Quick questions on American isolationism 1919-1939: HSC Modern History USA

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. The American Senate, controlled by Republicans after the 1918 mid-terms, refused to ratify without the Lodge Reservations on Article X (collective security), to which Wilson would not agree.

President Harding's first major foreign policy act was the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament (12 November 1921 to 6 February 1922), chaired by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes opened by proposing the scrapping of 30 American capital ships and asked Britain and Japan to match.

American banks were the indispensable creditor of the post-war European economy. The reparations and war-debt arithmetic ran: Germany paid reparations to Britain and France; Britain and France serviced war debts to the United States; American banks recycled their dollars to Germany as private loans.

The General Treaty for Renunciation of War, signed in Paris on 27 August 1928 by Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, and representatives of 13 other states, "renounced war as an instrument of national policy" and pledged to settle disputes by "pacific means". Sixty-two states eventually ratified, including the future Axis.

The Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, established by Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri, ran from April 1934 to February 1936. It investigated arms manufacturers (DuPont, Remington, J.P. Morgan and Co.) and concluded that war profits had drawn the United States into the First World War.

The Neutrality Acts attempted to insulate the United States from any future European or Asian war by prohibiting trade or financial assistance with belligerents.

Roosevelt's inaugural address (4 March 1933) pledged "the policy of the good neighbor". The Seventh Pan-American Conference at Montevideo (December 1933) saw Secretary of State Cordell Hull endorse the principle of non-intervention in Latin America.

Robert Dallek (Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945, 1979) is the standard study.

The United States was actively engaged through the Washington system, the Dawes Plan, Kellogg-Briand, and the Good Neighbor Policy.

It built the public mood that the Neutrality Acts codified.

Each one made a different bet about what neutrality meant; the 1939 Act was a major shift.