by Andrew Johnstone (Author)
In Against Immediate Evil, Andrew Johnstone tells the story of how internationalist Americans worked between 1938 and 1941 to convince the U.S. government and the American public of the need to stem the rising global tide of fascist aggression. As war approached, the internationalist movement attempted to arouse the nation in order to defeat noninterventionism at home and fascism overseas. Johnstone's examination of this movement undermines the common belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wrenched an isolationist United States into global armed conflict and the struggle for international power.Johnstone focuses on three organizations-the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Fight For Freedom-that actively promoted a more global role for the United States based on a conception of the four freedoms later made famous by FDR. The desire to be free from fear was seen in concerns regarding America's immediate national security. The desire to be free from want was expressed in anxieties over the nation's future economic prosperity. The need for freedom of speech was represented in concerns over the potential loss of political freedoms. Finally, the need for freedom of worship was seen in the emphasis on religious freedoms and broader fears about the future of Western civilization. These groups and their supporters among the public and within the government characterized the growing global conflict as one between two distinct worlds and in doing so, set the tone of American foreign policy for decades to come.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 200
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 24 Oct 2014
ISBN 10: 0801453259
ISBN 13: 9780801453250
Against Immediate Evil is an important contribution to the historiography of the formation of the foundations of American foreign policy as the United States asserted its role in the mid-twentieth century as not just a great power, but as an emerging global superpower.... Andrew Johnstone's book is a concise and readable chronological narrative of the development of the American internationalist before the entrance of the United States in the Second World War.
-- Grant Harward * H-War *There is a tendency to give FDR much of the credit for easing U.S. public opinion toward war. In this first-rate book, Andrew Johnstone complicates that view, injecting new perspectives and actors into a well-known story. The author reveals how the long, difficult, and passionate debate over intervention in World War II was shaped by a selection of activists. At crucial points, it was not the president but these influential figures and their organizations that had decisive impact on which direction the government and the country moved.
-- David Ekbladh, Tufts University, author of The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order
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