During the late 1930s and as late as 1941, there was a strong political movement to keep the United States out of WW2. This “isolationist” movement had several causes: it was motivated by the fact that entering the war would ally us with the Soviet Union, whose atrocities and human rights violations were known; by the fact that allying with the Soviet Union would strengthen the USSR’s goal of colonizing smaller nations and building an empire; and by the fact that any alliance with the USSR would be a short-lived sham, destined to evaporate once the common enemy had been defeated.
The movement to keep American out of WW2 was called ‘anti-interventionist’ because it saw a potential entry into the war as ‘intervening’ into matters which weren’t American, but rather which belonged to other nations.
When the Japanese Empire attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, America’s perspective changed. The war was no longer “someone else’s business,” but rather it was now “our business,” as historian Mary Grabar writes:
Of course, there was internal opposition to the war. There was a very strong and public anti-interventionist movement. One of the fears was that the anti-interventionists had was about allying with the Soviet Union, whose executions and mass starvations were already known. They were rightly concerned about the Soviets’ imperialist ambitions. As Melvyn Leffler noted, “Almost a third of all Americans” continued to distrust our military ally the Soviet Union even at the height of the fighting against the Nazis, and most polls showed that fewer than half of all Americans expected cooperation to persist in the postwar period.” But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many anti-interventionists, including future President Gerald Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave the war effort their full support.
American entered the war, forming an uneasy and uncomfortable alliance with the Soviet Socialists. During the war, the American public was clear that this was, at best, a temporary alliance of convenience, and that after the war, there would be no illusion of continued cooperation between the USSR and the free democratic countries of the western Allies.
