ABSTRACT
As the anti-isolationist historian Selig Adler pointed out, "The American Revolution was in itself an act of isolation, for it cut the umbilical cord to the mother country." The American Revolution was, as Garet Garrett put it, a pilot flame that leaped the Atlantic and lighted holocaust in the Old World. In 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, Congress passed a resolution rejecting American entry into the European League of Armed Neutrality, declaring that the 13 states "should be as little as possible entangled in the politics and controversies of European nations." The revulsion against the European catastrophe was broad-based and bipartisan; leaders of every faction and subfaction in American politics scrambled to put distance between themselves and even the hint that the United States might become involved in the conflict. One indication of the popular mood of isolationism was the fate of the Republicans' preparedness campaign.
