When Bad Ideas Were "Good": Just Say "No" to Fighting Fascists, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 589    Blog Bookstore

Sometimes the screaming done in pamphlet titles like this example are odd and outrageous and entertainingly naive and are often taken out of context.  This one isn't.  It isn't odd and it isn't entertaining and it isn't naive (at least in the outsider sense).  It is the effort of Frederick J. Libby (1874-1970) to convince Americans that it was against their morality and their best interest to engage in any war to stop fascist aggression in Europe or Japan.  The world was well on its way to total war--Japan had already been savaging China for five years at this point and Europe was sinking into the Styx.  (Just two months before Libby's May 4th speech Hitler "annexed" Austria and in April had signed a pact with Franco. In the short months following the speech Hitler would mobilize the German army, sign the Munich agreement with the failed Chamberlain, occupy the Sudetenland, and initiate Krystal Nacht.)  The speech was given at Madison Square Garden, which in another years would see have an audience of 20,000 supporting the German American Bund, one of the limp pro-Nazi organizations which sought an anxious fifth-column foothold in the U.S.) 

The biographical bits I've found on Libby support him as a a decent pacifist.  His National Council for Prevention of War--which hosted his speech at the Garden--was evidently his great achievement, though his subject matter was not.  Now it isn't as though there was a spearhead movement to get the suffering U.S. involved in European activities in 1938--and remember it took 27 months  after the invasion of Poland to get the U.S. into WWII, and that took a massive attack by a non-European entity.  So Libby's "No!" was really playing to the strengths of the majority.  The U.S. was still in the grip of the Depression--and had just suffered another fresh setback in that year--so there wasn't much public concerted support for stopping the very visible spread of Fascism around the world.  So as eyebrow-raising as his immodest title might seem, it did reflect the answer that most people in the U.S would have given to that question in the spring of 1938.