Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Reluctant Arsenal: America's Uneasy Path from Neutrality to Pearl Harbor, 1935-1941

The Reluctant Arsenal: America's Uneasy Path from Neutrality to Pearl Harbor, 1935-1941

Paperback

20th Century United States HistoryArmed ForcesWorld War II

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798170667598
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Six years before Pearl Harbor, the United States was fighting a different war - against itself.

The Reluctant Arsenal tells the story of how a nation that swore, again and again, to stay out of Europe's war became the arsenal that would help win it - one furious political battle at a time.

From the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s through Charles Lindbergh's America First rallies, from the razor-thin 203-202 vote that saved the peacetime draft to the undeclared shooting war already raging in the North Atlantic months before Congress ever declared one - this is the story history skips on its way to December 7th. It's the argument America had with itself, and lost, before it ever set foot on a battlefield.

Inside, you'll follow:

  • The isolationist coalition that nearly kept America out of the war - and the sincere, WWI-scarred logic behind it
  • FDR's Arsenal of Democracy fireside chat and the industrial buildup it set in motion
  • The bruising congressional fight over Lend-Lease, the program Churchill called the most unsordid act in the history of any nation
  • Charles Lindbergh's Des Moines speech, and the moment America First began to come apart
  • The undeclared war in the Atlantic - U-boats, sunk destroyers, and a shooting war nobody in Washington would call by its name
  • The final, collapsing weeks of U.S.-Japan diplomacy, and the morning that decided the argument for good
Written as narrative history, not textbook chronology, The Reluctant Arsenal follows the people who fought this argument in real time - not knowing, as history does, how it would end.

For readers of Lynne Olson's Those Angry Days and narrative histories in the vein of Erik Larson - a tightly told account of the two most consequential, least-remembered years on America's road to war.

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