Explain the rise of fascist and militarist regimes in Europe and Asia during the 1930s and evaluate the reasoning behind American isolationism before Pearl Harbor.
While America fought the Depression, totalitarian regimes seized power across Europe and Asia, promising order and national greatness in exchange for total obedience. Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy (in power from 1922) and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany (Hitler became chancellor in 1933) both blamed their nations' humiliations -- for Germany, the harsh Treaty of Versailles terms from Unit 2 among them -- on internal enemies and weak democracy, and both built powerful, propaganda-saturated states that crushed political opposition. Hitler's regime specifically built its ideology around a vicious antisemitism that would culminate in genocide, which you will study directly in a later week; it also began rapidly rearming in violation of the Versailles Treaty and annexed Austria in 1938. Meanwhile, militarist Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and full-scale China in 1937, committing large-scale atrocities against Chinese civilians. Britain and France, still scarred by World War I's losses, initially responded with "appeasement," most notoriously at the 1938 Munich Conference, where they allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for a promise -- quickly broken -- that Hitler would seek no further territory.
Most Americans, watching this unfold, wanted no part of another European war. Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts (1935-1937) restricting arms sales and loans to nations at war, reflecting a widespread belief that financial ties to belligerents, more than any moral principle, had dragged the U.S. into World War I. The America First Committee, whose most famous spokesman was aviator Charles Lindbergh, argued forcefully that the war was Europe's problem to solve and that American intervention would be a costly mistake -- a position held by many sincere Americans, not merely a fringe view, even though we now know how the war ultimately required American involvement to defeat Nazi Germany. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting the European war; Roosevelt gradually moved the U.S. from strict neutrality toward supporting Britain, first through "cash and carry" arms sales and then, in March 1941, through the Lend-Lease Act, which let America become what FDR called the "arsenal of democracy" for Britain and, later, the Soviet Union, without yet sending American troops.
Mastery looks like: They can name a specific aggressive action by each totalitarian power in the 1930s, explain appeasement using the Munich Conference, and state the isolationist argument fairly in its own terms.
Common stumbles: Judging 1930s and 1940 isolationists as simply foolish because we now know war became unavoidable, instead of evaluating their argument by what was actually known at the time.