ONE night during the long, hot Washington summer of 1940, as Americans debated how to handle the war in Europe, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida took a call from the police, asking what to do with his effigy. After a moment’s bafflement, Mr Pepper learned that a life-size dummy bearing his name had been hanged from an oak tree in front of the Senate, before being dragged around Capitol Hill behind a car. The lynch-mob was made up of angry ladies in hats: members of an isolationist mothers’ movement, incensed by his calls for young men to receive compulsory military training.

Thousands of women protesters prowled Congress that summer. Often clad in mourning black, they screamed and spat at members for plotting to kill their sons. The politicians were not much calmer. Feuding senators called one another war profiteers. A fist-fight broke out in the House of Representatives after one member growled “traitor” at a colleague. Even as German forces swept through Europe a leader of the Republican Party’s haul-up-the-drawbridge wing, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, declared that the big-government policies of President Franklin Roosevelt were a “good deal” more dangerous than Nazism.

Such scenes put into perspective today’s—mostly genteel—wrangling over Syria. America is not reliving 1940: a year vividly captured in a pair of new history books, “Those Angry Days” by Lynne Olson and “1940” by Susan Dunn. Still, powerful echoes can be heard. The Founding Fathers told Americans to beware of foreign entanglements. Suspicion of calls to intervene overseas has ebbed and flowed ever since, surging in moments of war-weariness. So 1940 marked a modern high point of isolationism in its purest form. Then as today, opponents of military intervention came from the right and the left, forging an uneasy alliance in response to painful memories of recent combat. In the “America First” era of Taft and lynch-mob mothers, that meant the first world war. Many came to see that conflict as a betrayal of American good faith. Woodrow Wilson sold the war as a crusade to make the world “safe for democracy”, but post-war Europe reverted to atavistic hatreds and nationalism. As Herbert Hoover, a former president, put it in 1941: “Europe degenerated into a hell, the brew from which poisons the earth today.”

Foreshadowing leftish critiques of the 2003 Iraq invasion, such farm-state populists as Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota convinced many that the Great War had been cooked up to profit “merchants of death”, from European bankers to arms-makers. On the isolationist right, such spokesmen as Charles Lindbergh, an aviator-turned-demagogue, urged Americans to shun European squabbles, and to seize the historic good fortune of isolation across an ocean. Lindbergh, though later marginalised by his anti-Semitism, commanded a nationwide audience with a 1939 radio broadcast in which he urged Americans to harden their hearts against tales of Old World suffering, judging the national interest as impersonally “as a surgeon with his knife”.

In 2013 it is not hard to find voices making similar arguments about the Middle East, as a region impervious to outsiders with good intentions. The Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons is “deplorable”, declares Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a conservative crowd-pleaser. But Syria “is in the midst of a sectarian civil war, born of centuries-old animosities”, in which America has no clear ally. Strange alliances abound. A protest on September 9th outside the White House found Syrian-American Christians holding portraits of Bashar Assad alongside white protesters clutching “No US troops in Syria” banners. One of the second group, Nancy Wild, thinks that in Syria “both sides are terrorists”. She supported George W. Bush and the wars he started. But after seeing bad outcomes across the Muslim world, she wants America to secure its borders and “hunker down”.

The cavalry is not on the way

Opinion polls point to a similarly hard-boiled national mood. Hefty majorities of Americans say that the Assad regime probably used chemical weapons against civilians. A smaller majority told a New York Times/CBS News poll that American air strikes would be at least somewhat effective in deterring new chemical attacks. But most still oppose such strikes. To state baldly the main parallel with 1940, lots of Americans sound sick of calls to fix Muslim countries, just as their grandparents were tired of trying to fix Europe. Yet there are instructive differences, too.

A revealing contrast with the past involves broader attitudes to war. Modern Americans, especially Republicans, insist that Congress should control any decision to strike Syria—by which they mostly mean that they want a veto over Mr Obama. In 1938 the House of Representatives only narrowly rejected a much more radical idea: that future wars would have to be approved by the public, via national referendums. In those febrile days generals would wear mufti rather than uniforms to congressional committees to avoid antagonising anti-war members, records Ms Olson, while shops near army bases routinely barred soldiers.

Modern Americans are wary of war but reverential towards warriors. Troops in uniform are invited to throw out first pitches at baseball games and hailed as they board airliners. At the most bruising congressional hearings, members are careful to thank uniformed, beribboned generals for their service.

In 1940 many drew the lesson “Never again” from their most recent war. Modern Americans draw nuanced lessons from 12 years of conflict. According to Gallup polling, most Americans now call the Iraq war a mistake. But by 51% to 44% they still think that going to war in Afghanistan was the right decision. Today’s America is not so much pacifist as fed up. But even a fed-up America is a big deal, as the world is now finding out.