The ‘America First’ idea goes back 70 years—and Donald Trump used to oppose it
Some of the most powerful people in the U.S. supported isolationism
On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh, the iconic aviation hero, stepped up to a bank of microphones to deliver an address before a large crowd in Des Moines, Iowa. He cleared his throat and delivered what would become his most famous speech.
It was the latest stop on Lindbergh’s speaking tour that had packed halls and arenas across the country, including Madison Square Garden. The subject was not his historic 1927 aviation feat for making the first solo transatlantic flight. Nor was the talk about the sensationalism-packed “Crime of the Century” — the 1932 kidnapping and death of his son that led to a self-imposed exile in Europe for nearly a decade.
Instead, it was about politics and war.
Brave, handsome, and charismatic, Lindbergh had become the public face of the America First Committee — the organization that some saw as protectionist but came to be viewed as isolationist, conspiratorial, and anti-Semitic for its urging of the U.S. appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
The America First Committee, which was founded in spring of 1940 on the tree-lined campus of Yale University, opposed any American participation in World War II, and was sharply critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it insisted was marching the U.S. toward war. Instead, their solution to the international crisis was to promote a negotiated peace with Hitler.
From the outset, the Yale law student founders — future vice president Gerald Ford, future Supreme Court justice Potter Stuart, and Douglas Stuart Jr., the son of a Quaker Oats co-founder — set the tone in a drafted petition stating, “We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.” Other Yale students — including Sargent Shriver, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Kingman Brewster, the head of the Yale Daily News (and future president of Yale and ambassador to the Court of St. James) — signed on to their isolationist crusade.
Future president John F. Kennedy sent a $100 check, with a note that read, “What you all are doing is vital.”
With chapters across the country quickly organizing Americans who were against an American role in the war, America First counted nearly one million dues-paying members that drew from conservative and socialist circles alike. Funding soon came from some of America’s wealthiest families, including Robert Wood, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck; Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune; Sterling Morton of the Morton Salt Company; and Minnesota meatpacker Jay Hormel.
But in its attempt to brand itself as a mainstream organization, America First also struggled with some of its most famous members.
It had to remove from its executive committee not only Henry Ford, who had paid to publish a series of anti-Semitic pamphlets called The International Jew, but also Avery Brundage, the former U.S. Olympic Committee chairman who had barred two American Jewish runners from competing in the finals of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The leader from a chapter in Kansas had declared President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt “Jewish” and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill a “half-Jew.”
In his Des Moines speech, Lindbergh expressed sympathy for the persecution of Jews in Germany. In the next breath, however, he said American Jews were pressing the U.S. to enter a war that was not only against American interests, but also their own.
“Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Lindbergh said. “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.”
Lindbergh also lamented the power American Jews had in the U.S., saying, “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”
Jeering began to drown out the cheering, repeatedly forcing him to stop and wait for lulls in the shouting before attempting to speak again.
Lindbergh’s speech was immediately slapped down as anti-Semitic in media and in politics. The Des Moines Register called his speech “so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this country.”
A San Francisco Chronicle editorial wrote that “the voice is the voice of Lindbergh, but the words are the words of Hitler.” New York Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote of Lindbergh’s speech and the America First Committee, “I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.”
Just a few months later, the America First Committee was forced to back off its non-interventionist campaign when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The following day, the U.S. declared war on Japan, which led to Germany and Italy declaring war on the U.S.
Roosevelt reciprocated.
“We have been stepping closer to war for many months,” Lindbergh said in an address, as America First canceled his next big speech at the Boston Garden. “Now it has come and we must meet it as united Americans regardless of our attitude in the past toward the policy our government has followed.”
Although Lindbergh’s reputation had suffered beyond repair in the eyes of most Americans, he attempted to revive it through newfound bellicosity.
“Whether or not that policy has been wise, our country has been attacked by force of arms and by force of arms we must retaliate,” said Lindbergh. “Our own defenses and our own military position have already been neglected too long. We must now turn every effort to building the greatest and most efficient Army, Navy, and Air Force in the world. When American soldiers go to war it must be with the best equipment that modern skill can design and that modern industry can build.”
Just three days after that attack on Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee formally disbanded on December 10, 1941, but they remained defiant in their beliefs. “Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided. No good purpose can now be served by considering what might have been, had our objectives been attained,” they insisted, in a statement announcing their dissolution.
Elements of the America First Committee platform have resurfaced in the decades following their disbandment.
Far-right political figure Pat Buchanan praised America First, saying the “achievements of that organization are monumental,” and used its name as the slogan in his bid for the presidency on the 2000 Reform Party ticket.
One of Buchanan’s stiffest critics denounced him as “a Hitler lover” for his America First slogan, adding, “I guess he’s an anti-Semite…He doesn’t like the blacks, he doesn’t like the gays.” That devastating critique of Buchanan’s “America First” slogan as discriminatory and xenophobic was lodged by a billionaire businessman. His name is Donald Trump.
