SOURCE: "Roosevelt and His Detractors," in Understanding the American Past: American History and Its Interpretation, edited by Edward N. Saveth, Little, Brown and Company, 1950, pp. 514-28.

In the following essay, originally published in 1950, Schlesinger responds to revisionist critics of Roosevelt's wartime foreign policy.

The storm of controversy around the foreign policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt is already as furious and looks to be as enduring as that which has raged around the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson since 1919. War brings an almost inevitable aftermath of disillusion; and the failure of this last war to produce even an approximation of peace has charged our contemporary disillusion with a bitter sense of betrayal. As the revisionists of the Twenties turned on Wilson, so the revisionists of the Forties are today turning on Roosevelt.

The Wilson policies had only to face the relatively uncomplicated attacks of the outright isolationists—men like...