"clifto" wrote in message
...
Frank Dresser wrote:
"clifto" wrote...
Check your history. The country was full of anti-war leftists; that's
what
kept us out for the first two years.

The history I learned says it was the Roosevelt administration which
most
wanted us in the war. The Republicans were against it, as was a large
part
of the US population, particularly in rural areas.

Yeah, especially high-ranking Republicans like Joe Kennedy.

Whatever influence Joe Kennedy had in the Roosevelt administration ended
when Roosevelt fired him for insubordination.

Had the Boston Republican brahmins been more hospitible to Irish Catholics,
the Kennedys might have been as Republican as the Rockefellers. Joe Kennedy
did ended up liking Joe McCarthy much better than he liked Roosevelt.

He was
making too much money doing business with Hitler.

OK, you've got me there. I've heard about Kennedy's sleazy financial deals
and mob connections, but I missed Kennedy's business ties with Hitler.
Please fill me in.



That's also why it took nearly a year
to get armaments produced; they kept the military budgets down back
then,
too.

Liberals kept military budgets down? Maybe. The depression certainly
did.
Roosevelt would have spent more, but even he had problems with his own
tax
and spend party. The borrow and spend party did not yet exist in it's
current form.

On the contrary, I'm pretty sure by this time Roosevelt had the WPA and
other stuff going and was well on the road to the free-money-for-the-
indolent economy.

Roosevelt was an anglophile and became a strong freind of Winston Churchill
well before the Pearl Harbor attack. He was way ahead of the American
public in wanting to give direct aid to the British. His opposition came
from those who wanted to keep American money and weapons in America.

I don't see any contradiction in being a welfare statist and wanting to get
America involved with the war.



They even had people flee the country to avoid the draft.

Let's not forget that the country was still in a funk over the First
World
War, after which the "anti-foriegn entanglement" stance of Washington
and
Jefferson made perfect sense to many people. And conspiracy theories
aren't
a new product of twentyfirst century SW radio. There was then no
shortage
of people who thought the blood spilled in the First World War was only
to
benefit arms manufacturers and bankers.

Difference
was that the press back then was pro-America and didn't make heroes out
of such scum.

Would that press also include such prominent isolationists as Col.
Robert
McCormack of the Chicago Tribune?

AAMOF, once Pearl Harbor was a fact, he pretty much went with the flow.
I don't suppose he'd have had much choice; people back then would
boycott a product for antisocial behavior.


Both the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler's declaration of war against the US
ended the isolationist movement. The isolationists weren't pacifists, but
they weren't interested in war with nations which weren't declared enemies
of the US.

Many US liberals of the era were admirers of the Soviet Union and ended
their neutrality earlier when the Nazis broke the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Frank Dresser