Today’s Echoes of the First ‘America First’
Charles Lindbergh’s ideology prefigured Donald Trump’s—and was rightly disgraced.
America First
Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War
by H.W. Brands
Doubleday, 464 pp., $35
THERE WAS A TIME, NOT LONG AGO, when a revanchist European dictator unleashed a devastating, genocidal war in the heart of Europe. Acting with a kind of messianic imperialism that the continent, and much of the world, thought they’d left behind, this despot built out alliances with similar fascistic regimes elsewhere—including, most especially, a brutal Asian regime bent on overturning the broader order in the western Pacific, and perhaps far beyond.
All the while, this European tyrant cultivated allies within the West—suckers and sycophants, far-right fellow travelers, any and all who nursed a grudge against both the liberal world order and the primacy of a democratic West. And this dictator found a fecund field of support in nation after nation. This was true even within the United States—especially among the so-called “isolationists,” who claimed that America had grown tired of its global entanglements and was eager to wash its hands of anything beyond its immediate shores. These isolationists found a lodestar in a man previously feted for accomplishments that had nothing to do with intellectual or geopolitical savvy, or even with politics whatsoever.1
It didn’t matter to these isolationists—those who congealed into a movement called “America First”—that their leader maintained his own curious, even suspicious, links with the European dictator devastating innocent nations across the continent, and eyeing geopolitical victories far beyond. All that mattered was disentangling the United States from any interests in Europe. And if that required dissolving American alliances—or even, if necessary, American democracy itself—so be it.
To say that the history of this era—of the years leading up to the Second World War, as Adolf Hitler ran roughshod around Europe—has modern echoes is an understatement. But as H.W. Brands writes in his illuminating, propulsive new book America First, it’s not simply the geopolitics of that era that now resonate. It’s not simply that, like Hitler, Vladimir Putin has claimed the right to European primacy, and is willing to obliterate neighboring nations—and use genocidal methods—on his march. And it’s not simply that, like Hitler, Putin has cobbled an alliance of authoritarian regimes, from Iran to North Korea to China. It’s also that, like Hitler, Putin has successfully cultivated support within the West, from religious fundamentalists to illiberal authoritarians to all those who would shatter Western democracy itself.
And it’s also that, as Brands makes clear, there was one man—a first among America Firsters, as it were—who tried to convince the United States to make peace with Hitler, and with the fact that America had no interests in things like European stability, or even global stability itself. There are, of course, worlds of difference between figures like Donald Trump and Charles Lindbergh, the latter of whom serves as one of the focal points for Brands’s new book. But at their core, their worldviews—and arguably their legacies—are broadly similar. Where others would face down tyrants, both Trump and Lindbergh continually preach appeasement. And where others would see America’s interests intertwined with those of existing allies, both Trump and Lindbergh would prefer to return the United States to something of an island-state—a world in which, if only we pull up the drawbridges and plug our ears to the pleas of nations trampled by expansionists dictators, all will be well.
INDEED, IT IS BECAUSE OF THE RISE of a figure like Trump—and the simultaneous return of revanchist European imperialism, thanks to Putin—that Americans have rediscovered the story of Lindbergh in recent years. Celebrated around the world for his feats of aviation, Lindbergh launched a second career as the locus of pro-Hitler appeasement, doing everything in his power to prevent the United States from entering, let alone winning, the Second World War. It is a story well-trod in books like Susan Dunn’s 1940, Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days, and Paul M. Sparrow’s recent Awakening the Spirit of America. And it’s one that Brands, as a historian and author on everything from the Revolutionary War to Ronald Reagan, similarly charts, tracing Lindbergh’s descent from simple celebrity to outspoken antisemite.
In approaching Lindbergh, Brands allows the aviator’s voice to take up entire paragraphs, and even entire chapters, of America First. Much of the book’s treatment of Lindbergh relies less on Brands’s analysis than on lengthy stretches of unbroken entries from Lindbergh’s journal, or on overlooked radio appearances and public talks he gave. In so doing—in allowing Lindbergh’s words to sit, untreated, on the page, for the modern reader to sift through—Brands brings Lindbergh to life in a way other historians haven’t managed to do.
And the Lindbergh who emerges is as myopic and nativist as popularly remembered. Describing Hitler’s war in Europe as “one half of the white race against the other half,” Lindbergh’s core belief is impossible to miss: that the United States must not seek to defeat Germany, whatever the cost. The Nazi regime, as Lindbergh sees it, did not threaten American interests. If anything, Lindbergh said, “the welfare of our Western civilization necessitated a strong Germany as a buffer to Asia”—and that he “would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England or even with Germany, with all her faults,” than with the Communist regime in Moscow.
But it wasn’t just that the United States should avoid war with the Nazis—it was that, as Lindbergh saw it, Hitler had done nothing wrong. In Lindbergh’s eyes, the fault of the Second World War lay not with Hitler’s genocidal mania but with countries like Britain and France, which declared war on Berlin for specious, spurious reasons—and which should not be allowed to win. “I feel it would be better for us, and for every nation in Europe, to have this war end without a conclusive victory,” Lindbergh said at one point. “I think a negotiated peace would be to the best interests of [the United States].”
