|
America First:
the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh
and the Second World War, 1940-1941
David Gordon
History Department
Bronx Community College / CUNY Graduate Center
Originally
presented at a joint meeting of the Historical Society and
The New York Military Affairs Symposium
on September 26, 2003
Democratic nations seldom go to war
willingly. The natural instinct of voters is to preserve peace
whenever possible. Aided by a free press, there is also never a
shortage of those ready to suggest alternatives to conflict. Yet
sometimes war is inevitable. This is most obviously true when a
nation is attacked. For some there is no other legitimate reason for
war. Others believe that hostile intent on the part of other
countries is also sufficient cause. The legitimacy of this view, as
well as the question of how one measures intent, can be the subject of
much debate. Such times are painful moments in the life of a nation.
The United States faced such a crisis during the first years of the
Second World War. Following the fall of France in the spring
of 1940, some Americans wanted to enter the war on the side of Britain
against what they believed was a Nazi threat to democracy everywhere.
The great majority did not. Yet most also believed Germany would
eventually attack the United States.[1]
They therefore wanted to give Britain whatever it needed to survive,
in order to preserve it as a bulwark against eventual Nazi aggression.
The America First Committee,
created in September 1940, was not only against entry into the war.
It also opposed aid. Its program was simple.
Since the United States, if properly armed, was impregnable against
German attack, there was no reason to help England. Aid would not
only fatally weaken America‘s own defenses. It would also draw the
country into the conflict.[2]
The leaders of the AFC claimed they were motivated by concern for
American lives. For some, this was no doubt true. For others,
humanitarian rhetoric hid different motives. Many joined the AFC as a
way of attacking President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Still others
had more sinister reasons. The evolution of the America First
movement in the eighteen months of debate preceding Pearl Harbor
revealed xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiment both within the AFC
leadership, and among its supporters. This
study of the America First Committee is thus a cautionary tale. It is
a reminder that anti-war movements are not always, or entirely, the
humanitarian movements their supporters claim them to be. But it is
also a moral tale, asking an important question in international
relations - that of what one democratic nation owes another in times
of mortal danger.
Americans had been largely
indifferent to the beginning of Nazi dictatorship in 1933.
Opinion had begun to change only after kristallnacht,
the first important anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany in November of
1938, and the occupation of the Czech lands the following March.[3]
By the summer of 1939, when war between Germany and the western
democracies seemed inevitable, most Americans had assumed it would be
a long struggle, in which a British naval blockade would eventually
strangle Germany into submission. Opinion in the United States was
overwhelmingly in favor of staying out of the war. At the same time,
an October Fortune magazine poll showed 85% of Americans hoped Britain
and France would win.[4]
Assumptions about the course of the
war changed in the spring of 1940. The sudden collapse of France,
arguably the greatest surprise of the European conflict, left England
to face Germany alone. An even larger number of Americans as a result
came to believe Hitler would eventually attack them They were more
anxious than ever to make sure Britain would not lose, and wanted to
supply the munitions necessary to preserve the last important
democracy in Europe.[5]
Pro-British organization like Friends of Democracy, founded in 1937,
and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, created in
May of 1940, enjoyed increased support.[6]
A more stridently interventionist group, the Fight For Freedom
Committee, followed in April of 1941.[7]
Still, as late as November of 1941 only one American in four favored
an immediate declaration of war.[8]
This kind of anti-war sentiment was
not enough to reassure America First. Its leaders remembered how most
Americans had wanted to stay out of the First War. Wilson’s 1916
electoral slogan claimed “He kept us out of war.” In the end none of
it had mattered. Less than six months after being re-elected,
Wilson had brought the nation into the fight. America Firsters were
certain Roosevelt would do the same. The
greatest weakness of the anti-war movement before 1917 had been
widespread sympathy for Britain and France. It remained so in 1940.
The central task of the Committee therefore became to reduce support
for Britain. Building on the fears of the electorate, its leaders set
out to convince Americans that aid was synonymous with war. But
America First did much more. It claimed the nation could work
peacefully and profitably with Germany. It consistently minimized or
ignored Hitler’s crimes in Europe. At the same time the
Committee’s unceasing criticism of the British Empire helped convince
at least some voters that democratic England was not only an unworthy
recipient of American aid, it was also undeserving of American
sympathy.
The America First Committee
initially had seemed only the latest and most extreme example of
isolationist opinion in the United States that had grown up in the
1920s, and which had become stronger during the Great Depression.
There had been a widespread belief in America since 1919 that the
country had gained nothing out of the First War. That this was not
true had little effect. The earliest important anti-war organization,
the Keep America Out of War Congress, had been created in 1938 by
Socialist Norman Thomas with the help of liberals like John T. Flynn,
Oswald Garrison Villard, the former editor of the Nation, and
Harry Elmer Barnes, revisionist historian of the First World War.[9]
Anti-war organizations on American campuses were similarly led by
liberals, Socialists and Communists. The Committee itself had been
created by two Yale students. (One, Robert Douglas Stuart Jr., a 24
year old Princeton graduate, and son of the senior vice president of
the Quaker Oats Company, was a law student sympathetic with New Deal
reforms.[10]
The other was Kingman Brewster.[11])
America First therefore appeared neither particularly conservative,
nor pro-German. It was not surprising that Thomas and Villard soon
joined the executive board.[12]
However, most AFC supporters were
neither liberal, nor Socialist. Many simply wanted to stay out of the
war. Since many also came from the Midwest, an area never as
sensitive to European problems as the east coast, isolationist
arguments was soon buttressed by more traditional prejudices against
eastern industrial and banking interests. (Almost two-thirds of the
Committee’s 850,000 registered supporters would eventually come from
the Midwest, mostly from a radius of three hundred miles around
Chicago.)[13]
Many AFC supporters were certain industry and the banks wanted war for
their own profit.[14]
Many other supporters were Republicans who flocked to the AFC for
partisan political reasons. Still others were covertly pro-German.
Some were German-Americans whose sentimental attachments had not been
diminished by the crimes of the Nazi regime. Others, whether of
German origin or not, were attracted to Hitler’s racism and
anti-Semitism.
Midwestern voters had long been
suspicious of eastern elites. The building of transcontinental
railroads, organized by New York bankers and financed with British
capital, had opened new markets for farm produce. Yet dependence on
them had also created fear and hatred in many farming states.[15]
By the 1890s, the struggle for a “cheap dollar” that would help
farmers pay off mortgages, and which led them to support a silver and
gold based currency, had brought them into open conflict with New York
bankers anxious to preserve a gold standard. William Jennings Bryan’s
“Cross of Gold” speech had stirred many farming communities. It had
done little to advance their cause. Farm fortunes had improved
dramatically during the First World War, when J.P Morgan and Company,
as official British purchasing agent, had paid inflated prices for
Midwest produce. But it was the subsequent collapse of farm prices
after 1920 (when the commodity price index fell from 205 that year to
116 in 1921) that was remembered in the decades before Pearl Harbor.[16]
The enduring anger this created would provide fertile ground for
anti-British and anti-eastern rhetoric.
Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota
was typical of those Western and Midwestern politicians who combined
support for farmers with hostility to the east. As chair of the
Senate’s Munitions Investigating Committee between 1934 and 1935, he
had delighted constituents by questioning the patriotism of industrial
and financial leaders like the DuPonts and J.P. Morgan.[17]
Convinced these same groups were again attempting to get America into
war, he became one of Congress’s most eloquent supporters of America
First. He was joined by Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, William
Borah of Idaho, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, George Norris of
Nebraska, Robert Taft of Ohio and Henrick Shipstead of Minnesota,
among others. All except Taft were Progressives who had supported
much of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda.[18]
Some, like Nye, who wanted a reorganization of the Federal Reserve
system for the benefit of farmers, had even found the president’s
first New Deal too moderate.[19]
They now opposed his efforts to bring America into the war. Like Nye,
they were certain it would hurt farmers, while helping industry and
the banks. They also wanted to avoid helping Britain. Some feared
war would detract from domestic reforms. Finally, all had become
suspicious of what seemed Roosevelt’s overweening ambition.[20]
The president’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term had
troubled many. That his decision had been made more acceptable
because of the war crisis made them angry.[21]
They suspected the president was pushing the nation towards war
primarily to get reelected. Like Nye, many Progressive senators
therefore turned against his anti-Nazi policies, and supported America
First.
The AFC found partisans in other
quarters as well. Progressive senators may have helped the Committee,
but its most important supporters were a core group of Republican
Chicago businessmen. Chief among them was General Robert Wood, CEO of
Sears, Roebuck, who had replaced the impossibly young R. Douglas
Stuart as president of America First. Wood had served during the
First World War as acting Quartermaster General of the army. After
joining Marshall Field in the immediate post-war period, he later
moved to Sears, Roebuck, eventually becoming president, and finally,
in 1939, chairman of the board. Like Nye, Wood had originally
supported some of Roosevelt’s policies, including the AAA, the SEC and
Social Security. But he had rebelled against excessive taxation that
he believed was undermining capitalism.[22]
Other Chicago businessmen, such as meat packers Jay Hormel and Philip
Swift, and William J. Grace, head of one of Chicago’s largest
investment firms, had never supported the president. All became key
Committee members. Colonel Robert J. McCormick, owner of the
Chicago Tribune, was the most influential of all. A passionate
Roosevelt hater and Anglophobe, his paper became an important
disseminator of AFC propaganda.
Ultimately, the Committee’s
executive board contained a more diverse group than even Progressives
and Republicans. Among them were Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Eddie
Rickenbacker, Kathleen Norris, the popular novelist, Robert Maynard
Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, Lillian Gish, and,
for a time, Henry Ford. The leadership of the New York branch was
even more diverse, with Norman Thomas and Charles A. Beard working
with Herbert Hoover and Joseph Patterson, conservative publisher of
the New York Daily News.[23]
Clearly, the anti-war movement won the support of many humanitarians
and pacifists, as well as others inspired by partisan politics,
provincialism and bigotry.
