Almost exactly two years after Fritz Kuhn’s German American Bund disgraced itself by explosively combining the symbols of Americanism with Nazism in Madison Square Garden, another event was held at the same venue. This time, the turnout was even larger than it had been in 1939. the New York Times called it a “capacity crowd” of around twenty-two thousand, with around ten thousand more listening to the proceedings on loudspeakers set up outside. They were flanked by tens of thousands of protestors and a more than thousand New York police officers sent to provide security. Some of the attendees had probably also been there for Fritz Kuhn’s last big hurrah, and some pro-Nazi groups canceled their own meetings that night to encourage attendance. A New York City official hyperbolically claimed 60 percent of the attendees that night were “members of or sympathizers with the German American Bund.” Members of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front were in attendance as well and hawked copies of Social Justice on the street.1 This was a catch-all gathering of Hitler’s American friends.
The event was headlined by two of the biggest names in American politics: aviator-turned-celebrity-political-activist Charles Lindbergh and Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler, the staunch isolationist and Roosevelt opponent. Both men were given a nationwide radio audience that night that numbered in the millions, with Lindbergh’s remarks broadcast live on the Mutual Broadcasting System and Wheeler being carried by NBC and CBS. Both used the platform to denounce the “war makers” they claimed were trying to drag the country into the European war, and told the audience that “America has nothing to fear from foreign invasion, provided it has the right leadership.” Even if Britain were to fall under the boot of German oppression, they continued, America would be “strong and mighty enough not to worry about its defense from any invader.” The crowd uproariously supported these sentiments and loudly booed every mention of the president, members of his cabinet, and the British ambassador. Wheeler told the crowd Roosevelt was being pushed into war by “jingoistic journalists and saber rattling bankers in New York.” Lindbergh received a four-minute standing ovation.2 By any definition, the event seemed to be a massive success.
This was the America First Committee at its political peak the summer before Pearl Harbor. Since its inception the previous September, America First had rapidly become the country’s most vocal and best-known group seemingly articulating the concerns held by millions of Americans about the country’s entry into the European war. With France defeated and occupied by German troops who made a point of parading down the iconic Champs-Élysées in Paris, American involvement was becoming more likely by the day. Or was it? If Wheeler and Lindbergh were to be believed, even if Buckingham Palace ended up flying a swastika flag it would matter little to the average New Yorker or midwestern farmer.
Why should Americans concern themselves about a conflict that was thousands of miles away, expending blood and treasure to save European empires from destroying one another? The sacrifice of young American men such a war would involve was made clear that May night in Manhattan by the appearance of the New York State chair of the Gold Star Mothers, an organization of women who had lost sons in war. The audience was told explicitly that the event’s objective was to “make sure there should be no more Gold Star Mothers here.” In addition, Senator Wheeler told them, the outbreak of war might lead to the emergence of “one-man government,” the “end of constitutional democracy,” and dictatorship at home.3 Presented in this way, the argument was clear-cut. Who could possibly support American entry into a faraway war to save the British Empire if it would mean weeping mothers and widows, financial ruin, and dictatorship at home?
This was the essence of the America First Committee’s argument and appeal. While Roosevelt was trying desperately to help save Britain from imminent defeat and prepare the United States for what he believed was inevitable entry in the conflict, the America Firsters were busy appealing to roughly the same group a future president—Richard Nixon—would memorably refer to as the “silent majority”: the mass of Americans who want law and order, and otherwise to be left alone. In Nixon’s era, this would mean assuring worried citizens that American pride and the nation itself could survive increasing anti-Vietnam protests, but in 1941 it meant appealing to the genuine desire held by a similar group of Americans to stay out of another distant conflict. Decades before Donald J. Trump adopted an identical slogan for his own campaign, America First represented the idea that issues beyond the country’s borders were dangerous, expensive, and unworthy of American attention.