Using Lindbergh’s words alone, Brands confirms the reputation the former aviator had developed for himself: as someone willing to peddle appeasement for anyone who’d listen. And as Brands makes clear, Lindbergh—despite having been directly awarded a Nazi German Eagle by Hermann Goering—had no pecuniary motivation. Instead, he did it out of pure ideological fervor. In contrast to certain pro-Putin voices on today’s American right, Lindbergh was never a paid stooge of a foreign dictatorship. He meant every word.
It is that conviction that is perhaps the greatest revelation of Brands’s book. In allowing Lindbergh to speak for himself, Brands reveals him to be something that history has largely washed out of his reputation: that the former flying ace was, if nothing else, a dullard. A bloodless, almost emotionless automaton, dedicated to little other than blocking American involvement in the Second World War. There are scant signs of an internal life, only an occasional reminiscence of memories with his grandfather or walks through the woods. Lindbergh reveals himself as a shallow, monochromatic figure, a man who can see things only one way. Small wonder that the most cutting comments about Lindbergh in Brands’s book come not from those who accused him of being a Nazi agent but from Harold Nicolson, the British politician and diplomat, who quipped, “Let us not allow this incident to blind us to the great qualities of Charles Lindbergh; he is, and always will be, not merely a school-boy hero, but a school boy.”
It is that schoolboy’s attitude that, as Brands accurately summarizes, propelled Lindbergh to lead his “campaign against modernity.” In his writings and his speeches, Lindbergh viewed America in a nineteenth-century, or even eighteenth-century, framing—as a nation protected by impenetrable oceans, untouched and untouchable, even while Europe and Asia went up in flames. It was a viewpoint that, even by the early twentieth century, was an outmoded concept, not least once things like German rocketry and submarines figured into the defense calculus. But Lindbergh, for all of the ways he advanced aviation, was a man stuck as a boy, with a boy’s understanding of the way the world worked.
THANKFULLY, LINDBERGH NEVER ATTAINED anything like the political power Trump achieved. As Brands illustrates, for every one of Lindbergh’s anti-interventionist thrusts, Presidential Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a successful parry, and kept the United States steadily on the march to the right side of history. As with Lindbergh, Brands allows FDR’s voice—his fireside chats and his secret letters, his campaign speeches and his back-channels with London—to carry much of the book. In so doing, FDR emerges as the anti-Lindbergh not only in terms of policy, but also personality. Where Lindbergh cleaves any emotion out of his voice, FDR basks in it. Where Lindbergh seems content to exist in only two dimensions, FDR sprawls through all three. Where Lindbergh remains staid and stale, FDR dances off the page. (Paul Sparrow, in his recent book, quotes a famous line of Churchill’s: “Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”)
And where Lindbergh sees a small, reticent United States afraid of its own shadow, FDR sees—and wills into being—the colossus that is modern America, confident in its abilities, in its place, and its ability to lead the world to a brighter future. “Some indeed still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force,” FDR said at one point.
Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom—the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.
If anything, America’s fate was directly tied to those nations suffering at the hands of imperial monsters. “We must look ahead and see the effect on our own future if all the small nations of the world have their independence snatched from them or become mere appendages to relatively vast and powerful military systems,” the president said. Because if there is one lesson that the dictators of that era—and this one, as well—have illustrated, it is that they do not stop. Not at borders. And certainly not at oceans. The United States, as FDR added, “will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.” If Lindbergh and his America Firsters got their way, they would usher in a bleak, battered world, in which America would be forced to service and supplicate powerful dictatorships—dictators who knew that they could get away with murder, on the grandest of scales, so long as isolationists held sway in the United States.
This is a side of FDR that remains familiar to modern audiences. And it is, as Brands’s timely book reminds readers, an element of FDR’s leadership that only grows more relevant—and worth reading, by Americans across the political spectrum.
ALL OF WHICH RAISES A QUESTION: With President-elect Trump as the clear inheritor of Lindbergh’s legacy, and with America Firsters now more emboldened than ever, where is Roosevelt’s heir? With the Democrats trounced in the recent election, any inheritor seems further away than ever—if anyone can, in this world once more of expansionist empires and trammeled democracy, even reclaim such a legacy anyway.
It all adds up to one uncomfortable, even nauseating, reality. FDR may have snatched victory from Lindbergh in the lead-up to the Second World War. But with Trump’s victory, it’s now possible to claim that Lindbergh, and his strain of isolationism, has claimed the last laugh—and joined a chorus of cheers from all of the dictators, despots, and kleptocrats around the world who are likewise cheering Trump’s return to the White House, and to whatever comes next.
The term “isolationist” was, as Brands highlights, a misnomer. After all, Lindbergh was perfectly content intervening anywhere in the Western Hemisphere for America’s interests—making him not an “isolationist” but a “hemispherist” who firmly believed in the Monroe Doctrine.
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