America First Committee, the principal national American organization which sought to mobilize public opinion in the USA against intervention in the European War. Formed in September 1940 in the wake of the
fall of France as questions of aid to the UK arose, America First fought to preserve traditional American non-entanglement in Europe's quarrels. Arrayed against it in the so-called Great Debate of 1940–1 was the
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and later the even more interventionist
Fight For Freedom Committee.
The instigator of America First was a 24-year-old Princeton graduate at Yale Law School, R. Douglas Stuart Jr. By consulting leading isolationists in Congress and using family connections with prominent businessmen in Chicago, Stuart drew together the diverse voices of non-intervention. He prevailed on General Robert E. Wood, the innovative and reformist head of Sears Roebuck, to become national chairman. Wood had served as quartermaster general of the army in the
First World War and had initially been a supporter of the New Deal. Also active at the national level were the businessmen Hanford MacNider, William H. Regnery, and Jay C. Hormel, former diplomat William R. Castle, William Benton of the University of Chicago, Chester Bowles, advertising executive, Philip LaFollette, former governor of Wisconsin, and the author John T. Flynn. At its peak, membership of America First exceeded 800,000.
America Firsters were strong American nationalists. Like most Americans they were suspicious of Europe, horrified by the bloodshed of the First World War, and disillusioned at the failure of the peace. They had no objection to selling arms to the UK on a cash and carry basis (see
Neutrality Acts), but they did not see Britain or the Soviet Union as an asset to American security, nor Nazi Germany as a threat to it. They argued that the USA should build up its own military forces, defend the
western hemisphere, and rely on the broad Atlantic as protection. Involvement in Europe's wars, they believed, would only weaken American democracy.
America First fought an uphill battle. In a time of world peril, its message was essentially negative. It was hard to argue that the USA would be safer in the long run by defending its own side of the Atlantic than by seizing the moment to keep the war on the other side by sustaining the UK, and later the Soviet Union, especially when
German surface raiders, U-boats, and
auxiliary cruisers were already sinking ships off American shores. More than most such national pressure groups, it suffered from the disparate and often contradictory viewpoints of its members. Its core was anti-New Deal Republican, business-oriented, and Midwestern (especially Chicago). This bedrock conservatism sat poorly with liberals, who joined America First in fear that foreign involvement would wreck their domestic reform agenda. Meanwhile the leadership's support of military preparedness discomfited pacifists.
Unwelcome as they were to the national leadership, members of pro-Nazi and fascist organizations strayed into local chapters. One prominent America First speaker proved to be a German agent. The anglophobia of many America Firsters was also a handicap at a time of prevailing sympathy for the UK's plight.
Most damaging to the committee, however, was the reputation it earned for
anti-Semitism as a result of
Charles Lindbergh's speech under its auspices at Des Moines on 11 September 1941. The Lone Eagle, as the famous transatlantic solo pilot was nicknamed, expressed sympathy for Jewish hatred of Nazi Germany but warned against their ‘agitating for war.’ Tolerance, he said, could not survive war, and the Jewish people would be the first to suffer its loss. Jews carried great weight on the question of intervention, he pointed out, on account of ‘their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government’.
In spite of its weaknesses and embarrassments, America First fought on. Most prominent were its mass rallies with a clutch of admired speakers such as Senator on K. Wheeler and Lindbergh. It also organized repeated letter-writing campaigns to Congress, provided speakers for local meetings, sent transcriptions of speeches to radio stations, sponsored polls, and distributed pamphlets, auto stickers, newsletters, and posters.
By the time of
Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Great Debate had reached a bitter impasse while neither side emerged a clear winner, America First was, in the last analysis, the loser. At no point in the successive battles over intervention—
Lend-Lease, escort of
convoys during the
battle of the Atlantic, repeal of the remaining neutrality acts—did it score a victory. The Roosevelt administration moved warily against the isolationist bloc but never ceased its progressive intervention in the war and the public, by and large, went along with it. America First's fight represented the last stand of American detachment from world politics. It was disbanded after Pearl Harbor.
Waldo Heinrichs
Bibliography
Cole, W. C. , America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940–1941 (Madison, Wis., 1953).
Schneider, J. C. , Should America Go to War? The Debate Over Foreign Policy in Chicago, 1939–1941 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989).
