Larry, no quarrel from me with your points of view of the situation 50 years or so ago; I was referring to decades before that, before the war, when no one needed directions from anywhere to want food and jobs at home.
We'll have to disagree on Lindbergh, who advocated more than U.S. neutrality. Either way, the US didn't need Lindbergh's word on Germany's military capacity and prowess. Intelligence knew and Hitler later displayed it to the world.
(My late friend Bill Greenaway, British motorcycle and spin- and fly-casting champion, hung out on Goring's estate and with his hunting and angling crowd before the war. He was a major in British intelligence.)
We may agree that the isolationists were duped, using your term, until that other powerful modern military machine struck in the Pacific and they realized that only mobilization could save the US goose from being cooked.
The isolationists were not bad Americans. They dissented and they changed their minds as circumstances changed, as persons usually do, and as our countries are doing now concerning our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They were not then and are not now providing inadvertent assistance to our opponents. The US was made from dissent. Remove dissent and we're lost.
