Quarantine speech
The quarantine speech was a worldwide sensational speech by American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 5, 1937 during the inauguration of the "Outer Link Bridge" on Chicago's "Lake Shore Drive". In the speech, Roosevelt called for the states of Germany , Italy and Japan to be placed under political "quarantine" without explicitly naming them.
The speech
The speech referred to the Japanese invasion of China , the German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia . With the speech, Roosevelt called for an end to American isolationism and the appeasement policies of Great Britain and France . He pointed out that the peace and security of 90% of the world's population was threatened by nations that made up only 10% of the world's population. A thought he had already expressed on December 28, 1933 in a speech to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in Washington .
The crucial passage from Roosevelt's speech that gave it its name:
“Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that the epidemic of general lawlessness is rampant. When a stressful disease begins to spread, the community enacts isolation of patients to protect their health from the epidemic. I am determined to pursue a policy of peace and use all means at hand to keep war away from us. "
The speech was then heavily criticized by the isolationalists, for example by William Randolph Hearst .
Web links
- Wording of the speech in German ( Memento from August 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- Wording of the speech in English
Individual evidence
- ^ Franz Knipping : American policy on Russia during the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1939-1941. Tübingen 1974, p. 4 and 48.