David Mayers

Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad Before Pearl Harbor, 1935-1941

This study is centered on Americans who in private capacities went abroad in the unsettled years before the United States became embroiled in World War Two. Many of these people were notable in their time. Some have been remembered since. Others were obscure and everlastingly unremarked, but nevertheless vivid. Collectively, these people mirrored the wide range of U.S. thought, doings, and yearning on the eve of America’s getting swept into the violence that before Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack—7 December 1941—had already touched vast portions of Africa, Asia, and Europe.

The people reviewed in this book constituted a cross-section of the U.S. population. Between the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Pearl Harbor surprise, American artists, dissenters and partisans (of leftist and rightest stripe), feminists, civil rights activists, clergymen, defenders of the disabled, ethnic/racial champions, and journalists ventured overseas to lend their support to causes that they judged worthy. Not on Washington commission to promote U.S. diplomatic or military purpose, these people on the basis of their convictions gave labor and testimony to distant nations and doctrines. At the same time, these people sought in their international errands to find answers to U.S. questions centered on racial tensions, economic distress, social inequities, and frayed institutions.