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Limited Engagement: The Quiet American as History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Stephen J. Whitfield
Stephen J. Whitfield
Affiliation:
Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02254, U.S.A. He expresses gratitude to Thomas Doherty, Richard H. King and Rupert H. Wilkinson for their astute criticism, and to the American University (Washington, D.C.) and the école des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), for invitations to present an earlier version of this paper.
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Extract

Among the most intensely absorbed viewers of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was Adolf Hitler, who knew almost nothing of the United States but who observed how degenerate the “Okies” had become. He believed that immigration had already mongrelized the general populace and, since even farmers of Anglo-Saxon stock had succumbed to racial disintegration, the Americans would be pushovers for the Wehrmacht. This particular movie-goer failed to notice the resilience and endurance also flickering on the screen; and it would be foolish to claim that his decision to declare war on the United States was based only upon a misinterpretation of The Grapes of Wrath (which he watched several times). But since no treaty obligation compelled the Third Reich to make war, after Pearl Harbor, upon an industrial power of which the Führer was so ignorant, any analysis of his motives must remain speculative. It may have been a mad urge for apocalyptic destructiveness (and self-destructiveness), springing from subterranean depths that the psychobiographer can fathom more readily than the military or diplomatic historian. Perhaps Hitler's miscalculation was not utterly irrational: with Holland's surrender in 1940, its place as the world's nineteenth largest army was ceded to the Americans.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , April 1996 , pp. 65 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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