American "neutralists" and the Second World War

Sittser outlines the political anxieties of American "neutralists" opposed to American involvement in the Second World War, such Francis Talbot and Charles Clayton Morrison: the malignant growth of presidential authority, stalled social reform, and constrained civil liberties (Sittser, 56-59) What are we to make of these supporters of American neutrality? The awkward truth is that their prospective analyses were substantively correct. Militarizing the nation did, in fact, put a number of reform-minded legislative efforts on hold, dramatically expand presidential authority, and lead to significant limits on previously-assumed civil liberties. The long-term consequences were not significantly different; although Orser makes the case that the Second World War saw significant advances in mainline Protestant thought about institutional discrimination against African-Americans, Sittser points out the well-known fact that Japanese-Americans did not enjoy the same advances, such as they were. Certainly, presidential authority did not promptly shrink back to pre-World War II levels after the cessation of hostilities. And as far as civil liberties go, it's worth remembering that the late forties see the formal genesis of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, agencies not exactly noted for their robust defense of traditional liberties. (Remaining students contributing to this blog: I know that you will want to thank me for calling your remarks on this blog to the attention of our nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus, but please, no gifts. My needs are few and my apartment is full.)

So the relatively thoughtful neutralists whom Sittser considers were right in important respects. That they had an accurate analysis obviously didn't help them carry the day in American foreign policy. Are these tragic figures? Prophetic figures? People who happened to be right but were hardly assured of being so? Or people whose values Sittser admires on some level but whose values (or at least whose relative ordering of those values) just weren't shared by the average American?

To conclude on a note of disordered American values and expansion of presidential authority, I offer this story about a member of my extended family who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War. Many years after Franklin Roosevelt's death, a local pastor, weary of my relative's rhapsodizing about Roosevelt's saintliness, sardonically inquired whether my relative would follow Jesus or Roosevelt if both returned to Earth simultaneously. Without any hesitation or trace of irony, my relative answered, "Roosevelt."