amendment, who understand it as protecting a right that was associated with militia service and not "armed preparatory carriage" or the "castle doctrine." Second, and most notably for the significance of his book, Charles makes an important historiographical intervention by locating the emergence of modern gun rights theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of gun rights and gun regulation have argued that the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment was a recent invention, which largely dated to the 1960s and then, oddly enough, was most forcefully articulated in the public sphere by members of the Black Power movement. According to this account, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was a group that for most of its history was primarily interested promoting gun safety and target shooting. It was only Harlan Carter's 1977 "Cleveland Revolt" that turned the organization into a political advocacy group. With this new emphasis, the group was in favor of "law abiding citizens" carrying arms (concealed or otherwise) for their own protection. By the 1980s, a number of prominent law school professors agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to use arms for self-defense. Thus, from a confluence of interest group organization and legal academic reasoning, our current "golden age" of gun rights was born. Not exactly, Charles conclusively demonstrates. The actual emergence of gun rights tied to self-defense was located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early on, the NRA, and a competing organization, the United States Revolver Association (USRA), organized against Progressive Era legislation designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. New York State's Sullivan Act (1911), which requires the issuance of a license to own a handgun, was met with active opposition by the NRA and the USRA. These groups argued, in what would [End Page 309] become a standard rallying cry, that the act's passage would only serve to prevent law-abiding citizens from bearing arms. Once guns were "banned," only criminals would have guns. This rhetorical strategy of firearms organizations was only refined during the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration sought additional firearms regulations. Following the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s, the NRA again mobilized to prevent additional firearms laws. Although unsuccessful in their ultimate goal of preventing passage in the 1930s and 1960s, the group was successful in limiting the effects of these laws. If intellectual history should show people thinking, and not just thought, then Armed in America is quite uneven. Compare Charles's excellent discussion of Timothy Pickering, and his late-eighteenth-century ideas of what a well-regulated militia ought to be, with the depiction of the emergence of modern gun rights ideology in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We can clearly see the importance of the militia for republican political systems in Pickering's thinking. What we do not get as good a glimpse into is the thought process behind the early proponents of...

Il brain trust di Roosevelt davanti al corporativismo fascista

In the aftermath of the 1929 crisis, the United States looked with interest at the social models of European nations to work out a strategy in order to escape the hardships of the moment. The Democratic Roosevelt administration enacted the New Deal, which in many aspects shared some similarities with the corporatist reforms introduced by the Fascist regime. In particular, the President’s Brain Trust and the diplomats in Italy showed a great deal of interest towards the “Third Way”, until the drift in foreign policy led to un unbridgeable gap between the two nations

