The news is so alarming these days, we cats thought we'd have to resort to posting pictures and GIFs of red pandas again. (Red pandas always cheer us up.) But then we decided just to get offline and curl up with a book instead.
Our choice: "1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler — The Election Before the Storm," by Susan Dunn. Boy, was that a mistake. Kinda gave us nightmares.
Because guess what? Nazi Germany tried to interfere in that year's Presidential election.
It wasn't that the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was a big fascist and German sympathizer like Charles Lindbergh was. (In fact, after his '40 defeat, Willkie went to work for Roosevelt as his personal envoy to war-beleaguered Great Britain.)
But the Nazis didn't want FDR to get a third term because they knew what a formidable enemy he'd be. Their ambitions extended beyond Europe, and they appreciated how deftly Roosevelt was navigating prewar domestic politics — reassuring Americans that he wasn't spoiling for a fight, but at the same time shoring up the US's defenses by spearheading Lend-Lease and instituting a draft.
So, Dunn writes, the German government secretly bolstered the American isolationist movement, paying for newspaper ads during the Republican convention that summer, buttering up isolationist Congressmen and Senators, financing an anti-interventionist "Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee," and in short, doing everything possible to "convince Americans that fascist aggression posed no danger to them...and to engineer Roosevelt's defeat."
The good news is that the Nazis failed — it was 1940, after all, and Hitler didn't have Facebook, Twitter and a cowardly, complicit Republican Party at his disposal. The bad news is that today, scarily, Putin does. We cats HISS and hide under the bed.
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