Something to Fear: FDR and the Foundations of American Insecurity, 1912-1945

In Something to Fear, Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler demonstrate that Roosevelts rhetoric, vision, and policies promoted a broadly defined sense of American security over a period of thirty-three years, ultimately helping elevate security to its primacy in US political discourse by the end of his presidency. In doing so, however, 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.

FDRs presidency precipitated a complex shift in US foreign policy that defies any straightforward account organized along a linear isolationist-to-interventionist trajectory. Chernus and Fowler investigate the uncertainties and contradictions embedded in FDRs presidential rhetoric, which drew from realist, racial, progressive, nostalgic, apocalyptic, liberal internationalist, and American exceptionalist discourses. In this way, Roosevelts rhetoric anticipated the ambivalences contained in American adventures abroad ever since.

Something to Fear shows how FDRs response to the Great Depression, the debates over intervention, and World War II left an immense rhetorical legacy that often stressed insecurity. This study of FDRs entire political career also carefully links him to the Progressive Era before his presidency and to the Cold War era after it.