joes thinking of Chamberlain in England
Well, Joe Kennedy did.
Joseph Kennedy had a good relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe. :-)
Since you asked, I’ll report what my father noticed about the U.S. assessment of Hitler. Early on, the liberals were quite happy with Hitler and defended him.
Then, at a particular point, the American leftists turned on Hitler and insisted he was the epitome of evil.
Why the change? When I was in high school in the 1960’s, I had certain “proof texts” in order to discern whether history books were reliable or they were leftist propaganda.
First, I would look at the end of the Korean war. It was popular to posit that the primary support for North Korea was the Chinese. One saw that lie on TV depicted by M*A*S*H. The reality was that the North Koreans were highly dependent on the Soviet Union. This became obvious to anyone paying attention when Stalin died and the North Koreans came to the peace table within months. The replacement Soviet leadership were not able to deliver the war supplies in the face of opposition at home. Many textbooks continued to push the Chinese nonsense, but the Chinese were unable to help except for troops.
The second proof text for history books and this leads us to the question at hand, was whether they would mention that Stalin and Hitler were allies when the war broke out. Many texts would just ignore this since they were unwilling to smear the Communists.
Back to the relationship with American during the war. Hitler turned on Stalin since he never trusted Stalin and assumed that he might as well strike first and get the upper hand. On June 22, 1941, the Germans launched operation Barbarossa in order to invade the western Soviet Union.
My father said that June of 1941 was the month when American leftists changed from supporting Hitler and lobbied to keep America out of the European conflict to lobbying heavily to get America into the war. FDR had surrounded himself with left-leaning politicians. One of the most influential was Alger Hiss, who was a Soviet agent.
So, to add to my prior post, yes, there was enough lobbying from the left so that Hitler was acceptable to FDR before Hitler (and the Russians) invaded Europe. However, the statement is actually wrong, since that "good relationship", however tenuous, continued even after Hitler invaded Europe. For instance, the Russians invaded Poland by train from the east while the Germans invaded by sea from the north while they were still allies. Other countries were invaded after that. So it wasn't the "invasion of Europe" that changed our viewpoint so much as Operation Barbarossa when the Germans stabbed the Russians in the back.