I liked the comments and sign that showed EVERY American was behind the war effort...and the stories of what people did to support it. It showed that there were people too that were cynical of how bad ...reminded me of people today.
Leading up to the war, not everybody was in favor of the US getting into the war. The Japanese attacked us and the Germans declared war on us a week or so later. I wonder if the Germans had not declared war against us, if we would have declared war against them. There was the America First Committee that was established September, 4, 1940 by Yale law student R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., along with other students including future President Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart. At its peak, America First may have had 800,000 members in 650 chapters, located mostly in a 300 mile radius of Chicago.
To preside over their committee, America First chose General Robert E. Wood, the 61 year-old chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co.. While Wood would accept only an interim position, he remained at the head of the committee until it was disbanded in the days after Pearl Harbor.The America First Committee had its share of prominent businessmen as well as the sympathies of political figures like Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Senator Gerald P. Nye, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, with its most prominent spokesman being Charles A. Lindbergh.
Other celebrities supporting America First were novelist Sinclair Lewis, poet E. E. Cummings, author Gore Vidal (as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy), Alice Roosevelt Longworth, film producer Walt Disney and actress Lillian Gish.