American History Hit - America Prepares for War: FDR & WW2

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Was the USA already a superpower when it joined the Second World War? How did it turn from an isolationist nation to a force ready for action? Today Don is joined by Craig Nelson to find out how President Franklin D. Roosevelt manoeuvred the country from the isolationism of the interwar years to supplying an arsenal and, eventually, manpower to its European allies.Craig's new book is 'V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the Triumph of World War 2'.For more History Hit content, follow our newsletters here.If you’d like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's June 1941. We're in Michigan at Willow Run, the enormous new Ford Motor Company factory

purpose built for the production of components to be assembled into B-20 Ford Liberators, heavy bombers destined for the skies over Europe. Only a few months ago at the Rouge plant, Ford workers fought violently to join the UAW, United Auto Workers, against the wishes of Henry Ford himself. Striking workers won. Only to see many of these newly unionized auto workers reassigned to the war effort, manufacturing plane parts. Across the nation, there are those who strenuously object, including Michigan's own Charles Lindbergh, the famous flyer. In April 41, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, in front of an overflow crowd of 20,000, Lindberg called on all Americans to resist intervention in Europe.

But this rallying call will soon fall. on deaf ears. Led by FDR, the nation is moving inexorably towards war. America's great arsenal democracy is underway. Hi, everybody. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. The 20th century is so often referred to as the American century. Due to the Allied victory in World War II, largely attributable to American industrial and military might, had we not joined that conflict in 1941 and supporting our allies beforehand, it's likely we would be living in a very different world than the one we enjoy today. And Europe and Asia would be much less colorful continents, which is saying the least of it. But a resounding victory thanks to the U.S. was anything but a certainty.

Americans were reluctant to leap into another global conflict, given the huge loss of life in the Great War a quarter century earlier. Isolationist attitudes were the norm, and no wonder. But many American leaders saw it differently, led, of course, by Franklin Roosevelt. The decision to enter the war was necessary and absolute to him. Our very survival depended on it. But this meant pushing back against popular opinion at a time when average Americans were only beginning to recover from a crippling economic depression. The last thing anyone wanted was war. Here today to discuss this and so much more is Craig Nelson, historian and accomplished author of award-winning bestsellers.

whose newest publication, now released, is V for Victory, Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the triumph of World War II. Craig Nelson, welcome to American History Hit. This is one of my favorite history shows, so I'm very honored to be here. Thank you so much. That's exactly how you should start this interview. Thank you so much. Craig, before we talk about the war in the 1940s,

it's vital to remind listeners how bad the Great Depression was in the 1930s. It lasts for the better part of a decade, and knocked this nation to its knees, along with the rest of the world. This was paramount on everyone's mind at the time. It had been the war Roosevelt was already fighting at home, right? Yes. One of the really interesting things as a historian is always to look at what's the traditional way of thinking about something and trying to upend that and come up with a new way of looking at it.

And in a traditional way of looking at the Roosevelt presidency, it's divided into two parts. The New Deal is the first part and World War II is the second part and there's no interrelationship. And the thing I really wanted to do in this book was show how the New Deal actually enabled the United States to leap forward and win World War II with a whole bunch of ways, starting with that Roosevelt had to already do all of these things with the federal government to fight the Great Depression. And he used the managerial experience he had from that to defeat Hitler. He has swept into office with a mandate for change. And in short order, in 1933, first hundred days, Congress passes 15 pieces of man. major legislation, virtually transforming the federal government forever, really. And all that was just beginning when events in Europe start going sideways. How was the U.S. perceived by the Europeans

at that time, given the depression and the recovery? What did the Germans see happening? Well, many people were angry in Europe, were angry with the United States because we were pressing them to pay back the loans we had made them over World War I. There was a real hostility amongst the allies or who would be the allies in France and England, that the United States wasn't doing enough and that we were backwards and that we were self-absorbed, all of which was true. At the moment, Hitler is rising and taking over Czechoslovakia and then Poland and then all of Western Europe. The United States has a military that's 14th in size in the world. It's between Portugal and Bulgaria. So I always thought that a great sign would be, you should

join the army. After all, we're bigger than Bulgaria. And when they had training, they used ice cream trucks to imitate tanks. And they dropped bags of flour to imitate bombs. And they were so popular, they were called Betty Crocker bombs. And I guess my favorite moment is that Norfolk, Virginia, which is now the biggest naval base in the world, had a signs in its park saying no dogs or sailors. Sailors weren't allowed to use the park. So this is where we stood. And Roosevelt had to conquer this sort of terrible feeling of hopelessness that America had. And that same sort of we can do it, there is hope, spirit, he would apply to World War II as well. That's what this conversation is really about. The great turnaround, the phenomenal turnaround, really, that happens inside of 10

