The United States finally joins World War Two,
the isolationists disband, Roosevelt founds the United
Nations. After the Cold War ends, isolationism
in America starts to reappear.
BY ATTACKING the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet, the Japanese shot the isolationists’ fox. All arguments about America staying out of war were made redundant. In a specially summoned meeting on November 7, Roosevelt asked his cabinet whether “the people would back us up in case we struck at Japan down there” and, Stimson recalled, they were “unanimous in feeling the country would support us.”1 The cabinet were right. There was an immediate, overwhelming patriotic response from the American people demanding that the president declare war on Japan.
Many isolationists had anticipated the course of events. One of Roosevelt’s most persistent critics, Senator Gerald Nye, thought it “probable that if we got into the [European] war it would be through the back door of Japan,”2 and there had been a frantic effort by America First on December 5 to mobilize sympathetic congressmen to speak out against action against Japan. But it was too late. The attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, came before the isolationists could mount a preemptive peace campaign. On the evening of the surprise assault, Roosevelt invited to the White House the stalwart isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson, ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who expressed the view that “the worst part of this Japanese war” was that it would slide “very easily into the European war.”3
Other isolationists and non-interventionists were quick to rally around the president. Old campaigner Senator Burton Wheeler declared that “the only thing to do now is to do our best to lick the hell out of them.” He was joined by Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, another stalwart opponent of intervention, who promised Roosevelt support “without reservation.” “Nothing matters except VICTORY,” he wrote in his diary. “The ‘arguments’ must be postponed.”4 Arthur Capper, a longstanding isolationist senator from Kansas, wrote to Roosevelt pledging his “fullest support and cooperation in steps which may be required to bring the war to a successful conclusion.”5 Even the president’s favorite punching bag, Congressman Hamilton Fish, had the good grace to write saying that “the time for debate and controversy has passed” and asking how he could “best help promote unity, uphold your war program, serve my country.”6
On December 8, Roosevelt addressed both houses of Congress and described the Japanese attack the previous day as “a date which will live in infamy. . . . I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.”7 The same day, the Senate voted unanimously in favor of war with Japan, with Vandenberg the only senator to speak. Isolationists and non-interventionists, he said, were “not deserting our beliefs, but . . . were postponing all further arguments over policy until the battle forced upon us by Japan is won.” “To better swing the vast anti-war party in the country into unity,”8 he would vote in favor.
Losing so many prominent supporters overnight, America First soon followed suit, the national headquarters in Chicago suggesting in a mass mailing on December 7 that the movement’s members should “give their support to the war effort of this country until the conflict with Japan is brought to a successful conclusion. In this war the America First Committee pledges its aid to the President as commander in chief.” All campaigning and leafleting was halted. The statement’s allusion to Japan, like that of Vandenberg, was significant, for some of the leadership held out the possibility that America would restrict its fighting to the Pacific theater. Those who had a sneaking sympathy for Germany hoped it might be possible for America to retaliate against the Japanese without also confronting Hitler’s expansionism. Roosevelt, too, was careful not to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany lest he be seen as the aggressor by those Americans still reluctant to consent to joining Britain in the war against Nazism.
Pearl Harbor might not have been enough to deter continued efforts to keep America out of the European conflict by a rump of isolationists had it not been for Hitler’s surprising response to the attack. He had long urged the Japanese leaders to attack British interests in the East, but had not ventured to encourage an assault upon America. Germany and Japan enjoyed an alliance that stopped short of mutual defense, so there was no public obligation for Hitler to spring to Japan’s defense. It might have suited him to have the US preoccupied with a Pacific war that would distract it from helping Britain in the Atlantic. What few knew at the time, however, was that in April 1941 Hitler had made a secret pledge that “in case of a conflict between Japan and America” Germany “would promptly take part.”9 On December 11, therefore, after a blistering personal assault upon Roosevelt delivered to the Reichstag, in which he blamed the war on the president and “the Jews, in all their satanic baseness, gathered around this man,”10 Hitler declared war against the United States. On hearing the news, Roosevelt promptly asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany and Italy, which was approved unanimously.