The leaders of the AFC had different
political beliefs, but once they decided to work together, they began
to sound remarkably alike. Like their supporters in Congress, many
believed war hysteria was being created to distract the public from
the failures of the New Deal.[24]
The second collapse of the economy in 1937, widely regarded as
the “Roosevelt depression,” had certainly hurt the president. His
prestige was at its lowest during the early part of 1939. Precedent,
as well as his failed economic record, had suggested that his second
term would be his last. Then came the war crisis, and the revival of
his fortunes. Many believed, in the words of John Flynn, that
Roosevelt wanted war because he found it a “glorious, magnificent
escape from all the insoluble problems of America.”[25]
In order to defeat the president’s
pro-British agenda, Committee members insisted the crimes of the
western powers were as great as those of Germany. Their arguments
usually began with a formulaic denunciation of Hitler, without any
serious examination of his actions. This was followed by a detailed
catalogue of the sins of the allies.[26]
Since the war initially was assumed by AFC spokesmen to be for the
preservation of the French and British colonial empires, and not for
the democracies themselves, they could claim that Britain and France
were as least as great oppressors as Hitler.[27]
This argument, however, did not change even when the situation of the
democracies became desperate. Thus, Norman Thomas had insisted in
1939 that “French imperialism is … a curse to mankind, and that the
anti-German phobia of the French did much to create the Nazi
movement.” Yet even after June 1940 he would continue to turn his fury
against Britain. Senator Nye in the same period called the British
empire “the very acme of reaction … and exploitation.”[28]
As late as July of 1941, with the Nazi invasion of Russia already
begun, Robert Maynard Hutchins could still write that there were more
victims of aggression before1939 than after. These included
“populations in Indochina, Africa, the Malay States, and especially,
India.” General Hugh Johnson, former director of the National Recovery
Act, also insisted that Britain’s sole war aim was “to maintain her
dominant Empire position with her own kinsmen (as well as) over black,
brown and yellow conquered and subject peoples in three continents.”[29]
One AFC pamphlet asked “when Britain is going to release the 30,000
political prisoners in India?“[30]
The verdict was clear. The European democracies, tainted by
imperialism, were not worth saving. But it took a sly politician like
Gerald Nye to strike the appropriate homely note. “The conflict in
Europe,” he said, was not “worthy of the sacrifice of one American
mule, much less one American son.”[31]
In making these arguments, America
Firsters chose to ignore fundamental differences between the western
empires and Nazi rule in Europe. Hitler in the first six months of
1940 had overrun six democratic states. He was determined to destroy
democracy wherever he found it.[32]
His rabid hatred of Jews and Slavs was already having affect in
Poland. The Holocaust had not yet begun. But the Polish educated
classes were already being systematically destroyed, and Polish
schools and universities permanently closed. Jews were being
ghettoized in horrific conditions. Anyone interested could have
discovered these things. The French and British colonial empires were
not democratic. But by the 1930s they had no central or consistent
policy of slavery and mass murder. Created in a earlier age
uninformed by Wilsonian principles, they were moving, however slowly,
towards more democratic government and greater respect for individual
human rights.
The most important
difference, however, was between the governments of France and Britain
themselves, and Nazi Germany. Britain and France (before Vichy) had
both valued humanitarian ideals, which, however poorly honored at home
and abroad, still assured the fundamental human rights of their
citizens. These, combined with a free press, had also come by the
1930s to mitigate the worst excesses of colonialism. It was the
British press that had made Gandhi a hero, and allowed his campaigns
of passive resistance to succeed. The 1937 Government of India Act
had hardly satisfied members of the Congress Party anxious for
immediate independence. But it was a step towards democracy and
self-government. Hitler’s dictatorship repudiated both democracy and
human rights. The Nazi empire was the arena in which Hitler’s master
race philosophy was to be put into practice. Censorship prevented the
German press from exciting the conscience of the nation. There could
never have been a successful passive resistance movement against the
Nazis. The inability of members of the AFC to recognize this,
especially men like Hutchins of Chicago, and Norman Thomas, is
remarkable.
It was fear - fear of war, and fear
of Communism - that created this failure. AFC propaganda never sounded
more genuine than when it warned about the effects of war. America
had entered the First World War late. Casualties had been relatively
light, and the country had emerged as the world’s industrial and
financial giant. This did not prevent the Committee leadership from
being convinced another war would have a devastating effect on
America. Many thought it would destroy both democracy and
capitalism. The Chicago Tribune assured readers it would cost
“four hundred billion dollars, a million deaths, and several million
ruined lives.”[33]
John Flynn warned that “our economic system will be broken. Our
financial burdens will be insupportable… The streets will be filled
with idle men and women. The once independent farmer will become a
government charge … and amidst these disorders we will have the
perfect climate for some … Hitler on the American model to rise to
power … .”[34]
The First War had led to dictatorship in Russia, Italy, and
ultimately, Germany. The lesson seemed plain. “If America goes to
war, we shall inevitably have fascism in this country,” Flynn
concluded.[35]
Robert Hutchins put it more simply. “The American people,” he wrote in
Scribner’s Commentator in April of 1941, “are about to commit
suicide.”[36]
Fear of war would drive America Firsters to increasingly extreme
rhetoric.
Charles Lindbergh was among the most extreme AFC
spokesmen.[37]
He also
introduced a troubling new theme into the America First campaign. It
was support for Germany. Most AFC supporters opposed war. Many had
criticized Britain and France simply to balance the general American
dislike of the Nazis. To justify their position, they had noisily
opposed British imperialism. Some were also anti-English, but the
England they hated was largely the City of London’s financial
establishment. Many America Firsters, like
most Americans, still wanted Britain to win the war, even if they
didn’t want to do anything to help.[38]
Very few AFC members discounted the importance of democracy and
personal freedom. Lindbergh, with what one critic called an
“Olympian contempt for all democratic processes,” did.[39]
Despite formulaic protestations about its “excesses,” he found
much to admire in the new German state. He also shared many of its
leaders’ racial beliefs. Lindbergh was not against war. He simply
opposed war with Germany.
Lindbergh’s opinions were not shared
by all AFC leaders, or the membership. However, he was the
Committee’s most popular spokesman.[40]
His speeches were heard by hundreds of thousands within the
movement, and millions outside. As such, he was the Committee’s most
important asset, the one voice that was always assured a national
hearing. By the beginning of 1941 General Wood even began to
hope Lindbergh would replace him as head of the Committee.[41]
Lindbergh would ultimately decline, although he would remain very
popular with the leadership. By choosing to serve with him, Wood and
the others also chose to associate themselves, at least to some
extent, with his beliefs.
This decision would prove fatal.
Lindbergh gave voice to Nazi fellow travelers and anti-Semites who
were among the least worthy elements within America First. They
repaid him with enthusiastic support. His appearances at Committee
rallies were always charged with excitement. But he also attracted to
the AFC extremists and bigots who previously had been discouraged from
joining.[42]
Popular to the end, his reckless rhetoric would fatally wound the
Committee in the eyes of the nation. Some members of the leadership
would eventually repudiate him. Most did not, and chose to follow him
into the moral wilderness. This decision would destroy the reputation
of the AFC.
Lindbergh, like the rest of
the Committee, had been driven by fear of Communism. But while the
others also feared for American democracy, Lindbergh was concerned
about the future of the white race, and what he called “western
civilization.” That his definition did not include democracy soon
became painfully apparent. “Our bond with Europe is a bond of race,
and not of political ideology,” he would insist.[43]
Neither did it include freedom for the smaller nations of Europe. The
great western nations, in which he included Germany, were the only
ones of importance for him, since they alone demonstrated the
industrial and technological superiority that he admired, and which he
believed was proof of racial superiority.[44]
The only real danger to civilization, Lindbergh believed, was from
lesser breeds, the “pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown” who were
incapable of technological progress. The Soviet Union‘s “semi-Asiatic
hordes,” being the best organized and armed, were the most dangerous.
Long before the war began, Lindbergh believed he had found the means
of defeating this threat. It was Nazi Germany.[45]
Lindbergh had long admired
German engineering, industry and “efficiency.“ He also believed these
had improved under Hitler’s dictatorship.[46]
Best of all, Nazi Germany was the Soviet Union‘s greatest enemy.
Lindbergh had begun to worry even before the war that “the potentially
gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical
idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without
realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape,
loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the
fatal wounding of western civilization.”[47]
After the war began, he still hoped bloodshed between Britain, France
and Germany, could be avoided. In the Fall of 1939, with Poland
already overrun, but with the western powers not yet engaged, he
lamented that “the heirs of European culture are on the verge of a
disastrous war … which will reduce the strength and destroy the
treasures of the White race … (and) which may even lead to the end of
our civilization.” Its preservation could only be guaranteed by a
united “Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a
Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.”[48]
Since the war in Europe was between western nations, it was not only
pointless, but suicidal. Neither the freedom of Poland, nor the
destruction of the Nazi dictatorship, seemed worth the struggle. Even
after the invasion of Poland, he refused to blame Hitler for the
conflict. “No one, not even Germany,” he asserted, “is more
responsible for the conditions that caused this war than England and
France.”[49]
This was pretty strong
stuff. Lindbergh’s racial beliefs were probably not very different
from those of many Americans convinced by arguments about northern and
western European racial superiority made in Madison Grant‘s The
Passing of the Great Race and similar works. But the emphasis he
gave them, and the vulgarity with which he expressed himself, made
some members of his audience, like some Committee members,
uncomfortable.[50]
That his beliefs did not discredit him with a larger American audience
says much about opinions in the period.[51]
Most members of the AFC leadership refused to denounce him. Some
agreed with him. Others, like Norman Thomas, Oswald Villard and John
Flynn were willing to go along in order to achieve their goal - the
preservation of American neutrality.[52]
The unity of the anti-war movement, they were certain, was worth the
sacrifice.
The moral implications of
Lindbergh’s position were not entirely apparent in January 1941. What
did seem clear was the need to remain united. The Committee faced its
most important battle - the debate over Lend-Lease. The president’s
previous changes to the Neutrality Act of 1937, which had originally
prohibited America from selling arms to anyone in the European war,
had reflected the mood of the nation.[53]
But Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s proposal to provide arms to Britain
without payment, was practically a declaration of war against the
Axis. America First was determined to stop it. Burton Wheeler warned
the Senate that “the lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s
triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American
boy.“ “Never before,” he complained, “has the United States given to
one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses.“[54]
Lindbergh’s Washington testimony
also received national attention. “It is not the duty of the United
States to police the world,“ he had declared.[55]
This would become a refrain taken up by men as different as Gerald Nye
and Charles Coughlin, head of the anti-Roosevelt and anti-Semitic
Christian Front movement.[56]
However, Lindbergh’s stated hope for a negotiated peace rather than
an English victory hurt him.[57]
The majority of Americans, contrary to AFC hopes, wanted to support
Britain, even if it led to a much dreaded participation in the war.
Seventy-two percent, according to one poll, regarded “defeating
Nazism” as “the biggest job facing the country;” 70% preferred war to
Allied defeat.[58]
Most Americans still believed a declaration of war was not yet
necessary. But Lend-Lease was. The bill was passed in March by 260
to 165 in the House, and 60 to 31 in the Senate.[59]
“This decision is the end of … appeasement in our land,“ Roosevelt had
triumphantly announced. It is “the end of urging us to get along with
the dictators. The end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of
oppression.”[60]
The Committee was to prove him
wrong. America First had lost a battle It was still determined to
stay out of the war. Its reputation as the country’s chief
anti-interventionist organization had grown during the Lend-Lease
debate. So had its membership. New chapters grew up all over the
country. The Committee developed a mass following for the first time.[61]
The AFC leadership therefore remained optimistic. The large margin by
which the bill had passed only made them more aggressive. Lindbergh
was especially pugnacious. By the summer of 1941 he was denouncing
the president as a greater threat to peace than Hitler. He ridiculed
Roosevelt’s assertion that the safety of the United States depended on
control of the Cape Verde Islands. “Even Hitler never made a
statement like that,” Lindbergh charged. “Mr. Roosevelt claims that
Hitler desires to dominate the world. But it is Mr. Roosevelt himself
who advocates world domination when he says that it is our business to
control the wars of Europe and Asia, and that we in America must
dominate islands lying off the African coast.”[62]
Hitler‘s invasion of Russia in June
increased Committee optimism. The war at last had seemed to become
what the Committee had always claimed it to be, a struggle between two
totalitarian systems, in which one was destined to dominate Europe.
