"A president unlike any other, Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy in foreign affairs has been contested since the second he left office. Although few scholars assert that FDR's actions directly led to the Cold War, many note that his presidency bears an ambiguous relationship to the superpower rivalry that followed him. In Something to Fear, the authors show that Roosevelt's rhetoric, vision, and policies promoted a broadly defined sense of American security over a 33-year time span, ultimately helping elevate security to a ...
Read More
"A president unlike any other, Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy in foreign affairs has been contested since the second he left office. Although few scholars assert that FDR's actions directly led to the Cold War, many note that his presidency bears an ambiguous relationship to the superpower rivalry that followed him. In Something to Fear, the authors show that Roosevelt's rhetoric, vision, and policies promoted a broadly defined sense of American security over a 33-year time span, ultimately helping elevate security to a primary value in U.S. political discourse by the end of his presidency. In doing so, however, they argue that he also heightened the prominence of insecurity in American public life, mediating the United States' transition to superpower status in a way that also elevated fear in debates over foreign affairs. To demonstrate these contrarian claims, they examine a series of thematic snapshots encompassing FDR's entire political career. They capture the progression of his security rhetoric from his first campaign for New York State Senator to his defeat of the anti-interventionist movement and instantiation of a new way of talking about the United States' role in the world during World War II. Roosevelt's presidency precipitated a complex shift in U.S. foreign policy that defies any straightforward account organized along a linear isolationist-to-interventionist trajectory. This study investigates the uncertainties and contradictions embedded in FDR's presidential rhetoric, which drew from realist, racial, progressive, nostalgic, apocalyptic, liberal internationalist, and American exceptionalist discourses with little consideration for the possible inconsistencies this paradoxical brew might contain. In this way, Roosevelt's rhetoric anticipated the ambivalences contained in American adventures abroad ever since"--
Read Less
Add this copy of Something to Fear: FDR and the Foundations of American to cart. $53.67, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2023 by University Press of Kansas.