The same day, in Chicago, the leaders of America First met. A minority still felt that “some method of adjourning was preferable to complete liquidation,” but, led by Robert E. Wood and John T. Flynn, the majority of the ruling committee voted to dissolve the organization. In a final statement, they maintained to the end, “Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided. No good purpose can now be served by considering what might have been. . . . Today, though there may be many important subsidiary considerations, the primary objective is . . . victory.” The conclusion could not have been more emphatic: “The America First Committee has determined immediately to cease all functions and to dissolve as soon as that can legally be done.”11
A few dissenting isolationists still held out, but overwhelmingly, prominent members of America First not only bowed to the inevitable but volunteered to serve the war effort. Roosevelt was less than gracious in dealing with some of those who, he felt, had been so wrong for so long and, he suspected, still harbored pro-German sympathies. These included Wood, a brigadier general in World War One, who, despite his age of sixty-two, offered his services. The president wrote to army chief of staff George C. Marshall, “I do not think that General R. E. Wood should be put in uniform. He is too old and has, in the past, shown far too great approval for Nazi methods.”12 Wood was restricted to offering advice to Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a civilian. One of the principal founders of America First, R. Douglas Stuart Jr., was treated more gently and went on to serve as a major on Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Britain. He saw active duty, landing in Normandy in the Allied invasion of German-occupied France shortly after D-Day.
Charles Lindbergh greeted Pearl Harbor not with the indignation shared by the vast majority of Americans but with a pointed question about whether Roosevelt had not left the Pacific Fleet vulnerable when he sent part of the navy to protect the trade route to Britain in the Atlantic. Lindbergh’s response was one of reluctant patriotism. “We have brought it on our own shoulders,” he told his diary, “but I can see nothing to do under these circumstances except to fight. If I had been in Congress, I certainly would have voted for a declaration of war.”13 He considered writing directly to Roosevelt, “telling him that while I had opposed him in the past and had not changed my convictions, I was ready in time of war to submerge my personal viewpoint in the general welfare and unity of the country.”14 He decided instead to approach Arnold with a view to offering his considerable expertise in flight engineering to the Army Air Corps.
As soon as it became known that Lindbergh was volunteering for service, a barrage of hostile stories appeared in the press calling him a traitor and a Nazi. A number of Americans said they would not be happy for Lindbergh to join the armed forces. One couple wrote to a newspaper, “Our son is in the service and we want no Quislings behind his back.”15 Lindbergh was the subject of similar vitriol from those in government, led by his perennial enemy, Interior secretary Harold Ickes. Lindbergh should not be allowed to serve in the armed forces, Ickes wrote to Roosevelt, because he was “a ruthless and conscious fascist, motivated by a hatred for you personally and a contempt for democracy in general.” Lindbergh should be “buried in merciful oblivion.”16
Roosevelt replied, “What you say about Lindbergh and the potential danger of the man, I agree with wholeheartedly,”17 and passed Ickes’s letter on to secretary of war Stimson and secretary of the navy Frank Knox. Roosevelt suggested to Stimson that the solution to Lindbergh’s request was that “for the time being the matter can be possibly maintained ‘under consideration’.”18 After meeting with Stimson, who told Lindbergh to his face that he was hampered by his “political views” and consequent “lack of aggressiveness,” he said it would be inappropriate to appoint Lindbergh to a “position of command.” Lindbergh abandoned all attempts to join the services.
He soon discovered he was also persona non grata in the commercial aircraft companies in receipt of federally funded arms orders. He enquired about work at Pan American, United Aircraft, and Curtiss–Wright, but each time the War Department or the White House was consulted, Lindbergh’s application for work was rejected. By February 1942 he was in despair, though he appeared to remain oblivious of why his past words and actions had caused so much offense. “I have always believed in the past that every American citizen had the right and the duty to state his opinion in peace and to fight for his country in war,” he told his diary. “But the Roosevelt Administration seems to think otherwise.”19
Salvation came in the form of his old isolationist friend Henry Ford, whose assembly lines since the summer of 1941 had been busily building Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber planes. Unlike the management of the other commercial airlines and plane manufacturers, Ford was prepared to defy Roosevelt in the belief that the administration could ill afford to withdraw contracts to build urgently needed warplanes over such a trivial issue. “It annoys him to think he has to ask anyone what he wants to do in his own factory,” wrote Lindbergh. “And, as a matter of fact, it annoys me to have to ask the government’s position to make a connection with a commercial company; it’s too damn much like Russia!”20 Ford put Lindbergh to work at his Willow Run plant.
