The Hoover Applied History Working Group held Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.
ABOUT THE TALK
National security may seem like a timeless notion. States have always sought to fortify themselves, and the modern state derives its legitimacy from protecting its population. Yet national security in fact has a very particular, very American, history—and a surprising one at that.
The concept of national security originates in the 1930s, as part of a White House campaign in response to the rise of fascism. Before then, national self-defense was defined in terms of protecting sovereign territory from invasion. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his circle worried that the US public, comforted by two vast oceans, did not take seriously the long-term risks posed by hypermilitarization abroad. New Dealers developed the doctrine of national security, Andrew Preston argues, to supplant the old idea of self-defense: now even geographically and temporally remote threats were to be understood as harms to be combated, while ideological competitors were perilous to the “American way of life.”
Total Defense shows it was no coincidence that a liberal like Roosevelt promoted this vision. National security, no less than social security, was a New Deal promise: the state was obliged to safeguard Americans as much from the guns and warships of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan as from unemployment and poverty in old age. The resulting shift in threat perception—among policymakers and ordinary citizens alike—transformed the United States, spearheading massive government expansion and placing the country on a permanent war footing.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Preston is the W.L. Lyons Brown Jr. Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy and Statecraft, and Professor of History, at the University of Virginia. Before moving to UVA last summer, Preston taught for 20 years at Cambridge University in the UK. He has published 11 books, including the prizewinning Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Knopf, 2012). His most recent book is Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, which was one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2025. He is currently working on his next book, on the United States and the origins of World War II in Asia and the Pacific. Currently titled The Road to Infamy, it will be published by Henry Holt in the US and Penguin/Allen Lane in the UK.
ABOUT THE DISCUSSANT
Anthony Gregory is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His historical work examines political, legal, and ideological development of state power, in both its liberatory and coercive dimensions, and in particular the ways law enforcement and security policy interact with liberalism and constitutional federalism. He is the author of three books, most recently New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State. His previous books are American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment and The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror. His writing has appeared in Law and History Review, the Journal of the Early Republic, and other popular outlets.
