er nearly seventy years of dramatic economic expansion which had made it the richest and most powerful country on earth, abruptly reduced half the population to poverty. In August 1935 Roosevelt passed the first Neutrality Act, which kept the U.S. officially and globally out of the war. This allowed America to rebuild its internal infrastructure, without having the glaring inevitability of war present in congress and the public eye. Roosevelts administration became infected by the spirit of isolationism, not out of national idealogy or arrogance, but out of panic at a nation and populace that now found its self bankrupt and desperate. Roosevelt showed himself as lacking in leadership as Baldwin and Chamberlain in Britain, or Daldier in France. It is permissible to speculate that Theodore Roosevelt, with his clearer ideas of Americas responsibilities to the world, and his warmer notions of democratic solidarity, would have been more energetic in alerting the American people to the dangers which threatened them and the need for timely preparation and action, thereby saving countless American lives, and prodigious quantities of U.S. treasure. As it was, not until November 17, 1941, after repeated confrontations with German submarines in the North Atlantic, and the actual torpedoing of the US destroyer Reuben James, did Congress amend the Neutrality Acts to allow US merchant ships to arm themselves and to carry cargo to belligerent ports. This was only three weeks before Pearl Harbor ended the tragic farce of American neutrality. Thus the United States was finally drawn into the war for the survival of democracy and international -6-law at a time and place not of its own choosing, but of its enemys.Roosevelt had no real belief that Pearl Harbor was ever going to be bombed. The Japanese war preparations were a characteristic combination of breathtaking efficiency and inexplicable muddle. Gen. George Marshall, FDRs principal military a...
