Fdr’s Worldviews, 1941–1945

Amidst the Global Bloodshed, national upheavals, attempts of racial extermination, and the massive movement of what turned out to be historic political, economic, and social movements in a period of just five years, Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplished a great deal—enough to rank him, along with Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson, in the highest echelon of American leaders. Battling the last throes of isolationism during the later years of the 1930s, FDR finally took a unified nation into war in 1941. During the conflict, his administration did a remarkable job of maintaining a pro-war consensus and convincing Americans—most of whom had indicated only a few years earlier that they would not allow their sons and daughters to fight and die abroad, especially after Roosevelt himself had said as late as 1940 that such sacrifice might not be necessary—to participate wholeheartedly in a conflict that covered much of the globe, mobilized more than sixteen million American men and women, and killed in battle 292,000 of them.1