Abstract
The Study of “Collective Memory” is One of the Growth Areas in recent historical writing. This term originated with Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist, back in the 1920s, but it gained currency among cultural historians in the 1980s thanks to the massive seven-volume project by Pierra Nora and his collaborators, Les Lieux de Memoire, on how the French had remembered their past. Their essays explored a wide variety of traditions, mentalities, and symbols, but subsequent work on collective remembrance has concentrated on “places” or “sites” of memory, particularly cemeteries and war memorials.1 Likewise, American scholars have found rich case studies in the struggles to establish a Holocaust Museum and to commemorate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.2
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Notes
The English translation, problematically titled, is Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998). For European examples see Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000); Jan-Werner Muller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
For a survey, see Robert D. Schulzinger, “Memory and Understanding U.S. Foreign Relations,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 336–52.
Nora’s general introduction in Realms of Memory, 1:17; Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 241–70.
Keith Wilson, ed., Forging the Collective Memory: Governments and International Historians through the Two World Wars (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996); Jeffrey Grey, The Last Word? Essays on Official History in the United States and British Commonwealth (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003); David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005).
Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live in Infamy: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3, 5, who argues that “in recent American culture, historical memory…is inseparable from the modern media, in all their forms” and that the distinction between “memory” and professional “history” has “little significance” when studying the place of World War II in American culture in the late twentieth century.
A theme I have explored further in “How the Cold War Froze the History of World War Two,” the Liddell Hart Lecture for 2005 (Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London).
Cf. Alice M. and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), chapter 1.
For some reflections on methodology, see the essay on “Culture, Discourse, and Policy: Reflections on the New International History,” in David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 18.
See Reynolds, In Command of History, 39, 68–77.
John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), 335, citing a photocopy of the contract. I have been unable to discover confirmatory evidence in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (henceforth FDRL).
Davis did not conceal his role as FDR’s mouthpiece, for instance when summarizing the president’s tentative postwar blueprint “which I have had the privilege of learning from the highest authority.” Forrest Davis, “Roosevelt’s World Blueprint,” Saturday Evening Post, April 10, 1943, 20–21, 109–110, quoting 109. See also “What Really Happened at Teheran,” ibid., May 13 and 20, 1944; correspondence in FDRL, OF 4287, esp. FDR to Welles, February 16, 1943, and PPF 1493 indicating meetings with Davis on February 10, 1943, and March 8, 1944.
Though journalist Bernard Asbell tried to fill the gap with his imaginative book The F.D.R. Memoirs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), constructed around the idea that Roosevelt was a loner who always tried to be “one of the boys” but never succeeded (55).
Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946), quoting xiii, xvii, 36, 38, 42, 256.
As reported in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Lift in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 435–6, from conversation with Elliott, and in the earlier investigative article by Joseph and Stewart Alsop, New York Herald Tribune, December 2, 1946. See also Joe Alsop to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 17, 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt papers, box 3248: Alsop (FDRL).
Felix Frankfurter to Robert Sherwood, October 7, 1946, Frankfurter papers, box 102, folder 2112 (Library of Congress, Washington, DC); Beaverbrook to Churchill, draft telegram, no date [September, 1946], Beaverbrook papers (House of Lords Record Office, London). The telegram, based on a conversation with FDR Jr., is marked “unsent” but it is likely that Beaverbrook communicated its contents verbally to Churchill.
Bohlen to Sherwood, July 8, 1948, Robert E. Sherwood papers, folder 94 (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1947).
Sherwood later told the president’s secretary that the letter had been of “incalculable value” in obtaining information for the book. See Truman to Sherwood, May 23, 1946, and Sherwood to Matthew J. Connelly, January 23, 1948, President’s Personal Files PPF 1685: Hopkins (Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri—henceforth HSTL).
See Reynolds, In Command of History, 53–54, 156–9.
See Willis D. Nance to Don Maxwell, memo on Admiral Leahy’s memoirs, March 11, 1946, William D. Leahy papers, box 10: Book Correspondence, General (Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983–1984), vol. 1, 473–5.
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1948), vol. 1, vi and vol. 2, 1726–7; William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950), acknowledgment; cf. Heslip to Leahy, April 14, 1949, Leahy papers, box 10: Heslip.
Ralph Ingersoll, Top Secret (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1946), vii.
Ross, memo to Truman, May 9, 1949, and Shepard to Kelly, May 13, 1949, Leahy papers, box 10: Distribution of MS., and Bohlen to Kelly, May 11, 1949, ibid., box 10: General.
For the State Department, see Washington Chancery to FO Library, November 23, 1949, FO 370/1759, L5326/39/405 (The National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office, Kew—henceforth TNA); also generally David Reynolds, “Official History: How Churchill and the Cabinet Office Wrote The Second World War,” Historical Research 78, 201 (August, 2005): 400–23.
