In July 1939, Franklin D Roosevelt met with senators from both political parties at the White House in a final effort to persuade them to amend the Neutrality Act preventing America from aiding other countries. After drinks were poured, Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, argued that the world was approaching a catastrophic war. The 74-year-old Republican senator William Borah, who had led the fight against Woodrow Wilson and American entry into the League of Nations in 1919, shook his head in disgust. "There is not going to be any war in Europe this year," he said. "All this hysteria is manufactured and artificial." Two months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and England and France declared war on Germany.
Now that it has become the good war fought by the greatest generation, the ferocity of the disputes over entering World War II has largely been forgotten. But the story of America's anti-interventionist lobby is not only historically fascinating, it also echoes in debates today over whether America should engage abroad or hold back.
The debate was largely rooted in disappointment over the outcome of World War I, when Wilson's promised crusade for democracy ended with the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Leading liberal historians like Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Beard, both of whom had noisily championed Wilson's decision to intervene, now denounced it. At the same time, senators like Gerald P Nye, who had headed an investigation into the munitions manufacturers of World War I ("merchants of death"), attacked the idea of bailing out "British plutocrats".
Those Angry Days, by Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun and the author of several books on England and World War II, and 1940, by Susan Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, powerfully recreate this tenebrous era. Ms Olson captures in spellbinding detail the key figures in the battle between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist movement. She maintains that the president was too timorous in challenging Congress, but the fervour and depth of isolationist sentiment suggest a more sympathetic verdict. Far from shirking the conflict, Roosevelt played his cards well, seizing upon events to nudge the country toward war and patiently waiting, as he told Winston Churchill, for the big crisis that would settle the debate. Ms Dunn superbly depicts the 1940 election between Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, and his internationalist Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie.
It was Willkie, more than any other Republican politician, who ended up challenging the party's embrace of isolationism, but this did not really occur until after the election, when he travelled to Britain with Roosevelt's approval and was promptly denounced as a "Republican Quisling" by Col Robert McCormick, the rabidly isolationist publisher of The Chicago Tribune. To the consternation of mossback Republicans, Willkie had captured the nomination by riding a groundswell of enthusiasm for an outsider. As a candidate, however, he began to hedge on interventionism. So, Ms Dunn shows, did Roosevelt.
Ms Olson argues persuasively that Roosevelt drew a lesson from his failed Supreme Court packing scheme in 1937 and his inability to defeat Republicans in the 1938 Congressional elections: he could never get ahead of public opinion.
In the Senate it was none other than Wheeler who denounced Roosevelt's modest attempts to keep Britain afloat as it single-handedly battled Germany. Ms Olson shows that the campaign against the isolationists was successfully waged by several prominent citizens' groups, including members of New York's Century Association, who called themselves "Centurions".
The most nettlesome antagonist Roosevelt faced was Lindbergh. He presented himself as a cool and dispassionate realist, assuring his American audiences that England was doomed and that there was no choice but to cozy up to the Third Reich. But he tipped his hand at an America First rally in September 1941 in Des Moines, when he announced that the real enemy was internal and Jewish.
After World War II, the right continued to search for internal subversion. Having previously flayed Roosevelt for trying to stop Nazism, conservatives now complained that he had been too soft on Communist traitors. But as Schlesinger showed in a 1952 article in The Atlantic titled "The New Isolationism," figures like Senators Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy were really trying to camouflage their lack of enthusiasm for military intervention abroad by endorsing witch hunts at home. But as Ms Olson and Ms Dunn valuably remind us, Roosevelt got it right. Had he wavered, events could have turned out very differently. No less than Churchill, Roosevelt saved Western civilisation from the greatest menace it has ever known.
THOSE ANGRY DAYS
Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
Lynne Olson
Random House; 548 pages; $30
1940
FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler - The Election Amid the Storm
Susan Dunn
Yale University Press; 402 pages; $30
Now that it has become the good war fought by the greatest generation, the ferocity of the disputes over entering World War II has largely been forgotten. But the story of America's anti-interventionist lobby is not only historically fascinating, it also echoes in debates today over whether America should engage abroad or hold back.
The debate was largely rooted in disappointment over the outcome of World War I, when Wilson's promised crusade for democracy ended with the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Leading liberal historians like Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Beard, both of whom had noisily championed Wilson's decision to intervene, now denounced it. At the same time, senators like Gerald P Nye, who had headed an investigation into the munitions manufacturers of World War I ("merchants of death"), attacked the idea of bailing out "British plutocrats".
Those Angry Days, by Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun and the author of several books on England and World War II, and 1940, by Susan Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, powerfully recreate this tenebrous era. Ms Olson captures in spellbinding detail the key figures in the battle between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist movement. She maintains that the president was too timorous in challenging Congress, but the fervour and depth of isolationist sentiment suggest a more sympathetic verdict. Far from shirking the conflict, Roosevelt played his cards well, seizing upon events to nudge the country toward war and patiently waiting, as he told Winston Churchill, for the big crisis that would settle the debate. Ms Dunn superbly depicts the 1940 election between Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, and his internationalist Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie.
It was Willkie, more than any other Republican politician, who ended up challenging the party's embrace of isolationism, but this did not really occur until after the election, when he travelled to Britain with Roosevelt's approval and was promptly denounced as a "Republican Quisling" by Col Robert McCormick, the rabidly isolationist publisher of The Chicago Tribune. To the consternation of mossback Republicans, Willkie had captured the nomination by riding a groundswell of enthusiasm for an outsider. As a candidate, however, he began to hedge on interventionism. So, Ms Dunn shows, did Roosevelt.
Ms Olson argues persuasively that Roosevelt drew a lesson from his failed Supreme Court packing scheme in 1937 and his inability to defeat Republicans in the 1938 Congressional elections: he could never get ahead of public opinion.
In the Senate it was none other than Wheeler who denounced Roosevelt's modest attempts to keep Britain afloat as it single-handedly battled Germany. Ms Olson shows that the campaign against the isolationists was successfully waged by several prominent citizens' groups, including members of New York's Century Association, who called themselves "Centurions".
The most nettlesome antagonist Roosevelt faced was Lindbergh. He presented himself as a cool and dispassionate realist, assuring his American audiences that England was doomed and that there was no choice but to cozy up to the Third Reich. But he tipped his hand at an America First rally in September 1941 in Des Moines, when he announced that the real enemy was internal and Jewish.
After World War II, the right continued to search for internal subversion. Having previously flayed Roosevelt for trying to stop Nazism, conservatives now complained that he had been too soft on Communist traitors. But as Schlesinger showed in a 1952 article in The Atlantic titled "The New Isolationism," figures like Senators Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy were really trying to camouflage their lack of enthusiasm for military intervention abroad by endorsing witch hunts at home. But as Ms Olson and Ms Dunn valuably remind us, Roosevelt got it right. Had he wavered, events could have turned out very differently. No less than Churchill, Roosevelt saved Western civilisation from the greatest menace it has ever known.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
THOSE ANGRY DAYS
Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
Lynne Olson
Random House; 548 pages; $30
1940
FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler - The Election Amid the Storm
Susan Dunn
Yale University Press; 402 pages; $30