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13. U.S. Entry into World War II

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I. U.S. Diplomacy in the Interwar Period

II. Pearl Harbor

III. Explanations

Like the First World War, the Second World War began as a European conflict. The

Second World War, however, spread to the Asian sphere, involving Japan and China. Revisionist

powers, in this case primarily Germany and Japan, challenged the hegemony of status quo

powers such as Great Britain and France. The war began with Germany’s invasion of Poland on

1 September 1939. The Soviet Union had signed a pact with Germany to divide Poland, but

Hitler betrayed the pact by sending German troops into Russia in 1941. The war thus shaped up

as a contest between the Axis powers: Italy, Germany, and Japan (or Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis);

and the Allied Powers: England, the Soviet Union, and the United States (or “The Big Three”).

How and why the United States ended up joining the Allies is the topic of this lecture. The place

to begin is with a review of U.S. diplomacy during the period between the two world wars. Then

we will examine events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to the

formal entry of the United States into the war. The final part of the lecture examines various

explanations that historians have given for why the United States went to war against the Axis

powers.
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I. U.S. Diplomacy in the Interwar Period

Many historians describe incorrectly the 1920s as a period of isolationism in the United

States. After the defeat of the League of Nations, so the story goes, Americans retreated from

Europe because they were too weak to preserve the balance of power. Isolationists in Congress,

such as Henry Cabot Lodge, sought to avoid European entanglements. Unfortunately, this view

of the 1920s is misleading. True, two of the presidents of this period -- Harding and Coolidge --

were fairly ignorant about foreign affairs, but their secretaries of state -- Charles Evan Hughes,

and Frank Kellogg -- were actively engaged with other nations, not cowering before an unruly

American public. President Hoover was very knowledgeable about foreign affairs and took a

strong hand in guiding Secretary of State Henry Stimpson.

A much better label for U.S. foreign policy in the 1920s is “independent

internationalism.” This phrase means that U.S. leaders were active on an international scale but

independent in action. U.S. foreign policy goals in the 1920s did not differ much from the ones

set earlier in the century: economic opportunities for trade and investment; overseas military

bases; protection of American lives and property; and the spread of American ideas, religion, and

culture. Where the United States was weak as in Asia, it moved cautiously. In Latin America,

where the United States was strong, it intervened frequently. In Europe, the United States was

heavily involved in advancing disarmament conferences, settling war reparations issues,

advocating currency reform, and fostering private business, labor, and finance connections. All

these activities show that U.S. foreign policymakers deliberately sought to extend empire, not

retreat from world affairs.1

Now it is true that Roosevelt remained very cautious about foreign affairs, in part because
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of divisions within the Democratic Party and because of the reluctance of the American public to

become involved in another European war. Roosevelt had to balance the interests of isolationist

constituents from the Midwest with those of Southern internationalists. In his first term, FDR

leaned toward the isolationists. In 1936, for example, he gave a stirring speech at Chautauqua,

New York, which denounced war in no uncertain terms. “I have seen blood running from the

wounded, . . . I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs . . . I have seen the agony of

mothers and wives. I hate war.”2

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The general revulsion against war was understandable given the horrors of the First

World War. Once again, those Americans who opposed intervention in European affairs came

from a wide variety of backgrounds. They included pacifists such as Jeannette Rankin of

Montana, socialists such as Norman Thomas, intellectuals such as Albert Einstein, journalists

such as Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, and anti-Semites such as Charles E.

Coughlin and Charles Lindberg. To keep the pressure on the Roosevelt administration to stay out

of the war, a select group of non-interventionists formed an organization in 1940 called the

America First Committee, which developed 450 chapters, most of them clustered in the Chicago

area and the Midwest.3

1
Stephen M. Streeter, “Independent Internationalism.” In U.S. Foreign Policy: A Diplomatic History, ed. Robert J.
McMahon and Thomas W. Zeiler (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), 159-171.
2
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 2d ed., 129.
3
Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns, and Fredrick Logevall, eds., Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy,
2d ed. (New York: Scribner, 2002), 486.
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The noninterventionists lobbied Congress to pass a series of neutrality laws in the 1930s.

For example, the 1935 and 1936 acts prohibited arms shipments and loans to all belligerents. In

1937, Congress established the “cash and carry” principle, which meant that belligerent nations

had to pay cash for nonmilitary purchases and ship the goods in their own vessels. The 1939

Neutrality Act forbade Americans from traveling on the ships of belligerent nations.

