It was that damn traitor Roosevelt, that’s why! How did he ever think giving lend lease aid to the Soviet Union was a reasonable idea?!? What a toady to a non-democratic dictatorship, a pawn in Stalin’s pocket! How did he get away with strengthening COMMUNISM?
Actually, the US had been isolationist for quite some time after WWI, and we didn’t really care about what happened on the other side of the world, right up to the moment where it was almost TOO LATE to do anything about it (imagine if the Nazis had taken over Moscow in Dec 1941, it’d def be a different history right now). Also, the US had just come out of the GREAT DEPRESSION, and captialism wasn’t seen as the motive force driving world progress forward at the time. A hell of a lot of government programs were keeping the country on its feet back then, and continued to do so during the war years. So Communism didn’t sound that bad to a lot of folks at the time (probably cause the country was essentially socialist for most of a decade), and a lot of people even had Communist Party membership cards. Remember anything about the McCarthy trials in the US in the 1950’s; most of the victims imprisoned were Depression Era “communists”, and I very much doubt many of them were die-hard Stalinists promoting world dictatorships of the proletariat.
It’s kinda funny when you think how Hitler came to power in Germany by promising the European elites (i.e., Chamberlain) he would eradicate Communism in Europe, THEN the historic Non-Aggression Pact with Russia with 1939 against the Western Powers and the seizure of Poland, THEN you had capitalist Britain pledging allegiance with communist Russia once they were both in the soup against Germany in 1941. It was pretty much anybody’s game back then, where the enemy of my enemy is my friend unless he’s my enemy tomorrow, but maybe he’s my friend today. In 1940 countries were a lot smaller and the was world divided into more spheres of influence… so the US backing up a Communist dictatorship whose sole goal was the overthrow of capitalism across the world wasn’t that far-fetched an idea in 1940. We take for granted today just how powerful the US is in world affairs, compared to how little we cared back around the start of WWII.