Anatomy of a Brown Scare: Strategic Misrepresentation of the American Noninterventionists of 1939–1941 for Current Political Purposes

$30.00

Trump Derangement Syndrome has a precedent in the 1939–1941 Brown Scare: the campaign to equate antiwar sentiment with sympathy for Hitler. The Roosevelt administration and its allies turned marginal extremism into a pretext for discrediting millions of Americans opposed to foreign war. With sharp scholarship and wit, Stromberg traces how that episode created a lasting template for branding critics of war and empire as authoritarian threats that continued into the Trump era.

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By Joseph Stromberg

Long before Trump Derangement Syndrome, there was the Brown Scare of 1939–1941: a deliberate campaign to equate opposition to foreign war with sympathy for Hitler. In this incisive study, independent historian Joseph R. Stromberg dissects how the Roosevelt administration and its allies inflated marginal extremists into an existential danger as pretext for a sweeping smear campaign against millions of ordinary Americans who simply wanted to stay out of another European war. The result was not only America’s entry into World War II but a durable template for managing democracy through manufactured crises. From Lindbergh to Taft to the TDS of Rachel Maddow, John Ganz, and Jacob Heilbrunn, Stromberg reveals the counterintuitive truth: the paranoid style has long belonged more to the antifascists than to their targets. With meticulous scholarship and biting wit, Stromberg shows how this original “Brown Scare” created precedents still recycled today to brand skeptics of endless war and empire as Hitler reincarnate.

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