It was no longer necessary to dismiss Britain, as Harry Elmer
Barnes had done, as an example of “democratic dry rot.”[63]
The sins of colonialism were now forgotten. The AFC now had a more
useful opponent - Stalin. The leadership was certain the Nazi-Soviet
war would prevent the United States from entering the war on either
side.[64]
John Flynn’s Should America Fight to Make Europe Safe for
Communism? contained anti-interventionist statements from Herbert
Hoover, Norman Thomas and Senators Taft, Clark, Wheeler and La
Follette.[65]
But it was Lindbergh, as usual, who was willing to go further, and
explicitly state his preference for the Nazis. On July 1, 1941, only
ten days after the German invasion of Russia, he was already
complaining about “the murderers and plunderers of yesterday (who) are
accepted as the valiant defenders of civilization today.” “I tell
you,” he continued, “ I would a hundred times rather see my country
ally itself with England, or even with Germany, with all of her
faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that
exist in Soviet Russia. An alliance between the United States and
Russia should be opposed by every American, by every Christian, and by
every humanitarian in this country.”[66]
The effect of the invasion
was not what the Committee had hoped. Most Americans sympathized with
the Soviet Union. German support in the country was further reduced
by the desertion of their erstwhile Communist party allies. The Nazis
more than ever appeared to most Americans the country’s most dangerous
enemy. The invasion also had a bracing effect on Churchill. Up to
the last the Soviet Union had supplied Germany with supplies that made
the British blockade ineffectual. The invasion had thus not cost
Britain a potential ally. It had cost Germany a real one. It also
had given England its first major partner in the war since the fall of
France. Despite the initial fears of many in Britain and America,
Russia did not collapse. The result was that Hitler seemed more
vulnerable than ever. American determination to oppose him increased.
The summer of 1941 was a curious
time for the AFC. Pro-German elements in the country waited anxiously
for Hitler’s blitzkrieg to succeed. The majority of Americans,
sympathetic to Russians defending their own country, hoped for a
German defeat. America Firsters continued to be troubled by the
popular mood. American concern about Britain was now joined with that
for Russia. This they feared could only strengthen interventionist
forces. That realization, combined with the passage of Lend-Lease,
inspired a new tactic. Previously, most AFC propaganda had been
directed against Britain, its American friends, and the president.
The largely Protestant banking establishment, from J.P. Morgan to the
Rockefeller controlled Chase National Bank, had been attacked without
charges of bigotry. Roosevelt had always been a legitimate target.
The Committee would now attack Jews.[67]
The unstated charge was disloyalty.
Since Americans of undivided loyalty, Committee members reasoned, had
to see that neutrality was the only rational course for the nation,
pro-interventionists had to be working for alien interests. Lindbergh
had already suggested this.[68]
America First itself had been careful to keep those of divided
loyalties out of its own ranks. Neither members of the
German-American Bund nor Communists, anxious to oppose war before June
22, had been welcome.[69]
Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Fronters were also discouraged
from joining.[70]
The Committee was now ready to apply its own high standards to its
opponents.
Anti-Semitism was the most
inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason
to hate Hitler. Their loyalty was suspect by some for that very
reason. Since most Americans assumed the country was safe from German
invasion, American Jews, they concluded, were also safe. Jewish
interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help
co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to
sacrifice American lives. This to many seemed more than just a case
of divided loyalties. It was pernicious. The fact that
interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally
conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population,
had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the
drive for war.[71]
(So great was the antipathy for America First in the south,
and so complete the consensus in favor of support for Britain, that
its few sympathizers had been intimidated into silence.)[72]
Interventionist organizations, fearful of being labeled the tools of
Jews, had been careful to keep Jewish membership on their governing
boards small.[73]
The AFC, which since its creation had been careful to avoid appearing
anti-Semitic, had the opposite policy. General Wood had been very
pleased when Lessing Rosenwald, a member of the Sears, Roebuck board,
had joined the executive committee. But Rosenwald had resigned to
protest the presence of Henry Ford, and no Jews had been found to take
his place.[74]
At a time when the Committee was being attacked in much of the press
as a tool of Hitler, charges of bigotry had to avoided at all cost.[75]
That many American anti-Semites, anxious to avoid fighting Germany,
had joined the AFC, made this task more difficult. AFC chapters in
the east from the beginning had struggled to keep out Christian
Fronters.[76]
The Committee leadership was painfully aware they had not always
succeeded.[77]
Jews in much of the world had become by 1940 a beleaguered minority
threatened with mass murder. Most Committee members, as people of
conscience, did not want to add to Jewish tribulations. Some AFC
supporters had in the past occasionally expressed hostility to Jews.[78]
But they had kept these views private. This reticence would now
come to an end.
Burton Wheeler, chair of the Senate
Interstate Commerce Commission, announced in August of 1941 that he
would investigate “interventionists” in the motion picture industry.
Most studio heads, he would soon be surprised to learn, were Jews.[79]
Gerald Nye, who accused Hollywood of attempting to “drug the reason of
the American people,“ and “rouse war fever,“ was particularly hostile
to Warner Brothers.[80]
Wheeler questioned why so many foreign born were allowed to shape
American opinion, causing Roosevelt to observe that the Bible, too,
had been written “by mostly foreign-born and Jewish people.” But the
industry knew how to fight back. It retained Wendell Willkie, the
Republican party’s 1940 presidential candidate, as counsel. He soon
ridiculed the Committee into silence.[81]
The Committee’s first overt
anti-Semitic attack came in September. Charles Lindbergh was its
author. More than a year earlier Thomas Lamont, senior partner of
J.P. Morgan, had asked him to name the “powerful elements” he claimed
were working for war. “We must not broadcast suspicions and
accusations unless we have complete basis for the charges,” he had
warned.[82]
Since then, the AFC situation had become more desperate. Lend-Lease
had been followed by a more aggressive anti-German campaign. On
September 1 President Roosevelt had promised every effort to defeat
Germany to prevent “Hitler’s violent attempt to rule the world.“
[83] On September 11,
following a U-boat attack on the American destroyer Greer,
Roosevelt ordered the navy to shoot on sight any German vessel
threatening American ships or convoys.[84]
That same day, having previously been goaded by Secretary of the
Interior Harold Ickes and columnist Dorothy Thompson, who had called
him a Nazi fellow traveler, Lindbergh struck back.[85]
Lindberg Des Moines
“The three most important
groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he told a Des
Moines audience, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt
administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance,
are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who
believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the
domination of the British Empire …These war agitators comprise only a
small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous
influence.” Of the Jews he said “it is not difficult to understand
why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany… But no person
of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today
without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and
for them. 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. Tolerance is a virtue that
depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive
war and devastation… Their greatest danger to this country is in
their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press,
our radio, and our government.”[86]
Lindbergh’s threat was obvious. Its most unfortunate aspect was
his (perhaps unconscious) paraphrasing of Hitler’s “warning”
delivered in the Reichstag in 1939.
“If international finance
Jewry in and outside of Europe should succeed in thrusting the nations
once again into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization
of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of
the Jewish race in Europe.”[87]
Softened for an American audience, Lindbergh’s words were
unmistakably, and uncomfortably, similar.
Press reaction was immediate, and
explosive. The Des Moines Register observed that “it may have
been courageous for Colonel Lindbergh to say what was in his mind, but
it was so lacking in appreciation of consequences - putting the best
interpretation on it - that it disqualifies him for any pretensions of
leadership of this republic in policy-making.” The speech was “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 crisis.”[88]
The Kansas City Journal was more succinct. “Lindbergh’s
interest in Hitlerism is now thinly concealed.”[89]
The isolationist Hearst newspapers were equally critical.[90]
Frank Gannett told General Wood his newspaper chain could no longer
afford to be associated with the Committee. Even the Chicago
Tribune hastened to condemn the speech.[91]
The response of the Republican
national leadership was as severe. Wendell Willkie called it “the
most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national
reputation.” Thomas Dewey said it was “an inexcusable abuse of the
right of freedom of speech.”[92]
Even conservative Republican Robert Taft was no gentler, styling
Lindbergh’s reference
to “the Jews, as if they were a foreign race, and not Americans at
all, a grossly unjust attitude.”[93]
Lindbergh’s speech destroyed the
unity of the AFC. Norman Thomas, long troubled by Lindbergh’s
bigotry, could stand no more. He refused for a while to appear at
America First rallies.[94]
Oswald Villard resigned from the Committee.[95]
John Flynn, although furious, remained.[96]
The anti-Semites in his New York chapter, he lamented, were
“uproariously delighted,” and warned the task of keeping bigots out of
the movement would now be much more difficult.[97]
The majority of the Committee
leadership was not troubled.[98]
Most even refused to admit the speech was anti-Semitic.[99]
The membership was equally supportive.[100]
While some had regrets about the tone, 85 to 90% of the letters
received at national headquarters were favorable. Robert Taft
likewise refused to condemn Lindbergh entirely, citing the greater
intolerance of organizations like the Fight For Freedom Committee.[101]
The AFC nonetheless had been
severely damaged. Its chief speaker was now roundly pilloried in the
press. Lindbergh was no longer the target of shrill interventionists
alone. Public opinion had turned against him. The rest of the
leadership, by supporting him, inevitably came in for a share of
criticism. The New York newspaper PM had already characterized
a Lindbergh audience as “a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists,
anti-Semites, crackpots and just people,“ in which the “just people
seemed out of place.“[102]
This now seemed increasingly true. America First appeared more than
ever an organization of bitter Progressives, opportunist Republicans
and outspoken anti-Semites. Lindbergh’s remarks may have been
satisfying to most AFC members. But they offended mainstream
opinion. Discredited among the larger electorate, the Committee was
further than ever from winning its battle for strict neutrality.
The last months before Pearl Harbor
were disappointing for America First. On September 16 the U.S. navy
began formal convoy duty, escorting British as well as American ships
as far as Iceland.[103]
That same month Anglo-American negotiations were begun in Moscow to
determine Soviet military needs.[104]
The president in October offered Russia a one billion dollar interest
free loan to buy American military equipment.[105]
This was soon followed by a request to repeal key sections of the
Neutrality Act, thereby allowing American merchant ships to be armed,
and to enter combat zones.[106]
Congress quickly approved.[107]
German reaction was equally swift.
On October 17 the destroyer Kearney was torpedoed while on
convoy duty off Iceland. Eleven sailors were killed. At the end of
the month the destroyer Reuben James was sunk, with the loss of
115 lives.[108]
Most Americans still refused to go to war. This might have reassured
isolationists. But there was always the danger that additional
attacks could change the national mood. By the end of the year, some
AFC supporters were apparently willing to do anything to stop the
drift to war.
Secret joint Army and Navy war plans
were published in the isolationist press on December 5. Anticipating
operations in a two ocean war as well as in Europe, Asia and Africa,
they appeared in two AFC friendly papers, the Chicago Tribune
and the New York Daily News.[109]
The documents had been stolen by an isolationist captain from the War
Plans Division and passed to Senator Wheeler, who gave them to a
Chicago Tribune correspondent.
Two days later the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor. It was at first unclear whether the war would be
extended to Europe. Senators Wheeler, Vandenberg and Shipstead, all
friends of the AFC, were determined it should not.[110]
They were defeated by Hitler, who declared war on the United States on
the 11th.
