“I’ve been interested, in some ways, in the history of losers,” Justus Doenecke tells The American Conservative.
Doenecke, who taught at New College of Florida from 1969 to 2005, made his reputation in the historical profession through an open-minded reappraisal of arguably the most prominent group of American losers in the twentieth century: the pre-World War II anti-interventionists. These were the middle Americans who saw Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy as the path to bankruptcy, chronic overseas war, and presidential dictatorship.
It’s a story he was practically born to narrate.
“I grew up in Brooklyn. People always think of New York as very liberal, but there are pockets of extreme conservatives, in fact you would call them reactionaries,” Doenecke explained. “My father was a building estimator, and he hated Roosevelt. He didn’t like the regulations of the New Deal, he didn’t like trade unions. You know, ‘son of a bitch ruined America.’ And he had all these conspiracy theories. Every single book that came out trying to prove that Franklin Roosevelt planned the Pearl Harbor attack, my father owned.” Läs artikel