Once war was engaged in earnest, there was little time for anyone in the Roosevelt administration to concern themselves with the part Lindbergh was playing, which led to him operating as a test pilot improving the Navy Marine Chance Vought F4U Corsair fighter for United Aircraft Corporation. By April 1944, he was in the South Pacific and, unknown to the military authorities, flying combat missions against the Japanese. In total, he flew in combat fifty times in Lockheed P-38s and Marine Corps Vought F4U Corsair fighters. On July 28, flying a P-38, he shot down a Japanese fighter over Elpaputih Bay, Seram island, Indonesia, in an aerial duel. In September, anxious that Lindbergh’s combat role would become known back home or that he would be shot down, he was ordered back to the United States. After all his profound reservations about countering Fascism, it might be said that Lindbergh had a “good war.”
Other isolationists, such as William Randolph Hearst, were less fortunate. Though he was allowed to retain editorial control of his newspapers after his forced bankruptcy in 1936, when his company was acquired by his creditors, led by Chase Manhattan bank, who put his vast collection of semiprecious antiques under the hammer, his strident newspaper columns laden with isolationist opinions had long lost their potency. Increasingly he came to be viewed as a silly old man brought low by women and his own profligacy. He told his financial adviser, John Neylan, that when it came to antiques, “I’m like a dipsomaniac. They keep sending me these catalogs and I can’t resist them.”21 When a bombastic, bullying newspaper proprietor’s private life becomes news, it marks the beginning of the end of his influence. Once a great power in the land, Hearst had become a laughingstock.
His friendly advice to Hitler after Kristallnacht had appeared naive and out of touch, and his hectoring of Roosevelt for daring to anticipate a war with Germany had sounded increasingly petty. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, his view that “occidental culture and political policies and material advancement will be lost. Only cruel, destructive Asiatic tyranny will triumph,”22 echoing Lindbergh’s racial theories, had appeared insular and irrelevant. In late 1939 and early 1940, his financial state became even more parlous when his investors began to sue him for mismanaging his company. His hysterical response to Roosevelt’s sale of old destroyers to Britain—“Well folks, as your columnist foretold, we are in war. . . . We all have in the neighborhood of three weeks, according to our admirals, in which to prepare boarders. . . . Mr Roosevelt has his wish at last.”23—had appeared alarmist and plain wrong.
After Pearl Harbor, Hearst effected a perfect backward somersault which diminished his influence further. “Well, fellow Americans, we are in the war and we have got to win it,” he wrote. “There may have been some differences of opinion among good Americans about getting into the war, but there is no difference about how we should come out of it. We must come out victorious.”24 Paradoxically, it was the great increase in the public’s appetite for news about the war that he had tried so hard to prevent that eventually returned Hearst to financial health. By early 1945, he had regained control of his company. It had come, however, at a huge price to both Hearst’s political influence and his personal health.
Pearl Harbor also brought an abrupt end to the activities of the radio priest Charles Coughlin, who had for years been playing a cat and mouse game with his Roman Catholic superiors and the federal authorities. Roosevelt had tried many times to silence Coughlin, whose anti-Semitic and isolationist Sunday broadcast sermons and his vitriolic attacks on the president through his newspaper, Social Justice, continued despite his being banned from the main networks. The president had offered a bargain to the Catholic hierarchy—to appoint to the Vatican an official US envoy, if not quite a full ambassador, if Coughlin were silenced—but to no avail. Roosevelt had even threatened the Catholic archbishops with an income tax audit if they did not act.25 With America now at war, however, an investigation was launched into the funding and content of Social Justice, and evidence was found by the FBI and Justice Department that the paper was partly funded by a pro-German lobbyist and that the paper was urging dissent in the armed forces and publishing seditious articles that undermined the war effort. Finally, the reluctant Catholic authorities, who had been flummoxed by Coughlin’s dodging and weaving, were obliged to act.
