Actions for Something to fear : FDR and the foundations of American security, 1912-1945

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Something to fear : FDR and the foundations of American security, 1912-1945 / Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler

Author
Chernus, Ira, 1946-
Additional Titles
FDR and the foundations of American security, 1912-1945
Published
Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, [2023]
Physical Description
xi, 362 pages ; 24 cm
Additional Creators
Fowler, Randall

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Contents
None Who Can Make Us Afraid -- Domestic Policy, 1912-1932 -- Foreign Policy, 1912-1932 -- Economic Policy : The New Deal -- Prewar Foreign Policy, 1933-1939 -- The Debate Over Intervention -- Roosevelt's Rhetorical Victory, 1940 : Arsenal of Democracy -- Roosevelt's Rhetorical Victory, 1941 : The Four Freedoms -- Administration and Public War Aims -- Roosevelt's Winning Synthesis -- A Still Unfinished History.
Summary
"A president unlike any other, Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy in foreign affairs has been contested since the second he left office. Although few scholars assert that FDR's actions directly led to the Cold War, many note that his presidency bears an ambiguous relationship to the superpower rivalry that followed him. In Something to Fear, the authors show that Roosevelt's rhetoric, vision, and policies promoted a broadly defined sense of American security over a 33-year time span, ultimately helping elevate security to a primary value in U.S. political discourse by the end of his presidency. In doing so, however, they argue that he also heightened the prominence of insecurity in American public life, mediating the United States' transition to superpower status in a way that also elevated fear in debates over foreign affairs. To demonstrate these contrarian claims, they examine a series of thematic snapshots encompassing FDR's entire political career. They capture the progression of his security rhetoric from his first campaign for New York State Senator to his defeat of the anti-interventionist movement and instantiation of a new way of talking about the United States' role in the world during World War II. Roosevelt's presidency precipitated a complex shift in U.S. foreign policy that defies any straightforward account organized along a linear isolationist-to-interventionist trajectory. This study investigates the uncertainties and contradictions embedded in FDR's presidential rhetoric, which drew from realist, racial, progressive, nostalgic, apocalyptic, liberal internationalist, and American exceptionalist discourses with little consideration for the possible inconsistencies this paradoxical brew might contain. In this way, Roosevelt's rhetoric anticipated the ambivalences contained in American adventures abroad ever since"--
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Genre(s)
ISBN
9780700635641 hardcover
0700635645 hardcover
9780700635658 electronic book
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Endowment Note
Steighton (Steve) A. Watts, Jr. Endowment
View MARC record | catkey: 42540484