Overcoming Isolationism: America's Path to WWII

Convincing and Recruiting the American public for World War II The American public did not want to enter the war to support the Allies though thousands innocent people were dying because of the tyranny of the Axis of Power that was Germany, Japan, and Italy. The U.S. citizens were content watching from afar as long as it didn’t affect the U.S. mainland; even though President Roosevelt tried to prepare the country for the unavoidable, they public remained isolationist. Convincing and recruiting the American public to support the war efforts during WWII was initially difficult, but once the inevitable was realized the greatest generation united for the more important cause of defeating fascism. To the east of the U.S., Adolf Hitler

The relatively recent stock market crash of 1929 and the failure of thousands of banks that caused the Great Depression were also on the minds of many Americans. As Hampe explained in his writing, “The American people were still isolationist and to some extent anti-war in 1939, even if the Roosevelt administration wasn't.” (Hampe) The cost of Life was the biggest deterrent in getting involved in someone else’s war. Most adults still alive during the pre WWII timeframe had a relative or knew of someone killed in the first Great War and never really understudy why the U.S. was fighting in that war to begin with. In his text, U.S. History Professor Muray Godfrey details the amount of lives lost in WWI, “It cost 116,000 American lives among 9 million deaths and accomplished what?” (Godfrey) The second opposing view of the war was the tremendous cost of rebuilding a military capable of taking on the fascist axis of power. In his online analysis Barry Hampe details just a few of the costly materials need by the military to defend themselves, “The US needed time to build up its army and to produce planes, tanks, ships and guns in large quantities.” (Hampe) All these items were not just affected by time but also directly related to