The Hidden War in Argentina: British and American Espionage in World War II

Wartime espionage in Argentina commands special interest in light of that country's controversial commitment to neutrality until the eve of Nazi Germany's fall. Prominent members of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration headed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull viewed neutrality as a mask for pro-Axis sympathies at variance with the Pan-American movement that also impaired the Allied war effort. In this context, US officials deployed many schemes to discover evidence of Argentine collusion with the Nazis, including espionage. After the war, Spruille Braden, who in 1945 served as the US ambassador in Argentina and then as the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, instigated publication of the notorious Blue Book, an exposé of alleged wartime ties between Nazi Germany and Argentine political leaders. Argentina gained additional ill repute as a suspected haven for escaped Nazi war criminals.British espionage in Argentina developed greater in scope than American spying, which reflected Britain's enormous business stake in the country and its wartime dependence on Argentine meat. More successful on balance than their American counterparts according to Panagiotis Dimitrakis, the British networks focused on protecting trade and shipping by preventing sabotage. Meanwhile, the Winston Churchill government accepted Argentine neutrality. The benefits that Britain received from this policy included the near-threefold increase in wartime meat exports and the deferment of all payment for meat until after the war. Further, neutrality protected British business against US competitors. Thus a state ostensibly failing to support British and Allied war aims, for which it was denounced by the United States, developed during the war into a British commercial satellite to a far greater extent than ever before in its history. Neutrality also served British interests by permitting maximum resources to be diverted into meat production and exports as opposed to being used for alternative purposes under US control. Under such conditions, the British were reluctant to denounce any but the most blatant instances of Argentina having “chosen to dally with evil,” as Churchill referred to cases of collusion with Nazi Germany. Dimitrakis describes one of these instances, the Oscar Hellmuth affair of early 1944, in which the British tailed and arrested the courier sent by President Pedro Ramírez to purchase weapons in Germany.The author includes “British and American espionage” in his book's subtitle, but he also devotes a substantial section to German spy activities. Following Ronald C. Newton's notable 1992 study The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931–1947, Dimitrakis analyzes German espionage, though he does incorporate new archival data, much of it from The National Archives in Britain. While fleshing out some old stories and narrating new ones, he nevertheless leaves an impression that espionage in wartime Argentina had only a limited impact. Among Germans, figures like Johannes Siegfried Becker could do little more than transmit information already in the public domain culled from newspapers. On the British side, MI6 reports included scarcely relevant data like the invention of the Biro ballpoint pen in Buenos Aires by László Biró, a Hungarian migrant. Dimitrakis reports, oddly it would seem, that among the Latin American states Argentina was a low priority in the eyes of the British Special Operations Executive. All indications point to the contrary in light of the importance of Argentine meat in Britain.US espionage too proved mundane and unspectacular. Turf wars between J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, dominate this part of the story. Dimitrakis's narrative lacks reports of spectacular feats associated with espionage: the assassination of public figures tied to enemies, the sinking of ships transporting crucial cargoes, the disruption of railroads, or the type of heroic exploits associated with the French Resistance. Nazi spies in Argentina failed to disrupt the frigoríficos; there is no compelling evidence that spies found ways to guide the U-boats to consistently attack the meat ships. The book conveys nothing of the intrigue, treachery, or romance of contemporary movies like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, made in 1945–46 in locations reminiscent of wartime Buenos Aires.Dimitrakis proffers a bureaucratic history of spying. He fails to explain each country's perception of its national interest and how this influenced the development of its espionage networks. He applies his enviable multilingual skills to only limited advantage. He neglects important secondary literature devoted to wartime Argentina published in the United States. The author uncovers numerous issues but leaves interesting, long-asked questions unresolved. For example, he accepts the long-held if often-contested view that Ramón Castillo, president of Argentina in 1940–43, supported the Nazis but provides no new evidence. Dimitrakis hints at undiscovered data revealing Juan Perón's pro-Axis proclivities but once more omits details and proof. In too many instances, the book fails to distinguish between fact and propaganda.

Bank Supervision, the Great Depression, and the Creation of the New Deal

The U.S. banking holiday of March 1933 was a pivotal event in 20th century political and economic history. After closing the nation’s banks for nine days, the newly inaugurated Franklin D. Roosevelt administration restarted the banking system as the first step toward national recovery from the global Great Depression. In the conventional narrative, the holiday succeeded because Roosevelt used his political talents to restore public confidence in the nation’s banks. Such accounts, however, say virtually nothing about what happened during the holiday itself. In this article, we reinterpret the banking crises of the 1930s and the 1933 holiday through the lens of bank supervision, the continuous oversight of commercial banks by government officials. Through the 1930s banking crises, federal supervisors identified troubled banks but could not act to close them. Roosevelt empowered supervisors to act decisively during the holiday. By closing some banks, supervisors made credible Roosevelt’s claims that banks which reopened were sound. Thus, the union of FDR’s political skills with the technical judgement of bank supervisors was the key to the solving the banking crisis. Neither could stand alone, and both together were the vital precondition for further economic reforms—including devaluing the dollar—and with them, Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Was Maoist China a Clone of the Soviet Union?

