Given the
tight Anglo-American alliance of the twenty-first century,
it is hard to fathom how frayed British-American relations
were in the 1930’s. Americans, particularly in the heartland,
felt hostile and suspicious toward Britain. While some East
Coast Americans had a continuing and deep feeling of kinship
with the English, many ethnic groups, including Irish-Americans
and Jews saw the British as part of an elitist and class-conscious
Europe they had come to America to escape. Americans were
suspicious of foreign allegiances and entanglements of any
kind, bitter about the costs and results of the last world
war, and resentful about Britain’s failure to pay war
debts. By 1939 the resulting isolationism was deeply entrenched
in the United States, especially in the Midwest, where many
mainland European immigrants had settled after fleeing monarchies
and dictatorships.
As war in Europe began to look inevitable, the British initiated
a massive propaganda campaign to win America to its side in
the struggle. The June 1939 state visit of King George VI
and Queen Elizabeth to Washington, New York City, and Hyde
Park was a crucial component of that crusade. While such personages
as the Duke of Windsor, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and aviator
Charles Lindbergh were expressing awe about German military
might, President Roosevelt initiated the royal visit in order
to sway public opinion toward supporting England in the upcoming
war. The centerpiece of The Roosevelts and the Royals
is the precedent-shattering picnic that the president and
his wife hosted at FDR’s estate in Hyde Park, New York
where George and Elizabeth agreeably ate hot dogs for the
first time, not only signaling their accessible style and
their accommodation to American ways but cementing Anglo-American
relations at a dangerous juncture.
Previous historians have treated the royal visit and the Roosevelt-Windsor
connection as a mere footnote to history. For the first time,
Dr. Swift vividly demonstrates the importance of that visit
in developing Britian and America’s "special relationship"
and in the eventual creation of President Roosevelt’s
"Lend-Lease" program. He shows how the two couples
worked together to help save democracy.
More than the above, the book is a joint biography of the
Roosevelt and Windsor dynasties. It shows how their family
friendship began in the early 1900s when Teddy Roosevelt befriended
King Edward VII, continued through Eleanor Roosevelt’s
close bond with the king and queen after FDR’s death,
and was revitalized last year when Prince Andrew spoke at
the FDR Library. The Roosevelts and the Royals is
also the first book-length study of these four complicated
characters and their two intriguing and radically different
marriages, the Roosevelts’ spacious, complex and quite
modern, the royal couple’s tight-knit, traditional and
simple. It demonstrates the similarities between the personalities
of George VI and Eleanor Roosevelt and that of Queen Elizabeth
and Franklin Roosevelt.
The book is based on exclusive interviews with the Roosevelt
grandchildren and on previously unpublished letters of Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Queen
Elizabeth II, the Duke of Windsor, the Duke of Kent found
in the FDR Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.
The publication of the book was supported by the Queen Mother
who gave the author quotations about the Roosevelts in the
last months of her life. Her private secretary, Sir Alistair
Aird, was an enthusiastic advocate for the book as well.
The Roosevelts and the Royals reads like a novel.
Filled with extraordinary anecdotes, it is written in a lively
and engaging style making it an extremely enjoyable reading
adventure for biography lovers, history buffs and scholars
alike. It should be available and on display at your neighborhood
bookstore and a limited number of copies will be offered for
sale at the Columbia County Historical Society Museum in Kinderhook. |