Morison to FDR, March 23, 1942, Samuel Eliot Morison papers, series 33.41, box 37/1 (Harvard University Archives). See generally Samuel E. Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, 15 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1947–1962); Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, eds, The Army Air Forces in World War II, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948–1958).
On the Army series see Edward J. Drea, “Change becomes Continuity: The Start of the U.S. Army’s ‘Green Book’ series,” in The Last Word, ed. Grey, 83–104.
Quotations from Langer memos, “Projected History,” February 12, 1946, and “The United States in the Second World War,” October 1, 1945, in Council on Foreign Relations papers, box 49: Langer Project, files on “Access to Government Materials” and “Langer Appointment” (Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University). These two paragraphs draw generally on material in box 49.
Kennan to H. Freeman Matthews, September 29, 1950, and similarly Mallory to Langer, October 10, 1950, ibid., files on “State Dept. Clearance” and “Correspondence with Langer.”
On the earlier era, see Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967).
Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its Aftermath (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1953), 15–16. Barnes glossed over Tansill’s access to State Department documents—cf. 46–47.
Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), viii–ix.
The various inquiries in 1941–1946 are surveyed in Martin V. Melosi, The Shadow of Pearl Harbor: Political Controversy over the Surprise Attack, 1941–1946 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1977). The texts may be found on the Internet at http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/invest.html
Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 133, 151; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–40 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 5–6.
Wayne S. Cole, “American Entry into World War II: A Historiographical Appraisal,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (1957): 595–617, still offers a useful summary of the debate from both sides (esp. 603–10).
Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), 606, 614–15.
See the discussion by Richard N. Current, “How Stimson Meant to ‘Maneuver’ the Japanese,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1953): 67–74.
Quotations from Barnes, ed., Perpetual War, 263–4, 651.
Charles A. Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940: A Study in Responsibilities, and President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946, 1948); Samuel Eliot Morison, “Did Roosevelt Start the War? History through a Beard,” The Atlantic, August 1948, 95.
For more recent “back door” texts, see John Costello, Days of Infamy (New York: Pocket Books, 1994); and Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 1999).
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 249, press conference of August 30, 1945; U.S. Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 2–3.
Walter Johnson, The Battle against lsolation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1944), vii, 239.
Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1945), 356, 361.
Quotations from Barnes, ed., Perpetual War, 561, and Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 11–12.
Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 157; President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 6.
Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1970), 7, argued that Beard’s first volume was “a sound study” and that in the 1930s the president “pursued an isolationist policy out of genuine conviction.”
RayAllen Billington, “The Origins of Middle Western Isolationism,” Political Science Quarterly 60 (1945): 44–64; Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), chapter 7. A rare exception was Wayne S. Cole’s scholarly study of the main anti-interventionist pressure group America First: The Battle against Intervention, 1940–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953).
Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 253; Ingersoll, Top Secret, 46, 348. Cf. Admiral Leahy in 1950: “We were concentrating on the early defeat of Nazi Germany. The British wished to defeat the Nazis but at the same time to acquire for the Empire postwar advantages in the Balkan States” (Leahy, I Was There, 242).
Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 590–1; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 445–7.
See Reynolds, In Command of History, 154–6.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubelday, 1948), 194–5, 283–4; “Notes on General Eisenhower,” April 26, 1946, Hanson W. Baldwin papers, 101/754 (Sterling Library, Yale University).
Hanson W. Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), quoting 1, 36, 45.
Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (London: Collins, 1951), 708, 714–15.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Wilmot’s War, Or, ‘Churchill Was Right,”’ The Reporter, April 29, 1952, 35–40. An edited version of this essay, less caustic about the British, was published in The New Statesman and Nation, May 10, 1952, 557–9.
WSC’s annotations appear on 31–44 of a copy of Baldwin’s book that he forwarded to Deakin on April 3, 1950. I am indebted to the late Sir William Deakin for showing this to me. See also Churchill to Ismay, June 17, 1949, dismissing claims that he favored “the large-scale invasion of the Balkans”
“absolutely without foundation” (Ismay papers, 2/3/160, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London). More generally see Reynolds, In Command of History, chapter 24. 55. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 306; Sunday Times (London), November 21, 1948. On the background, see G.E. Patrick Murray, Eisenhower versus Montgomery: The Continuing Debate (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), chapters 3 and 4.
Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (New York, 1951), 434–5. Bradley acknowledged Monty’s “brilliant record” in the war but argued that those who advanced “the myth of the infallible military commander” did Monty “the greatest disservice,” xi. For specific criticisms see especially 208–9, 299–300, 416–19 (Arnhem), and 476–89 (the Bulge).
Wilmot, Struggle for Europe, 13, 460–1, 464–5, 468, 528.