years, not even, not only from this back on your heels depression that we've been going through, but also this transformation of a military identity, really. I mean, prior to this, aside from World War II, the Spanish-American War, we had not been active overseas whatsoever. This was a really unusual mentality for Americans to be in. Did the Germans know about Franklin Roosevelt? Were they familiar with him? And did they already see him as a kind of adversary or not? Absolutely. By 1940, Hitler is writing to Mussolini that they have to figure out what to do to resolve the issue before Roosevelt jumps in the war. They were perfectly aware of America's manufacturing capacity. We were the Saudi Arabia of the world then. We controlled petroleum pretty much globally.

We outproduced everyone else when it came to automobiles. So there were certain key issues that everyone knew about. And in fact, we now know that the entire reason for the Blitzkrieg invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium and France was to prevent the United States from coming into the war. To create such a, it's called Feistung Europe, such a continental fortress Europe that Roosevelt wouldn't want to jump in. Wow, that's interesting. It's a whole different facet of the idea of Blitzkrieg. This was an absolute necessity strategically, really. As Roosevelt grew more and more belligerent, and he was completely on his own in this, no one else in America wanted anything to do with helping England and France. It triggered Hitler into moving forward.

As far as the other European powers go, after the Treaty of Versailles, which is signed in 1919, was the alliance strong between U.S. and England and France? No, the Americans were really furious. Pretty much everyone was furious at the outcome of World War I. The Germans were starved to death. They were eating horse meat in the street. And the English and French basically put their royals back on the throne. They basically returned to government as usual. The French were convinced that their imaginal line would protect them forever and that they didn't need to think about it anymore. And the English became so anti-German that they forced their ruling household to change their name from Coburg, Saxo. to Windsor. But the United States, the citizens were enraged that the promises Wilson had made had not come true. It seemed like the war had done nothing, that Americans were suffering, that the Europeans took our money and didn't pay it back. And there was this incredible hostility to the rest of the world. And in fact, there's sort of an incredible moment where the American military itself is isolationist. And suddenly the Nazis take over all of Europe, the military realized,

is that they've been saying all along, we don't need to fight in Europe, we just need to defend the Western Hemisphere. Suddenly it becomes apparent to them that they don't even have enough of a military to defend the Western Hemisphere. There's a lot of cynicism about this in terms of using war to create

basically a huge government stimulus. A lot of people suspect that of FDR. Certainly the Great Depression was an engine of all of this, as we're talking about. But do you see any direct correlation in the man himself as far as seeing this as some sort of solution? Well, I think to the United States,

to me, Roosevelt is the greatest politician in American history, and I made that in every sense of the word. And he could be extremely cynical. For example, there's one moment where England is about to collapse, and Roosevelt calls Churchill and say, what are you going to do with all those ships in your Navy if England collapses? Because he wants to get his hands on them. And Churchill says, well, we're going to fight to the last man, and we're going to lose all those ships. And that makes it dawn and Roosevelt's mind that, he's not getting the ships, but also that England is a very staunch country, and they're going to keep binding to the end. So in 1938, when appeasement by England and France gives Czechoslovakian territory to Hitler, Roosevelt responds by dramatically expanding airplane production in the United

States. He still has double-digit unemployment from the Great Depression, and that's sort of the last problem he has in the Great Depression. So he wants to fix that, and he wants to make money selling planes to England and France. But he also wants to boost American aerial defenses because unlike everyone else, he realizes that now with the airplane era being cocooned by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is no guarantee of safety for the United States. So this is 38, three years before Polar Harbor, this is the very beginning of the arsenal of democracy, which is the secret weapon that will win the war. He was a master communicator, of course. It was his magic touch, his ability to connect either through speeches to crowds live or to press corps in the Oval Office. He was just

one of those guys who had that ability to really reach people with a look, even. He had a personal touch. And he would use it on the radio to talk the nation out of its depressed state of mind. Tell us about his fireside chats. So the very first fireside chat happens right after he becomes president. And he has the three network announcers. Just like we had three TV networks for a while. There were three radio networks at the time. And he has them announced that the president would like to come into your home and have a little talk with you, just like you're sitting around the fire together. And he really pushed this idea. He kept bringing up over and over again. And it worked. It was a absolute brilliant media campaign. It was literally someone who in our time would have broken the internet,

we would say. At that time, it broke the radio network. And he really became the biggest star of the biggest media of its time. So his first speech was in 33, right after being president, the banking network across the country was completely collapsing. It was just falling to pieces, and people were losing all their savings. And he came on the radio and he said, you know, when the banks take your money, they don't just put them in a vault. They invest them. And it's much safer for you than keeping it all at your house. And we need to banish fees. You know, this is right after the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, speech. He said it again.