CONCLUSION
From the fall of France until the
end of the war, Senator Gerald Nye never lost his way. “To take care
of our own (is) the number one American obligation.” The destiny of
America, he was certain, was not “either to reform or to police the
world.”[111]
This was a practical policy. Depending on how the Nazi threat was
assessed, it might have been a rational one. But it was not
generous. It consigned most of Europe to Hitler’s murderous rule.
Other Progressives were like minded. “I do not believe,” said Senator
Robert La Follette, “ that the fate of 130,000,000 Americans will
either now or in the future be dependent upon, or be determined by,
the outcome of war in Europe, Asia or Africa.”[112]
This was a simple belief, simply expressed. It was shared by millions
of Americans. Both men would certainly have also agreed with Charles
Coughlin’s slogan, “Less care for internationalism and more concern
for national prosperity.”[113]
Progressives like Nye were also
convinced the United States could never reform Europe or Asia, or help
determine the democratic future of the world. Oswald Villard wrote in
the Nation that “the United States cannot settle the future of
Europe; only Europe itself can do that.[114]
Perhaps Progressives thought the rest of the world so foreign that
ideals of democracy and human rights, which the Enlightenment had
proclaimed to be universal, and upon which the American Republic had
been established, could never take root, or even be appreciated,
elsewhere.
Of course, not all America Firsters
were motivated by these beliefs. Some had joined the AFC primarily as
a way of attacking President Roosevelt and the New Deal. That the
success of America First would have catastrophic affect on the
political future of Europe left them unmoved, as long as it weakened
the administration and the Democratic Party at home. They were as
indifferent to what happened outside America as other Committee
supporters. But their claims about the intractability of the rest of
the world were merely excuses born of cynicism and partisan politics.
The hostility of most AFC members to both Nazism and Communism were
real. Many just believed they couldn’t do anything about them.
Others simply didn’t care.[115]
Indifference and timidity
characterized the AFC program. Most America Firsters were prepared to
live, however uncomfortably, with Hitler because they believed they
had no choice.[116]
There were others, however, who were pro-German. Charles Lindbergh
was among them.[117]
Gerald Nye, and those like him, cherished democracy and the Bill of
Rights, hated Britain, and loathed both the Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany. They also feared the growth of fascism at home. Lindbergh
and his supporters both in and outside the AFC feared for the future
of the white race, regretted the British decision not to support
Hitler’s war against Russia, and hated Communism. Both men hated “the
East.“ But “the East” for Nye, as for much of the Midwest, was Wall
Street and the City of London. For Lindbergh and his supporters, it
was Asia and the Soviet Union.
Lindbergh wanted Hitler to destroy
the Soviet Union, and was willing to accept Nazi domination of Europe
as the price.[118]
His protests to the contrary are not convincing.[119]
Long before most Committee members, he had come to believe the
existence of the Soviet Union had made Hitler’s dictatorship
necessary. The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 made the need
to keep America out of the war greater than ever. As a result, the
efforts of America Firsters to keep America neutral became more
frenetic as German successes in Russia mounted, and Roosevelt’s
efforts to enter the war increased.
These included more vigorous
attacks on interventionists. By the summer of 1941 Lindbergh had
begun accusing the president of being a greater war monger than
Hitler. The loyalty of interventionist groups, long suspect by the
AFC, was now openly questioned.[120]
Jews, who most AFC leaders had long avoided criticizing out of fear of
exciting anti-Semitism, were also attacked. “A refugee who steps from
the gangplank and advocates war is acclaimed as a defender of
freedom. A native born American who opposes war is called a fifth
columnist,” Lindbergh had snarled shortly after the Nazi invasion of
Russia.[121]
Nye and Wheeler‘s assault on Hollywood followed in August. Then came
Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech. Lindbergh had begun his speaking
career for America First by defending Hitler. He ended by sounding
like him. In so doing, his own moral bankruptcy, and that of much of
the Committee, was revealed.
America First remained to the end an
uncomfortable alliance of isolationists, pacifists, enemies of
England, opponents of Roosevelt and friends of Germany.
Interventionists were an equally mixed group. The stated aim of the
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, begun in May 1940,
had been clear. The war in Europe, according to William Allen White,
its leader, was “a life and death struggle for every principle we
cherish in America. For freedom of speech, of religion, of the ballot
and of every freedom that upholds the dignity of the human spirit .“
The need was obvious. “The time has come when we must throw into the
scales the entire moral and economic weight of the United States on
the side of the free peoples of western Europe who are fighting the
battle for a civilized way of life.”[122]
But interventionists, like isolationists, had also been divided.
White wanted to stay out of the war, and limit American support to
supplies. Not all CDAAA members agreed. Fiorello La Guardia accused
him of “doing a typical Laval.”[123]
Some would later join the Fight for Freedom Committee in demanding
war against Germany.
Reasons for supporting intervention
were as complex as those for joining the AFC. Partisan politics
brought many New Deal supporters, including most of organized labor,
into the anti-Nazi camp.[124]
But the president also found many of new friends among former
Republican opponents. These included Morgan partners like Thomas
Lamont, as well as executives from General Electric and United States
Steel. The conservative New York Herald Tribune now also
supported the president‘s foreign policy; Dorothy Thompson’s anti-AFC
columns were one of its most popular features. Henry Luce, publisher
of Time and Life magazines, had long supported a
pro-Chinese policy. He too readily adopted a pro-British one.[125]
In Chicago the Republican Daily News (owned by Frank Knox)
became one of the AFC’s most relentless opponents.[126]
PM, owned by Marshall Field III, played a similar role in New
York.
Interventionists’ strongest
support came from the South. Many southern Democrats had been
suspicious of the president’s domestic legislation. But they also
proved largely immune to Lindbergh’s arguments. Lindbergh spoke of
the need to preserve the white race. Most white southerners
identified more narrowly with their Anglo-Saxon and Celtic British
heritage. Like other interventionists, many admired England’s
parliamentary democracy. Others wanted to preserve the British
empire. Many were also repelled by Hitler’s anti-Semitism. The
South’s military traditions made southerners readier than most to
fight for what they valued.
Some AFC supporters had been
motivated by humanitarian ideals. Not all interventionists were. Yet
in the end those who supported intervention also supported the
preservation of democracy and human rights in Europe. Those who
opposed war did not. This obvious fact had long troubled some
Committee members, including Socialist Party presidential candidate
Norman Thomas. Although anti-fascist, his Party had never been able
to explain how fascism could be eliminated without war.[127]
The argument that war would only bring fascism to America had been
neither entirely convincing, nor satisfying. It was a problem
anti-war supporters of democracy never succeeded in solving.
This moral dilemma
was the AFC’s most serious weakness. The Committee’s enemies
Had been quick to see their advantage. The
Chicago Daily News observed that “a crazier coalition was never
assembled! Come lately German Nazis and Italian Fascists, Communists,
pacifists, professional Anglophobes, Socialists, anti-Semites, rabid
partisans who hate Roosevelt more than they hate Hitler, ostrich
isolationists and a scattering of timid citizens afraid of they don’t
know what - all rally around …to attack and calumniate the United
States government in a moment of national crisis. These people,
whether they know it or not - and some of them do - are performing
Hitler’s work in America.”[128]
It was optimism that fundamentally
separated interventionists from America First and its allies.
Roosevelt and his supporters believed the safety of the American
Republic could only be assured by the destruction of Nazi Germany.[129]
They were also certain they could reestablish democracy in Europe.
In the end, they would be proven right. But at the end of 1941, they
had still failed to convince the American public. America First had
been unable to prevent aid to Britain or Russia. Interventionist
failure was more serious. By the beginning of December Hitler was at
the gates of Moscow. Most Americans were concerned. They were also
not going to do anything more about it.
This natural reluctance to
go to war without first being attacked prevailed right until Pearl
Harbor. Most Americans refused to the last to enter the battle, even
against as brutal an enemy as Hitler, if it was primarily for the
benefit of others. Even after the Japanese attack, it was only the
German declaration of war that brought the United States into the
European conflict.
It was only then that America’s
moral purpose was fully restored. The nation with few exceptions
supported a conflict that began as a struggle against military
aggression, and ended as a battle against mass murder. Professor
Maynard Kreuger of the University of Chicago had earlier told an
anti-war rally that the issues in Europe were more complex than many
would admit. “The image of a madman loose on the peaceful world
oversimplified the realities of international rivalries and
competition for resources.”[130]
The professor was wrong. The Committee had always claimed the war was
about rival imperialisms, and not simply about Hitler and his Nazi
ideology. But it was. The German dictator was a madman, and the
empire he hoped to create in Europe would have meant the destruction
of all of those political ideals upon which American democracy was
based. Interventionists understood this. America Firsters did not.
The optimism and moral vision of
interventionists and the Roosevelt administration produced great
achievements. The mounting of a massive invasion of Europe was
followed by the political and economic reconstruction of much of the
continent. It took years, and billions of Marshall Plan dollars, but
in the end western Europe emerged solidly democratic and more
prosperous than any time in the past. Victory in 1945 had not been
complete. It would be almost another fifty years before Communist
dictatorship disappeared from the continent. But the war and post-war
reconstruction had been a good start. It helped subvert the Soviet
Empire by placing successful democratic, capitalist regimes on its
border. The Chicago Tribune in 1939 had proclaimed “the
frontiers of American democracy are not in Europe, Asia or Africa.”[131]
. Interventionists had a more generous vision. In the end, they
liberated half a continent.
| David Gordon
received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University, and is the
author of two books, Merchants and Capitalists:
Industrialization and Provincial Politics in Mid-Nineteenth
Century France, and Liberalism and Social Reform:
Industrial Growth and Progressiste Politics in France, 1880-1914,
as well as several articles and chapters on African and European
economic history. He has taught at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California, Riverside,
and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also taught
for two years at Kaohsiung Teachers University, Taiwan, and was a
seminar director at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Professor
Gordon is working on a study of European and American economic and
political activities in interwar China. He is currently a member
of the History Department, Bronx Community College, City
University of New York, the CUNY Graduate Center and of the NYMAS
Board of Directors.. Dr. Gordon lectures on America First and
Charles Lindbergh. His paper
France, 1940: National Failure and the Uses
of Defeat,
is
available on this site. |
Footnotes
[1]
Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935-1945, Ithaca,
1966, p. 214.
[2]
America First eventually adopted three additional principles. The
fifth, approved in December 1940, called for humanitarian aid for
Britain within the limits of neutrality. The sixth, accepted in May
1941, demanded a popular referendum before the Congress voted any
declaration of war. In November a seventh called on the AFC
membership to continue to remind their representatives of their
opposition to war. A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh, New York, 1998,
p. 411; and Ruth Sarles, A Story of America First: The Men and
Women Who Opposed U.S. Intervention in World War II, Westport,
Connecticut, 2003, pp. 6-7.
[3]
American ambassador Hugh Wilson was recalled to protest the pogrom.
A poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in
December 10 1938 found 94% of Americans opposed Hitler’s treatment
of Jews. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, who until that time had
supported non-involvement in European affairs, spoke for many when
he said “the people of the United States do not like the government
of Germany.” Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 211.
[4]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 212.
[5]
A Princeton Public Opinion Research Project found in September 1940
that 53% of the American population believed defeating Hitler was
more important than staying out of the war. True isolationist
opinion, opposing both participation in the war and aid, had fallen
from 23% in May to 12% in September. By January 1941 the number
supporting aid even at the risk of war had risen to 68%, a figure
that remained constant for the rest of the year. Jonas,
Isolationism in America, pp. 214-215.
