Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security

The story of how FDR and fellow New Dealers created the idea of national security, transforming the meaning of defense and vastly expanding the US government's responsibilities. National security may seem like a timeless notion. States have always sought to fortify themselves, and the modern state derives its legitimacy from protecting its population. Yet national security in fact has a very particular, very American, history-and a surprising one at that. The concept of national security originates in the 1930s, as part of a White House campaign in response to the rise of fascism. Before then, national self-defense was defined in terms of protecting sovereign territory from invasion. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his circle worried that the US public, comforted by two vast oceans, did not take seriously the long-term risks posed by hypermilitarization abroad. New Dealers developed the doctrine of national security, Andrew Preston argues, to supplant the old idea of self-defense: now even geographically and temporally remote threats were to be understood as harms to be combated, while ideological competitors were perilous to the "American way of life." Total Defense shows it was no coincidence that a liberal like Roosevelt promoted this vision. National security, no less than social security, was a New Deal promise: the state was obliged to safeguard Americans as much from the guns and warships of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan as from unemployment and poverty in old age. The resulting shift in threat perception-among policymakers and ordinary citizens alike-transformed the United States, spearheading massive government expansion and placing the country on a permanent war footing.

About the Author :
Andrew Preston is Professor of American History and Fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University. He is the author of The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam and the prizewinning Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, London Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs.

Review :
Shows in fascinating detail how Roosevelt used similar language when talking about the social-protection policies and public-investment programmes of the New Deal and the emerging concept of national security. An incisive reconsideration of a landmark legislative program. Andrew Preston’s Total Defense does what the very best history books do: It identifies something we all take for granted—in this case, the idea of a ‘national security’ establishment—and gives it a history. Less than a century ago, the suggestion that the United States should maintain a permanent military-intelligence-industrial complex would have been anathema to most Americans. Today, it helps to structure the daily lives of billions of people around the globe. Preston shows brilliantly how ‘national security’ emerged from the same state-building impulses that produced ‘social security,’ though with far different consequences. Andrew Preston explains how three distinct areas we often use to divide twentieth-century American history–the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War–are all connected by a literal bridge in Chicago and a landmark speech Franklin Roosevelt gave to dedicate it in 1937. That is just one of the sparkling contextual insights in this important and urgent book. Preston's sinewy synthesis links Social Security to national security and FDR's ‘quarantine’ to George Kennan's ‘containment’ in a timely work that illuminates today's global interdependence and the backlash against it. In this highly original study, Andrew Preston incisively connects the rise of the American national security state to the simultaneous rise of the American welfare state. No other book so brilliantly captures how a liberal politics of fear and security moved between the arenas of domestic and foreign policy in the 1930s. A major reinterpretation of some of the central events of modern American history, Total Defense counts among the most important books written about the New Deal and its legacy in recent times. In this expansive and beautifully written book, Andrew Preston illuminates the domestic origins of US national security in the New Deal years. FDR's national security rhetoric laid the ground for confronting the next great threat, global war, and ultimately enabled persistent military engagement to eclipse domestic welfare as the nation's top priority. Highly recommended. Preston deftly chronicles the evolution of the expansive notion of ‘national security’ that emerged during the 1930s and then congealed during World War II. This groundbreaking study of the interplay between domestic and international forces in shaping US grand strategy is not only fascinating; it speaks directly to the combination of internal and external challenges the United States faces today. Every sovereign state must guard its territory and population, but with what scope and resources should they? With characteristic ambition and lucidity, Andrew Preston explains in this rich analytical study of ideas and political culture why the United States, propelled by domestic New Deal liberalism, pursued policies for an expansive and truly global conceptualization of national security.