It is a distinctively American notion, notwithstanding the strong counterevidence of our Founders (or, at the other extreme, our Civil War "leaders,") and, ironically, the so-called "Greatest Generation" supports it better than any other. This sounds like just a variation on the classic comparison between FDR and Hitler: Elected almost simultaneously under very similar conditions, the radical differences between their strategies, tactics and policies produced equally different results. And yes, I am well aware of how strongly you deny ANY difference existed, but you are surely just as aware how few agree, and that the comparison has often been made in the stated terms, with the basic argument that, had their locations been reversed, Hitler would just as easily have been elected in the US or FDR in Germany.

So perhaps Turtledove is just making a popular alternate history argument that history has an inherent inertia and destiny so much larger than any individual or small group as to be independent of particular humans, instead dictated by HUMANITY, mostly in acts predating any contemporary actors. In short, history written by the ancestors, not the victors, whose most significant victory was in a genetic lottery over which they had no influence. From that perspective, replacing FDR with Joe Stalin, Joe Blow or anyone else could not have changed history more than superficially.

Needless to say, I have not READ the book, so am only "speculating." Despite a strong general interest in both history and "speculative fiction" (as distinct from fiction restricted to concrete observed fact ) I have read very little alternate history, none of which includes Turtledove. But I have read enough to recognize signs of one of the genres popular tropes, and the description of this book exhibits many of them.

Please note that I neither endorsed nor disputed Halseys view (for the record, I believe the truth is a combination of his view and that of history as the work of extraordinary men.) But, again, that view applies remarkably well to the Depressionary/WW II era, when anonymous millions of Allied and Axis citizens contended with each other to the death to decide humanitys future. Roosevelt, Stalin and other world leaders were merely the most prominent few of those millions, who would probably have found other leaders to similarly represent them had the historical ones been unavailable. Even before the war, signature "FDR" policies were merely his response to OTHERS challenging him from the left (e.g. Social Security neutralized Francis Townsend, while the WPA and similar programs mooted many of Huey Longs.)

So is Turtledoves book Panglossian, or merely a kind of predestination? I confess temptation to find out for myself.

As for the rest, could Steels unexplained antipathy to Trotsky be simply an inside joke, Turtledove winking at history and his readers? And on the subject of glass: A national bank=/=NATIONALIZING banks any more than a national army means conscripting every man, woman and child in the nation. Neither Hamiltons creation of the first national bank, Madisons of the second nor Wilsons of the third NATIONALIZED anything. It is a safe bet Glass would have been among the first to object had the Federal Reserve constituted anything of the sort, but the US Treasury farming out its minting duties to PRIVATE bankers who then SELL US OUR OWN MONEY is privatization, the antithesis of socialism.