Book Review: Thomas Mullen’s portrayal of a divided nation in 1943 draws parallels to today

It’s 1943, a quarter century after the armistice that ended the so-called Great War, and Americans are once again fighting in foreign lands, battling the ascendant Empire of Japan in the Pacific and confronting Germany’s Afrika Corp along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea.

The country had been divided over whether to enter the war. Isolationists opposed sacrificing American lives to save the democracies of Western Europe. And thousands of Nazi sympathizers openly trumpeted support for Adolf Hitler. Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 unleashed a patriotic fervor that seemed to settle the question, but in some quarters, opposition to the war still ran deep.

In Boston, a city long torn by ethnic and religious hatreds, antisemitism, racism and xenophobia ran rampant. Yankee Protestants despised the city’s teeming population of Irish immigrants. And the Irish saw no reason why their adopted country should come to the aid of England, which had long oppressed their ancestral land.

Such is the setting for Thomas Mullen’s “The Rumor Game,” a disturbing yarn about a divided, rumor-riddled nation that offers apt but unstated parallels to present-day America.

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