Dude, who even knows.
Post with 68 notes
America entered World War One in the face of a lot more ferociously opposed pacifist, socialist, anti-imperialist sentiment than our school books emphasized (they emphasized “isolationism”, foolish from the perspective of the Cold War empire)
And after the war there was a hard backlash against American entry, that it had been in the interest of rich Europe- and coastal city-based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers
(Sub rosa, America had lent to everyone and intervened before anyone’s homeland got too rekt to repay; the flood of repayments inflated the Gatsby-ass Roaring Twenties but also funded the factory build-out that allowed the US to be the WWII Arsenal of Democracy and postwar consumer cornucopia/labor aristocracy)
That’s a big part of why interwar America was so entranced by buisnessman-public intellectuals associated with the new modern industries where domestic producers led the field, figures like aviation superstar Charles Lindbergh, assembly-line innovator Henry Ford, and Hollywood animation maestro Walt Disney!