Even the maps in subsequent books are often evidently based on Wilmot’s stark depiction of the alternatives—see Struggle, 461.
Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 696; Churchill, Second World War, 4: 685–8. See also Reynolds, In Command of History, 322–3.
Memoirs of Ernst von Weizsäcker, trans. John Andrews (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), 274, 297.
Allen W. Dulles, Germany’s Underground (New York: Macmillan, 1947); see also Franklin L. Ford, “The Twentieth of July in the History of the German Resistance,” American Historical Review 51 (1946): 609–26, esp. 625 on unconditional surrender.
Quotation from B.H. Liddell Hart, “Two Words: The War’s Greatest Blunder,” The Sunday Pictorial (London), December 7, 1947, 11 (copy in Liddell Hart papers, LH 10/1947/22c, Liddell Hart Centre). See also Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk (New York: William Morrow, 1948), 292–3—the British edition was entitled The Other Side of the Hill.
Baldwin, Great Mistakes, 14. Likewise Chester Wilmot concluded it was “both unnecessary and unwise” (Strugglefor Europe, 713).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Roosevelt and His Detractors,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1950, 62–8, esp. 66.
For a fuller discussion see Athan G. Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics, 1945–1955 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1955).
Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 576–7. The journalist William Henry Chamberlin enlarged and updated this indictment after the communist takeover of China to demonstrate, in his words, the “bankruptcy” of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, “complete and irretrievable.” Quotations from Barnes, ed., Perpetual War, 542.
William Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, August 30, 1948, 91–94, and September 6, 1948, 86–90.
Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949), quoting from 295, 306, ix–x.
Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, 95–96.
Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 867.
Baldwin, Great Mistakes, 7, 77–78, 87.
Unlike Baldwin, who blamed FDR for all this, Wilmot rightly pointed out that Churchill was implicated in the Asian concessions: see Struggle for Europe, 628, 650–5.
This paragraph draws on Theoharis, The Yalta Myths and material in FDRL, Administrative Files, State Department Correspondence, 1952–1955.
Congressional Record, Supplemental State, Justice, and Commerce, 1954, 25–29; Congressional Record, Senate, April 21, 1954, 5044–6.
Herman Kahn, Director FDRL, memo, March 5, 1954, FDRL, Admin., State Dept., 1954.
U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955), iii.
For background, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Seizing the Contested Terrain of Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Diplomatic History 17 (1993): 35–72, quoting 38; James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), chapter 16, quoting 284, 291–2.
Conant to Harvey H. Bundy, September 23, 1946, James B. Conant, presidential papers, box 296 (Harvard University Archives).
Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947, 97–107, quoting 102, 106–7. On the figures, see Bernstein, “Seizing the Contested Terrain,” 48, and Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 93, 97–98, 419–20.
Baldwin, Great Mistakes, 88–107, quoting from 95 and 101.
“Was Yalta Stalin’s Greatest Victory?”—transcript of ABC’s “Town Meeting,” April 29, 1952, 8–10—copy in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., papers, box W-33 (John F. Kennedy Library, Boston).
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948–1953), vol. 6, 638. Churchill did, however, say later (in an addition drafted by his adviser on naval history), “It was a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell, and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power.” Ibid., 646.
Harry S. Truman, 1945: Year of Decisions (New York: Signet Books, 1965), 460.
Some writers have supported Truman’s claim, most cite estimates of 40,000 to 50,000 American fatalities (still a very real consideration if one remembers that the country’s total combat deaths in the war were some 300,000). On the historiography, see Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Bomb and American Foreign Policy, 1941–1945: A Historiographical Controversy,” Peace and Change 2 (1974), 1–16; J. Samuel Walker, “The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update,” Diplomatic History 14 (1990), 97–114; J. Samuel Walker, “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” Diplomatic History 29 (2005), 311–34, where the casualty debate is examined at length.
A theme developed in David Reynolds, “Official History: How Churchill and the Cabinet Office Wrote The Second World War,” Historical Research 78, 201 (August 2005): 400–22.
Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1964). See more generally the valuable historiographical articles by Mark A. Stoler, “World War II Diplomacy in Historical Writing: Prelude to Cold War,” in American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review, ed. Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 187–206, and “A Half-Century of Conflict: Interpretations of U.S. World War II Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 18 (1994), 375–403.
Quoted in Reynolds, In Command of History, 37.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Roosevelt Literature,” ADA Yearbook 1 (1949), 26, copy in Schlesinger papers, box W-33 (JFKL).
Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, xi.
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© 2008 David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball, and David Reynolds
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Reynolds, D. (2008). Fdr’s Foreign Policy and the Construction of American History, 1945–1955. In: Woolner, D.B., Kimball, W.F., Reynolds, D. (eds) FDR’s World. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616257_2
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