Chapter 32 Flashcards
A sixty-six-nation economic conference organized to stabilize international currency rates. Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to revoke American participation contributed to a deepening world economic crisis.
London Economic Conference
A departure from the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, this Policy stressed nonintervention in Latin America. It was begun by Herbert Hoover but associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Good Neighbor policy
This act reversed traditional high-protective-tariff policies by allowing the president to negotiate lower tariffs with trade partners, without Senate approval. Its chief architect was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who believed that tariff barriers choked off foreign trade.
Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act
Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, and Fascist Italy, led by Benito Mussolini, allied themselves together under this nefarious treaty. The pact was signed after both countries had intervened on behalf of the fascist leader Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
Rome-Berlin Axis
Steeped in ugly memories of World War I, this spiteful act prevented debt-ridden nations from borrowing further from the United States.
Johnson Debt Default Act
Short-sighted acts passed to prevent American participation in a European war. Among other restrictions, they prevented Americans from selling munitions to foreign belligerents.
Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937
Idealistic American volunteers who served in the Spanish Civil War, defending Spanish republican forces from the fascist General Francisco Franco’s nationalist coup. Some three thousand Americans served alongside volunteers from other countries.
Abraham Lincoln Brigade
An important speech delivered by Franklin Roosevelt in which he called for “positive endeavors” to “quarantine” land-hungry dictators, presumably through economic embargoes. The speech flew in the face of isolationist politicians.
Quarantine Speech
The policy followed by leaders of Britain and France at the 1938 conference in Munich. Their purpose was to avoid war, but they allowed Germany to take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.
Appeasement
Treaty signed on August 23, 1939, in which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to fight each other. The fateful agreement paved the way for German aggression against Poland and the Western democracies.
Hitler-Stalin pact
This act stipulated that European democracies might buy American munitions, but only if they could pay in cash and transport them in their own ships, a policy known as “cash-and-carry.” It represented an effort to avoid war debts and protect American arms-carriers from torpedo attacks.
Neutrality Act of 1939
German for “night of broken glass,” it refers to the murderous pogrom that destroyed Jewish businesses and synagogues and sent thousands to concentration camps on the night of November 9, 1938. Thousands more attempted to find refuge in the United States but were ultimately turned away due to restrictive immigration laws.
Kristallnacht
A U.S. agency formed to help rescue Jews from German-occupied territories and to provide relief to inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The agency performed noble work, but it did not begin operations until very late in the war, after millions had already been murdered.
War Refugee Board
An isolationist advocacy group formed in September 1940 that opposed American intervention in the Second World War. Though it boasted 800,000 members at its peak, support for the committee dissipated following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
America First Committee
Based on the motto “Send guns, not sons,” this law abandoned former pretenses of neutrality by allowing Americans to sell unlimited supplies of arms to any nation defending itself against the Axis powers. Patriotically numbered 1776, the bill was praised as a device for keeping the nation out of World War II.
Lend-Lease Bill
