Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-45

In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency of the United States, both he and the American people were too caught up in the domestic troubles of the Great Depression to become involved in the wars, alliances, and squabbles of the Old World. Yet within nine years Roosevelt was leading a unified America in the largest war in history.

The isolationists generally supported the domestic New deal, but they opposed Roosevelt's increasingly internationalist foreign policy. They proposed their own initiatives to require a vote of the people before entering war, to take profits out of war — and to make and keep the United States indomitable in the defense of the nation and the Western Hemisphere. They feared that Roosevelt's proposals would implicate America irrevocably in the world's troubles, they fought him, and they lost. Wayne S. Cole explores not only all the legislative and political contests at issue but also the day-to-day matters that often determined the success or failure of measures in Congress, The result is a comprehensive history of the isolationist movement, and, especially, its contest with the evolving foreign policy under Roosevelt that brought the United States to world dominance.

The isolationists included some of the more notable public and political figures of the 1930s: William Randolph Hearst, George Norris, Gerald P. Nye, Hiram Johnson, Robert E. Wood, William Borah, Robert A. Taft, Arthur Vandenberg, Burton K. Wheeler, and the La Follette brothers. Cole interviewed many of those men (many of them now deceased). He draws upon research in over one hundred manuscript collections, including many private files, and over ten thousand previously confidential FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.