In The Battle against Intervention, 1939–1941, the historian Justus Doenecke offers a more nuanced and concise discussion of the topic, providing a useful correction of such over-simplified, distorted depictions of the anti-interventionists. Addressed primarily to college student audiences, Doenecke’s brief study appears in the Anvil Series, in which the content is one-half narrative and one-half a collection of primary documents. A crisp explanatory note precedes each document selected by the author, and together the thirty-four selections illustrate a range of anti-interventionist perspectives.

It is surprising that Norman Thomas, whom Doenecke identifies in his essay as “one of anti-interventionism’s most respected proponents” is absent from the documents, as is Charles A. Lindbergh’s infamous September 1941 address at an American First Committee (AFC) rally in Des Moines. It was in that speech that Lindbergh named Jews, the British, and the Roosevelt administration “as among the three major elements leading the nation to war” (56). As Doenecke notes, despite denials of pro-Nazi, anti-British, and anti-Semitic sentiments, Lindbergh’s speech “dealt the AFC a blow from which it never recovered” (57). Given its importance, the text of the speech merited inclusion and evaluation.

Doenecke clarifies the diverse nature of the ranks of the anti-interventionists and identifies the equally diverse organizations that were formed to carry the anti-intervention message. Lesser-known personalities such as the socialist minister John Haynes Holmes, the New York Times military editor Hanson Baldwin, the former New Dealer George Peek, and the University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins are represented. The conservative AFC which, according to Doenecke, had at its peak 450 units and over 800,000 members, shares space in the text with the liberal-leaning National Council for the Prevention of War, in existence since 1921, and the leftist Keep America Out of War Congress, established in 1938.

The author also addresses several myths about the anti-interventionists. They were not confined to the Midwest but had substantial followings as well in the West, including the Pacific Coast, in the Northeast, and in border states. Only the South, to which Roosevelt looked for support of his foreign policies at the expense of more far-reaching New Deal legislation, lacked a significant anti-interventionist presence.

Most important, Doenecke disputes the label “isolationist,” used by their opponents to discredit the anti-interventionists and thereafter applied by historians to identify critics of Roosevelt’s policies that were moving the United States towards indirect and finally direct involvement in war. Ironically, Roosevelt had himself repudiated the epithet in August 1936 when he advertised his then antiwar sentiments in a famous speech at Chautauqua, New York. “We are not isolationists,” the president declared, “except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”

Whether or not the United States could or should do this became the crucial issue in the debate between interventionists and anti-interventionists. “On one level,” Doenecke writes, “the argument centered on whether the United States could subsist, indeed prosper in a world in which Germany dominated the bulk of Europe and Japan much of East Asia” (vii). In another respect the issue concerned whether America could retain its independent conduct of foreign policy and who should possess the power to make policy.

Roosevelt and his supporters answered emphatically no to the first question and maintained that the administration’s policies of aid to those fighting Japan, Germany, and Italy would keep America out of war and at the same time protect America’s freedom of action in foreign affairs. The president, it was asserted, acted in the national interest and sought congressional approval when he believed it was necessary to carry out particular measures. Other actions he defended as within his constitutionally sanctioned executive power.

Anti-interventionists vigorously disagreed about both aspects of the matter. “To a sizable minority of the population,” Doenecke remarks, “American security did not depend on the survival of such powers as Great Britain and China” (vii). Moreover, anti-interventionists charged, Roosevelt’s actions progressively threatened the very interests and freedoms he claimed to be defending, handcuffing United States foreign policy options in the process.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch, for instance, attacked the destroyer-base deal of September 1940, announcing that “if Roosevelt gets away with this, we may as well say good-bye to our liberties and make up our mind that henceforth we live under a dictatorship” (136). America’s most distinguished and widely read historian of the day, Charles A. Beard, lashed out at lend-lease legislation as conferring on the president virtual dictatorial powers, including the unconstitutional authority to “wage an undeclared war.”

Despite such vocal protests throughout the period, the anti-interventionists lost their battle, and the vast majority of them supported the conflict after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Their patriotism was never a real issue; only support of their ideas was lacking.

Doenecke’s essay explains that a major reason for the failure of the anti-interventionist cause was that it could never win the endorsement of the majority of Americans or of the foreign policy elite. As late as October 1941 public opinion polls revealed that most of those asked wished the country to avoid direct military involvement, particularly the use of ground troops. Americans, however, increasingly backed Roosevelt’s program of arming the country and aiding the nations fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan despite the risk of war. Even anti-interventionists such as Beard and Robert A. Taft accepted the principle of aiding Britain and China in the months preceding America’s formal entry into the war. Beard objected to Roosevelt’s aggrandizement of power, and Taft opposed the 1940 draft bill and convoying ships into war zones.

Those among the anti-interventionists who endorsed assistance to Britain and China (though not to the Soviet Union after Germany’s attack in June 1941) or who stressed the urgency of a western hemispheric defense build-up weakened their case against interventionism. Both measures implicitly conceded that some effort was required to deter a potential military engagement or, more significantly, German and Japanese control of global markets and raw materials vital to America’s capitalist economy.

Anti-interventionists denied that either possibility really existed. More to the point, they continued to insist that the United States could preserve its political and economic system alone in the world. Furthermore, they believed the nation should not expend its wealth and blood trying to preserve an American global order which, the anti-interventionists argued, would be impossible to maintain, and which, if attempted, would destroy political freedom and prosperity at home. A debatable proposition to be sure, but key elements of it have challenged the purpose and conduct of American foreign policy throughout the twentieth century.

Even in defeat, few in the devoted ranks of the anti-interventionists repented. “[I]n its losing statement,” Doenecke concludes, the American First Committee declared: “‘Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided’” (96). That assertion, of course, cannot be proven. Doenecke’s book does help us to appreciate more fully who the interventionists were, what they believed, and why they fought a losing battle.