Top Photo: Political cartoon by the artist Clifford K. Berryman depicting three supporters of the Neutrality Act, Senators William Borah, Gerald Nye, and Hiram Johnson, published on September 7, 1939, in the Washington Star. National Archives NAID: 6012202

On August 31, 1935, four years and one day before the start of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reluctantly signed a bill that severely restricted the president’s foreign policy authority. The new law, recently passed by Congress, made it illegal to export “arms, ammunition, or implements of war” from US territory to a belligerent state or any neutral port for transshipment to a belligerent country.[1] Recalling controversies surrounding US entry into World War I in 1917, the law also forbid American ships from carrying arms to those same states and cautioned Americans against traveling on the ships of belligerent nations. 

Upon signing the bill, which became known as the Neutrality Act, Roosevelt called it “an expression of the fixed desire of the Government and the people of the United States to avoid any action which might involve us in war.”[2] This legislation was the culmination of efforts by American citizens, activists, and politicians across the political spectrum to insulate the United States from foreign conflicts and prevent the country from being drawn into another global war. It highlighted deep divisions within the country over the role of the United States in the world and the power of the presidency to conduct foreign policy. 

Several factors convinced large numbers of Americans that their country needed to distance itself from the world in the 1930s. First, despite the Allies’ victory over Germany [in 1918], many Americans were shocked at US losses in that conflict (over 100,000 deaths in only a few months) and did not believe that the gains had been worth the cost. Fueled by this popular discontent, the US Senate voted against US membership in the newly established League of Nations; one senator, Gerald Nye of North Dakota, formed a committee to investigate the factors that led the United States into World War I. These developments led historian David Kennedy to conclude that “No people came to believe more emphatically than the Americans that the Great War was an unalloyed tragedy, an unpardonable costly mistake never to be repeated.”[3] Supporters of the Neutrality Act saw it as a tool to keep the United States out of another costly global war and tailored it to avoid the “mistakes” that had drawn the country into what they believed was an unnecessary conflict.  

In addition to their bitterness over the recent “European war,” Americans in the 1930s were also battling the worst economic crisis in their history. The Great Depression devasted the United States, driving unemployment up to nearly 25 percent and paving the way for the election of the first Democratic president in 12 years. Running for office in 1932, then-New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt campaigned on the promise of a “new deal” for the American people that would halt years of economic decline and restore prosperity. Though a committed internationalist in the vein of former President Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt was also an astute observer of the mood of the American people. Believing that most Americans had little to no interest in foreign affairs and knowing that he would need the support of isolationist politicians in Congress to pass his New Deal agenda, Roosevelt opted to sign the Neutrality Act. 

But Roosevelt’s endorsement was only partial. In the same statement he released endorsing the Neutrality Act, he cautioned the American people that no president or Congress could predict the future and reminded them that “History is filled with unforeseeable situations that call for some flexibility of action.”[4] Roosevelt also insisted that Congress agree to revisit the Neutrality Act in six months, ensuring that the debate over neutrality would continue into 1936. 

President Roosevelt was not the only one who decried the Neutrality Act’s rigidity, so too did senior American diplomats. On August 29, 1935, before the act even became law, Secretary of State Cordell Hull called the Neutrality Act “an invasion of the constitutional and traditional power of the Executive to conduct the foreign relations of the United States.”[5] Several months later, US Ambassador to Germany William Dodd also objected to the restraints the law placed upon the US government, warning that “What may be desirable for the maintenance of our independent position at one moment may be positively dangerous for this purpose in a different set of circumstances.”[6] 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt Seated at his Desk in the Oval Office, Washington, DC. 1935. National Archives. NAID: 6728523

Once the Neutrality Act became law, Americans quickly realized that it was one thing to pass such a law, but another to apply that policy in response to real international events. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 presented the first major test of the law, and it proved only a partial success. While the Neutrality Act proved effective in cutting off arms sales to Italy, the aggressor, the law only applied to “arms, ammunition, or implements of war.” It did not cover vital resources such as oil, which were not themselves weapons but nonetheless helped sustain a war. Several months later, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 further complicated the issue. While the Neutrality Act specifically mentioned wars between states, it did not explicitly mention civil wars. 

