Eighty Years Ago This Week

The strength of isolationist sentiment in the USA can but gauged from the fact that, when it finally came to a vote in Congress, a well-worn isolationist proposal was only narrowly defeated. Senator Louis Ludlow had proposed that the Constitution should be amended so that the USA could only declare war if this was approved by a national referendum unless it had actually been attacked. In the aftermath of the Japanese sinking of the USS Panay fears of war rose to a point that the Ludlow Amendment was brought forward. Ludlow himself was a nonentity who achieved nothing else but spoke for a powerful section of politicians and the public. President Roosevelt is supposed to have swung the Irish American vote away from its traditional isolationist stance and the “discharge petition” which would have made for a full-scale debate was only defeated by 209 votes to 188. Whilst this support was well short of the two-thirds majority that would have been needed to amend the Constitution the vote …