 First edition | |
| Author | Upton Sinclair |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Series | Lanny Budd |
| Genre | Historical |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | 1944 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 655 pp |
| Preceded by | Wide Is the Gate |
| Followed by | Dragon Harvest |
Presidential Agent is the fifth novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1944, the story covers the period from 1937 to 1938.
Visiting New York in 1937 to see paintings for sale, Lanny runs into his old mentor from the Paris Peace Conference, Professor Alston, who is working in the Roosevelt administration. Upon hearing that Lanny's wealthy European customers include top Nazis Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Josef Goebbels, and that Lanny's father Robbie has started a military aircraft Company in Connecticut, but is finding only Nazi customers, Alston suggests a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR is impressed with Lanny’s grasp of the situation in Europe. Lanny agrees to gather information in Europe as a confidential agent.
In Germany, Lanny’s old school friend Kurt is rising as a German agent. In England, schoolmate Rick is a leftist writer of political analysis. Lanny's American heiress ex-wife Irma is looking to marry into the English aristocracy. The English upper crust, including Lanny's ex-lover Rosemary (back from the Argentine, her husband's scandal having blown over), and the wealthy DeBruyne family of Lanny's deceased French ex-lover Marie, all fear a "Red" Spain and see Hitler as preferable to Stalin.
In Paris, Lanny finds his secret wife Trudi has vanished, as have others working in the anti-Nazi underground. He seeks help from his “Red” uncle Jesse. His Spanish friend Raoul may be able to reach Trudi’s old underground contact Monck, who is fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Lanny believes Trudi may be imprisoned in the walled, guarded Chateau Belcour outside Paris. Lanny manages get himself, Monck and a locksmith into the chateau dungeons, where they find Trudi has already been taken to Germany.
Trying further to rescue Trudi, Lanny steps up his mingling in Nazi society as an art dealer and by posing as a convert to Nazism. Hitler purchases Detaze paintings and asks Lanny to spy on wealthy Austrians in Vienna. Lanny learns Hitler is preparing to force the Anschluss; he notifies FDR. By a device involving an occult séance, Lanny maneuvers Nazi Rudolf Hess to reveal that Trudi died at Dachau Concentration Camp.
Lanny again reports to FDR on Nazi terrorism and aims of domination. In New York City, Lanny witnesses a fascist rally of the Christian Front (United States). Back home on the Riviera, Lanny discovers that his sister Marceline's husband, the Italian fascist officer Vittorio, has stolen Marcel Detaze paintings from the home of Lanny's mother Beauty; Lanny allows Vittorio to avoid arrest by leaving France permanently. Shortly thereafter, a pregnant waitress threatens to sue Vittorio for child support; upon learning of the affair, Marceline divorces Vittorio. Marceline becomes a professional dancer.
Back in Germany, Lanny sees Czechoslovakia partially dismembered "in the name of peace" at the 1938 Munich Conference. The Krystallnacht pogrom erupts all over Germany. Discouraged by the failure of England and France to arm themselves against Hitler and the political difficulties preventing FDR from acting, Lanny considers resigning as a Presidential Agent, but he stays on. Lanny sees the future holds a fateful struggle of Roosevelt against Hitler.
In 2001 the book was re-issued by Simon Publications in two volumes. [1] Digital editions are available.
The 1940 United States presidential election was the 39th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 5, 1940. Incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican businessman Wendell Willkie to be reelected for an unprecedented third term in office. Until 1988, this was the last time in which the incumbent's party won three consecutive presidential elections. It was also the fourth presidential election in which both major party candidates were registered in the same home state; the others have been in 1860, 1904, 1920, 1944, and 2016.
It Can't Happen Here is a 1935 dystopian political novel by American author Sinclair Lewis. Set in the fictionalized version of 1930s United States, it follows an American politician, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who quickly rises to power to become the country's first outright dictator and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor who sees Windrip's fascist policies for what they are ahead of time and who becomes Windrip's most ardent critic. The novel was adapted into a play by Lewis and John C. Moffitt in 1936.
The America First Committee (AFC) was an American isolationist pressure group against the United States' entry into World War II. Launched in September 1940, it surpassed 800,000 members in 450 chapters at its peak. The AFC principally supported isolationism for its own sake, and its varied coalition included Republicans, Democrats, farmers, industrialists, communists, anti-communists, students, and journalists – however, it was controversial for the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist views of some of its most prominent speakers, leaders, and members. The AFC was dissolved on December 11, 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war.
Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl was a German American businessman and close friend of Adolf Hitler. He eventually fell out of favour with Hitler and defected from Nazi Germany to the United States. He later worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt and was once engaged to the author Djuna Barnes.
The Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch and the White House Putsch, was a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator. Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified under oath before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities on these revelations. Although no one was prosecuted, the congressional committee final report said, "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."
Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the organizer of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. The plan involved eight German saboteurs who had previously spent time in the United States.
World's End is the first novel of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1940, after World War II had begun in Europe the previous year, the story covers the period from 1913 to 1919, before and after World War I.
Before, during and after his presidential terms and continuing today, there has been criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945). His critics have questioned not only his policies and positions, but also accused him of trying to centralize power in his own hands by controlling both the government and the Democratic Party. Many denounced his breaking of a long-standing tradition by running for a third term in 1940.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with Civil Rights was a complicated one. While he was popular among African Americans, Catholics and Jews, he has in retrospect received heavy criticism for the ethnic cleansing of Mexican Americans in the 1930s known as the Mexican Repatriation and his internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. From its creation under the National Housing Act of 1934 signed into law by Roosevelt, official Federal Housing Administration (FHA) property appraisal underwriting standards to qualify for mortgage insurance had a whites-only requirement excluding all racially mixed neighborhoods or white neighborhoods in proximity to black neighborhoods, and the FHA used its official mortgage insurance underwriting policy explicitly to prevent school desegregation.
Dragon Harvest is the sixth novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1945, the story covers the period from 1939 to 1940.
John Flournoy Montgomery was an American businessman and diplomat. His sole diplomatic posting was as U.S. Minister to Hungary, between 1933 and 1941. This ambassadorial assignment placed Montgomery at the center of the seething intrigue and gathering storm that characterized 1930's Hungary and Central Europe; in particular he was witness to the rise of Adolf Hitler's influence in Budapest, and the complex struggle over the alliance between Hungary and Nazi Germany. His memoirs, entitled Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite, are considered a valuable document of that era.
Mussolini and I is a 1985 made-for-television docudrama film directed by Alberto Negrin. It chronicles the strained relationship between Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, based on Ciano's diaries. Made in English as an Italian-French-German-Swiss-Spanish-US co-production, with Bob Hoskins, Anthony Hopkins and Susan Sarandon in the leading roles, it first aired on Rai Uno on 15 April 1985 in a 130-minute version. On 8 September 1985, it premiered in the USA on HBO in an extended four-hour version.
Fascism has a long history in North America, with the earliest movements appearing shortly after the rise of fascism in Europe.
A World to Win is the seventh novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1946, the story covers the period from 1940 to 1942.
The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was founded in Los Angeles in 1936 by Soviet agent Otto Katz and others with the stated purpose of organizing members of the American film industry to oppose fascism and Nazism. It was run by the American popular front, and it attracted broad support in Hollywood from both members and nonmembers of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It ceased all anti-Nazi activities immediately upon the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.
The following events occurred in September 1937:
The 1940 United States presidential election in Wyoming took place on November 5, 1940, as part of the 1940 United States presidential election. State voters chose three representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
The foreign policy of the United States was controlled personally by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first and second and third and fourth terms as the president of the United States from 1933 to 1945. He depended heavily on Henry Morgenthau Jr., Sumner Welles, and Harry Hopkins. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Cordell Hull handled routine matters. Roosevelt was an internationalist, while powerful members of Congress favored more isolationist solutions in order to keep the U.S. out of European wars. There was considerable tension before the Attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The attack converted the isolationists or made them irrelevant. The US began aid to the Soviet Union after Germany invaded it in June 1941. After the US declared war in December 1941, key decisions were made at the highest level by Roosevelt, Britain's Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, along with their top aides. After 1938 Washington's policy was to help China in its war against Japan, including cutting off money and oil to Japan. While isolationism was powerful regarding Europe, American public and elite opinion strongly opposed Japan.
Egon Ludwig Sedgwick Hanfstaengl was a German-American art publisher who was also Adolf Hitler's godson and the son of Ernst Hanfstaengl.