Of all the periods in modern American history, the tumultuous, record-breaking years of Franklin D. Roosevelt are perhaps the most explored by scholars and the general public alike. Straddling the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II, the Roosevelt period is rich and fascinating and the source of much present-day discourse about the relationship between state, society and citizen. While the World War II phase of Roosevelt’s reign has attracted scholarship dealing with the President’s diplomatic exploits during the war, far less attention has been paid to how he negotiated the war at home. For Roosevelt, the war presented unprecedented challenges in the realms of social organization, not least in relation to the demands of war production, but also in terms of the physical and psychological welfare of American citizens. War mobilization invited federal engagement with economy and society in ways unimaginable under the flagging New Deal programme, encouraging liberals once again to push vigorously for heightened state involvement in society.

Dallek's Defenseless under the Night highlights one such debate over the extent of state responsibility in the running of American lives, namely the protection of the home front during wartime. Dallek masterfully shows how “civil defense” had its origins not in the Cold War, but in the early days of World War II. This little-known story involves two of the most dynamic characters of the time, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who together headed the nation's first Office of Civil Defense (OCD) in May 1941. What superficially appeared a good match between two New Deal stalwarts turned into an administrative nightmare. Urban reformer La Guardia interpreted the OCD as an organization essentially designed to eject foreign incursions on American soil. His focus was on emergency preparedness against physical attack, convincing, educating and drilling a quasi-military civilian army built at the grass roots and coordinated by the government. Americans were encouraged (by fearsome propaganda) to be firefighters, air raid wardens, first responders and even spies under La Guardia's plan. For Eleanor, the chance to lead a federal agency (a first for a First Lady) offered so much more. For her, the war was an opportunity to revive and extend the New Deal liberal project, with the OCD as a means not just for ensuring military preparedness but also for enabling “social defense” by way of providing improved housing, clothing, food and medical care “to make every place in this country a better place in which to live, and therefore more worth defending” (10). The profound differences in the scope of their visions – narrow “national security” over wider “social defense” – proved irreconcilable. After a year of near constant bickering and complaining, the President, who once bristled “I cannot cope with it” (12), asked them both to resign.

According to Dallek, this tale revealed the limits of New Deal liberalism in the face of total war. Eleanor's dream to win Americans to a more widespread notion of federal responsibility for providing basic human needs was muscled out by La Guardia's more pragmatic version of “self-defense,” as became clear when the OCD was taken over by another New Deal loyalist, lawyer James Landis, for the remainder of the war. Dallek traces Eleanor's failure to the inconsistency of the President himself in his uneven championing of New Deal liberalism as he succumbed to the political and economic exigencies of waging war. The need to keep his political opponents onside led the President to curb his liberal agenda. Indeed, the President chose La Guardia because his robust ideas about self-defense and the militarization of society would, the President believed, help prepare the nation for war, a primary objective for the White House. What resulted, as Dallek explains, was the beginnings of a “national security liberalism” that eclipsed social defense liberalism and has undergone several incarnations in the decades since, spawning today's conception of “homeland security.” Though some liberty has been taken with the book's subtitle, “The Origins of Homeland Security” – after all, this popular term is today more associated with domestic surveillance than it is about physical protection from external attack as it was in Roosevelt's day – Dallek can lay claim to identifying the moment when the US first realized in organizational form the merit of more directly incorporating its civilian population into the machinery of national defensive preparedness. As President Roosevelt himself put it, “The role of Civilian Defense in mobilizing our American communities … cannot be overestimated, for it affords the means for welding our people into one army that will continue to do battle in the many ways that war demands on every front that they can find” (255).

This is a study that will attract those interested in the detailed machinations of the Roosevelt administration and in understanding the myriad debates and decisions that resulted from the merging of New Deal liberalism with the practice of managing, waging and winning a total war of unprecedented scale. Fastidiously referenced in ample footnotes, thoroughly and meticulously researched from an array of archive and library sources, this book (despite its eye-catching subtitle) is not for the faint-hearted and is a worthy contribution to our understanding of this (still) fascinating period.