“Of the hell broth that is brewing in Europe,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1935, “we have no need to drink.” America’s military — what little there was: the Army’s size was 17th in the world, behind Portugal’s — largely agreed. The Neutrality Acts banned U.S. arms sales to countries at war and denied Roosevelt the power to apply the prohibition only against aggressor nations. …

Yale University incubated the America First organization. An undergraduate, Kingman Brewster, later Yale’s president and U.S. ambassador to Britain, was a founder. Other Yale student-members included future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, future President Gerald Ford and Sargent Shriver, future head of the Peace Corps under his brother-in-law President John Kennedy, who as a Harvard undergraduate sent $100 to America First.

Olson writes that people from many antiwar organizations with “Mothers” in their titles swarmed over Capitol Hill: “Dressed in black, many with veils covering their faces, the women made life miserable for members of Congress who were not avowedly isolationist. They stalked their targets, screamed and spat at them, and held vigils outside their offices, keening and wailing.” When an interventionist congressman said he refused “to sit by a traitor,” the offended isolationist knocked him down with what the House doorkeeper called the best punch thrown in the chamber in 50 years.