Was Maoist China a Clone of the Soviet Union? Felix Wemheuer Lucien Bianco, Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, translated by Krystyna Horko. 448 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-9882370654. $65.00. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. 462 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0190640552. $34.95. It has become fashionable in Western China studies to write about transnational entanglements between the People's Republic (PRC) and the Soviet Union or to compare the development of both countries. The similarities of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China are obviously many, making it impossible to cover them all in a single text. Two new books approach this comparison from different angles. Lucian Bianco looks at the great leaders and macropolitics in Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, while Elizabeth McGuire uses a focus on personal relations and microhistory in Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. This review discusses the two monographs within the larger context of Western China studies and with attention to paradigm shifts in Sino-Soviet relations. Paradigm Shifts in Western China Studies Since the mid-1930s, Western scholarship regarding the impact of the Soviet Union on the Chinese Revolution and later the PRC underwent several paradigm shifts. During World War II and under the alliance of the United States and China against the Japanese Empire, Chinese Communists were often considered anti-imperialists and nationalists. The bestseller Red Star over China, written by the American journalist Edgar Snow, contributed to [End Page 442] the view of Mao Zedong as a grassroots revolutionary. The lives of communist leaders in the revolutionary base area in Yan'an were presented by Snow as simple and egalitarian. Therefore, Snow saw Chinese communism as an alternative to bureaucratic state socialism in the Soviet Union.1 When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, the Cold War had already started. Anticommunist hardliners in the McCarthy era blamed "liberals" of the former Roosevelt administration and scholars in China studies for underestimating the communist threat and causing the "loss of China." In the 1950s, the newly founded PRC was often seen in the West as a "Soviet satellite state" and "totalitarian dictatorship." Western perception started to change significantly due to the rise of the Anti–Vietnam War movement and the New Left around 1968. Activists and many scholars then saw Maoist China through the lenses of anti-imperialism and Third World liberation movements.2 The New Left considered the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) an experiment in mass participation and rural based-development strategies. Western media reports about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were often ignored as "anticommunist propaganda"; violence was rationalized, because "revolution is not a dinner party," as Chairman Mao had said. The guerilla fighter and the "barefoot doctor" became poster children for an alternative development model to Western and Soviet modernity. CCP criticism of "Soviet revisionism," and in part Western scholarship, emphasized the "Chinese way" of building socialism.3 From the 1930s until the early 1990s, the history of the CCP was often written as step-by-step emancipation from domination by the Comintern and the Soviet Union. The departure from revolutionary Maoism in China after "Reform and Opening" in 1978 destroyed many dreams and illusions. However, it was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives of the Comintern and CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), that the history of the Chinese Revolution was rewritten again. The new findings from archives deconstructed the myths that the CCP had taken an independent path from the Soviet Union. Stalin's guidance and Soviet support had played [End Page 443] a crucial role in creating the second United Front with the Nationalists (GMD) against Japan in 1937 and in bringing the CCP into power in 1949.4 Archival documents show that Soviet advisers influenced the development of the political and economic system in China in the early 1950s based on the Stalinist model. In the fields of culture, education, agriculture, and policies...

