ABSTRACT
Compared with the urgency of the issues being discussed in homes, colleges, factories, farms, drugstores, and filling-stations all over the country, the Senate debate on neutrality in the fall of 1939 was a piddling and superficial affair. Leslie Buell’s book is an impressive compendium of information and analysis, historical and contemporary, on practically every issue being discussed in the Great Debate. He carries over into his book all the occupational skills and the occupational hazards of one who has been research director and later president of the Foreign Policy Association, and has more conducted the Fortune Round Table. Buell lacks the depth of insight and the mastery of style that Beard possesses; he possesses a capacity for a researcher’s intellectual round-up that Beard lacks. In Beard’s classification, Buell would belong to the Wilsonian internationalist school. In Buell’s analysis, Beard would be classed as a pleader for an isolated America.
