Brooke Blower's Americans in a World at War is a marvel of archival recovery. Focussed on the period between 1914 and 1943, the author draws on digital databases, newspaper reporting and family papers to reconstruct the lives of six very different American citizens united by two common features: first, all led remarkably international lives at a time of unprecedented global tension, and second, all were passengers on the final flight of the Yankee Clipper, an ill-fated Pan-American aircraft that crashed off the coast of Lisbon in February 1943.
The passengers on the Yankee Clipper were both products of and participants in global exchange. Blower consistently refers to her six core “characters” by their first names. They consist of Frank, a salesman; Tamara, an actress and musician; Ben, a journalist; George, a lawyer; Manuel, a shipping agent; and Harry, an oil man. Two of the six were born outside the United States, a further three are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. While none fired a gun in either of the world wars, all were remade in the crucible of conflict. The book centres the recurring difficulties Americans faced in balancing their own affinities and goals with “national interests” that shifted according to circumstances far beyond their control. The flight of Frank, an export agent turned radio correspondent from Java to Australia in the wake of the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies provides the most gripping example of these sudden collisions, but such tensions resurface repeatedly. Manuel, who was born in Spain, risks his livelihood to smuggle material from the United States to the Franco regime and eventually to Nazi Germany. George, a lifelong New Yorker and committed disciple of Herbert Hoover, finds a new lease of life working for President Roosevelt's Reverse Lend–Lease programme. Global conflict also unsettled the assumptions that underwrote the peacetime cultural networks that formed the focus of Blower's previous work on American emigrants in Paris. As one observer writes after the New York premiere of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in July 1942, it would take “much more than attending a concert” to stem the “tide” of total war (249).
Blower's vivid depiction of the ongoing tussle between personal and political circumstance is made possible by an enormous array of primary material. An illuminating note on method makes clear that this project is only possible in the age of mass digitization, as text-searchable databases opened doors to obscure archives and family papers. Moreover, due to their relatively distinguished careers and financial resources, the class of people who were able to take a transatlantic flight in early 1943 were eminently more likely to have left personal archives and appeared in print than the majority of their compatriots.
It is thanks to this archival abundance rather than absence that the author can state plainly in the front matter that “nothing that follows has been embellished” (xviii). Chapters follow the lives of the individual passengers, and the eponymous crash only rears into view in the book's conclusion, though brief airborne interludes at the end of each of its four chronological sections bring the reader back to its central premise. Piecing together such complex material is not simple work. An early chapter on the flight of Tamara and her family from central Ukraine to the United States during the worst pogroms of the Russian Civil War stands out as a remarkable feat of historical reconstruction and imagination, relying on little more than a handful of scrapbook clippings and allusions made in later interviews to pinpoint a young Jewish woman in the eye of a region-wide storm. Crucially, though, it is an imagination that need not be couched in novel methodologies or overreliance on the conditional mood.
The richness of the archival record allows the author to treat her subjects as people who inhabited fully lived lives rather than stand-ins for broader trends or constituencies. Still, particular sections give new insights into often elusive topics. The chapters on Ben Robertson, a South Carolina writer and gay man who identified as liberal yet was fervently committed to the Lost Cause, offers a startling window into the complexities and contradictions of “progressive” segregationist politics, even before those politics are transformed by his travels through Europe and Asia. Similar to Nan Enstad's work on corporate cigarette networks and Hazel Carby's memoirist approach to race and mobility in the British Empire, Blower uses transnational intimacies to illuminate otherwise abstract forces.
The biographical approach adopted here is of immense value to historians of US foreign relations. It is one thing, as Blower and other historians have done over the past two decades, to expose the myth that the interwar years marked the height of American isolation. It is quite another to demonstrate the depth of US citizens’ engagement with the world beyond their own nation's borders in such rich and varied detail. Americans move from the United States not just to Paris and London but to the oil fields of Romania or to India at the height of protest against British rule. In East Asia, the US-occupied Philippines also functions as a gateway into the Dutch and British empires. In addition to retracing the transnational and transimperial mobilities of her passengers, the author demonstrates a deep engagement with local circumstances. Even when subjects sealed themselves in Euro-American bubbles, Blower draws on secondary literature to show the non-American contexts that shaped their lives. This is very much a history of the United States in the world, not simply the United States and the world.
It is to the author's credit that readers may occasionally forget that this is not a work of fiction. The cinematic prose might leave readers yearning for the kind of chance encounter that only ever really happens on the big screen – besides the trial of one being covered by the newspaper that another worked for, the passengers’ stories never directly intersect before they board the Clipper. But even a story as extraordinary as this has its limits. This is an engaging, readable, and eminently useful work that demonstrates the value of transnational history in understanding global crisis.