Vulnerable Youth in Richard Wright’s Protest Fiction

Vulnerable Youth in Richard Wright’s Protest Fiction Claire E. Lenviel The twenty-first-century Movement for Black Lives Teaches us daily about the countless injustices of black vulnerability and, since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, the political power of that same vulnerability to organize protests, drive legislation, and unify a global coalition of antiracist activists. A litany of hashtags like “#drivingwhileblack” or “#walkingwhileblack” illustrates the vulnerable state of merely being black in the United States. Moreover, the disproportionate assault on young black lives—and the youth-led anti-racist movements that follow—exemplify how the age-and race-based vulnerabilities of black youth can be deployed for antiracist protest. Literary protest is no exception. Protest authors like Richard Wright recognized the political power of vulnerability long before our current moment. Interrogating the dialectic between Richard Wright’s protest fiction and the political discourses of the Roosevelt Administration reveals how Wright weaponized depictions of vulnerability by characterizing black youth as the most vulnerable population during an era of unprecedented federal accountability toward the welfare of American youth. The Roosevelt Administration framed national relief and recovery around a discourse of vulnerability with American youth, conceived broadly, as the intended recipients of federal protection. The power behind Wright’s protest lies not only in his tragic depictions of growing up while black during the Jim Crow era but in the discovery that these daily atrocities happened concurrently with a years-long, federal, multimillion-dollar effort to protect and support youth from the ongoing threats of the Great Depression. Wright’s protest fiction frequently depicted vulnerable and victimized black youth both as a form of literary protest and as a vehicle to stimulate protest among the public. Protest, as a political reality and as an artistic genre, used the atrocities of real life to engender civil unrest [End Page 121] and to employ that unrest for reform. Authors of protest literature during the thirties, from Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner to Theodore Ward and Richard Wright, often depicted young, black protagonists facing the conditions of economic exploitation, abject poverty, and racial violence to mobilize audiences. Characterized by a return to realism, an unapologetic critique of racism, and often a valorization of the masses, protest literature reinforced the cultural shift toward politically motivated civil unrest. Alfred Kazin and William Stott, for example, propose that writers of the thirties turned to documentary, not fiction, as the ideal form for offering a critically reflexive American consciousness. African American protest authors likewise demanded that “practitioners of democracy truly . . . live up to what democratic ideals on American soil mean” (Harris). They often employed real historical events or the genre of social realism as a mirror to reflect American injustice and the insufferable conditions of everyday life for the marginalized and exploited. Protest literature, then, is what Paul Lauter calls “a social dynamic,” one that allows an author like Richard Wright to position black youth as both marginalized by American politics and central to its reform (12). Protest, therefore, has always had a close relationship with vulnerability, for vulnerability serves as both the catalyst for social activism and the evidence of that activism’s necessity. Contemporary scholars of vulnerability agree with the term’s potential to critique dominant discourses, particularly as activists and authors like Wright translate it into political agency. For example, Judith Butler’s 2016 publication of Vulnerability in Resistance takes as its foundational given the feminist potential of recognizing how vulnerability exists within strategies of political resistance.1 In African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era, E. Lâle Demirtürk addresses the significance of revisiting vulnerability’s relationship to protest, particularly in the current era. Through an analysis of “racialized vulnerability,” Demirtürk “aims at revealing the black people’s transformation of the power of racialized vulnerability into a political strategy for social change to enhance democracy” (4). My work shares this objective, but where Demirtürk illustrates how black characters grapple with performative whiteness [End Page 122] through an interrogation of racialized vulnerability, I argue that Wright put vulnerability to a slightly different use. Wright used vulnerable black youth as an indictment...

Вопрос о кредите в отношениях СССР и США, 1944–1947 гг.

The course of talks between Moscow and Washington on the provision of a post-war credit to the Soviet Union is discussed in the article. Negotiations between the American and Soviet sides on this issue began in 1943 and initially developed quite successfully, although not quickly. However, in early 1945, Washington’s position changed dramatically: in providing the USSR with a credit, the Roosevelt administration began to see a lever of pressure on Moscow. After coming to the post the new U.S. President G. Truman was guided by the same considerations. In August 1945 in connection with the adoption of the law on expanding the powers of the Export-Import Bank, the Soviet Union was actually invited to start negotiations from scratch, and later that year, the USSR’s request for a billion-dollar loan was “lost” in papers of the Foreign Economic Administration. In early 1946, the issue of credit began to be considered by the U.S. government in conjunction with other economic problems in Soviet-American relations, and by the summer of 1946 it had completely lost its significance to the American side.

