Santorum made some fairly insulting remarks about the WWII generation recently:

But remember, the Greatest Generation, for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness, where our closest ally, Britain, was being bombed and leveled, while Japan was spreading its cancer all throughout Southeast Asia. America sat from 1940, when France fell, to December of ’41, and did almost nothing.

“Why? Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, ‘Well, you know, he’ll get better. You know, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This’ll be okay.’ Oh yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy, and after a while, you found out things about this guy over in Europe, and he’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? Why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems. Just get our families off to work and our kids off to school, and we’ll be okay.

All of the controversy over these remarks has completely missed that Santorum was saying that Americans prior to Pearl Harbor were all naive, overly-optimistic people who thought Hitler was a “nice guy.” That’s just not true. Obviously, there was a majority of Americans opposed to entering WWII prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was never quite as much popular enthusiasm for the European war as there was for the war in the Pacific, but opponents of U.S. entry had no illusions that Hitler was a “nice guy” who will “get better.” What they did believe was that it was a mistake for America to become embroiled in another European war. This was informed by the realistic (or some might say pessimistic) assessment that U.S. entry into WWI had all been for nothing, and that staying out of a major war was better for America than joining it.