SOURCE: "Notes on Roosevelt's 'Quarantine' Speech," in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. LXXII, No. 3, September, 1957, pp. 405-33.

In the following essay, Borg focuses on the political contexts of Roosevelt's 1937 "quarantine" speech—an address aimed at checking the aggression of the Axis powers—and examines the domestic response to U. S. involvement in restraining belligerent nations.

The "quarantine" speech which President Roosevelt made at Chicago on October 5, 1937, is generally assumed to have been a landmark in our foreign policy, showing the point at which the President made a definite decision to take a strong stand against the Axis Powers. It is also widely supposed that, because of evidence at every hand of the country's hostility to the speech, Mr. Roosevelt, quite justifiably, felt compelled to relinquish his determination to deal firmly with the totalitarian states. Yet the further one examines these assumptions, the more they seem to invite rethinking.

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