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach

Reviewed by: The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach Rafael Medoff (bio) The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist. By Julien Gorbach. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2019. xxiii + 453 pp. Interwar Hollywood had more than its share of Jewish actors who changed their names and Jewish producers who steered clear of content that might draw attention to their ethnicity. In the early stages of his public career, Ben Hecht, the columnist, novelist and playwright turned screenwriter, seemed to be cut from the same cloth, or worse. His 1931 novel A Jew in Love was awash in stereotypes so grotesque that one prominent critic called the main character "the caricature of the anti-Semite come to life." In reality, Julien Gorbach contends in The Notorious Ben Hecht, he was just "parodying the un-Jewish Jew" (8). Not many people seemed to get the joke. "Outrage cascaded like an avalanche from some quarters of the American Jewish community," Gorbach reports. Rabbis in Cleveland declared they would never allow Hecht to be buried in their city. Hecht replied that he was not troubled to miss out on "an honor nobody I know has ever yearned for" (97). In fact, he seemed to revel in the tumult that his writings often provoked. So how did the iconoclast known for writing the scripts for such blockbusters as Gone With the Wind and The Front Page become a notorious Zionist militant? Hecht's transformation evidently had nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish culture, not his immigrant parents nor his boisterously ethnic extended family. He changed because the world had changed. Hecht looked around in 1939 and was horrified to see Jews around the world under siege and most American Jews seemingly hesitant to respond. Many had "discarded their Jewishness out of the belief that as Jews they could line up only for a snubbing," Hecht wrote (118). His instincts—honed as a gritty crime reporter on the streets of early 1900s Chicago—told him that the Jews needed to answer their persecutors with "a battle cry, rather than moans" (164). In this thoroughly-researched and finely-written study—the first comprehensive scholarly biography of Hecht—Gorbach adeptly chronicles the stages of Hecht's political evolution. It began with his decision to join the Fight for Freedom committee, which on the eve of World War II urged preemptive American military action against Nazi Germany. Polls showed the public overwhelmingly opposed to US involvement in Europe's conflicts, but Hecht never minded being in the minority. Using his dramatist's skills to make his case, Hecht created Fun to Be Free, a three-hour "Mammoth Revue" of patriotic songs, skits and speeches by [End Page 462] stars of Broadway and Hollywood, which played to capacity crowds at Madison Square Garden in 1941. When reports of the mass murder of Europe's Jews were confirmed in late 1942, Hecht joined the Bergson Group, a political action committee that sought to pressure the Roosevelt administration to aid Jewish refugees. Toward that end, he authored another dramatic spectacle at Madison Square Garden, We Will Never Die. The defiant title summed up Hecht's credo. Gorbach recounts Hecht's unsuccessful effort to coax a sympathetic message from the White House to read aloud at the event. The president and his aides feared that calling attention to the slaughter would increase the pressure to open America's doors. For Hecht, that episode was a bitter reminder that before rescuing Jews, he and his comrades first had to "rescue the word 'Jew' from the garbage can" (181). In their public statements about Nazi oppression in 1942–1943, President Roosevelt and other US officials mentioned refugees of various nationalities—but not Jews. Even a White House statement marking the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt failed to acknowledge that the fighters were Jews. Whether to focus on Jews or subsume their suffering among that of other oppressed peoples is a debate that did not end with World War II. Hecht addressed the problem the way he knew best—with his pen. In full-page advertisements with headlines such as "Time Races Death" and "They...

Westbrook Pegler and the Rise of the Syndicated Columnist

The syndicated political columnist emerged as a fixture of American newspapers in the 1930s. By the end of the decade, the partisan views of a few journalists were placed before millions of potential readers. Columnists offered readers an alternative to the event-based, source-driven reporting style of the day. They offered publishers an inexpensive source of politically sophisticated content that they could use to advance their ideological interests or to demonstrate fairmindedness on the opinion pages. Conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler was among the best known and most divisive newspaper writers of the day. He was a sharp critic of the Roosevelt administration, organized labor, and liberals, and his work as a regular contributor to daily newspapers was followed by supporters and detractors alike.