When the Neutrality Act came up for debate again in February 1936, Roosevelt and his supporters hoped Congress would grant them more leeway to implement the actual policy of neutrality. Instead, the opposite occurred. Fearful that a looser law might draw the United States into another war, isolationists in Congress set even stricter limits on how a president must deal with nations at war and went even further by forbidding Americans from loaning money to belligerent powers. The president and his advisers were disappointed in the outcome, but, facing an anti-interventionist Congress and population in an election year, there was little they could do. That did not stop Roosevelt from warning Congress and the American people that, despite legislators’ best efforts to construct effective neutrality legislation, “no laws can be provided to cover every contingency, for it is impossible to imagine how every future event may shape itself. In spite of every possible forethought, international relations involve of necessity a vast uncharted area.” It was the job of the president and his advisers, Roosevelt concluded, to help the country navigate that vast uncharted area.[7]

In 1937, the Neutrality Act was once again the subject of fierce debate in the halls of Congress, and this time economic concerns were front and center. While Americans were eager to stay out of foreign wars, they did not want to lose out on potential profits from foreign trade, especially during a slow recovery from the Great Depression. The most important outcome of this debate was a new provision known as “cash-and-carry,” which allowed Americans to sell most goods to belligerent states, provided they paid for them in cash up front and transported them away from the United States on their own ships. This new concept was the brainchild of Bernard Baruch, an experienced businessman and Washington bureaucrat. Writing in the journal Current History, Baruch argued that American policy should be “to sell to any belligerent anything except lethal weapons, but the terms are ‘cash on the barrel-head and come and get it.’”[8] Cash-and-carry mostly favored powerful, wealthy nations with large navies and merchant fleets, including traditional American allies such as France and Great Britain but also potential adversaries like Japan. Satisfied that this newly revised Neutrality Act gave him more discretion than the previous version, Roosevelt signed it into law on May 1, 1937. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaks out against the Neutrality Act during a State of the Union address on January 4, 1939. National Archives. NAID: 17343464

Two years later, with the international situation looking much worse, the Roosevelt administration again pressed Congress to revise the Neutrality Act. In addition to Japan’s ongoing war in China, a rearmed and assertive Germany under Adolf Hitler had absorbed neighboring Austria and Czechoslovakia and had turned its attention to Poland. Roosevelt and his advisers worried that one or more of these conflicts would harm vital US national interests, but many Americans and members of Congress remained steadfastly opposed to altering the Neutrality Act. After a long debate over the legislation’s future, Congress refused to alter the Neutrality Act in March 1939. This was a serious blow to the Roosevelt administration, but the protracted debate in Congress and shifting opinion polls demonstrated that the American people were becoming less certain that neutrality was the country’s best path forward in such a dangerous and volatile international environment.  

Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which signaled the start of the bloodiest war in human history, was the turning point for the Neutrality Act. Believing that the United States would eventually have to fight Germany but recognizing that many Americans still wanted nothing to do with European wars, Roosevelt and his advisers made a determined push to revise the Neutrality Act by ending the embargo on arms sales, which would allow the US to sell arms to its allies France and Great Britain. In one of his signature Fireside Chats delivered two days after the German attack, Roosevelt warned the American people that “When peace has broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”[9] Speaking before Congress several weeks later, he expressed regret at having signed the Neutrality Act in the first place and called upon Congress to repeal the arms embargo provisions, calling them “vitally dangerous to American neutrality, American security, and, above all, American peace.”[10] Two months later, Congress complied, and this move cleared the way for a gradual expansion of US involvement in World War II, starting with the Lend-Lease Act of 1941. The United States would not fully join the conflict until the Japanese at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.