Something I think about a lot lately is how much Nazi support there actually was in the US and if things had gone slightly differently we would not have been calling ourselves the good guys of WWII
This is beyond the normalization of publications like the Times at the time. But the Times specifically was wrong on Hitler, wrong on MLK Jr, wrong on Ida B Wells, wrong on the famine in ukraine, wrong on weapons of mass destruction. Being wrong somehow isn't disqualifying.
Circling back I do wonder what would happen if we taught WWII history not as the US "boldly daring to do the right thing" but really ending up doing the right thing by the edge of a coin toss, and even then it wasn't like the country saw Jewish people as fully human.
We certainly didn’t allow Jewish refugees into the country. And though people want to blame FDR for that, the historical polls are damning. It was public opinion that kept Jewish refugees out.
The book Human Smoke does a great job of presenting the anti-semitism, isolationism, and fascist leanings of the United States in the lead-up to the U.S. finally entering the war.