A deal was finally struck in May 1942 between US attorney general Francis Biddle and Coughlin’s bishop, Edward Mooney, which agreed that the case against Coughlin and Social Justice would be dropped, thereby avoiding the spectacle of the Justice Department prosecuting a Catholic priest, and the Catholic Church being shown to have for decades protected America’s most vocal anti-Semite. The quid pro quo was that Coughlin would be muzzled. The agreement did not entirely stop Coughlin from trying to spread his hateful creed, and not long afterward he was threatened with further prosecution when he began collecting the names and addresses of members of the armed forces to mail them antiwar literature. The deal did, however, mark the end of Coughlin’s malignant national influence and he went to his grave in 1979 cursing Roosevelt, protesting his innocence, and insisting that he had at all times remained within the law and the spirit of Catholic teaching.
Like Henry Ford, Walt Disney’s silence was bought off through the awarding of federal government contracts. Disney’s animations were highly labor-intensive and expensive to produce, but the ease with which they could be dubbed into foreign languages raised substantial revenues around the world. The start of the European conflict in September 1939 had put an abrupt end to those foreign earnings because of the closure of German and other Nazi-occupied markets. In the summer of 1941, the federal government stepped in to make up the lost returns by sending Disney and a team of animators to South America for ten weeks to make animated shorts that would stress the importance of having the US as an ally and neighbor. The result was a pair of charming animated features, Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944), which proved to be hits with audiences in both North and South America. War with Germany and Japan entailed even more government work being passed Disney’s way, with commissions for short films to introduce new draftees into the ways of army life, such as Donald Duck in Donald Gets Drafted (1942), and morale-boosting comedies at the expense of Hitler, such as Der Fuhrer’s Face (1943).
As soon as he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, Joe Kennedy, who had worked hard and long to keep America at arm’s length from the European war, sent a cable to Roosevelt: “In this great crisis all Americans are with you. Name the Battle Post. I’m yours to command.” After repeatedly ignoring the letter, Roosevelt offered him a lowly post running two shipyards in Maine. Kennedy declined. He was obliged to spend the rest of the war in forced retirement. He watched as his two elder sons volunteered for military service. Of all the isolationists to have been defeated by Roosevelt, Kennedy suffered most at the hands of a war he had tried so hard to prevent. He had once said that the inspiration for his isolationism was simply to protect his children from an early grave. As he watched the war unfold from the gilded cage of his compounds in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida, he suffered a series of personal family tragedies which he had for ten years been trying so hard to avoid.
Kennedy had high ambitions for his eldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Through young Joe he plotted a long and vicarious campaign to take the White House. It was Kennedy’s plan that his eldest son should become governor of Massachusetts, then president. The first step was to win an empty House seat in Massachusetts’s 11th District in the 1946 election, which, given the pull of the Kennedys and Joe Jr.’s mother’s family, the Fitzgeralds, in their home state, was sure to be a shoo-in. But the war intervened. Young Joe was served with a low-numbered draft card while in his final year at Harvard, and rather than wait to see what post the War Department awarded him, in August 1942 he enlisted in the navy, won his wings as a pilot, and found his way back to Britain as a naval flier. Kennedy was proud of his firstborn taking such a prominent and dangerous role. “Wouldn’t you know,” he told a friend. “Naval aviation. The most dangerous thing there is.”26
His second son, John F. Kennedy, known as Jack, suffered from severe back troubles and in September 1941 was rejected by both the army and navy on medical grounds. Undeterred, he had his father write to Captain Alan Kirk, director of naval intelligence in Washington DC, to intervene. After passing a cursory medical examination that made no attempt to discover his many ailments, John Kennedy served briefly in the office of the secretary of the navy before training to become a motor torpedo boat captain. On August 2, 1943, while patrolling for Japanese shipping at night near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, his patrol boat, PT-109, was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer, the Amagiri. Joe Kennedy was immediately informed that his son was missing in action, but did not pass on the news to Rose. Four days later, it emerged that John and ten of his crew had survived the sinking and swum to shore. After an SOS message scribbled on a coconut shell was passed to a sympathetic islander, they were all rescued.
In July the following year, after two tours of duty, young Joe, who had just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday, embarked on a most dangerous mission. He and another pilot were to fly a Consolidated PB4Y Privateer bomber, built at Henry Ford’s factory at Willow Run, laden with 22,000 pounds of explosives to penetrate the deep concrete defenses of German submarine bases on the Belgian coast. The plan was to bail out over the North Sea and be picked up by British patrols, leaving the plane to be directed by remote control to its target. Just before the two men were due to jump out of the plane, it blew up. Neither body was ever found.