We must unite together and banish fear. And the next day, the Treasury Department spent something like 72 hours preparing to ship cash to banks they thought would fail next. And they did this titanic effort, but it was completely unnecessary. People stopped pulling their money out of the banks just for that one fireside chat, and the banking crisis was over. It was amazing. And one of my favorite comments about all this is,

a congressman seeing the legislation of the first hundred days says, it's like looking at the first chapter of Genesis. Well, it really did rebuild the country. You know, and this is more recent than people think. I mean, certainly a 20-year-old will feel differently than I do. But I'm the youngest of a large family. And so I was raised by Depression-era parents. And it was talked about so frequently that I remember it as the theme of my childhood.

You know, and it was a joke for the most part that we get chipped beef. and my parents would talk about chift beef as what they ate when we were kids. And, you know, that whole trauma of that depression really created that generation and laid the groundwork for a lot of value changes in the 20th century. I had the same experience. One of my aunts had rickets, which is a disease you get from not having enough vitamin C. And what my mother came from extreme rural poverty in Wisconsin. It was sort of hopeless in grim.

And forever after, I inherited her feelings about money. Exactly. I mean, it wasn't as bad as under the mattress, but it was a mentality of frugality, I guess is what I'm talking about. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Join me, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a podcast by History Hit, where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional stories behind everyday objects. Snakes and Ladders is really a game about a karmic journey. through stages of existence towards liberation. Look back in time to understand technologies of the future.

One of the really interesting things about it is that it showed just how hard AI in the real world really is. And we examine unexpected origins. Who or what invented sex? Yeah, fish. Fish for the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. For the answer to those questions and a whole lot more, subscribe to Patented on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Join me for new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday.

What was FDR's opinion of Adolf Hitler? You know, before things get bad, how did he see this guy? So Roosevelt had this sunny, happy, easygoing guy next door demeanor, but he was quite brilliant. And this was a sort of a persona he created for political power. And in reality, he was extremely well educated and extremely knowledgeable. And he spoke and read German. And one of the things he was enraged about was the fact that the English translation of Hitler's mind cop removed a lot of the really crazy stuff that was in the German original. And he actually, he had read it in German and then he read the English one and marked it up with everything missing.

You mentioned this before. I want to get into detail about the state of the American war machine late 1930s. America's unreadiness, was that any kind of encouragement to Germany, the idea of attacking? Were we giving them an open door? No, I don't think Germany really understood that side of how bad things really were here. They had seen America enter World War I very, very late, but we entered very powerfully by the time we entered, although it was too late to really accomplish anything. And they knew about the production miracle of Detroit. In this era, Detroit was like how we consider Silicon Valley today.

They're the state of the art, future of the country thing, the pioneered mass production. So everyone knew about these sort of essential elements of America that could make it into a Titanic force. And they just thought that people were lazy here. The same argument you hear about Americans now, that, oh, we just didn't care about money, we're lazy, we're coddled. the same sort of things that foreign people say about cliches about Americans today. They were saying back then. The America First Movement is often characterized by its Nazi allegiance. The German-American Boond Rally, Madison Square Garden, with the gigantic portraits of George Washington as a Nazi.

And Adolf Hitler pictured in the same godlike dimensions. The Germans encouraged the Boond. How far had this ever gone by the time the war starts? Well, there were 30,000 people who attended the Boond rally. and Madison Square Garden. So that was quite alarming. And you can see the influence when you bring in the figure like Charles Lindberg.

While he was living in England, was taken up by the Nazis, and given a big propaganda tour, and ended up announcing to people, oh, the Nazis have the power to attack anybody in Europe. You people don't know what you're going to happen to you, and you just better say yes to everything.

