History question on roosevelt?

Question

how do standard american history textbooks explain Roosevelt's reluctance to stop japanese and german aggression

Answer 1

by isolating the US from all area's except our territory's, we did not project our power like we do now to help ease tensions around the world  

Answer 2

Roosevelt, in order to fund his many socialist "get America moving" type projects had gutted an already skeletonized military, which had suffered a draw down after the Great War (AKA WW I).  Roosevelt's cousin was the Army Chief of Staff when he took office and he absolutely HATED his cousin (Gen. Douglas MacArthur).  He'd been heard commenting that the two most dangerous men in America were Huey "King-fish" Long and Douglas MacArthur.  Long, he had to do nothing about but MacArthur, he sent packing to the Philippines (along with his trusted assistant Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower) and then demoted him and telegramed him to tell him as much.  He then promoted an inside man named Marshall to the post of Army Chief of Staff.

Roosevelt was not blind to what was going on in the world, he was just carefully orchestrating U.S. involvement.  In Germany, he sent his old bootlegger buddy, promoted to Ambassador Joseph Kennedy.  He later recalled him for having gotten a little too close to the n***s.  In Spain, he "allowed" the Lincoln Brigade to fight against the fascists in their civil war.  In England, he "allowed" the Eagle Squadron to recruit American fighter pilots.  He also agreed to the Lend Lease Act to support Britain more indirectly.  And in China, against the Japanese invaders, Chiang Ki Chek's "American Volunteer Group -- AVG for short, also known as "the Flying Tigers."

Most standard history books in the U.S. avoid most of this and simply state that the U.S. was maliciously attcked without provocation.  Rarely ever do they address facts.  Facts are unpleasant and tend to get in the way of popular memory.

Answer 3

It was a strictly European and Asian affairs.  America was isolation mode, especially when everyone rather have the depression stop.  

Answer 4

In the late 1930s our army was not large enough to counter these threats. Roosevelt knew he could only make relatively empty threats, and he didn't want to anyone to call his bluff. (Witness what happened in the country Georgia last month and how Bush was powerless to stop it.) Plus, Congress was isolationist and conservative in Roosevelt's time, and he knew he couldn't get the votes to back up any threats he made.

Answer 5

Three successive Republican administrations in the 1920s had continued irresponsible policies which caused a worldwide Depression.  Roosevelt thought he would depart from the policies of the past, as exemplified by Hoover, whose answer to 25% unemployment and actual starvation in the US was to bolster public morale by publicizing the seven-course meals he was consuming in the White House.  Roosevelt was willing to try anything to get America back to work, including (gasp!) public work projects to give people jobs.

America had a tradition since its founding to avoid, on the advice of George Washington, "foreign entanglements" and alliances.  Many Americans felt that we had shed a lot of blood saving western Europe from militarism in World War One, as well as huge amounts of money.  They had had enough of the endless squabbling and bloodshed of Europe and wanted nothing more to do with saving Europeans from themselves.  Perceptive Americans probably felt that France and England should have stopped Hitler in 1935, when he remilitarized the Rhineland, announced he would no longer abide by the Treaty of Versailles, and began building an Air Force, banned by the Treaty.  The average American was determinedly "isolationist" and felt we had no dog in the fight, and could rely on the oceans that kept us isolated from the continual European wars since we kicked out the colonial powers.  Many wealthy Americans, like upper-class Britons, sympathized with the n***s, for getting Germany back to work and "making the trains run on time".

MacArthur had become Chief of Staff of the US Army in 1931, before Roosevelt took office.  The tradition was that a general held this position for two years, then retired.  Roosevelt continued MacArthur in this position for twice as long, and he served as Chief of Staff for four years, through 1935, and then retired after 34 years of service.  He then took a position offered him as Field Marshall of the Philippine Army, and actually was not back in the US until Truman had to fire him during the Korean War, in 1951.

Roosevelt wanted to assist England when they were alone in the struggle against Germany, but knew the US public remained isolationist and would not go along.  He did what he could through lend-lease, but it took Pearl Harbor to reverse public sentiment.  Even then he asked Congress only for a declaration of war against Japan on December 8, 1941.  Germany declared war on the US on December 11.  By that time Roosevelt had undertaken a large naval construction program, beginning in 1935, though this was constrained by a Treaty entered into by the Republican Harding Administration in 1923.  He had also increased the Army to one million men, assisted by the first peacetime draft in US history, beginning in mid 1940.  He had ordered thousands of planes and many millions of dollars worth of other military hardware, but this took time to finish.  Roosevelt had also embargoed sales of scrap metal and oil to the Japanese, in an effort to get them to stop the slaughter in China, and this is what provoked the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.  He had sent US Marines to occupy Iceland, replacing the British brigade there denying Iceland to Germany and freeing the British troops to fight elsewhere.  He had begun escorting convoys of supply ships carrying lend lease materials to mid Atlantic, provoking an undeclared war with Germany in the autumn of 1941, resulting in one sunken US destroyer, another heavily damaged, and hundreds of US sailors killed.  He had also given the British fifty destroyers, in return for ninety-nine year leases on some naval bases, so that Britain might be able to better combat the U-boat menace.

In short, it was not that Roosevelt was reluctant to stop the aggression, it was that the American people felt that it was not our responsibility, and that perhaps their neighbors ought to handle the problem.  We never wanted to have to bleed and die to end European foolishness, or to become the world's policeman.  We are today saddled with trillions of dollars in debt from having had to do so.  I would personally rather have back my relatives who died in the cause.