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Roosevelt initially bent to the isolationist lobby, however, he gradually began to change

his mind because of advisers such as Henry Stimson and Cordell Hull, who had a more

international outlook. Capital-intensive multinational corporations, such as du Pont, Standard

Oil, General Motors, and Union Carbide, formed an internationalist bloc of capital opposed to

the closure of markets by Germany and Japan. Finally, private citizen groups began to lobby for

U.S. intervention in Europe. The most important of these was the Committee to Defend America

by Aiding the Allies, also known as the White Committee after its founder, journalist William

Allen White.

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As Japan and Germany expanded, FDR began cautious preparations for war. In 1935 he

requested the largest peacetime military budget in American history. In 1939, FDR pleaded with

Congress to repeal the Neutrality Acts. The key turning point appears to have been the fall of

France in the summer of 1940. The swift manner in which European countries fell to Hitler’s

invading forces alarmed many Americans, and isolationists in Congress began to crumble in their
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opposition to aid the Allies.

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The Roosevelt administration did not jump into the Second World War immediately,

however, but gradually took a series of steps that brought the United States closer to the Allies.

First, was the bases-for-destroyers deal of September 1940, in which 50 old American destroyers

were exchanged for leases to 8 British bases, including Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Jamaica.

Second, in September 1940, the U.S. Congress narrowly passed the Selective Training

and Service Act, which was the first peacetime military draft in American history. Under the law,

all men between the ages of 21 and 36 were required to register for the draft, although Roosevelt

promised in his 1940 election campaign that they would not have to fight in any foreign wars.

Third was the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which Roosevelt famously introduced to

Congress using a garden hose analogy. The United States should lend rather than sell weapons,

he argued, much as a neighbor lends a garden hose to fight a fire. The fire hose, critics joked

turned out to be the most expensive one in American history. By the end of the war, the United

States had sent $50 billion to the allies, more than half to England.4

The fourth step that FDR took to bring the United States closer to war was to sign an

agreement in August 1941 with English Prime Minister Winston Churchill setting out war aims.

The Atlantic Charter, as it came to be known, called for collective security, disarmament, self-

determination, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas. Like Wilson’s Fourteen Points,

the Atlantic Charter served mainly as a propaganda weapon against the Axis.

4
Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Lend-Lease and Military Aid to the Allies in the Early Years of
World War II.” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/lend-lease.
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II. Pearl Harbor

Because the Roosevelt administration followed a “Europe first” foreign policy, it was

somewhat unprepared when events shifted rapidly in the Asian sphere. In the 1920s and 1930s,

Japan began expanding into China and Southeast Asia to establish its own empire. Under the

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan hoped to exploit China and other nearby Asian

countries for raw materials and trade. In short, the Japanese viewed the Greater East Asia Co-

Prosperity Sphere as a Monroe Doctrine for Asia and argued that it would be hypocritical for the

Americans to oppose it.5

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Japanese reasoning had little effect on U.S. diplomacy. After the Japanese seized

Manchuria, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson warned that the United States would not

recognize impairment of the Open Door policy in China. The Stimson Doctrine (1932), as it

became known, was little more than a lecture that the Japanese could ignore since there was no

threat of force behind it.

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Despite the Stimson Doctrine, Roosevelt remained cautious in Asia perhaps because he

was reluctant to curtail American exports to Japan, which had more than doubled since World

War I and amounted to nearly 9 percent of America’s external trade.6 Japan’s southward

5
Katsuji Inahara, “An Asiatic Views a U.S. Doctrine,” Living Age 359 (November 1940): 256-62.
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movement into Indochina in 1941, however, threatened important strategic materials that the

United States could not do without. British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, for example,

provided the United States with almost all of its tin and crude rubber.

slide 11

In September 1940, the Roosevelt Administration slapped an embargo on shipments of

aviation and scrap metal to Japan. In July 1941, the Americans cut off oil and froze Japanese

assets. These economic sanctions represented a severe threat to an island nation that depended

heavily on imports for its survival. In the Hull-Nomura talks, the Japanese offered to accept

Open Door in Asia if the United States would also apply Open Door principles in Latin America.

The Japanese offer may have been a bluff, but we will never know because U.S. negotiators

turned it down.

slide 12

In retaliation for the American embargo, the Japanese attacked the American military

base in Hawaii known as Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Although much has been made of

Pearl Harbor as the first major attack on American soil since the War of 1812, Hawaii had not

yet achieved statehood, so technically speaking the attack was on a quasi colony, not the

mainland.7

slide 13
6
Christopher G. Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1931-1933
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 52.
7
Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 26.
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The Pearl Harbor attack killed 2,403 Americans and sank or damaged eight battleships. 8

More important than the physical destruction, however, was the psychological impact. The

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor led the U.S. Congress to declare war against Japan on December

8th. Because of the Tripartite Pact, which Germany, Italy, and Japan signed in late September

1940, Germany and Italy were then forced to retaliate by declaring war on the United States.

