And to clarify a point I made earlier, now that I have a real keyboard under my finger tips, people constantly fish through the Gallup (and other polls from the era) looking for favorable numbers. "BUT 88% said they didn't want to go to war!" Yeah, what rational person does? But the same poll shows that 68% of the people said that war with Germany was inevitable. And 72% said the same thing for Japan. Very few said war with these countries was NOT likely.
When I was a grad student I looked at two college newspapers, a traditionally conservative school (Purdue) and a generally liberal school (Indiana U.) (because I could get to their papers easily). I had expected the liberal school to be less vocal about the need for intervention by the US. Didn't turn out to be the case, both school papers were giving generally the same responses to world events and the Op-Ed pieces were reflective of concern for democracy if we didn't come to the aid of the embattled Allied countries.
Then I did a gut check to see these papers were representative. I looked at newspapers from New York, Chicago, Miami, and L.A. I found that the same things were being said in those papers to a great degree. The Chicago paper was run by a FDR-hater and isolationist, but even they printed letters from prominent people calling for more active aid on the part of the US. This lead to another semester of work on why FDR wasn't responding to those calls as quickly as he could have. After looking at the records I decided that mind reading was needed to get a solid grip on Roosevelt's guiding policies. And that way lies madness...
When I was a grad student I looked at two college newspapers, a traditionally conservative school (Purdue) and a generally liberal school (Indiana U.) (because I could get to their papers easily). I had expected the liberal school to be less vocal about the need for intervention by the US. Didn't turn out to be the case, both school papers were giving generally the same responses to world events and the Op-Ed pieces were reflective of concern for democracy if we didn't come to the aid of the embattled Allied countries.
Then I did a gut check to see these papers were representative. I looked at newspapers from New York, Chicago, Miami, and L.A. I found that the same things were being said in those papers to a great degree. The Chicago paper was run by a FDR-hater and isolationist, but even they printed letters from prominent people calling for more active aid on the part of the US. This lead to another semester of work on why FDR wasn't responding to those calls as quickly as he could have. After looking at the records I decided that mind reading was needed to get a solid grip on Roosevelt's guiding policies. And that way lies madness...
