Free Roosevelt by James MacGregor Burns

strongest in the nation’s broad hinterland, the Midwest and the Plains states. Generally, younger people were more isolationist than older; lower-income than higher; less-informed than better-informed—differences that implied some weaknesses in the foundations of Roosevelt’s three-party coalition.
    Guiding and galvanizing interventionist attitudes was an energetic pressure group, the carefully named Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Organized in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Norway, the committee was headed by William Allen White, the shrewd old Kansas editor. The President, an old friend, enjoyed chiding him for being with the administration three and a half years out of every four, but White had retained his Republican credentials even while helping mobilize support for Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Local chapters of the committee were so numerous and articulate that the national committee seemed, to many a friend and foe, to be the spearhead of a mighty army. Actually, its numbers were relatively few, and White, who kept in close touch with the White House, was almost as cautious on intervention as the President himself. He felt that his committee should not “get out ahead of the White House and the main body of troops.” The committee had been rent by divisions between all-aid-short-of-war advocates and all-out interventionists, who were especially strong in the big Eastern cities. White resigned his chairmanship of the committee at the beginning of January 1941, not long after Fiorello La Guardia, the pugnaciously interventionist Mayor of New York, had accused him of “doing a typical Laval.” Equally formidable in appearance but divided in fact were the isolationist groups, which stretched across a broad spectrum from the “respectable” Fight for Freedom Committee to the largest and most prestigious organization, America First, to Gerald L. K. Smith’sCommittee of One Million, along with a host of smaller, even more extreme groups.
    There was, indeed, a curiously mottled, unstable quality to opinions on foreign policy, especially on the isolationist side. There were the ethnic isolationists—the German-Americans and Italian-Americans, who resented the ever-intensifying feeling against the old country (the German-Americans, moreover, remembered the anti-Hun hysteria of World War I); the Irish-Americans centered in the larger cities, who could not forget English excesses on the Ould Sod. There were the ideological isolationists, who felt that the United States had been sucked into the first war, bled white, and then rejected as Uncle Shylock, and who saw a diabolical motive and a cabalistic plot in every step toward intervention. There were the left-wing isolationists, who viewed the war as a struggle among imperialisms; right-wing isolationists, who feared intervention would mean more spending, heavier taxes, bigger government, less individual liberty, and an even more dictatorial Roosevelt; intellectual isolationists, who had little in common with one another except their fear of militarism, their reading of diplomatic history as the seduction of innocent Americans, and their vision of war as corrosive of civil liberties, social welfare, and the free play of the mind.
    The interventionists were divided, too, and in much the same way. No group was monolithic. The division over foreign policy within business, labor, and liberal groups seemed as sharp as the divisions between them. And bit by bit alignments were changing under the impact of events abroad.
    Behind this complex of slowly shifting attitudes was something far more powerful, more unreasoning, more awesome to the Washington politicians. This was not a program or group or opinion; it was a mood, expressed in the simple outcry “No Foreign Wars!” It was a mood compounded of fear of foreign involvement, cynicism toward other nations, pessimism about the possibilities of cooperation among the democracies. It was a mood fired by