[6]
Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against
American Intervention in World War II, New York, 1974, pp.
137-139.
[7]
The Fight for Freedom Committee, the creation of eastern elites,
demanded the immediate break of diplomatic relations with Germany,
the use of the navy for anti-U boat operations, and the repeal of
all neutrality acts. Its primary aim, in the words of one member,
was “to agitate for an open declaration of war against Germany and
Italy.” Mellon family member David K. E. Bruce contributed $10,000
to the organization, as did the Rockefellers. Other large
contributors included Marshall Field, Max Ascoli, Darryl Zanuck, and
Harry and Jack Warner. Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda
Warriors: America’s Crusade Against Nazi Germany, Lawrence,
Kansas, 1996, pp. 40-41.
[8]Some
polls showed only one in five in favor. James C. Schneider,
Should America Go to War? The Debate Over Foreign Policy in Chicago,
1939-1941, Chapel Hill, 1989, p. 149; and Wayne S. Cole,
Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945, Lincoln, Nebraska,
1982.
[9]
John T. Flynn had received a law degree from Georgetown University
before becoming editor of the New York Globe. He had become
well known in the 1920s and 1930s for his attacks on Wall Street
manipulations, writing a column, “Other Peoples Money” for the
New Republic. Flynn had originally supported the New Deal, but
broke with Roosevelt over the National Recovery Act, which he
believed was excessive government interference in the economy.
Harry Elmer Barnes was an extreme revisionist whose Genesis of
the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt
(1926) had moved beyond Sidney Fay’s arguments about joint Allied
and Central Powers responsibility for the war (which had first
appeared in the American Historical Review in 1920 to 1921)
to accusing Russia and France as being its principal authors. He
also claimed that it was Anglo-French purchases and borrowing,
combined with the machinations of Wilson, Colonel House and
Secretary of State Lansing, that had really got America into the
war. The submarine issue, and claims about fighting for democracy,
had only been for popular consumption. The final version of Fay’s
arguments appeared in his The Origins of the World War (1928)
Barnes remained a respectable figure through the 1930s. Prior
to his death in 1968 he would become one of America’s most famous
Holocaust deniers. Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old
Isolationists in the Cold War Era, Lewisburg, Maine, 1979, p.
93; and Donald F. Drummond, The Passing of American Neutrality,
1937-1941, 1968, pp. 23-24.
[10]
Stuart had decided while still at Princeton that “the United States
had gained nothing and lost a great deal through participation in
World War I.” He had therefore decided to oppose Roosevelt’s
foreign policy. Still, he had liked much of Roosevelt‘s domestic
legislation, and had hoped to work for the National Labor Relations
Board after graduation from law school. Michele Flynn Stenehjem,
An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee,
New Rochelle, New York, 1976, pp. 13-14.
[11]
The Yale group, which included Potter Stewart, Gerald R. Ford and R.
Sargent Shriver, had originally hoped to create a national student
anti-war organization. Writing to students elsewhere, the called
for a program of “hemisphere defense,“ and resistance to any changes
in the country’s “cash and carry” policies. Like many others, they
believed American democracy could survive only if the country stayed
out of war. Hoping for broader public support, they soon
concentrated their organizing in Chicago. There they had organized
radio programs featuring Wisconsin governor Philip La Follette and
General Hugh Johnson, former head of the National Recovery Act.
Schneider, Should America Go to War?, p. 113.
[12]
Stenehjem, An American First, p. 37.
[13]
This included Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, as well as
parts of Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Iowa. An additional 25% of
the membership was in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland, although there was also strong
opposition to America First in the East. The South, with the
exception of Florida, was the region least receptive to Committee
arguments. Chicago itself, with large Czech and Jewish populations,
as well as 700,000 Poles (the largest concentration outside Poland)
was itself hardly united in support of America First. George
Cardinal Mundelein in Chicago had also been the first cardinal to
attack both Hitler (in 1937), and Charles Coughlin. Wayne S. Cole,
America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 ,
Madison, Wisconsin, 1953, pp. 30-31; and Schneider, Should
America Go to War, pp. 30-31.
[14]
Both the isolationist Chicago Tribune and the interventionist
Chicago Daily News, owned by Roosevelt’s Republican Secretary
of the Navy, Frank Knox, agreed that most Chicagoans didn’t think
foreign affairs were critically important. Schneider, Should
America Go to War?, p. 21.
[15]
The hatred for the British financial establishment by American
farmers is discussed in Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The
British Propaganda Campaign Against American “Neutrality“ in World
War II, Oxford, England, 1998, p. 7.
[16]
Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of
the1920s, New York, 1931, p. 161.
[17]
Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign
Relations, Minneapolis, 1962, pp. 79-80.
[18]
Not all of the AFC Congressional group was from the West and
Midwest. Hamilton Fish, the AFC’s greatest supporter in the House
of Representatives was from Dutchess County, New York. He had
supported Social Security and the minimum wage law. But he also
moved in Liberty League circles, spoke at German-American Bund
rallies, and allowed his franking privileges to be used to mail
propaganda of anti-Semitic organizations. He had become an
embarrassment to the Republican party long before his aide, George
Hill, was convicted in 1942 for helping a paid German agent
distribute pro-Nazi propaganda. Jonas, Isolationism in America,
pp. 52-54; and Stenehjem, An American First, p. 123.
[19]
Nye wanted the federal reserve system replaced with a bank that
would “issue bonds equivalent to the total of our outstanding farm
mortgages. These bonds would not be sold. They would be held as a
basis for the currency issue to pay off the mortgages, the
government taking over the mortgages and permitting their gradual
liquidation on terms possible for the farmers to meet without loss
of their acres or undue hardship … From agriculture the system would
be speedily extended to the financing of all industry. It would
amount in fact to the establishment of a money based solely on
government credit. Of course it would extinguish all gold based
creditor values.” Cole, Nye, p. 54.
[20]
Senator Hiram Johnson of California for example told his son that
Roosevelt “has developed the dictator complex.” Cole, Roosevelt
and the Isolationists, p. 308.
[21]
Schneider, Should America Go to War?, p. 225.
[22]
William Regnery, president of the Western Shade Cloth Company, and
one of the three signers, along with R. Douglas Stuart and General
Wood, of the papers of incorporation of the America First Committee,
had also previously been a Roosevelt supporter. A director of
Chicago’s Hull House, he had been supported the president in 1932
and 1936, and had approved of the National Recovery Act. Sarles,
A Story of America First , p. xxvii.
[23]
Stenehjem, An American First, pp. 54-55.
[24]
Charles A. Beard, eminent American historian and early New Deal
supporter, were among them. “Confronted by the difficulties of a
deepening domestic crisis and by the comparative ease of a foreign
war, what will President Roosevelt do?” he had asked in
Scribner’s Magazine in February 1935. “ Judging by the past
history of American politicians, he will choose the latter.“ Jonas,
Isolationism in America, p. 71-76.
[25]
This quotation comes from Flynn’s 1948 book, The Roosevelt Myth.
However, his belief about the president’s desire to hide his
economic failures was already fixed before the war began. Doenecke,
Not to the Swift, p. 97.
[26]
These included, according to Senator William Borah, the
collaboration of French and British conservatives with Hitler in
order to direct German aggression against the Soviet Union. They
had been quite willing, he was sure, to delude their own countrymen
to accomplish this. Later, when their schemes turned against them,
they had looked to the United States to help them. “What in
history,“ Borah asked, “has been more shameful than England and
France conferring with Benes at midnight in Prague while they played
Judas to Czechoslovakia? Let England go into the wilderness and
perish with her sins. They are all guilty: Germany, France and
England. Guilty as dogs!“ In fact, many European appeasers had
wanted Hitler to go east. So had Charles Lindbergh. In 1938 he
hoped that the western powers would not confront Germany, so that “a
westward expansion of Hitler might still be prevented through a
combination of diplomacy, strategic convenience, and the use of
defensive power.” In a paper written at the time of the Munich
crisis at the behest of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, he had also
suggested that “it is wiser to permit Germany’s eastern expansion
than to throw England and France, unprepared, into a war … .”
Lindbergh’s support of appeasement, and Borah’s later denunciation
of it, did not prevent them both from supporting America First.
Robert James Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy,
Baton Rouge, 1969, p. 237; and Berg, Lindbergh, pp. 375-376.
[27]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 112.
[28]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 230.
[29]
Theodore Dreiser wrote in America Is Worth Saving that “the
British Empire is not a democracy and never has been.” It “now holds
500,000,000 of the world scattered colonials as well as 29,000,000
of its natives in educationless, moneyless, and privilegeless
bondage. Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 231.
[30]
It went on to state that “the battle in Asia is Britain’s battle -
and a battle not for democracy, but to continue her hold onto
300,00,000 people in India, millions more in Malay and other
territories of Asia, to say nothing of a hundred million in Africa.
She is parked there for the gold, the oil, the rubber, the silver,
the diamonds, the rich supplies which her capitalists own there -
which belong to the peoples of those countries, but which Britain
has stolen. Yet … America … will send our sons to Asia … to enable
the British empire to perpetuate its hold upon Asia.” Cole,
America First, p. 191.
[31]
Nye made this statement in a talk to a Pennsylvania college audience
in April 1940, shortly after the Germans had overrun Denmark and
Norway. Cole, Nye, p. 169.
[32]
Not all Americans agreed. “If Hitler wins in Europe,” Sherwood
Anderson warned, “if the strength of the British and French armies
and navies is forever broken, the United States will find itself
alone in a barbaric world, a world ruled by Nazis, with ‘spheres of
influence’ assigned to their totalitarian allies. However different
the dictatorships my be racially, they all agree on one primary
objective: Democracy must be wiped from the face of the earth.”
New York Times, June 10, 1940.
[33]
Jonas, Isolationism in America , p. 270.
[34]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 270.
[35]
Stenehjem, An American First, p. 34.
[36]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 270.
[37]
His father, Charles Lindbergh Senior, a lawyer, had been elected to
Congress in 1906 as a Progressive Republican, and had served for ten
years. An agrarian radical supporter of Robert La Follette and
George Norris, he was, like so many Progressives , an enemy of “the
Money Trust” and Wall Street. His book, Why Is Your Country at
War? blamed industrialists and bankers for getting America into
the war for their own profit. Accused of disloyalty, he was defeated
in a 1916 Senate race, and left politics. Cole, Lindbergh,
p. 18.
[38]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 239.
[39]
Playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter Robert Sherwood, speaking at a
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies rally in December
1940, had said Lindbergh was “simply a Nazi with a Nazi’s Olympian
contempt for all democratic processes - the rights of freedom of
speech and worship, the right to select and criticize our own
government and the right of labor to strike.” Cole, Lindbergh,
p. 147.
[40]
Lindbergh drew overflow crowds, and increased Committee chapter
membership wherever he spoke. He was as a result in constant
demand. Cole, America First, p. 142.
[41]
Sarles, A Story of America First, p. 100.
