In fiction, spoiler alerts exist to protect the reader experience, premised on the idea that knowing a story’s outcome will reduce momentum and suspense. In historical writing, it’s just the opposite. Works of history gain energy from the fact that readers know where the narrative is going, especially when it’s going nowhere good. Books on the origins of wars tend to rely on a tragic arc, with the reader aware of the shoals ahead while the books’ subjects blithely reassure one another that the coast looks clear, that diplomacy will win the day, that any conflict will be short and easy.
Within this literature, no decade is more doom-laden than the nineteen-thirties, when misguided hope and willful blindness led the world’s democracies to grossly underestimate the threat of Fascism. In the standard story, the United States, Britain, and France stood by, wringing their hands and straining for appeasement while the Japanese stampeded through Asia and Nazi Storm Troopers ran roughshod over Europe. The result was the greatest cataclysm in modern history: seventy million dead, the genocide of European Jews, the bombing of once magnificent cities. The reader, aware of this outcome, is left with the literary equivalent of shouting at the screen: Don’t do it! Act now! Watch out—they’re coming for you!
The historian William I. Hitchcock’s excellent new book, “A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II” (Simon & Schuster), leans into this sense of foreboding. In the course of nearly six hundred pages, Hitchcock describes how Fascism spread across the globe, beginning with Mussolini’s rise in the battered, destabilized Italy of the nineteen-twenties and ending in 1941, when Hitler occupied most of Continental Europe. A Pulitzer finalist and a professor at the University of Virginia, Hitchcock has written several books about the Second World War, each with an emphasis on the European theatre. This time, he wants to explain why U.S. policymakers, especially F.D.R., failed to act or even to fully comprehend what was happening until it was almost too late.