It doesn't repeat . . . it rhymes

Two teacher friends have left me with clever ways of thinking about teaching the past. Judy is one of them. She's the one who scolded me some time ago for not looking hard enough to find connections between history and current events. Josh, meanwhile, likes to tell his students that the past doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

I just finished a book on the diplomatic history of the U.S. between 1931 and 1941. I learned a lot from it. I'll admit, though, that it's too dry a book for me to recommend. It seems as if I'm alternating these days between heavy historical works and lighter ones. This most recent one was a heavy one.

There are some interesting takeaways from the book, though, and some learnings from what our nation went through between 1931 and 1941 and today. To wit:

• The author really hates to use the term isolationism. Too perjorative in his opinion. Instead he talked a lot about anti-interventionists. 
• And anti-interventionists had some multifaceted motivations for their point of view. I was surprised at the weight the author gave to anti-British sentiment, which he asserted was more prevalent in 1930s America than most of us realize. That sentiment fed in with a perception that the British might just be guilty of using the U.S. as the keeper of our empire, and anti-imperialism was a common attitude in America at that time as well. There was some moral indignation over war and its costs, too. 
• A great deal of cynicism and mistrust motivated the anti-interventionists as well. There was wide-spread belief that we had been lured into World War I as a result of the pursuit of profits by war industries and financial interests. Certainly the attitude that we not be suckered again motivated many at that time. 
• And before 1939 there was some ambivalence about how much of a menace the Nazis truly posed. But sympathy for them and their ideals really seemed to disappear after the invasion of Poland, an event that seemed to focus Americans on knowing the Nazis were a threat, and the debate then seemed to center on how to best counter that threat. 
• I walked away with fairly different impressions of two events that I have taught (or mistaught) that are two of the most dramatic before Pearl Harbor: The Quarantine Speech and The Atlantic Charter. 

Of course Japan's conquests in Asia loomed large in the telling of the book. But there weren't as many surprising insights in there for me about that.

The author certainly did not fawn over Roosevelt. His ultimate judgment was somewhat critical, that he was a leader who had a vague sense of where we were going and who the enemy was, but didn't have the discipline to master the details for getting there. Also, he was somewhat reckless in how he would pit cabinet members and advisors against one another. The author often floated a tantalizingly negative legacy FDR may have set, that of accepting presidential duplicity in the name of foreign policy, a duplicity that allowed America to drift toward war without Congressional permission. There are overtones of the decision-making that led us to Vietnam in that judgment.

I left the book being reminded of modern-day realities a little more than I expected. However, I am saddened to see the contrast between a country then in which bipartisanship mattered a bit more than now. More interestingly, I saw a time when our parties were divided themselves into cleaner factions, factions that forced political leaders to harmonize interests across groups rather than bludgeon them with self-righteousness.