America First Beyond Lindbergh

The multi-faceted argument against U.S. intervention in WWII

Every morning I get an email from Google letting me know what new articles have been written about Charles Lindbergh. This month brought a birthday reminder (Lindbergh himself, 121 on February 4th) and an anniversary notice (Bruno Hauptmann being convicted for kidnapping and murdering the Lindberghs’ first-born son). But most often, what Google reports is that yet another writer has suggested some contemporary analogy to the America First movement, invariably mentioning its most famous speaker’s most appalling attitudes: anti-Semitism, admiration for Nazi Germany, and white supremacy.

For more on all of that, see chs. 8-9 of my Lindbergh biography. I don’t shy away from those topics; in fact, just last week I heard from a reader upset that I was “cancelling” Lindbergh for his racism.¹

But while I’m not all that sympathetic to the America First Committee (AFC) of 1940-1941 — and I’m downright opposed to its contemporary manifestations — I want to push back a bit: before Pearl Harbor, Americans opposed intervention in World War II for all sorts of reasons that had nothing to do with religious or racial bigotry or sympathy for fascist dictatorships.