And this really triggered the appeasements with Czechoslovakian land in 38. that then triggered the arsenal of democracy. So there's this entire chain of events that happens. So the Nazis are doing various things to try and influence America, but they're essentially failing. But what happens is that as the drumbeat of war increases, American college students start worrying about being drafted.

And in an almost perfect echo of what happens during Vietnam, they start having college campus protests, and that turns into America first. Oh, interesting. But then they're offered free rent in Chicago for their operation, and they move it. And in Chicago, it's taken over by right wingers. And that's how it transforms into this thing that it goes from being college kids protesting to Charles Lindbergh and a Nazi affiliation.

The Lindberg episode is a really interesting chapter in all of this story. It's not directly related in every regard, but, I mean, let's just take a slight sidebar here. They lose their baby. They are hounded by them. media. This is a giant story in the 30s. And in order to get away from this, they move to Europe. And that's when Lindbergh becomes familiar with the Nazis. He's visiting and Goring sees him and all sorts of things happen. And in this time frame, he actually tracks his way back to the United States by virtue of his knowledge of the Nazis, right? It's an incredible story. So the Lindberg

baby, which is probably the biggest story of its time, was kidnapped and murdered. And then when they have another kid, that kid's car is driven off the road by photographers trying to take pictures of the new son. So the Limburg's, Charles Lindbergh essentially, blames the American media for this and moves to Europe. And there, they're treated like normal people. They aren't the greatest American hero like they are here. And they get taken up with a fairly right-wing crowd in England, and that introduces them to the Nazis. And then as Lindberg sees, the growth of Nazism and the growth of FDR wanting to fight the Nazis, he decides that he could become an American hero all over again if he could talk America out of joining the war

with England and France. So he returns to the United States. He's very close with Hap Arnold, the head of the United States Army Air Forces, who returns him to service. He says again the same things over and over again about how the Nazis are so much better than the American military which is true at that time. But he says it over and over, as though nothing can be done and we can't possibly do it. And the thing that happens is that he and Roosevelt

get into something that in its time was called the Great Debate, where Roosevelt would present a new policy to try to help England and France and the remaining democracies in Europe. And Lindberg would go on the radio and argue against it. And so you have these two people,

almost a perfect reflection of modern times, whether you have these two people, in opposing camps. But at least they're arguing with each other and Americans get to listen to it and they get to take part and crafting foreign policy by hearing these arguments on the radio. Interesting. It's sort of like a perfect illustration of modern American democracy at work. But the whole thing, his whole choice to do this kind of backfires on him, doesn't it? Because of the realization that Germany is our enemy.

He gets pinned more and more into a corner and starts revealing his ideas about eugenics. which is that there's a hierarchy of race. And then he starts revealing his anti-Semitic feelings by saying that the Jews better watch out or something worse than Germany might happen to them here. And he even privately says, which he republishes later, the only thing we can do is take the vote away from black people. He's sort of pushed into this position

where his personal feelings come to the fore instead of his heroic flight from New York to Paris. And that dissolves everything. Modern Americans don't know enough about this guy and the American story that he really is. Let's discuss the industrial transformation of America in the face of this war. How does Roosevelt really begin this process? He has to call on the industrialist, doesn't he? Well, during the New Deal, they had this effort where they reached out to the heads of corporate America

to try and coordinate the federal government with industrial manufacture. The way they did it was something called the National Recovery Act, NRA, which fell apart because it became wildly complex, and it was sort of destroyed by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional. But that set up a new kind of relationship between commerce and businessmen and the federal government. And this continued into the war. And it first began when Roosevelt reached out to the president of GM,

who's Bill Nudson. And Nudson was his very colorful character. He had arrived in America as a young man with $30, in his pocket because he created the first bicycle built for two in Copenhagen, who was a Danish immigrant. And he first worked for Henry Ford, and he worked on sales and marketing and production with Ford. And then he moved over to GM, and he restored Chevy. Chevy was a money-losing operation, and they were going to get rid of it. And the brilliant thing that Nootson did at GM was he got information about customers back from the retailer and the repair operations to

to make Chevy more customer oriented. So it's almost another perfect echo of modern times where Facebook is watching everywhere you go to target you ads. He was sort of doing the same thing for GM at that time. So he comes to Washington. Roosevelt calls him up. And you know, Roosevelt is like the most famous voice in America. So you get a phone call, you immediately know who it is.

Yeah. What year is this, Craig? May 23rd, 1940s. Oh, okay. So very late in the game here. Yes, it's really scary. Yeah. And Roosevelt has him come in and he tries to coordinate national production with the Defense Department.

