Eric and Eliot welcome Professor H.W. Brands, the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at the University of Texas, Austin and the bestselling author of more than a dozen books on American history. They discuss his book America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War (New York: Doubleday, 2024) touching on: what drew Brands to the subject of the America First movement; the nature of the national debate on radio from 1939–1941; the transformation of the nation's default foreign policy of noninterventionism to globalism; the role of the congressional fight over repealing the Neutrality Acts; Lindbergh’s racialized thinking and antisemitism; how the speech he gave in Des Moines at an America First rally in fall 1941 destroyed his national image and reputation; Lindbergh’s personal character (and his multiple affairs with and children by German women in the last twenty years of his life); the transition in elite thinking from hemispheric defense to a global posture of forward defense; the British and German influence operations to shape American public opinion before Pearl Harbor; the contemporary overtones of Lindbergh’s noninterventionism; and the political naïveté today visible in Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast cosponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
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