But I Thought We Were Friends...?

Parallels between US attitudes about Germany/USSR in the '30s, and Russia/China today

Question: Subscriber John Melton asks: It seems that the US attitude towards Stalin during WW2 wasn't as severe as it later became. Is that true or was it merely the fact that a common enemy like the Nazi makes strange bedfellows? What was FDR's opinion of Stalin and did he see the growth of communism as a direct threat to the west at the time in WW2? Was there less worry over communism in that day? If so, why? Did the US know what Stalin was doing to his own people?

Answer: A real answer to this question would take a whole book, but the short answer is yes, the attitude of the Roosevelt administration throughout the 1930s and during the war were radically different than the one that would take root in the late 1940s. The friendliness of Roosevelt probably owes to a few reasons. One that is commonly discussed is the fact that his administration was shot through by communists and communist sympathizers. This, while not irrelevant, has IMO taken on an exaggerated importance to people trying to figure out Roosevelt’s thinking. While it’s true that there were many high-ranking sympathizers around Roosevelt, it’s also true that other influential luminaries - such as William Bullitt, Averill Harriman, and George Kennan - were warning Roosevelt against the naive belief that Stalin shared American ideals or interests. The truth is, Roosevelt was his own man, and, on this and other topics, listened to people who told him what he wanted to hear, and ignored other voices.

Another reason is that, in the 1930s, sympathy with the Soviet Union was a fashionable high-status opinion. All the cool kids were doing it. If you were at an Ivy League college, in Hollywood, the arts, or participated in “respectable” political activism, being outed as anti-communist had a similar effect as being outed as a MAGA Republican would have in those communities today. It revealed one to be gauche, vulgar, low-class. This attitude held even after the war, when the American establishment had soured on Stalin, and even hard leftists began to doubt whether the USSR was an acceptable representative of their ideology.