And it's a big mess because people don't understand that in order to convert a factory that makes caterpillar into a factory that makes tanks, you have to redo the whole thing. Sure. It isn't just a couple of things you can adjust. And then they have to make machine tools, which are the tools that make machines from scratch, to do this. mass production, as it's done in Detroit, takes an enormous amount of time to get everything set up. But once you get it set up, it starts producing at this incredible rate. Yeah. So it took almost two years for Ford to create a bomber factory.

But once they had it, they could produce a bomber an hour. Yeah, right. People couldn't understand this at the beginning of the Arsenal democracy. So Newton would get criticized constantly from all sides. You mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, the synthesis that American manufacturing had already been doing where they took, you know, they didn't invent the car, but they just made the manufacturing process that much better. This was the specialty of Americans to do this kind of thing. So they were already sort of primed up for this need to retool their own factories. Yeah.

My mention of how Detroit was Silicon Valley was based on mass manufacturing, which is a fantastic combination of hooks that rose overhead. from the meatpacking industry, and the coordination of identical parts from singer sewing machines, and the assembly line technology that had been developed at Mercedes-Pens, and the uniform theory of workers that was done with time and motion studies at this time.

So you'd create a factory, and Ford actually pioneered this, that really was a machine in and of itself, and each worker had one tiny job that they did. So it was boring, but they had no injury and people were paid very well. So it worked very well while it worked.

Yeah, right. Talk about the importance of aluminum production in World War II, and there's certain individuals that were involved in that. So aluminum was the key for airplane manufacturing at the time. It was really turned into every part of the plane, maybe not the propeller, but everything else was made out of aluminum. And at the very start of this period,

all of aluminum is controlled by Alcoa, who has the unbridled right to use the power of Niagara Falls to make aluminum. And they really are the only people making aluminum. And so a guy named Reynolds from Virginia starts reading about how Nazi Germany is taking over the production of aluminum in Nazi Germany says, oh, we're doing this to make knobs and drawers and window sales. But no, they're doing it to make stucca bombers. And Reynolds gets very upset about this.

So he starts to talk about people about not having. one company only make aluminum. And he goes to the head of Alcoa and says, you've got to beef up your aluminum buddy. And everyone ignores him. And it collapses. The aluminum production of America collapses so badly that there's trouble with getting clothes

because they can't get zippers. As ramifications across all of society, Boeing stops making bombers. And so Reynolds gets involved with it. But he also comes up with something else, which is Reynolds' rap. And it's alongside with saran wrap also has invented in World War II.

And probably my favorite World War II bounty surprise is that a guy named Mars has a big fight with his father over their candy production. And he goes to England and he sees people there eating chocolates encased in a hard-shell candy. I know where this is going. He realizes that this will solve chocolate manufacturers' problems in the summer where the candy melts and gets disfigured. And he teams up with a fella with a Hershey cyan. So this is Mars and Hershey together. And they create a candy that's exclusive for. fighting forces that you could eat on the battlefield and have all the chocolate you want.

And afterward, the rest of us are able to buy this candy, which the two founders, Mars and Murray, named after themselves M&Ms. M&Ms. And what did he use Saran Wrap for? Suran Wrap was used to cover all of the equipment that were on boats from saltwater. Oh, interesting. Fascinating. Well, there's all these individual portraits.

I mean, there's the story of the young woman on the assembly line, right? And was she from Kansas? I can't remember. beautiful woman, a photographer sent out to take pictures of her. It turns out she is. Well, this is a great story. I'm sorry, I'm telling it from scratch. Excuse me. So the head of propaganda in the United States at this time is a guy named Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan, one of his purviews, is running Yank Magazine. And he sends a Yank magazine photographer to take pictures of beautiful women on the assembly lines. There are so many pictures of beautiful women on the

assembly line of World War II. It's like some really great theme. Someone should just write about that. But anyway, so this guy finds a woman working in a drone factory. And if I hadn't followed this story, I would have no idea that there were drones in World War II. Yeah. But they're the little gasoline. You may have had a gasoline powered plane. Sure, of course. That's what the drones were. And that she finds this woman and he just is really taken with her. And Yank magazine doesn't use any of his pictures of her, but he takes two weeks off to take a picture, and she uses its pictures to become a model, and she's on the cover of 33 magazines, and her husband comes back from the war and says, I don't want my wife working,

