John V. Denson's 2006 Mises collection argues that presidents manufacture consent for war by arranging who fires first. Lincoln at Sumter and Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor, he contends, provoked the first shot, then used emergency to bypass Congress, setting precedents. He quotes Schlesinger defending necessity and warning against imagined emergencies.
Commerce supplies motive. Denson separates private enterprise seeking tariffs, loans and state protection, his charge against Northern manufacturers and the House of Morgan, from Mises's free enterprise trading abroad at its own risk. His nonintervention keeps that trade open.
The Pearl Harbor chapter overreaches. Provocation, partial warnings and wanting Japan to strike first do not show that Roosevelt knew the specific attack or ordered forces sacrificed. Richardson, quoted on page 164, admits he cannot prove the directive he suspects; the appendix rests on a 1995 letter recalling a 1970s account. The NSA's retrospective history says pre-August-1941 recoveries were too few to read naval texts, undercutting Denson's certainty.
Read it, footnotes open, to check radical noninterventionist history against its evidence.
Cover design: Chad Parish. Photograph: Frank Hurley, Australian War Memorial, E01220.