U.S. Neutrality Acts (1 gen 1935 anni – 1 gen 1939 anni)

Descrizione:

Neutrality act of 1935: Legislation that sought to avoid entanglement in foreign wars while protecting trade. It imposed an embargo on selling arms to warring countries and declared that Americans traveling on the ships of belligerent nations did so at their own risk.

Popular Front: A small, left-leaning coalition of Americans who pushed for greater U.S. intervention against fascism in Europe. It was comprised of American Communist Party members, African American civil rights activists, and trade unionists, among others


As Hitler pushed his initiatives in Europe, isolationist sentiment ran strong among Americans. In part, isolationism reflected disillusion with American participation in World War I. In 1934, Senator Gerald P. Nye, a progressive Republican from North Dakota, launched an investigation into the profits of munitions makers during that war. Nye’s committee alleged that arms manufacturers (popularly labeled “merchants of death”) had maneuvered President Wilson into World War I.

Although Nye’s committee failed to prove its charge against weapon makers, its factual findings prompted Congress to pass a series of acts meant to keep the nation out of any overseas war. The Neutrality Act of 1935 imposed an embargo on the sale of arms to warring countries and declared that Americans traveling on the ships of belligerent nations did so at their own risk. In two subsequent Neutrality Acts, Congress banned loans to belligerents in 1936 and imposed a “cash-and-carry” requirement in 1937: if a warring country wanted to purchase nonmilitary goods from the United States, it had to pay cash and carry them in its own ships, keeping the United States out of any potential naval warfare. A fourth Neutrality Act, in 1939, did permit military goods to be purchased on cash-and-carry terms.

Americans for the most part had little enthusiasm for war, and a wide variety of voices espoused isolationism. Many followed Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who distrusted both Roosevelt and European nations with equal conviction, or famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who gave impassioned speeches against intervention in Europe. Some isolationists, such as the conservative National Legion of Mothers of America, combined anticommunism, Christian morality, and even anti-Semitism. Isolationists were primarily conservatives, but a contingent of progressives opposed war on pacifist or moral grounds. Whatever their philosophies, ardent isolationists forced Roosevelt to tread lightly.


A small but significant number of Americans rejected isolationism and called for the United States to confront the spread of fascism. Many of the most prominent calls for intervention came from the Popular Front, a broad coalition drawn from a wide range of social groups, including the American Communist Party (which had increased its membership to between fifty and seventy thousand), African American civil rights activists, trade unionists, left-wing writers and intellectuals, and even a few New Dealers. The Popular Front’s ties to communism and the Soviet Union became a liability due to the brutal repression of Joseph Stalin’s regime, and untenable after the Soviets made a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. Nevertheless American Popular Front activists were prominent among the small but vocal minority encouraging Roosevelt to take a stronger stand against European fascism.


Two days after the European war started, the United States declared its neutrality. But President Roosevelt made no secret of his sympathies. When war had broken out in 1914, Woodrow Wilson asked Americans to be neutral “in thought as well as in action.” FDR, by contrast, declared in 1939 that the United States “will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.” The overwhelming majority of Americans — some 84 percent, according to a poll in 1939 — supported Britain and France rather than Germany, but most wanted America to avoid another European war.

At first, any need for U.S. intervention seemed remote. After Germany quickly overran Poland, an uneasy calm settled over Europe. But on April 9, 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway, rapidly defeating both Scandinavian nations. In May, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg fell to the swift German army. The final shock came in mid-June, when the French government surrendered, and Nazi troops paraded through Paris. Britain now stood alone against Hitler.

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