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Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
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I feel compelled to respond to Astrid M. Eckert's review of Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany, which appeared in the June 2003 issue of the Journal of American History. Throughout, the reviewer fails to summarize, let alone engage with, the main arguments I put forward. Instead, she offers a list of criticisms about what I fail to do, which are either inaccurate or completely miss my main purpose. For brevity's sake, I will focus on the two points that go to the core of the book's argument. |
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First, the reviewer claims that I pay "scant attention" to the mediating influences between the administration and mass public. But this is simply not true. As well as basing my conclusions on the most visible of FDR's tools for persuading the media—his weekly press conferences—chapter 2 explores the work the Office of War Information (OWI) undertook with leading media outlets, chapter 5 looks at the Treasury's extensive media connections during its war loan drives, and elsewhere I explore how the White House often used pressure groups to float trial balloons and issue controversial statements. |
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The reviewer points out that, because this was a pre-TV age, I should have focused on the role of media tycoons. But, of course, in this pre-TV age most Americans got their news from the radio. For this reason, I based my argument not just on the OWI's links with radio networks, but also on the radio broadcasts at the National Archives II and the NBC collection in the Library of Congress. Throughout, I show how officials often fretted that key media figures were failing to follow their lead, even reproducing tables to demonstrate how worried they were that their publicity objectives were not being repeated in the press. In chapter 4, which offers the most detailed case study of the opinion-policy relationship, I include numerous media assessments of events surrounding Operation Torch. |
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Second, the reviewer criticizes my definition of public opinion as "whatever the Roosevelt administration deemed it to be," arguing that as a result my picture of the popular mood "does not go beyond the crudity of opinion polling at the time." But this entirely misses one of the central points of the project, which is to explore how officials thought about, and used, public opinion in this period. Like any piece of intelligence, polls and surveys are often "crude"; they can also be misleading, with significant underestimates and exaggerations. But what I seek to establish is how such sources, whatever their weaknesses, were used in the central decisions concerning Germany during the war. This is why chapter 3 focuses on the central elements of grand strategy, chapter 4 on unconditional surrender, and chapter 6 on the Morgenthau Plan. Despite the fact that more than half the book is taken up with an assessment of these policy debates, Ms. Eckert has completely ignored this whole dimension of the book. I can only hope that others give the arguments contained in these chapters closer attention than this reviewer has. |
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| Steven Casey
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London School of Economics and Political Science
London, England |
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