Pearl Harbor also remains historically significant for Americans to warn against appeasement

and to justify military preparedness.9

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III. Explanations

Why the United States entered the Second World War may seem obvious, but scholars

have long debated the exact reasons. One of the most controversial theories is that Roosevelt

deliberately exposed the Pacific flank to an attack in order to galvanize American public opinion

in support of a declaration of war against the Axis. This argument, known as the “back-door-to-

war” thesis, is very contentious.10 Most professional historians today discount this interpretation.

U.S. intelligence had broken the Japanese code, but because of a communications mix-up, the

American base commanders did not expect the Japanese to attack.11

8
Thomas G. Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations. Vol. 2. A History since 1895, 8th ed. (Boston: Cengage,
2015), 200-201.
9
Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003).
10
Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941 (Chicago: H. Regnery Co.,
1952).
11
On the “back-door-to-war” controversy, see Rosenberg, Date, 40-46.
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slide 15

Another theory is that public opinion pushed a reluctant Roosevelt into war.12 The

difficulty with this explanation is that it assumes that U.S. foreign policy is determined by the

masses. Undoubtedly millions of Americans believed in the righteousness of the Allied cause,

but most of them did not want the United States to become entangled in another European war.

As you can see from these opinion polls, as late as February 1940, most Americans opposed

sending troops even if England and France threatened to fall to Germany. Even more remarkable

is that after Pearl Harbor, the American public still appears to have been divided on whether the

United States should enter the Second World War. In this respect, Pearl Harbor stands more as

the trigger than the cause of the war, and some scholars have speculated that the attack might

have been avoided had the Roosevelt administration not taken such a hard line against Japan in

the first place.13

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Yet a third explanation, one often offered by liberal historians, is that America went to

war to fight fascism. Specifically, the United States had to go to war to save democracy because

expansionist powers such as Japan were violating treaties such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of

1928, which pledged those who signed the treaty to renounce war.14

This explanation takes the democratic provisions of the Atlantic Charter at face value, but

it also overlooks U.S. violations of the self-determination clause. If the United States and Europe
12
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
13
Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 26.
14
Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
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believed in democracy for all peoples, then why did they attempt to hold onto their empires?

American leaders spoke of democracy and claimed to hold a higher moral ground, yet their

actions contradicted their rhetoric. In fact, the U.S. government did not have a principled

ideological opposition to fascism. During the Spanish Civil War, for example, the Roosevelt

Administration denied aid to the Republican coalition fighting Franco and his fascists, who

received military assistance from Germany and Italy. The United States was also guilty of

appeasement. If Hitler had directed his aggression solely to the east the United States might well

have stayed out of the European theater. Nor was the American government particularly

concerned about anti-Semitism. During the war, American officials knew about the

extermination camps such as Auschwitz but decided not to attack them because bombing would

detract from the war effort. Furthermore, after the war, the United States did not accept many

Jewish refugees and tried to get the bulk of them sent elsewhere. Finally, in the postwar period,

the United States continually propped up right-wing dictatorships in the Third World, which

undermined any claim to be defending democracy and freedom.

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Some historians have pointed out that the Japanese and the Americans did not understand

each other very well. Secretary Hull, for example, incorrectly believed that adopting a hard line

would deter Japanese expansionism. To these analysts, the role of error and bureaucracy is

crucial. FDR, for example, had only ordered a partial oil embargo, but because of a

communications mix-up, U.S. officials cut off all oil, a drastic measure that was tantamount to a

declaration of war since Japan was an island nation that depended heavily on imports.15

Historians such as John Dower have also emphasized that the United States provoked Japan by
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passing anti-Asian immigrant laws that chafed the Japanese national sense of pride. As you can

see from the images on this slide from John Dower’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, War Without

Mercy, both Americans and Japanese held prejudiced views of each other.16

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Revisionist historians emphasizing economic factors in the origins of World War II have

argued that the Open Door policy was bound to clash with the autarchic policies of the fascist

countries.17 For example, the Japanese conceived of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as

a sphere of influence that would allow Japan to obtain raw materials and set up trading blocs that

would exclude Westerners. As this map suggests, Japanese expansion threatened U.S. access to

much of China and Southeast Asia.18

Endnotes

15
John Gripentrog, Prelude to Pearl Harbor: Ideology and Culture in US-Japan Relations, 1919-1941 (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
16
John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
17
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1972), 2d ed., 193-201;
Jonathan Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985).
18
Jonathan Marshall, To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).