and she says, I don't want to be married to you, and then she signs a contract with 20th century Fox and changes her name to Marilyn Monroe. There you go. That's putting war to good use. And to finish your question, I did have one of those gasoline-powered airplanes, but my parents wouldn't give me the gasoline. So I had this great spitfire, though. I couldn't really fly. your book is entitled, partially entitled, FDR's American Revolution. What is it that you meant by that exactly? What was the revolutionary quality of this time? Well, in American historians think that we've got two revolutions,

one being, of course, the one everyone else knows, the founding father revolution. Well, we also think that the Civil War, and that ended up being a second revolution, the end of slavery. I think that if you look at this entire history, the transformation that Roosevelt did to prepare to defeat Hitler is as much of a revolution as these other things, that he so dramatically changed the country.

You know, in 33, there's really sort of pathetic, beaten down, isolated, scared, frightened bunch of people. And by 45, we defeated Hitler. And so it's really an incredible transformation. And you can see that everything from computers to atomic weapons to the middle class taking over the country economically in having a economic prosperity for 30 years. The fact that we haven't had World War III in 75 years, all of these things come out of this moment. Interesting.

And it really is a revolutionary era. He very much is reminiscent of Lincoln in this regard anyway where you have to heal a divided country, unite a divided country. And you could probably draw a straight line through the presidents that had to face that task and their greatness as a result. He had a worthy partner in Churchill, though, in this effort.

How much did Churchill influence Roosevelt Well, one of my favorite stories in this book is the story of how a man by the name of Lord Lothian saved England. So at the very last minute, England has to send over a new ambassador, and they send this guy named Philip Kerr or Lothian. And you would look at this guy and you would think, there's no way this guy is going to work out with the ambassador. He was a big, super posh kind of guy. Anyway, but in fact, what happens is he arrives at the White House and turns over his condition. and he comes back out and there's a little black kitten running around at his feet. And here he is in full morning coat, his official ambassadorial car.

And he takes a kitten and puts it on his shoulder while he continues talking to the press. And he becomes this sensation. This is the front of every newspaper in America. He introduces people to one of the founding fathers in his office, King George III, his portrait of the king who American revolted against. And then he does this brilliant thing. He decides that the answer is not to portray Britain as helpless in needing American aid, but to portray Britain as being staunch allies who will fight to the death,

and America needs them as part of their own defense. And he does this by consulting with Churchill and telling Churchill what speeches to give and what letters to write FDR. And then he turns around and he tells FDR what speeches to give and what letters to write back to Churchill. So he's literally behind the scenes. of the entire effort that becomes Lend-Leese, which supports England and the USSR before Pearl Harbor.

And he really saved the country and saved the war. FDR takes a nation in 1933, depressed in more ways than merely economic, and shapes its mission single-handedly by motivating American leaders in manufacturing to retool the factories into war machines. I'm telling the story of your book here. And what you've really declared with this book is that we created a super weapon. We became a superpower as a result of our industrial base. Yes, but also that it was a result of Americans coming together to do this,

that you had two antagonistic forces, the isolationists and the interventionist on one hand, and you had two opposing forces, which is federal government and American corporate power, on the other hand, all uniting for this goal. I started this book because I had a military analyst say, you know, on the battlefield, logistics, each strategy for lunch, which just sort of blew my mind. mind because every book you read is strategy and nothing about logistics. Yeah.

So that really started this little thing. And then I ended up with this book that is a constant echo of modern times where Amazon is just like Sears Roebuck and Apple is just like Ford Motor and Silicon Valley is just like Detroit. And you have this giant battle going on between one side who is sort of a mainstream American politician and the other side who is a racist anti-Sy. So just seems so clear. And what I really like about this book is that for people who are upset about the way things are going on now, this book says you can have some hope because things used to be a lot worse.

I agree. It's one of the benefits of age. You know, we can look back and see that this is a pattern in this country. Actually, I really mean that. I think it's something to be repeated. A theme needs to be repeated that the norm in this country is division united. It's a dynamic that happens over and over again. And this nation leaps forward as a result of that struggle.

There's too many people that just think the norm is just the division. But in fact, it's actually a one-two punch that happens in the face of challenges. And we're in the midst of another chapter of that right now. The book is called V is for Victory, Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the triumph of World War II. We understand that title now. Thank you so much, Craig Nelson for coming on American history. It really appreciated. It's been fantastic.

I'll come back anytime you need me. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.