No one who has made an honest attempt to face the issue will assert that there is an easy answer. In the light of that experience, and in the red glow of war fires burning in the old countries, it is high time we gave some thought to the hard, practical question of just how we propose to stay out of present and future international conflicts. Even as late as November, 1916, President Wilson was reelected because he “kept us out of war.” Yet five months later we were fighting to “save the world for democracy” in the “war to end war.” In August, 1914, few could have conceived that America would be dragged into a European conflict in which we had no original part and the ramifications of which we did not even understand. At the present the desire to keep the United States from becoming involved in any war between foreign nations seems practically unanimous among the rank and file of American citizens but it must be remembered there was an almost equally strong demand to keep us out of the last war. Originally published as “Detour Around War: A Proposal for a New American Policy,” December 1935, Harper’s Monthly, 1-9, © 1935 by Harper’s Monthly. Source: Bennett Champ Clark, “Detour Around War: A Proposal for a New American Policy,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1935, 1–9. In 1937, Congress mandated that nations at war could purchase from the US only goods that were not war-related and must transport them in their own ships, a policy known as “cash and carry.” Congress heeded his call by renewing the act and adding a prohibition on loans to warring nations in the Neutrality Law of 1936.
In this opinion piece, Clark urges a renewal and expansion of the 1935 Neutrality Act. Nonetheless, the belief persisted that munitions manufacturers and financiers had secretly maneuvered the United States into WWI to continue their profitable war trade and to secure repayment of war loans to the Allies.
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In the mid-1930s the Nye Committee held a series of investigations into “Merchants of Death” conspiracy theories but uncovered little hard evidence. He made his case directly to the public in this December 1935 Harper’s Monthly article, “Detour Around War: A Proposal for a New American Policy.” Clark served on the Senate’s Munitions Investigation Committee, popularly known as the Nye Committee for its chairman, Senator Gerald P. Senate from 1933 to 1945, was a strong proponent of making neutrality a cornerstone of American foreign policy. Senator Bennett Champ Clark (1890–1954, D-MO), who served in the U.S.
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