A Comment on "Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics"
I am sympathetic to the general purpose of the preceding article. Franklin Roosevelt was a very remarkable but also a complex and often careless president. His methods could be casual and devious, sometimes inexcusably so, and history demands full documentation of his faults as well as his virtues. But historical assessment also involves due recognition of the context in which a historical figure has acted and of the standards by which action was judged in his epoch. And it forbids the suppression of evidence that tells on the other side of the author's case. In these aspects, this paper falls signally short. It is not a historical analysis but a prosecutorial brief. The historian's imaginative leap into the past enjoins first of all an understanding of problems as perceived at the time. Mr. Steele acknowledges contemporaneous perceptions in his early paragraphs, but this acknowledgment does not inform the pages that follow. Roosevelt, and many other Americans, really thought that Hitler was posing a mortal threat to the United States. Mr. Steele calls the idea that Nazi Germany was "the instrument of a madman" the "common-sense view of the period," almost as if it were no longer the common sense of a later and wiser period. It is easy to be complacent about nazism forty years after; but no president at the time, confronted by a state that still seems to me to have been the instrument of a madman, could afford to run unnecessary risks. No doubt the menace of the American Nazis was greatly exaggerated, but their "antics," as Mr. Steele characterizes their behavior, appear a good deal more "comic" now than they did then.