In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-interventionist Movement of 1940-1941 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee

In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France to Hitler's advancing troops, opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy organized their may divergent groups into the powerful and vocal America First Committee (AFC). The committee coordinated all anti-interventionist efforts to block Roosevelt's proposals for providing lend-lease assistance abroad, arming merchant ships and escorting war supplies to Allied ports.

By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the AFC had 450 units and at least a quarter of a million members. Indeed, the AFC's massive and efficient campaign to keep the United States out of the escalating war in Europe is believed by some to have delayed U.S. entry into World War II.

In Danger Undaunted, based on 338 manuscript boxes deposited in 1942 in the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and peace, conveys the logic, complexity, and passion of the anti-interventionist movement. The book illustrates the dramatic impact this well-organized and vocal group had on the foreign policy of the United States and on the political behavior of many of America's most prominent statesmen of the prewar years.