866 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms: World War II
little choice but to follow the policy of “appeasement” adopted by Britain and
France, who hoped that agreeing to Hitler’s demands would prevent war. Brit-
ish prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich conference
of 1938, which awarded Hitler the Sudetenland, proclaiming that he had guar-
anteed “peace in our time.”
Isolationism
To most Americans, the threat arising from Japanese and German aggres-
sion seemed very distant. Moreover, Hitler had more than a few admirers in
the United States. Obsessed with the threat of communism, some Americans
approved of his expansion of German power as a counterweight to the Soviet
Union. Businessmen did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets. Henry
Ford did business with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. Indeed, Ford plants
there employed slave labor provided by the German government. Trade with
Japan also continued, including shipments of American trucks and aircraft and
considerable amounts of oil. Until 1941, 80 percent of Japan’s oil supply came
from the United States.
Many Americans remained convinced that involvement in World War I had
been a mistake. Senate hearings in 1934–1935 headed by Gerald P. Nye of North
Dakota revealed that international bankers and arms exporters had pressed the
Wilson administration to enter that war and had profited handsomely from it.
Pacifism spread on college campuses, where tens of thousands of students took
part in a “strike for peace” in 1935. Ethnic allegiances reinforced Americans’ tra-
ditional reluctance to enter foreign conflicts. Many Americans of German and
Italian descent celebrated the expansion of national power in their countries of
origin, even when they disdained their dictatorial governments. Irish-Americans
remained strongly anti-British.
Isolationism—the 1930s version of Americans’ long-standing desire
to avoid foreign entanglements—dominated Congress. Beginning in 1935,
lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belliger-
ents’ ships and the sale of arms to countries at war. These policies, Congress
hoped, would allow the United States to avoid the conflicts over freedom of
the seas that had contributed to involvement in World War I. Despite the fact
that the Spanish Civil War pitted a democratic government against an aspir-
ing fascist dictator, the Western democracies, including the United States,
imposed an embargo on arms shipments to both sides. Some 3,000 Americans
volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the side of the Spanish
republic. But with Germany supplying the forces of Franco, the decision by dem-
ocratic countries to abide by the arms embargo contributed substantially to his
victory.