STEP #1 - Why Isolationism?
During the Great Depression, isolationist sentiment surged - even with the brewing crisis in Europe. In 1935, 150,000 college students participated in a nationwide Student Strike for Peace and half a million signed pledges saying that they would refuse to serve in event of war. A public opinion poll indicated that 39 percent of college students would refuse to participate in any war, even if the country was invaded.
Anti-war sentiment was not confined to undergraduates. Disillusionment over World War I fed opposition to foreign entanglements. "We didn't win a thing we set out for in the last war," said Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. "We merely succeeded, with tremendous loss of life, to make secure the loans of private bankers to the Allies." The overwhelming majority of Americans agreed; an opinion poll in 1935 found that 70 percent of Americans believed that intervention in World War I had been a mistake. |
|
Isolationist ideas spread through American popular culture during the mid 1930s. The Book of the Month Club featured a volume entitled Merchants of Death, which contended that the United States had been drawn into the European war by international arms manufacturers, who had deliberately fomented conflict in order to market their products. From 1934 to 1936, a congressional committee chaired by Senator Nye investigated charges that false Allied propaganda and unscrupulous Wall Street bankers had dragged Americans into the European war. In April 1935--the eighteenth anniversary of American entry into World War I--50,000 veterans held a peace march in Washington, D.C.