Email, David B Woolner, senior fellow and Hyde Park resident historian, The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, June 12, 2014

10:20 a.m.

As I noted yesterday in the phone this fact has been noted many times, you may find it referenced on p. 63 in a book I co-edited entitled FDR's World: War Peace and Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan 2008)  in the chapter entitled "FDR and the Origins of the National Security Establishment," by Mark Stoler, one of the foremost military historians in the United States. The direct source is in footnote # 2, p. 83: The Statistical History of the United States , Colonial Times to the Present, published by the Census Bureau.

It is also reference in various places in the official US Amry History of the Second World War (multiple volumes), including p21 of the volume Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940-1943, U.S. Army in World War II Series by the Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office (hereafter cited as GPO), 1955; reprint ed., 1984.

I should also point out here that the small size of the US Army in 1938-39 is sometimes referenced as being ranked 17th in the world, sometimes listed as smaller than Belgium, etc. it depends to a certain extent when the comparison is being made. The main point is that in the interwar years, the US Congress and public were very isolationist, and the United States was not the same sort of world leader it is today. That change came under Franklin Roosevelt, who orchestrated the largest military build up in world history - all of which required major Federal expenditures and borrowing - the kind of spending and borrowing that dwarfed the New Deal and brought an end to the Great Depression and which after the war led to the birth of the modern middle class and largest period of economic expansion in US history - so much for the perils of deficit spending!

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-David Woolner