I
n 1934 Senator Gerald Nye launched a high-profile
investigation of American entry into World War I.
Nye was responding to longstanding accusations that
munitions manufacturers had influenced the decisionto go to war against Germany in 1917. After eighteen months,
his committee found little direct evidence for these claims,
but the investigation drew wide attention and revived the
debate about whether the nation ought to have entered such
a costly war in the first place. The Nye Committee’s work
also signaled the deeply isolationist mood of the country.
Americans watched apprehensively as fascist governments
took power in Europe and Asia during the 1930s, but
expressed little desire to intervene.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly voiced concernabout the growth of fascism in 1937, but he faced a legislature
that was determined to prevent the entanglements that had
pulled the country into war two decades earlier. Congress
first attempted to legislate neutrality by limiting American
overseas trade and travel. After Germany invaded Poland in
1939, Congress required France and Great Britain to “cash
and carry” any arms purchased from the United States. Even
after the swift Nazi invasion against France and the Low
Countries in 1940, many Americans wondered whether a
rearmed and expansionist Germany necessarily posed a threat
to national security.
American isolationism was reinforced by the geographicalperception that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans separated the
United States from Europe and Asia. The advent of aviation
challenged that assumption, but only with the entry into
World War II were Americans forced to reckon with these new
spatial realities. Among the most forceful apostles of this
new “air age” geography was Richard Edes Harrison, whose
creative and unconventional maps simultaneously shocked
and dazzled the public during the war. His 1940 effort to map
the nation from unfamiliar angles (page 206) was just one
of many attempts to reassess world geography in the age
of aviation.
The following summer, Harrison issued an equallydisruptive map centered on the North Pole to demonstrate
that this “European” war had everything to do with the United
States (page 208). Just as American readers were poring over
that map, Roosevelt and the British prime minister Winston
Churchill met secretly off the coast of Newfoundland to
develop principles that would govern the postwar world.
Roosevelt was formulating such a vision even before the
United States had entered the war, and the principles of the
Atlantic Charter echo President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”
in 1918. In both cases, the US prioritized open access to
the foreign markets and raw materials. The British artist
MacDonald Gill rendered an ebullient and optimistic profile
of that new world, one ordered and integrated through
commerce (page 210).
Franklin Roosevelt’s own experience as Assistant Secretary
of the Navy in the 1910s gave him a keen appreciation of
geography. On several occasions during the war, he asked
Americans to consult their maps and globes as he explained
various aspects of strategy over the radio. On the title page of
this book we see the president consulting his 1942 Christmas
gift from the Army, a 750-pound globe that was designed to
rotate freely—without an axis—in order to facilitate strategic
thinking in a world governed by aviation. Like Harrison,
Roosevelt was attuned to a global sense of geography.
Through 1942 and much of 1943, most American troops
were sent to the Pacific, which led the Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin to charge that his country was bearing the brunt of
the fight against Germany. With the invasion of Italy in 1943,
but more importantly France in June 1944, the Americans
forcefully joined the Allied battle to destroy the Third Reich
in Europe. One soldier on the front lines—Henry MacMillan—
mapped the military and logistical challenges of that brutal
fight (pages 212–215). His two maps reveal not just the
Allied defeat of Germany, but the delicate relationship
between American and Soviet forces as they both marched
toward Berlin.
In that final year of war, American troops battling
the enemy in Germany and Austria also confronted the
unimaginable horror of the Final Solution. The immensity
of the Holocaust is impossible to comprehend, but the maps
on pages 216 and 217 record one young man’s survival of the
war and the concentration camps. Michal Kraus chronicled
his imprisonment and ultimate liberation through a lengthy
illustrated memoir written immediately after the war. Like
MacMillan, Kraus chose to map his experience. His first map
documents the brutal network of camps that tortured himBetween War and Abundance