Sunday · November 15, 2026
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19391776 Club

Roosevelt signs the Neutrality Act; Britain and France may now buy American arms for cash

The old embargo is repealed, but buyers must pay on the spot and haul the goods away themselves, and the Customs Service is ordered to enforce it.

For four years, American law had treated every country at war the same way: no arms for anyone. On November 4, 1939, with Germany having invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, Franklin Roosevelt signed a new Neutrality Act and ordered the Customs Service to put it into effect. Britain and France could now buy weapons from the United States, provided they paid cash immediately and carried the goods away themselves. The embargo acts of 1935 and 1937 were repealed in the same stroke…

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More from November 4
1924

Wyoming elects Nellie Tayloe Ross governor; the widow who said no never campaigned

A month after her husband's death, voters give her 55 percent of the ballots against Republican E. J. Sullivan.
1962

Tightrope flies from Johnston Island, and Operation Fishbowl is finished

A low-yield device on an XM-33 Strypi rocket ends the Atomic Energy Commission's high-altitude test series in the Pacific.
1979

Students storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seize hostages; they want the Shah sent home

Hundreds of students blindfold Marines and embassy staff and march them before photographers, with Washington's decision to shelter the exiled Shah as their stated grievance.
20081776 Club
Joe Biden takes the vice presidency over Sarah Palin as John McCain loses the race to succeed George W. Bush.
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More from The World Wars
1942

Japanese submarine shells Fort Stevens; Doney orders blackout, holds his guns

Commander Tagami surfaces I-25 at the Columbia River mouth after dark, fires seventeen rounds, and slips away undamaged, leaving cut telephone lines on the Oregon coast.
1942

Congress makes the Pledge of Allegiance official, fifty years after a magazine wrote it

The wording, unchanged from Bellamy's 1892 Columbus Day campaign, is now federal law, with the United States seven months into war.
1944

Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act; veterans to get mortgages, tuition, and a year's pay

Congress voted unanimously, sixteen days after D-Day, with the WWI bonus debacle and the 1932 Bonus Army march still fresh in every lawmaker's memory.
1945

Flag rises on Okinawa; Ushijima and his chief of staff are dead by their own hand

Eighty-two days of cave fighting, monsoon rain, and kamikaze attacks end with organized Japanese resistance broken and ninety miles of runway in Allied hands.
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