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Essay on Dictatorship and Totalitarianism between World War I and World War II
World war II was a godsend to American liberals. The New Deal had been dead in the water since 1937, torpedoed by its fundamental failure to effect an end to the Depression and its increasingly annoying meddling with traditional patterns of American life. A conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats blocked almost all of Pres. Franklin a Roosevelt's initiatives until the foreign policy crisis of 1939-41. That crisis renewed the President's vigor and allowed him gradually to maneuver the U.S. into a position that made entering the war in Europe and the Pacific inevitable. He was aided immeasurably by the recklessness of the Japanese and Germans. Nothing unites people like a common enemy. Since foreign policy always reflects domestic policy (and that goes for military policy, too), it should surprise nobody that the New Dealers geared up for war in New Deal ways. What happened between 1941 and 1945 was an expansion of the national state so vast as to be virtually irreversible.
Conservative Americans were pretty sure this would happen. Sen. Robert A. Taft (R.-Ohio), son of Pres. William Howard Taft, a patrician educated for leadership, and a traditional American from the heartland, is a case in point. "The basic foreign policy of the United States," he said in 1939, should be strength, independence, and to "preserve peace with other nations, and enter into no treaties which may obligate us to go to war.
He argued that Americans have little business trying to affect the outcomes of conflicts that are not their own and that war would "almost certainly destroy democracy in the United States." (William Langer and S. Everett Gleason, 1999)Taft was especially suspicious of the notion that the U.S. should "undertake to defend the ideals of democracy in foreign countries......
