In New Orleans last week to give a speech, I planned to otherwise amuse myself with food and music. It was only while trying to get a weather forecast on my phone that I discovered the Crescent City (for reasons having to do with the location of a factory that made landing craft that proved critical for the D Day invasion) is also home to the National World War II Museum, which TripAdvisor ranked as the city’s best place to visit. Indeed, it’s listed as the seventh-best tourist attraction in the United States, and, since I had been to the rest of the top ten (well, not the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which, for reasons having to do with Universal Studios, is in Orlando, Florida), I figured why not. And a tribute to the museum curator’s art it is: moving, informative, and (even as it celebrates the heroism of that era) sensitive to the ways that America has changed in the postwar decades. Right now, as Earth Day dawns on a planet where the temperature in the Antarctic just rose seventy degrees above normal, and where, two days ago, Vladimir Putin tested his new intercontinental ballistic missile, that history seems particularly poignant.
In our collective memory, America immediately rose to the challenge of Hitler. But, of course, that’s not really true—after Hitler had attacked the Sudetenland and Poland and even France, America was content to let Europe fight its own wars. In the winter of 1940, Gallup found that just twelve per cent of Americans wanted to declare war on Germany. Later in the fall, the country was split down the middle on the question of “Should the United States risk going to war to help the United Kingdom?” Major parts of the establishment—the Chamber of Commerce, for instance—opposed even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lend-lease plan to send matériel to defend Europe. Meanwhile, the America First movement attracted a wide following, which included a young John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, not to mention Walt Disney—and, notoriously, Charles Lindbergh. The museum notes the involvement of Kingman Brewster, Jr., who later became the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and the president of Yale; in those years, though, as a student activist, he organized across America to keep the country from being “entrapped” in foreign wars.
F.D.R., as the exhibits make clear, did his best to keep Britain going as he worked to change public opinion. Japan’s attack on the U.S. eventually did that; Brewster enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor, and so did the rest of America, at least metaphorically. The displays about the home front are literally riveting—you can wield a gun like the one that real-life Rosies would have used in factories and shipyards. There are food-ration books and recipe books, some published by the government, to help people cook with those rations. (“The Victory Cook Book,” free with any purchase of Lysol, instructed women that “every housewife’s job is to maintain her family’s health and spirits.”) There are bomb-shaped piggy banks that were given to children so that they could save for war bonds, and, to remind Americans to keep recycling metal, lurid posters of Axis aircraft in flames. (“Your Scrap Brought It Down.”) Looking at the displays reminds one of the somewhat perplexing fact that, so far, even as we watch the horrors daily inflicted on the people of Ukraine, we have not been asked to change our daily habits in any way to be of help to them.
It is, for instance, widely acknowledged at this point that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is financed by fossil fuel, and that Putin is exploiting his control of Europe’s oil and gas to wage it. Belatedly, Europeans seem to be waking up to their complicity; the Germans have announced plans to speed up their conversion to renewable energy, and, on Saturday, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, eight days out from his reëlection bid, called on his nation to get off fossil fuel altogether.
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President Biden did stop the importation of Russian oil to this country. But, because oil is traded on a world market, that hasn’t done much to hamper Putin. Indeed, as oil prices have surged around the world, Russia’s receipts from the oil that it can still sell have surged, too: the nation reports that its current account surplus nearly doubled in the first quarter of this year. In order for prices to fall, demand for all oil needs to be cut. Everyone who can work from home could continue to do so, at least on, say, Mondays, knocking a day off the national commute. Carpools could be organized, taking special advantage of the fact that there are now two million electric cars on the road. More bike paths could be made available, and, when air-conditioning season begins, Americans could turn their thermostats up a degree. And we could be building and sending millions of electric heat pumps to Europe, and installing them in our own homes. As Ari Matusiak, the C.E.O. of Rewiring America, a nonprofit working on the transition to clean energy, and Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, recently wrote for the Hill, “For too long, we have wanted to help in the fight, but had no way into battle. Electrifying your home one machine at a time is today’s Victory Garden—a thing you can do to fight tyranny, inflation, and runaway emissions.”
Yet we’ve been asked to do none of these things. Joe Biden has done a nuanced and tempered job of dealing with the military threat that Putin poses, walking the fine and scary line between assistance and provocation. But on the home front he and his Administration seem to think that Americans aren’t capable of much. Instead of asking us to conserve energy, which would also help his climate goals, they’ve given in to the demands of the fossil-fuel industry. This past Friday, the White House announced that it was going to open vast new sections of public land for more oil drilling, though it will take years for that action to reduce gas prices—and the policy violates the President’s remarkably specific campaign pledge. This just takes us deeper into a world dominated by oil and gas—the kind of hothouse in which Putinish despots thrive.
During the Second World War, victory demanded more oil—the museum in New Orleans documents the construction of big pipelines from Texas to the Northeast, and the construction of huge Navy oil tankers. (There’s also an account of how Esso, the forerunner to ExxonMobil, organized a special training program for “girl chemists.”) In the wars dominating the globe today—Putin’s land grab in Ukraine, and the global land grab caused by rising sea levels and spreading deserts—victory demands getting off fossil fuels as fast as we possibly can. Just as Biden has so far failed to match F.D.R. in getting crucial spending programs through Congress (which, to be fair, is far more narrowly divided than in Roosevelt’s time), so he has failed to match his predecessor in explaining to Americans why some sacrifice—or even some change—would be tonic. This Earth Day, that silence seems particularly profound.