Howard Berman: “in 1939, the leader of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, continuing a tradition of 20 years of Republican…”

“in 1939, the leader of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, continuing a tradition of 20 years of Republican isolationism that started after the end of World War I, Senator Arthur Vandenburg said: We cannot be the world's protector or the world's policeman. The price of such assignment would be the jeopardy of our own democracy. Let us avoid entanglement in any chain of circumstances which may be too strong for us to break. Seven years later, as the new leader of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party, the one that has dominated the Republican Party for the last 50 years, Senator Vandenburg said: If World War III ever unhappily arrives, it will open new laboratories of death too horrible to contemplate. I propose to do everything within my power to keep those laboratories closed for keeps. There are two ways to do it. One way is by exclusive individual action in which each of us tries to look out for himself. The other way is by joint action in which we undertake to look out for each other. The first way is the old way, which has twice taken us to Europe's interminable battlefields within a quarter of a century. The second way is the new way in which our present fraternity of war becomes a new fraternity of peace.”