The days of isolation are over warns President Roosevelt (1939)

“We have an interest,” he said, “wider than that of the mere defence of our sea-ringed continent. Our customs and actions are necessarily involved with those of the old world.”

“I pledge,” he said in another passage, “that my own country will also give economic support so that no American nation need surrender any fraction of its sovereign freedom to maintain its economic welfare.”

The speech was broadcast in six languages.

Mr Roosevelt was addressing the Board of the Pan-American Union.

“Few of us realise that the Pan-American organisation, as we know it, has now attained a longer history and a greater catalogue of achievements than any similar group of nations in American history,” he said.

“Justly we can be proud of it, but even more, we can look upon it as n. symbol of a great hope at a time when much of the world finds hope dim and difficult.

“The American family is today a great co-operative group facing the troubled world in serenity and calm. Our traditions and history are as deeply rooted in the Old World as are those of Europe.”

He continued: “What was it, then, that protected us from the tragic involvements which are today making the Old World a new cockpit of old struggles? The answer is easily found. A new and powerful ideal, that of the community of nations, sprang up at the same time that the Americas became free and independent.

“Elsewhere in the world to hold conferences such as ours, which meet every five years, it is necessary to fight a major war until exhaustion or defeat at length brings governments together to reconstruct their shattered fabrics. There is no fatality which forces the Old World towards new catastrophes, Men are not prisoners of fate. The are only prisoners in their own minds. They have within themselves the power to become free at any moment.”