- Recently Released Letters Between Reagan and Gorbachev Shed Light on the End of the Cold War, HuffingtonPost.com, February 27, 2013.
2. There’s a photo in the lobby of the building where I work that I pass every day, and I never thought much about it. But then, one morning, a small detail caught my eye.
The photo shows bow-tied bandleader Lawrence Welk and singer Mildred Stanley posing with a sign that says: “Keep us out of war. Be neutral.”
The photo was taken Sept. 11, 1939, days after the Nazis had ignited World War II by marching into Poland. Less than a year earlier, Adolf Hitler’s followers had burned hundreds of synagogues, killed nearly 100 Jews and sent 30,000 to concentration camps during two days of terror that became known as Kristallnacht — the night of broken glass. The intent of the advancing Nazi regime, therefore, couldn't have been much of a mystery.
But there were Welk and his vocalist, smiles on their faces at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, as they labored against the notion of involvement in a conflict that had already sucked in France and England. They wanted to be ‘neutral” in the face of Hitler. Let that sink in for a moment.
It might sound odd now, but it wasn’t an unpopular sentiment at the time. The nation was still fatigued by World War I, which had ended two decades earlier with more than 100,000 American deaths. Another entanglement on the other side of the Atlantic was understandably unpalatable.
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