In the run-up to America’s involvement in World War II, a nation wracked by the Great Depression felt it had been duped into sending its sons to fight and die in the bloody European “Great War” in 1917 and didn’t want to be caught up in such “Old World” conflicts again.
World War I had caused 53,402 American battle deaths, and for what? The “war to end all wars” hadn’t resulted in promised democracy in Europe. Allies didn’t want to pay war debts to the United States.
Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare and a proposed German alliance with Mexico had finally launched America into the war.
But isolationists believed that British propaganda, greedy arms companies and equally greedy European bankers had lured the United States into World War I,
In 1934, a seven-member special committee led by North Dakota Republican U.S. Sen. Gerald P. Nye, who opposed U.S. involvement in foreign wars, was convened to look into widespread reports that arms makers had been behind the decision to join the fighting.
The Great Depression, meanwhile, had left up to 15 million people without jobs in 1933.
“Many Americans became determined not to be tricked by banks and industries into making such great sacrifices again,” according to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian. “The reality of a worldwide economic depression and the need for increased attention to domestic problems only served to bolster the idea that the United States should isolate itself from troubling events in Europe.”
In 1935, Congress passed the first Neutrality Act prohibiting the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” to foreign nations at war.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an interventionist who felt America had a role to play on the world stage, kept a wary eye on Japan, Germany and Italy, noted the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
Adolf Hitler began his devastating march through Europe in 1936. In 1937, Japan was at war with China. In November 1939, Roosevelt won a lifting of the arms embargo so France and Great Britain could buy war materiel “cash and carry,” and in 1940 and 1941, he formalized aid to China.
Addressing Congress on May 16, 1940, Roosevelt warned of “ominous days — days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors: The brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror.”
Roosevelt added that, “The clear fact is that the American people must recast their thinking about national protection.”
The America First Committee, established in September 1940, became the most influential isolationist/non-interventionist group in America, organizing into 450 units with up to 850,000 members.
The group’s ranks included famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a Germany sympathizer who would later spend his final days living on Maui. The group wanted an impregnable defense for America and maintained that American democracy could only be preserved by staying out of the European War.
On the opposite side was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which was committed to Allied success because America “would be gravely imperiled by an Axis victory.”
On Dec. 7, 1941, in Pittsburgh, 2,500 America Firsters gathered to hear Nye and other isolationists. According to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story the next day, officials were told by a reporter before the meeting started that Hawaii had been attacked by Japan, but the group went on as if nothing had happened, calling Roosevelt a “warmonger.”
The following day Nye and other senators voted 82-0 for war against Japan. America First disbanded within days.
