A History of America in 100 Maps

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 decision

to 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 concern

about 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 geographical

perception 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 equally

disruptive 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 him

Between War and Abundance