When Kennedy was told the news by a priest, he took to his room in his home in Hyannis Port and remained there for days, listening to classical music on a gramophone. “It has been a terrible blow to us both,” he wrote to Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, “particularly as he was the oldest boy and I had spent a great deal of time making what I thought were plans for his future.”27 Kennedy was devastated and for the rest of his life was never able to mention young Joe’s name without weeping. Twenty-five years later, he told a reporter, “Every night of my life I say a prayer for him.”28
A month after young Joe’s death, Kennedy was struck a further blow. His daughter Kathleen, known as Kick, had abandoned her job as a reporter on Colonel McCormick’s Washington Times–Herald to volunteer for Red Cross service in London, where she fell in love with and soon became engaged to a young aristocrat, William, Marquess of Hartington,29 heir to the Duke of Devonshire, the scion of one of the most socially grand families in Britain and a major in the Coldstream Guards. The love affair was troubled because she was a Roman Catholic and he an Anglican. Protocol insisted that any children of the marriage be brought up as Protestants. The Kennedys, in particular the pious Rose, were wholly against the union and it was young Joe who intervened, encouraging his sister to follow her heart. Behind his wife’s back, the socially ambitious Kennedy quietly encouraged the union, sending Kathleen a paternal note of support: “With your faith in God you can’t make a mistake. Remember you are still and always will be tops with me.”30 Instead of the lavish wedding that was Hartington’s due, the couple married quietly at Chelsea Register Office on May 6, 1944, with Nancy Astor in attendance. The groom’s family sent hearty congratulations; no word came from either Joe or Rose Kennedy. The happy couple spent just five weeks together before Hartington joined the Allied invasion of France. Four months later, on September 9, 1944, he was shot dead by a German sniper outside Heppen, Belgium.
Four years later, on May 13, 1948, while flying to meet her father for a vacation on the French Riviera, Kathleen’s plane crashed into the mountains of the Ardèche above the Rhône. Kennedy rushed to identify the remains of his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, who was buried next to her husband in the Cavendish family cemetery at Chatsworth, Derbyshire. Kennedy was inconsolable. He told the Boston Globe’s Joe Dineen, “Nothing means anything any more. There’s nothing I can say.”31
In a letter to Beaverbrook, Kennedy summed up the nature of his grief. “For a fellow who didn’t want this war to touch your country or mine, I have had a rather bad dose,” he wrote. “Joe dead, Billy Hartington dead, my son Jack in the Naval Hospital. I have had brought home to me very personally what I saw for all the mothers and fathers of the world.”32
HITLER’S POOR JUDGMENT in declaring war against the United States immediately after Pearl Harbor ensured his defeat. The Axis, already starved of the raw materials and energy supplies needed to fight the war, now invited the full wrath of the world’s greatest industrial power. Thanks to Roosevelt’s percipience, and with no thanks to the isolationists, the non-interventionists and the rest, rearmament was already in full spate, with highly advanced plants delivering planes, tanks, ammunition, and assorted weaponry and military vehicles day and night. The logistics of winning back the Pacific islands and mounting an assault on Tokyo, and invading Europe and defeating the Germans from the west, would prove a severe test of American logistics, and there would undoubtedly be setbacks. But the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. Just as Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War One ensured that the Germans would lose, so Roosevelt’s involvement in World War Two made the result a foregone conclusion. It was little wonder that when Churchill heard that Hitler had declared war on the United States he cabled his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden: “The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give certain victory.”33
In making arrangements for the peace, Roosevelt learned the lessons of Wilson’s vain attempts to have the Versailles Treaty ratified by the Senate. There would be no treaty to ratify this time. He would insist that the Axis leaders surrender unconditionally. He took a similar view of the United Nations, his iteration of the League of Nations. It would be a fait accompli, designed and constructed by his administration without reference to Congress.
Roosevelt encouraged other key elements of a new, permanent international order, by which he ensured that the United States would bear the international responsibilities that stemmed from its position as the world’s preeminent economic power. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, presided over by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, he encouraged the establishment of the International Monetary Fund, to regulate the world’s financial and monetary system, the World Bank, to lend money to developing nations, and an agreement named after Bretton Woods to maintain order in the trading of world currencies.
