US_Ch8_webquest-rise-of-axis-US-response

=**Response of the United States**=

Many Americans bought into the **Merchants of Death Theory**, which said that business and special interests that profit from war drove America in WWI. You know that this wasn't the case, but public opinion at the time saw this as true and didn't want to get involved in another "European war." The Senate's Nye Committee (led by Senator Gerald Nye) also said this theory was true. This theory locked America into a policy of isolation.

With this isolationist impulse, the U.S. passed the **Neutrality Acts** in the mid-1930s which banned sales of arms to nations at war, prevented travel into war zones or on ships or planes of nations at war. Also, there was a cash and carry policy in which nations had to come to the U.S. to purchase war goods and carry on their own ships. However, the Neutrality Acts punished the nations we should've helped (Ethiopia and China).

Isolation was pushed by the American Left (Walter Duranty, Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, E.W. Scripps, Alger Hiss, and Edmund Wilson) who made excuses for the brutality of the Totalitarian dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. As of the mid-1930s, Hitler hadn't committed his atrocities against the Jews or his opponents yet...Stalin did.

Click here to make sure your answers are correct