[42]
Many were members of the National Legion of Mothers of America. The
NLMA ironically had at first seemed a potential America First
ally. Founded in California in September of 1939, it had been
encouraged by conservative Anglophobe William Randolph Hearst, who
had hoped to use it as a weapon against Roosevelt’s New Deal and
pro-British policies. Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald-Express
had claimed soon after its creation that the organization was
motivated only by patriotism, and made up of “commonplace mothers,
the type familiar in story and song … but grimly determined to fight
any attempt to send their sons to fight on foreign soil.” All women
regardless of race or religion were originally welcome; many of the
earliest members were mothers of draft aged sons. No dues were
charged. Within a year it had between five and six million members
organized in a loose confederation of 50 to100 separate groups. The
NLMA from the beginning had been very anti-Communist, but not at all
anti-Semitic. The
American Mothers National
Weekly, which soon had several million readers, did claim most
European refugees were Communists, and warned that only Christianity
could save the country. The paper also feared that Mexicans might
invade America and join with southern blacks to end white supremacy.
It had gained in national stature when Kathleen Norris, pacifist,
prohibitionist and enemy of capital punishment, became its first
president in 1940. Norris, who would later become a member of the
AFC national executive board, hoped to make the organization, with
more than seven times the membership of America First, an ally in
the struggle against intervention. She would be cruelly
disappointed.
The Mothers of
America had not grown quickly simply because of the war. The
ferocious energies which many of its members brought to the
organization suggested other reasons. The cultural wars of the
1920s had left many victims. Many of the mothers had been appalled
by the air of irreligion and promiscuity that many young people had
adopted as proof of sophistication. Bobbed hair, short skirts,
female smokers and a flaunting of prohibition, combined with the
popularity of jazz, the vulgarity of the movies and post-war
fiction, as well as a trumpeted contempt for traditional patriotism
religion, had left many women bewildered, and angry. The depression
and the ending of prohibition had only added to their misery. The
threat of war was the final blow. Millions were ready to fight
back.
The NLMA soon
became remarkable for its bigotry. Even more than Lindbergh, many
of its members were convinced Jews were chiefly responsible for the
interventionist movement. More importantly, they blamed Jews for
most of the unwanted changes in American society. Their control of
the motion picture industry seemed to many to have led to moral
decline. Jews, concentrated in a few large cities, also symbolized
for them an urban America that was both hated and feared by many who
still idealized farm life and “rural, Christian values.” Finally,
Jews were also hated for their perceived numbers in Communist and
Socialist parties. Many NLMA members were certain they were the
real leaders of the international Communist movement.
A number of NLMA
chapters, especially in the east, were soon infiltrated by members
of Charles Coughlin‘s anti-Roosevelt and anti-Semitic Christian
Front. Kathleen Norris, in a move later followed by the AFC, had
asked the radio priest not to indorse the NLMA. It had been to no
avail. The organization would later fragment under Norris’ moderate
leadership. The New York chapter, notorious for its support of the
Christian Front, and offended by Norris’ refusal to adopt an
anti-Semitic program, withdrew from the national organization. Its
offshoot, the Molly Pitcher Rifle Legion, proclaimed that “no Jew is
a true American,“ and urged women to “Buy Christian, Vote Christian,
Employ Christian.” The Philadelphia chapter was no better; it too
withdrew from the NLMA. Coughlinite influence continued to spread.
Norris expelled the Cleveland and Boston chapters. She finally gave
up the task as hopeless, and resigned as president at the NLMA in
April 1941. Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech increased the attraction
of the AFC for many NLMA members. Their presence, however, helped
reduce the credibility of America First as an organization devoted
to democracy and civil rights at home. It is not surprising that a
number of NLMA chapters continued to demand a negotiated peace even
after Pearl Harbor. Glen Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right: The
Mothers’ Movement and World War II, Chicago, 1996, pp. 45-54.
[43]
This was from his second radio address in October 1939. James Cross
Giblin, Charles A. Lindbergh, A Human Hero, New York, 1997,
p. 173.
[44]
Aviation for example was, according to Lindbergh, “a gift from
heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of
their era … a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific
art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier
between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of
Europe …”. These and similar observations first appeared in his
article “Aviation, Geography and Race” in the November 1939
Reader’s Digest. DeWitt Wallace had said he was proud to
publish it. A second article, “What Substitute for War?“, first
appeared in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Lengthy
quotations for these, as well as from Lindbergh’s journal, are in
Berg, Lindbergh, pp. 394-395.
[45]
He never changed his mind. A strong Germany, he wrote in “What
Substitute for War?,” was as necessary as a strong England and
France, “for she alone can either dam the Asiatic hordes or form the
spearhead of their penetration into Europe.” Berg, Lindbergh,
p. 395.
[46]
So did Anne Lindbergh. She wrote to her mother following her first
visit to Nazi Germany that “there is no question of the power, unity
and purposefulness of Germany … It is thrilling when seen manifested
in the energy, pride and morale of the people - especially the young
people.” Hitler himself she wrote “is a very great man, like an
inspired religious leader - and as such rather fanatical - but not
scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a
visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole
has rather a broad view.” She also believed, as she explained in
The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith , published in
1940, that the war in Europe was not so much a battle between the
“Forces of Good” and the “Forces of Evil” as it was between the
“Forces of the Past” and the “Forces of the Future.” While she
condemned Nazi crimes, she was convinced that “it is futile to get
into a hopeless ‘crusade’ to ‘save’ civilization.” Reader’s
Digest condensed the book into an article DeWitt Wallace called
“the article of the year.” Giblin, Lindbergh, p. 156; and
Berg, Lindbergh, pp. 362-406.
[47]
A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh, New York, 1998, p. 376.
[48]
These quotations are from Lindbergh’s journal, as well as his
Reader’s Digest and Atlantic Monthly articles. Berg,
Lindbergh, p. 394-396.
[49]
The war, Lindbergh explained in October 1939, had been brought about
“by the desire for strength on the part of Germany and the fear of
that strength on the part of England and France.“ Stenehjem, An
American First, p. 20; and Giblin, Lindbergh, p. 172.
[50]
Norman Thomas felt obliged to criticize Lindbergh’s “unscientific
and certainly anti-Socialist theory of the supremacy of the white
race and its duty to preserve its imperial supremacy.” W. A.
Swanberg, Norman Thomas, The Last Idealist, New York, 1976,
p. 249.
[51]
Reactions to Lindbergh reflected the deep divisions in American
society. To Kathleen Norris, pacifist and humanitarian, he was
“America’s Joan of Arc.” Roosevelt had come to a different
conclusion. “I am absolutely
convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi,” he had told Secretary of the
Treasury Henry Morgenthau as early as May 1940. Berg, Lindbergh
, p. 422; and Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 460-465.
[52]
Thomas, insisting on the primacy of his anti-war principles in
guiding his actions, objected to being called a Nazi sympathizer
either because of his collaborators on the AFC, or because his
anti-interventionist policies might help Hitler. Replying to
Dorothy Thompson, one of his most vociferous critics, Thomas wrote
that “many of us who hate Nazism … resent Miss Thompson’s attempt to
lump us with Nazi propagandists. It is a world where the disciples
of Machiavelli change sides so often one cannot guide one’s conduct
primarily by the company in which one temporarily finds oneself but
rather by principle. Miss Thompson ought to know that, because for
many months she and the Communists were exceedingly vociferous
members of the same group … the war party.” Swanberg, Norman
Thomas, p. 235.
[53]Roosevelt,
who had been critical of the Neutrality Act since its passage, had
requested in 1939 that the arms embargo provision be repealed. The
capture of the U.S. cargo ship City of Flint by the German
battleship Deutschland in October had helped convince
Congress to adopt a “cash and carry” policy, whereby America could
sell munitions to belligerents if paid for in cash and carried on
foreign vessels. Prime Minister Chamberlain wrote the president
that the new policy “was not only an assurance that we and our
French allies may draw on the great reservoir of American
resources; it is also a profound moral encouragement to us in the
struggle upon which we are engaged. Robert Goralski, World War
II Almanac, 1931-1945, New York, 1981, pp. 99; and Wayne
S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, Lincoln, Nebraska,
1983, p. 330.
[54]
Senate speech of January 12, 1941.
[55]
Berg, Lindbergh, p. 415.
[56]
Father Charles Coughlin had begun broadcasting from the Detroit
suburb of Royal Oak in 1926 to fight anti-Catholicism and Klan
influence. He also had become by the time of the Great Depression a
supporter of a silver backed currency, as well as the outspoken
enemy of “banisters” and “plutocrats;” the gold standard, he
maintained, was being defended by New York bankers solely at the
behest of British financiers. An early supporter of Franklin
Roosevelt, he had begun by calling the New Deal “Christ’s deal,” but
later broke with the president over the currency issue. Roosevelt,
fearful of being associated with the increasingly demagogic
Coughlin, had few regrets. Coughlin announced the creation of his
Nation Union of Social Justice on November 11, 1934; the name was
changed to the Christian Front after the 1936 elections. His radio
audience, estimated at 30 million, gave him great influence.
Associated with Huey Long and Gerald L. K. Smith in 1935, Coughlin
joined Long in asking Roosevelt to support the Bonus Bill, allowing
the payment the money promised First World War veterans. Coughlin
also developed an anti-Semitic program that would later become
central to his movement, thus breaking with early supporters like
Nye. The Progressive senator had associated international bankers
with New York and the City of London. Coughlin came increasingly to
associate them with “the Jews.” By the summer of 1938, when he
introduced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictitious
plan for Jewish world conquest, to his radio audience, his
transformation into an anti-Semitic demagogue was complete.
Germany’s anti-Jewish pogrom in November had horrified most
Americans. Not Coughlin. By 1939, he was insisting Britain and
France were not democracies, and therefore had no claim to moral
superiority over Germany. He also warned of subversive Jewish
forces in America trying to drag America into war out of a selfish
concern for co-religionists Europe. His Christian Front newspaper,
Social Justice regularly published pro-German articles.
Hoping for a German victory in Russia, he warned through 1941 that
Hitler’s defeat would allow the Red army to conquer the world. His
broadcasts were ended by the National Association of Broadcasters
once America entered the war; the Post Office banned Social
Justice. Father Charles Coughlin was finally silenced by
Archbishop Francis Mooney of Detroit in 1942. Cole, Nye, p.
206; Donald Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, Father of
Hate Radio, New York, 1996, pp. 58-162; Jonas, Isolationism
in America, pp. 38-39; and Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K.
Smith, Minister of Hate, New Haven, 1988, p. 50.
[57]
Lindbergh would repeat through 1941 that he did not want a German
victory. But the alternative to a negotiated peace, he believed,
was a long war that “would create prostration, famine and disease in
Europe - and probably in America - such as the world has never seen
before. The only real winners in such as war would be Russia and
Japan.” Cole, Lindbergh, p. 85.
[58]
Roosevelt’s advisors told him “the foreign policy issue is now
settled.” Cull, Selling War, p. 185.
[59]
Berg, Lindbergh, p. 416.
[60]
Goralski, World War II Almanac, p. 150
[61]
Schneider, Should America Go to War?, p. 113.
[62]
Charles Coughlin had been saying the same thing. He had called
Roosevelt “the world’s chief war-monger” in September 1940. He
wrote in Social Justice the following year that “Stalin’s
idea to create world revolution and Hitler’s so-called threat to
seek world domination are not half as dangerous combined as is the
proposal of the current British and American administrations to
seize all raw materials in the world. Many people are beginning to
wonder who they should fear most, the Roosevelt-Churchill
combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination. Cole, Lindbergh,
p. 464.
