WWII and wishful thinking, part 1

We’ve just finished reading a very interesting book: Radio and the Great Debate over U.S. Involvement in World War II, by Mark S. Byrnes. He painstakingly documents the many speakers who made their cases for the intervention and anti-intervention sides of the argument between September 1939 and December 6, 1941, when the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii settled the question.

His main focus is disproving the established anti-interventionist (“isolationist”) claim that the interventionists got special treatment–more time on the air, support from a Democratic-controlled Congress that did whatever the popular and clearly interventionist Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, said to do. Both sides got equal time, and both sides made points that resonated with Americans.

What’s fascinating to us is a twofold undercurrent Mark presents, at first almost as a footnote, but with growing emphasis as the book goes on:

• The wishful thinking Americans engaged in that the war could be won without them–or, much more alarmingly, the message they were sent by the anti-interventionists that America could manage living in a world where fascism had conquered Europe and Asia
• The prescient warning some anti-interventionists gave that even a U.S.-aided victory over fascism could lead to unintended, irreversible degradation of democracy here at home.

We’ll cover the first in parts 1 and 2, and the second in part 3.

The majority of Americans supported sending arms and planes to Great Britain to help it in their fight against Nazi invasion. They were repulsed by fascism and knew it posed a threat not just to Britain, or Europe, but to America and the whole world. And yet… in polls, many Americans consistently said things like this:

“I detest Hitler and everything he stands for, as I’m sure the vast majority of Americans must do. My sympathies are all with England in this struggle. But that doesn’t mean for one moment that I think we should involve ourselves in a war to destroy Nazism.” [p. 115]

As Mark summarizes the argument, “The evil nature of the Nazis did not mean it was America’s responsibility to right that wrong.” A year before America entered the war, in December 1940, 88% of Americans wanted to stay out of the war, and that number most likely included many or most the 60% of Americans who wanted to send arms and materiél–everything short of U.S. soldiers–to Britain. Even most of the Americans who said Britain’s survival was essential to America did not want to join the fighting. [p. 131] In May 1941, Alan Barth, assistant to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, said the nation was suffering “a form of schizophrenia”; as Mark puts it, “Even if most Americans believed Hitler must be defeated and that he almost certainly would not be without an American declaration of war, they would not support one until it was absolutely clear it was necessary.” [p. 256]

So American entry into the war was necessary to defeating Hitler, but Americans wouldn’t support entering the war until it was necessary. This reminds us of the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that said slavery might well be unconstitutional, and the Court had the power to overrule slavery on that basis, but as we say in our post, it refused to do so because “the Constitution can be changed, but until it is changed, it must be obeyed (‘it must be construed now as it was at the time of its adoption’). So yes, you can change the Constitution if you deem it unjust, but until you change it you can’t change it. And they’re not going to change it… because it hasn’t been changed yet.”

Wishful thinking at this moment, and this scale, is at once astonishing and frightening. By 1939 Americans had watched fascism engulf most of two continents and begin on a third. Yet so many of them willed themselves to believe that somehow that would all change without a major U.S. commitment. It’s easy to try to defend this by focusing on the understandable fear of sending young people to war and losing them. But it’s important to be honest and say that Americans were at least equally afraid, and perhaps even more afraid, of the economic disruption of war. The Great Depression seemed to be in the rear view as recovery continued. Things were getting back to normal. Why throw that all away by going to war? War meant shortages at home, high prices, and rationing. And, as we’ll discuss in part 2, there were many voices telling Americans that a Nazi victory wouldn’t be a bad thing for the U.S. economically.

We tend to learn about anti-interventionists as “isolationists” who knew about the Holocaust and still didn’t want to fight Hitler. This is not accurate. The main anti-interventionist argument was empahtically not “who cares about human rights? who cares about the Holocaust?” It was “we will fight when we know it’s the absolute last resort to save democracy in the world.” The message was “it’s not America’s job to fight for democracy anywhere but here at home.” Therefore, Americans could and should root for democracy in Europe from the sidelines.

This wasn’t just foolish, it was selfish. People committed to democracy and liberty and justice for all cannot ever sit back and hope someone else will do the fighting that’s always required to maintain those principles, practices, and governments in the world. If you really value them, you will always fight for them, in whatever way is necessary.

Next time: the shocking “would a fascist victory really be so bad?” message