The meaning of national security is not fixed. It's not set in stone anywhere in our founding documents. The definition is a result of politics, and at various points in American history, national security has meant different things. The upshot is that national security can mean different things again now and in the future. My book recovers Franklin Roosevelt's vision of national security, which was much broader than how we understand national security today. Roosevelt believed that national security meant not only protection from physical attack, but also the economic security and flourishing of all Americans. Recovering Roosevelt’s broader vision for national security opened my eyes, and I hope it will expand Americans’ understanding of what national security can mean as we face the serious challenges of our times.

Yes. And this was really new. The United States was founded as a republican democracy with a strong central government, but one that operated largely out of public sight. Most Americans’ only interaction with the government would be with the postman. The government's responsibility grew throughout the 19th century. The Civil War really accelerated the government's growth. But if you weren't a veteran, prior to the 1930s you really didn't have a lot of personal interaction with the government.

If you think about national security holistically as Roosevelt did, you want to ensure the physical protection of the citizenry, and perhaps you do that by building up the military into a figurative wall to deter the bad guys from attacking. But building a wall doesn't really do a whole lot for the country if inside the wall people are starving or society is not flourishing. Roosevelt argued that real national security doesn't just require tanks, planes, bullets and ships. It also requires health, education, recreation, the arts and the flourishing of society.

One of my book's contributions to our understanding of American political history is to show that an organized conservative movement began in this country earlier than a lot of people realized. And its origins really began in the 1920s with opposition to Prohibition (repealed the year Roosevelt was sworn in), which created a whole bunch of new federal enforcement powers. It empowered the federal government in ways that frightened some business leaders. In 1934, when Roosevelt proposed what became Social Security, these same prominent business leaders at companies like General Motors and General Foods, and their lawyers and bankers in New York, panicked. What terrified them was that Roosevelt seemed to have found a magic wand. If he invoked national security, he could expand the government's responsibilities seemingly without limit.

Going toe to toe with Roosevelt politically at the time was not a winning proposition because Roosevelt was promising people what they most wanted, which was economic security. The business leaders turned to the public relations and advertising industry and said, “Let's figure out how to shift public opinion away from the idea that the government is the ultimate source of solutions to problems.” The PR folks helped design a large campaign around the idea that Americans should see the private sector and not the government as the best provider of economic security. Conservatives’ argument was that if you give the government responsibility for economic security, not only will the government fail, but it will also destroy individual liberty in the process.

In addition to delivering their messages directly to Americans through radio, newspapers, billboards and every other medium imaginable, conservatives also focused on influencing people they considered “opinion molders” in society. For teachers, for example, the conservative-run National Association of Manufacturers developed entire curricula, and mailed out lesson plans with activities, homework assignments to teachers in public schools around the country. NAM gave them all these free materials. They did the same for religious leaders, women’s groups and others. These efforts showed something my colleagues in psychology understand well, which is that the volume and repetition of messaging shapes what people believe.

The majority of Americans weren't struggling after the war. They no longer saw economic insecurity as an urgent problem that the government needed to solve. Roosevelt had only been dead for two years when the National Security Act was passed, but the conservative backlash against Roosevelt's vision of national security had been going full tilt for more than 10 years at that point. The return of prosperity helps to explain the reduced appetite for expanding or building on social security, but the book also reveals some other surprisingly important factors. The irony, of course, is that it was a massive amount of government spending that restored economic prosperity and that helped sustain it during the Cold War. But, as I explain in the book, Americans began to view this “national security” spending differently from what became known as “welfare” spending. Many Americans came to support the one and resist the other.

I think we need to ask ourselves: Do we really have national security today when we have 40 million people living in poverty and another 40 million people living barely above the poverty line but unable to make ends meet consistently? When severe weather events regularly inflict catastrophic damage on parts of our country? When we have something like 200,000 people a year dying deaths of despair, whether because of fentanyl overdose or alcohol or other problems? And when our society is increasingly fractured? These are serious issues, but if we treat them as national security problems, I think we can solve them.