[63]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 231.
[64]
As one AFC pamphlet stated, “The entry of Communist Russia into the
war should settle once and for all the intervention issue here at
home. The war party can hardly ask the people of America to take up
arms behind the red flag of Stalin. With the ruthless force of
dictatorship and aggression now clearly aligned on both sides the
proper course for the United States becomes even clearer. We must
continue to build our own defenses and take no part in this
incongruous European conflict.” Jonas, Isolationism in America,
p. 233.
[65]
Hoover agreed “that the world would be vastly better if the whole
totalitarian idea were extirpated. But those who still cling to
this as the mission of America should ask realistically how much of
a job it is. … Such a war means that Hitler must be defeated. It
means Mussolini must be defeated. It means the War Party of Japan
must be defeated. It means that Turkey, Spain, and Portugal must be
defeated. It means that unless Hitler first disposes of Stalin we
much defeat him also. Does any sane person believe that by military
means we can defeat two-thirds of the military power of the whole
world in even years and years? It would be another Children’s
Crusade. Sarles, A Story of America First, p. 148.
[66]
He went on to ask, “Why give up an impregnable position in America
for a hazardous and untenable position in Europe? … The real
defeatist is the man who says that this nation cannot survive
alone.“ He ended his address by called for “a united nation behind
an impregnable defense, and an independent destiny for America.“
Berg, Lindbergh, p. 422; and Cole, Lindbergh, pp.
97-98.
[67]
Norman Thomas for example suggested to Senator Wheeler that when
attacking interventionist Jews he should “avoid even a suspicion of
racial implication” by putting in “the House of Morgan … and perhaps
the Chase National Bank.” Swanberg, Norman Thomas, p. 248.
[68]
Lindbergh had said in a radio address entitled “The Air Defense of
America” in May 1940 that “the only reason we are in danger of
becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements
in American who desire us to take part. They represent a small
minority of the American people, but they control much of the
machinery of influence and propaganda.” Charles Coughlin was so
pleased he featured Lindbergh on the front of his weekly newspaper,
Social Justice. Berg, Lindbergh , p. 402.
[69]
Avery Brundage, a Chicago contractor known for his work with the
Olympics Committee, was dropped after some hesitation from the AFC
national committee because of his previous praise of aspects of Nazi
Germany at a 1936 Madison Garden rally. R. Douglas Stuart likewise
rejected the two editors of Scribner’s Commentator, a
laissez-faire and occasionally anti-Semitic magazine owned by
Charles Payson, a relative of the Harrimans, who was an important
AFC New York chapter contributor. Schneider, Should America Go to
War?, pp. 106-107; Cole, America First, p. 132; and
Stenehjem, An American First, p. 42.
[70]
Coughlin was a cunning opponent. Following the ejection of several
Social Justice hawkers by General Wood from a Chicago AFC
rally in the summer of 1941, the priest accused the general of
religious discrimination. Not wanting to alienate Roman Catholics,
or those who were simply attracted to Coughlin’s economic program,
Wood wrote a carefully worded letter in which he welcomed Christian
Frontiers “in our common objective - preventing the country from
getting into war.” Social Justice then printed the letter in
late July, along with another from Lulu Wheeler, Senator’s Wheeler’s
bitterly anti-Semitic wife, embarrassing the Committee. Stenehjem,
An American First, p. 129.
[71]
This was again pointed out by F.H. Peter Cusick, executive secretary
of the Fight For Freedom Committee, after Lindbergh‘s address in Des
Moines in September. Senator
Robert Reynolds was one of the few southern Senators who was
isolationist. He was also anti-immigrant. “Hitler and Mussolini
have a date with destiny,” he told the Senate in 1938. “Why don’t
we play ball with them?” Cole, America First, p. 146; Jonas,
Isolationism in America, p. 70; and Jeansonne, Gerald L.
K. Smith, p. 87.
[72]
The only state in the deep South where the AFC had some success was
in Florida. Cole, America First, p. 31; and Schneider,
Should America Go to War?, p. 124..
[73]
The Chicago branch of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the
Allies, for example, not only had an Anglo-Saxon leadership, but
also tried to keep Jews our of public leadership roles in outlying
chapters. They believed this would enhance the Committee’s image as
being devoted entirely to American self-interest, as well as avoid
exciting anti-Semitism. Schneider, Should America Go to War?,
p. 76.
[74]
Rosenwald joined the Committee in September of 1940, and resigned in
December. Henry Ford was dropped the same month. Florence Kahn,
former Republican Congresswoman from California, and a Jew, also
served briefly before resigning. Cole, America First, p. 132;
and Sarles, A Story of America First, p. xxxv.
[75]
The first widely read anti-Committee broadside, America First -
Nazi Transmission Belt, published by Friends of Democracy
shortly after the passage of Lend-Lease, recognized the new
importance of America First in the anti-interventionist movement.
Calling it “America First-Aid to the Nazis,” it denounced the
Committee as “a Nazi front … by means of which the apostles of
Nazism are spreading their antidemocratic ideas into millions of
American homes,“ and compared statements by Senators Nye, Wheeler
and Hitler about the British empire and “international financiers.”
The pamphlet, which was distributed by Fight For Freedom as well as
Friends of Democracy, also noted the popularity of the AFC among
Coughlinites and Bundists. By the beginning of the summer the
mainstream press had joined the attack. The New Republic
called the Committee “the most powerful single potential fascist
group in the country today - the group that is polarizing every
fascist force among us.” Life said that “despite the lofty
rhetoric of its hired orators, America First en masse … (is)
emphatically anti-British, furtively anti-Semitic, and possibly
pro-Nazi. Schneider, Should America Go to War?, p. 187;
Cole, Lindbergh, p. 140; and Stenehjem, An American First,
p. 158.
[76]
The Committee also rejected members of the German-American Bund.
The Bund, under the direction of German born Fritz Kuhn, eventually
had 66 branches, as well as summer camps in ten states. Its 8,300
members, located almost entirely in the New York greater
metropolitan area, wore Nazi uniforms, held rallies and published
their own newspaper. Texas Democrat Martin Dies called the Bund
“the spearhead of Hitler’s attempted penetration” of the United
States. Bund support would have proved a great liability for the
AFC. The Committee was equally careful about keeping out
Communists, eager before June 1941 to support the anti-war
movement. Laurie, the Propaganda Warriors, p. 23.
[77]
The leadership was also aware that the Coughlinite element in some
eastern chapters was so large that their removal would weaken the
organization. Some were therefore ready to argue that there were
“good” and “bad” Coughlinites. Cole, America First, p. 138.
[78]
Hiram Johnson wrote to his son that the lines are drawn, “with all
the Jews on one side, wildly enthusiastic for the president, and
willing to fight to the last American both Germany and Italy; and
those of us - a very considerable number - who are thinking in terms
of our own country, and that alone… Naturally, like any normally
constituted human being, I hate the persecutions to which the Jews
have been put, and I will go any fair length save the ruin of my own
country to aid them; but I will not go to the length of fighting
citizens of other nations, who have been badly and shamefully
treated, nor that these citizens of other nations may vindicate
their rights or punish their wrongdoers. This is the basis of our
struggle here, and I don’t know but what somebody ought to say it
openly, but everyone is afraid - I confess I shrink from it - of
offending the Jews.“ He was also convinced that Roosevelt “cares no
more for what may happen to us in a war, than the man in the moon…
he has found, at last, the class which cheers him vociferously for
aid to their people, who neither live here, nor have anything in
common with our country. He will do anything for applause, and it
is this very group at present which applaud him to the echo.”
Lindbergh’s criticisms were more general. A journal entry in April
1939 complained “there were too many (Jews) in places like New York
already. A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but
too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.” In August,
Republican William Castle, former ambassador to Japan and
Undersecretary of State, conservative commentator Fulton Lewis and
Lindbergh agreed over dinner that “we must … limit to a reasonable
amount the Jewish influence in the Educational agencies in this
country - i.e. press, radio and pictures. I fear that trouble lies
ahead in this regard…. If an anti-Semitic movement starts in the
United States, it may go far. It will certainly affect the good
Jews along with the others. When such a movement starts, moderation
ends.” Cole, Roosevelt, p. 308; and Berg, Lindbergh,
pp. 376-393.
[79]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 254.
[80]
Other anti-Nazi films followed in 1940. These included Twentieth
Century Fox’s I Married a Nazi and Four Sons. MGM,
the last studio to produce anti-German propaganda, produced
Escape and The Mortal Storm, about a German academic’s
resistance to Nazi racial doctrines. The most popular film of the
genre was Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Cull,
Selling War, pp. 113-183.
[81]
Cole, America First, pp. 140-141.
[82]
Lamont, an interventionist, had been a partner at the Morgan bank
with Lindbergh’s father-in-law, Dwight Morrow. Lindbergh had
written back at the time that he “did not specify individuals,
groups or organizations” because he hoped it still might not be
necessary to do so. Cole, Lindbergh, p. 158.
[83]
Goralski, World War II Almanac, p. 172.
[84]
The Greer had been tracking the U-boat 175 miles off Iceland
when it was attacked. Roosevelt justified his actions by saying “it
is the Nazi design to abolish the freedom of the seas and to acquire
absolute control and domination of the seas for themselves.”
Goralski, World War II Almanac, pp. 173-174.
[85]
Ickes had called Lindbergh America’s “number one Nazi fellow
traveler” and “the first American to raise the standard of
pro-Nazism.“ On July 14, 1941 the Secretary in a New York address
said, “no one has ever heard Lindbergh utter a word of horror at, or
even aversion to, the bloody career that the Nazis are following
…“. Lindbergh, he continued, had never said “a word for democracy
itself.” It was Ickes’ repeated references to Lindbergh as a
“knight of the German eagle,” a sarcastic reference to the medal he
had received in Berlin in 1938, that would eventually help goad him
into leveling accusations against Roosevelt and the Jews at Des
Moines. Dorothy Thompson, who had called Lindbergh a “somber
cretin” and accused him of having no human feelings, was convinced
like Roosevelt that he was a Nazi. She attacked him in four columns
in 1940, and an additional four in 1941. Cole, Roosevelt, pp.
432-461; and Berg, Lindbergh, p. 397.
[86]
Berg, Lindbergh, pp. 425-427.
[87]
Warren, Radio Priest, p. 172.
[88]
Cole, America First, pp. 145-146.
[89]
Time was no gentler. “The America First Committee had
touched the pitch of anti-Semitism and its fingers were tarred.”
Liberty called him “the most dangerous man in America.” Cole,
America First, p. 146; and Berg, Lindbergh, p. 428.
[90]
Friends of Democracy within weeks of the speech held a luncheon at
Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York to raise ten thousand dollars
for a publicity campaign attacking Lindbergh as a Nazi. The
organization’s 28 page pamphlet, Is Lindbergh a Nazi? ,
claimed he had become “the American voice of the Berlin Propaganda
Ministry.” Cole, Lindbergh, p. 151.
[91]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 256.
[92]
Cole, Lindbergh, p. 428.
[93]
Cole, Lindbergh, p. 180.
[94]
Thomas eventually relented. Stenehjem, An American First, p.
136.
[95]
William O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and
Abroad in World War II, New York, 1993,
p. 49.
