In 1939, Hitler defied the 1938 Munich Agreement-which Britain and France hoped would appease Hitler’s imperialist urges-and invaded Czechoslovakia, making a wider war with France and Great Britain all but inevitable. “He saw the direction things were going in Europe and it took away his ability to act.” “Roosevelt didn’t like the neutrality legislation,” says Warren Kimball, an emeritus history professor at Rutgers University and author of Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, isolationists in Congress amended the Neutrality Acts in 1937 to include even more restrictions on foreign aid and civilian involvement in overseas conflicts. Through a series of savvy political maneuvers, FDR was able to work around the isolationists in Congress and find ways for America to contribute to the war effort long before December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States off the sidelines and officially into the war.īritish Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arrives in London holding the Munich Agreement signed by Germany, France, Great Britain and Italy.Ĭongress passed the first Neutrality Act in 1935, barring the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” to any foreign nation at war. That required money, munitions and equipment-foreign aid that was explicitly banned by the Neutrality Acts. Roosevelt understood, though, that the best way to keep American troops out of World War II was to help the British and French defeat Hitler without us. remained stubbornly neutral, bound by Congress not to lend aid or assistance to any “belligerents” in the European conflict. When Hitler marched into neighboring Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland, it prompted joint declarations of war from two of America’s closest allies, Great Britain and France. troops were killed in World War I, sacrifices that many Americans believed were made in order to stuff the pockets of the U.S. The United States, meanwhile, had taken an isolationist turn, with Americans refusing to send more young men to die on foreign battlefields. By the mid-1930s, the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany threatened to engulf Europe into another world war.
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