What effects did the Great Depression have on the United States involvement in World War II? How did the Great Depression cause us to enter the World War II?

-- Dustin Willard (wsidu1106@uswest.net), April 19, 2000

Answers

Response to Effects the Depression had on United States involvement in World War II

Well, it didn't. The U.S. entered World War II because the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Clark Field, and because Hitler declared war on the United States.

At a perhaps deeper level, Roosevelt certainly wanted to see Japan and Germany declare war on the U.S.--and took steps like cutting off oil exports to Japan and having U.S. navy ships tell British ships where German submarines were--because he thought (correctly) that they were threats to America and to the world.

Anyone except the most convinced isolationist would have to agree. Sooner or later the world would have gone nuclear even without the crash effort of the Manhattan Project. Can you imagine a nuclear-armed 1960s in which the Japanese generals whose troops slaughtered more than five million Chinese civilians rule East Asia, and in which Adolf Hitler rules from Gibralter to the Aral Sea, from the North Cape to the Cape of Good Hope?

Brad DeLong

-- Brad DeLong (delong@econ.berkeley.edu), April 19, 2000.