[96]
Lindbergh could not understand Flynn’s attitude. As he wrote in his
journal, “He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the
major influences pushing this country towards war. He has said so
frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk
about it among a small group of people in private. But apparently
he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what
the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is
done.” Cole, Lindbergh, p. 181.
[97]
Cole, Lindbergh, p. 180.
[98]
This did not include R. Douglas Stuart, who also wanted an
unambiguous denunciation of anti-Semitism. General Wood, reflecting
the divisions in the leadership, at various times suggested the
Committee disband, and that it wholeheartedly support Lindbergh.
Schneider, Should America Go to War?, pp. 210-211.
[99]
In the words of one author, many America Firsters “believed that
Jews represented a separate, cohesive, and definable interest group
on some foreign policy issues, one dedicated to promoting a policy
of intervention and possessed of the influence to help bring it
about. For this reason, some Committee members regarded Jews as
political enemies. But the stray references to Jews in the AFC
records contain considerably less malice than those to Communists,
anglophiles, or Franklin D. Roosevelt.” They did not believe their
views were anti-Semitic, as indeed they were not. It was Lindbergh’s
discussing Jews as though they were not Americans, but rather some
foreign element within America, that was anti-Semitic. His threat
against the Jews if America entered the war was more than that. It
seemed a call for persecution. Schneider, Should America Go to
War?, p. 210.
[100]
Stenehjem, An American First, p. 137.
[101]
In the apparently desperate struggle against Nazi domination of
Europe, many interventionists, taking their cue from the president
and Secretary of the Interior Ickes, made no effort to distinguish
between isolationists and Nazi sympathizers. However, since many
members of the AFC themselves were unwilling to criticize Lindbergh
and his increasingly extreme rhetoric, neither the administration
nor his interventionist opponents can be faulted too much for their
own lack of forbearance or tolerance. Cole, Lindbergh, pp.
180-181; and Cole, Roosevelt, p.484.
[102]
New York based PM was owned by the very wealthy, and
interventionist, Marshall Field III. Berg, Lindbergh, pp.
417-418.
[103]
Goralski, World War II Almanac, p. 175.
[104]
On October 4, Britain and the United States agreed to send 400
aircraft, 500 tanks, 200 gun carriers, 22,000 tons of rubber, 41,000
tons of aluminum, and 3,860 tons of machine tools to Russia every
month. Large quantities of food, medical supplies and raw materials
were also to be supplied. Goralski, World War II Almanac,
pp. 176-177.
[105]
Repayment was to begin five years after the war, and be completed in
10 years. The loan was approved by Congress on November 6. Goralski,
World War II Almanac, p. 179.
[106]
He warned that if this was not done, the United States “position in
the struggle against aggression would be definitely weakened, not
only in Europe and Asia, but also among our sister republics in the
Americas.” Goralski, World War II Almanac, p. 180.
[107]
Fought by the AFC, the changes were passed by a far smaller margin
than Lend-Lease. A change of ten votes in the House would have
defeated them. Cole, America First, p. 165-166.
[108]
Goralski, World War II Almanac, pp. 178-179.
[109]
The story also appeared in the Washington Times-Herald.
Manly described the material in a summary as a “confidential report
prepared by the Joint Army and Navy high command, calling for
American expeditionary forces aggregating five million men for a
final land offensive against Germany and her satellites. It
contemplates total armed forces of 10,045,658 men. It is a
blueprint for total war on a scale unprecedented in at least two
oceans and three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia.” The White
House Press Secretary said no action would be taken as a result of
the publication, explaining “it depends entirely on the decisions of
the publisher and editor whether publication is patriotic or
treasonable.” Goralski, World War II Almanac, p. 185.
[110]
All three supported a “Japan first” strategy proposed by Senator
Albert Chandler, Democrat of Kentucky. Doenecke, Not to the
Swift, p. 37.
[111]
These remarks were made in 1943. However, they express his pre-war
beliefs. Cole, Nye, p. 206.
[112]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 248.
[113]
Nye would have agreed with very little else. Although Coughlin’s
demand for a silver backed currency had got him the Senator’s
support early in his radio career, Nye and Coughlin definitively
parted ways over the priest’s anti-Semitic statements.
[114]
Jonas, Isolationism in America, p. 35.
[115]
President Robert Maynard Hutchins was aware of the callousness of
this attitude. He felt obliged in January 1941 to explain his
position. “I wish to dissociate myself from those who want us to
stay our of war to save our own skins or our own property. I
believe that the people of this country are and should be prepared
to make sacrifices for humanity. National selfishness should not
determine national policy … What then should our policy be? Instead
of doing everything we can to get into the war, we should do
everything we can to stay at peace. Our policy should be peace.
Aid to Britain, China and Greece should be extend on the basis most
likely to keep us at peace, and least likely to involve us in war. .
.. At the same time we should prepare to defend ourselves … In the
meantime, we should begin to make this country a refuge for those
who will not live without liberty. For less than the cost of two
battleships we could accommodate half a million refugees from
totalitarian countries for a year. The net cost would not approach
the cost of two battleships, for these victims, unlike battleships,
would contribute to our industry and our cultural life, and help us
make democracy work…. But most important of all, we should take up
with new vigor the long struggle for moral, intellectual , and
spiritual preparedness. If we would change the face of the earth,
we must first change our own hearts. The principal end that we have
hitherto set before ourselves is the unlimited acquisition of
material goods. The business of America, said Calvin Coolidge, is
business. We must now learn that material goods are a means and not
an end. … The aim of life is the fullest development of the highest
powers of men. This means art, religion, education, moral and
intellectual growth. … The American people, in their own interest,
require a moral regeneration. If they are to be missionaries to the
world, this regeneration must be profound and complete.” It is
difficult to doubt Hutchins’ sincerity. Still, his advice if
followed would have resulted in very little aid to the Allies, and a
Europe that would continue to be dominated by Hitler and Stalin. As
for America being a refuge from tyrants for millions, the nation’s
wartime record of immigration restrictions is well known. Sarles,
A Story of America First, p. 151.
[116]
Many America Firsters who had been genuinely isolationist, and not
just opposed to war with Germany, continued to oppose military
commitments abroad even after the war. Senator Robert Taft agreed
the United States had become embroiled in a world-wide conflict with
Communism. But he also wrote in 1950 that “I do not believe it is
at all clear that the Russians contemplate a military conquest of
the world … I believe they know it is impossible. It would take
them at least a hundred years to build up their sea power.” Joseph
Kennedy had already labeled American foreign policy “suicidal” and
“politically and morally bankrupt.” He called for a withdrawal from
commitments in Berlin and Korea, and believed the country had little
interest in, or responsibility for, the defense of Western Europe.
Herbert Hoover called on the Truman administration “to preserve for
the world this Western Hemisphere Gibraltar of Western
Civilization.” An economically self-sufficient America “surrounded
by a great moat” did not need to keep troops either in Europe or
Asia for its defense, he concluded. Hoover did think, however, that
the United States might still use Britain, Japan, Taiwan, the
Philippines, Australia and New Zealand as bastions of national
defense. General Wood and ex-Senator Wheeler, inspired by Taft and
Hoover, began to hope for a revival of America First. The
Chicago Tribune declared “Mr. Hoover Speaks for the Nation,” and
called for an end to the draft, the return of American troops from
Europe, and a defense strategy limited to North America. Some older
America First prejudices also re-emerged in the post-war period.
Britain was still hated. The election of a Socialist government in
1945 made it the world‘s first Socialist empire, and as such
unworthy of help on both counts. Some isolationists still feared
Britain might also still maintain imperial preference, the tariff
wall around its empire created in the early 1930s, thus putting
America at a disadvantage in the enormous sterling trading zone. In
keeping with another America First prejudice, some old Committee
members were anxious to rehabilitate Germany, and criticized the
“harshness” of the Potsdam agreement, the restrictions on German
industry and denazification. Finally, when Robert Taft, the
favorite of former America Firsters, failed to get the Republican
presidential nomination in 1952, he blamed his defeat in part on
“the power of the New York financial interests and a large number of
businesses subject to New York,” as well as the opposition of most
influential newspapers. Jonas, Isolationism in America , pp.
278-279; and Doenecke, Not to the Swift , pp. 59-221.
[117]
Stenehjem, An American First, p. 133.
[118]
“If Germany had been permitted to throw her armies eastward against
Russia in 1939 instead of in 1941,” he told a New York audience at
his last AFC rally in October 1941, “the picture in Europe would be
far different today. Whether or not Germany would have turned west
after conquering Russia is debatable. But even if she had done so,
a weaker Germany would have faced a stronger England and France.”
Cole, Lindbergh, p. 98.
[119]
“In the past,” Lindbergh had said during the Battle of Britain, “we
have dealt with a Europe dominated by England and France. In the
future we may have to deal with a Europe dominated by Germany.”
Cooperation with Nazi Germany, he assured his audience, “need not be
impossible.” Hitler’s invasion of Russia had made him even
more willing to accept German control of Europe. Giblin,
Lindbergh, p. 175.
[120]
In August Lindbergh charged that “the same groups who call on us to
defend democracy and freedom abroad, demand that we kill democracy
and freedom at home by forcing four-fifths of our people into war
against their will. The one-fifth who are for war call the
four-fifths who are against war the ‘fifth column’.“ Cole,
Roosevelt, p. 465.
[121]
Berg, Lindbergh, p. 422.
[122]
This definition of the aims of the CDAAA by William Allen White,
Republican editor of the Emporia Gazette, appeared in the
Chicago Daily News on May 21, 1940, a day after the Committee
was created. Cull, Selling War, p. 73.
[123]
La Guardia wrote to White that “you could continue as chairman of
the ‘Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies with Words,’
and the rest of us would join a ‘Committee to Defend America by
Aiding the Allies with Deeds.’” Cole, Lindbergh, p. 138.
[124]
John Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who feared wartime casualties
and government no-strike rules, was not among them. The
interventionists included William Green of the American Federation
of Labor, and most Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
leaders. Among these were Scottish born Philip Murray, president of
the United Steel Workers, Sidney Hillerman of the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America, Jim Carey of the United Electrical,
Radio and Machine Workers and Richard Frankensteen of the United
Automobile Workers. Murray would eventually become president of the
CIO. Cull, Selling War, pp. 164-166.
[126]
The Chicago Daily News had originally hoped to turn the 1940
presidential race into a massive repudiation of the New Deal. The
danger Hitler presented turned it into a pro-administration,
pro-intervention paper. Schneider, Should America Go to War
,p. 51.
[127]
Harry Fleischman, Norman Thomas, A Biography, 1884-1968, New
York, 1969, p. 192.
[128]
Schneider, Should America Go to War?, p. 62.
[129]
Roosevelt had told the nation during a fireside chat in December
1940 that “the Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they
intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own
country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use
the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
Therefore “the United States had no right or reason to encourage
talk of peace, until the day shall come when there is a clear
intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all
thought of dominating or conquering the world.” He also rejected
any notion of a negotiated peace, since such a peace “would be only
another armistice, leading to the most gigantic armaments race and
the most devastating trade war in all history. And in these
contests the Americans would offer the only real resistance to the
Axis powers.” Cole, Roosevelt, p. 343.
[130]
This summary of Kreuger’s argument is found in Schneider, Should
America Go to War?, p. 179.
[131]
Cull, Selling War , p. 34.
|
n´bûrg,
l
