Isolationists

Isolationists believed that the United States should avoid intervention in European wars, “entangling alliances” with other nations, and the use of military force except to defend American shores. The high point of isolationist sentiment and influence came during the 1930s, when noninterventionists kept the United States out of the worsening European situation, and prevented President Franklin D. Roosevelt from taking action to oppose aggression. While not advocating a complete cutoff of trade and other relations with the rest of the world, isolationists believed that the United States should have selfdetermination in foreign affairs and limit spending on the military. Liberal isolationists wanted to curtail the power of business to shape foreign policy, while conservative isolationists wanted to restrict the power of the federal government—especially the president (and in particular FDR)—to involve the United States in what they saw as international adventurism.

Isolationists in the 1930s included men and women from all walks of life. They were most numerous in the upper Midwest, and fewest in the South. While most isolationists were in the Republican Party, a significant number were in the Democratic Party, and some came from right - and left-wing groups as well. Isolationists were more prevalent in rural areas and small towns in the Midwest than in large eastern cities. Ethnically, isolationists were found primarily among German Americans, Irish Americans, Scandinavian Americans, and Italian Americans. In religious affiliation, noninterventionists were mainly Lutherans and Catholics, although it was much more their ethnic roots (German, Scandinavian, Irish, and Italian) than their religion that made them isolationists. Evidently more women than men were isolationist.

Isolationism reached its peak during Roosevelt’s first term, from 1933 to 1937. Such progressive Republicans as George Norris, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., and William E. Borah supported much of the New Deal, and since most were isolationist, Roosevelt often acquiesced to them in matters of foreign policy in order to retain their support on domestic legislation. Under pressure from peace groups who blamed financially powerful “merchants of death” for American involvement in World War I, the Senate in 1934 created the Nye committee, which investigated the munitions industry, its financial backers, and its role in influencing U. S. policy. Influenced by the Nye Committee, Congress in 1935 passed the first of the Neutrality Acts, imposing an arms embargo and restricting American travel on belligerent ships.

After Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, which was supported by a number of congressional isolationists, the president’s problems with the isolationists increased. Ironically, the troubles were exacerbated by a domestic issue, Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, which alienated the Senate’s largely isolationist progressive Republican bloc from the president. As events in Europe heated up, mistrust developed and an eventual break occurred. Roosevelt’s “quarantine speech” of October 1937, when he warned of worsening international conditions, was criticized by isolationists, as was the president’s attempt to block the Ludlow Amendment, which would have submitted any declaration of war to a national referendum.

Even after Germany’s annexation of Austria, the Munich Conference in 1938, and Adolf Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland in 1939, most Americans remained noninterventionist. But within a year,

Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and then France fell to the Nazis, a majority of Americans came to support the need to help Great Britain and defeat the Axis powers. The isolationists responded by forming the America First Committee in September 1940, and most prominent noninterventionists either were members or spoke at sponsored rallies. After Roosevelt’s third-term victory over interventionist Republican Wendell L. Willkie in the election of 1940, the American First Committee and its allies attempted, without success, to prevent the passage of the Lend-Lease Act and the repeal of Neutrality Act provisions banning the arming of American vessels crossing the Atlantic.

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, effectively ended the efforts of isolationists. When war was declared, every isolationist in Congress, except Jeanette Rankin, a Republican representative from Montana (who had also voted against entry into World War I), voted yes. During World War II, some prewar isolationists were concerned about postwar American eoreign policy, especially membership in an international peacekeeping organization. But in July 1945, with only two dissenting votes, the Senate ratified the United Nations charter, and the prominent isolationists in the Senate and elsewhere largely faded from the scene by the mid - to late 1940s. The lessons of the interwar years and the coming of World War II, the enormous economic, military, and political power of the United States at the end of the war, worsening Soviet-American relations, and the world’s entry into the nuclear age all made it impossible for the United States to retreat into isolationism. The events of 1929-45 had transformed American foreign policy, and the United States pursued a much-expanded role in international affairs in the post-World War II world.

Further reading: Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-45 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935-1941 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966).

—William J. Thompson