a morally just and necessary war, at least in hindsight. But as this counterfactual proposes, we could have gone to war in a much better way, both in World War II and in all subsequent American wars, if our leaders, President Roosevelt perhaps most obviously, had used better foresight—and moral insight—at the appropriate time.

Below is a nice video overview on the Ludlow amendment by Jim Lindsay at the Washington think tank, Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of the bi-monthly international relations journal, Foreign Affairs. It gives a brief peek at the social conditions that generated the amendment.

Most notably, Lindsay reminds us of the “Merchants of Death” thesis, the phrase the public used in the 1930s to describe the war profiteering and inappropriate influence they suspected that US banksand armaments companies had engaged in during World War I. This thesis was argued in a popular book at the time, Merchants of Death, by Helmuth Engelbrecht and Frank Hanighen, in 1934. Dozens of other books in the 1920s and 1930s made the same argument, even claiming that banks and arms manufacturers had “tricked” the US into entering World War I. Particularly influential was War is a Racket (1935), by Smedley Butler, a Major in the US Marine Corps during the war.

The Senate conducted a hearing into these allegations, the Nye Committee, beginning in 1934, headed by Senator Gerald Nye. Nye found no evidence of trickery, but he did document obscene profits made by the arms industry during the war, and to address this outrage, we can easily