At conferences with Churchill in Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, and with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, Crimea, in February 1945, the world was divided into spheres of influence. By the time of the third great Allied conference, at Potsdam, in eastern Germany, Roosevelt was dead.34 He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia, in the company of his mistress, Lucy Rutherfurd, the married name of the woman he had promised Eleanor thirty years before he would never see again. They had kept up a love affair for three decades.
When victory came, the American people appeared to take their new world role in their stride. No sooner had the Axis been defeated than a new specter arrived in the shape of the expansionist plans of the two great Communist powers, the Soviet Union and China. Under Stalin’s despotic direction, the focus of what came to be known as the Cold War was the division of Germany. In June 1948, to press the western Allies to vacate the still-occupied German capital of Berlin, the Soviets besieged the city. The United States, Britain, and France responded with the Berlin Airlift, a daring display of American military and economic might that lasted until May the following year. Other proxy wars between Communism and the West broke out in June 1950 in Korea, where forces under the flag of the United Nations fought to halt a Communist takeover of the peninsula. Korea was left divided between a Communist north and a democratic south. A similar, ideologically-driven war divided Vietnam into north and south, which was to lead to the Vietnam War, perhaps the most tragic and traumatic conflict of the Cold War.
By 1953, a million US troops were deployed abroad, rising to nearly 1.1 million at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, when civilians were once again drafted to fight a foreign war. In the two decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were still almost half a million American troops permanently stationed abroad, after which the numbers dropped to a little over 200,000.35
Throughout the postwar period, America’s role as the world’s policeman was barely questioned at home and was rarely a prominent issue for debate, except briefly during the Vietnam War. Indeed, it became a proud element of the American character that the United States had been charged with ensuring that democracy was promoted and protected around the world. President George H. W. Bush led the American military alliance that restored Kuwait to independence after it was annexed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The response by George W. Bush to the terrorist attacks by the fundamental Muslim group Al-Qaeda on the American mainland in 2001, however, set off a string of events that markedly changed the argument about the US’s global role. The 2001 war in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda bases trained terrorists to destroy Western targets, passed without much hostile domestic comment.
However, the 2003–11 war that liberated Iraq from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein proved highly controversial. What was sold to the American people as an essential war to rid the world of a despot who had proved willing to use weapons of mass destruction was, before long, when no such weapons could be found, widely redefined as an unnecessary war of choice. US Senator Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 was in large part due to the popularity of the early stand he took against the Iraq War when an Illinois state senator.
Alongside a largely leftist peace movement derived from the remnants of the anti-Vietnam protesters rose a new isolationist line of reasoning that emerged from a growing libertarian movement. The libertarians, who had infiltrated the Republican Party, resented both the amount of treasure spent on permanent troop deployments and police actions abroad and the notion that it was any business of America how other nations were governed. Chief among them was the 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate and persistent Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul,36 a US congressman from Texas, who, like his predecessors, traced his isolationism back to the Founding Fathers37 and who combined fiscal rectitude and a wariness about foreign entanglements in the same way as the Midwesterners who opposed both the New Deal and America entering World War Two. “The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people,” Paul wrote.38
As with the isolationists of the first half of the twentieth century, neo-isolationism was often passed off as non-interventionism. Again the confusion between the two terms was often mere semantics. Such views, however, elicited considerable public sympathy. By November 2013, a narrow majority of Americans believed that America “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,”39 the most isolationist position in the fifty years the polling organization had been asking the question. Two months later, in early 2014, when Russian forces occupied the Ukrainian province of Crimea, a full 56 percent of Americans said they did not want America to become involved.40
Nearly eighty years after Franklin Roosevelt charmed, provoked, prodded, and appealed to the better natures of Americans to accept their responsibilities in the wider world, the pendulum had swung halfway back to its prewar position, when nine out of ten wished to stay out of war in any circumstances. So, was American involvement in the world just a passing phase? It seems unlikely. By the twenty-first century, through travel and technology, the world had appeared to shrink. It had become so economically interdependent that the old, fond wish that America could retreat behind its protective oceans was an impossible dream.
As Roosevelt put it when running for vice president in 1920, “We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and out of it.”41