Review: Charles A. Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940: A Study in Responsibilities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.
Last year, 2016, marked the 70th anniversary of the publication of Charles Beard’s masterful study of United States foreign policy prior to the nation’s disastrous entrance into the Second World War, American Foreign Policy in the Making1932-1940: A Study in Responsibilities(AFPM). The book was soon accompanied by President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 published in 1948, the year of the great historian’s passing.
The two volumes were extremely influential and became cornerstones of World War II revisionism. AFPM chronicled US policy in the crucial decade prior to the fateful attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The records released and the research done in the decades following Beard’s studies have only substantiated the historian’s interpretation of events.*
The most recent of the growing literature of WWII revisionism has been by the German historian Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, and his provocative book, The War That Had Many Fathers.**As Beard did with AFPM, Schultze-Rhonhof seeks to assign responsibility for the outbreak of WWII in the European theatre. Like Beard, and in contrast to the official historical interpretation, Schultze-Rhonhof blames the provocative actions of the “Allied” governments in the years leading up to the conflict.***
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*This essay is dedicated to the late Charlie McGrath of Wide Awake News.