Yet there were always hints of a darker side to America First too. Among the audience that night in 1941 was Joe McWilliams, the self-proclaimed Führer of a group called the Christian Mobilizers and a favorite target of the left-wing press for his frequent statements praising Hitler. When an America First speaker told the audience McWilliams was present, much of the crowd called for him to be thrown out of the event, but at least one man was himself thrown out for audibly defending McWilliams. The Christian Mobilizer’s leader was allowed to remain. Minutes later, the crowd shouted down the idea of singing “God Bless America” on the grounds that the lyrics were too “interventionist” (the fact that it had been written by a Jew, Irving Berlin, probably did little to increase its appeal too). The New York America First chapter chairman told the crowd his organization was interested in the support of “the 100,000,000 Americans who are against the war” and not “a handful of Bundists, Communists and Christian Fronters who are without number, without influence, without power and without respect in this or any other community,” but it still was undeniable that the event had a fair amount of representation from those groups.4
The British government saw more sinister intentions in the America First movement from its earliest days onward. The America Firsters were obviously a major obstacle to the Roosevelt administration being able to provide much-needed aid to the British, and therefore William Stephenson’s BSC agents realized the need to monitor its activities closely. Their reports to London must have been stomach-turning for Winston Churchill’s government. A top secret dossier produced in 1941 argued that while the organization was “fundamentally American” and “conducted on American lines,” it was also “the most effective weapon at the disposal of the enemy for the purpose of keeping the United States out of the war.”5 More dangerously, no matter how respectable appearances might be, “It is the raw material of American Fascism … the present tactics and methods of action of the movement reveal it as the American Fifth Column, sowing racial hatred and accentuating internal division. This is the effect of its activity and whether the process is conscious or unconscious is irrelevant.”6 In other words, the British believed that no matter how it might present itself, America First was fundamentally an organization of Hitler’s most important American friends.
The British were in many ways right. From its inception, America First attracted an array of anti-Semites and right-wing extremists alongside seemingly respectable members of Congress and business leaders. It was, in fact, the final amalgamation of all the groups discussed in previous pages. As will be seen, America First was founded by a Yale student whose father was a corporate scion. Bundists, Silver Shirts, Coughlinites, and a bevy of other extremists rushed to join its ranks, despite the denials of America First’s leaders that this was taking place. The same senators who had taken part in George Sylvester Viereck’s Capitol Hill scheme now appeared on platforms around the country alongside the one man who still might have the chance to unite the far right and claim the title of American Führer: Charles Lindbergh. America’s most famous aviator may well not have known how he was viewed by his most extreme supporters, but there is little doubt that he was hailed as the future American Hitler by a cross section of Americans.
America First’s leadership always vehemently denied that they had any links to Hitler. Yet it was undeniable that the organization still retained a remarkable ability to attract the support of people with questionable views at best. There was a natural alliance between America First and groups such as the Bund that opposed American intervention in the war for their own reasons. There were further affinities between their stances as well. Foremost of these were strong undercurrents of anti-Semitism alongside anti-British, anti-Roosevelt, and anti–New Deal sentiment. The fact that all three of these aspects had a habit of regularly showing up in the public pronouncements of America First’s leaders served to endear the group further to the subsection of Americans whose views toward Hitler were far from unfavorable. As self-proclaimed American fascist Lawrence Dennis recounted decades after the war:
The anti-intervention or then so-called isolation [sic] cause was basically anti–New Deal. It was against America getting into the war only because the New Dealers seemed to be using American intervention in the war as essentially a New Deal strategy. The America Firsters or anti-war factors were not really pacifist or anti-war. They were anti–New Deal and that made them anti-war in that period and situation.7
In other words, America First had at least as much to do with opposing Roosevelt and the New Deal than the war itself.
This heavy anti-Roosevelt sentiment stemmed in part from America First’s business representation. As already seen, corporate America was hostile to Roosevelt from the early days of his administration, and many firms had a vested interest in ending the war before their European investments were threatened. America First truly began in the law school classrooms of Yale University, where Robert Douglas Stuart Jr., son of the vice chairman of Quaker Oats, embarked on what British intelligence described as “an ambitious project of adolescence” in early 1940 and began holding meetings with about two dozen fellow students to discuss the deteriorating international situation.8 With Roosevelt running for his controversial third term, the group believed that an elite group of up-and-coming attorneys who leaned Republican might well be able to affect the trajectory of national politics. Seeking to unify the isolationist right wing and “all political and social forces opposing the foreign policy of the Roosevelt Administration,” Stuart officially launched America First and began courting anti-interventionist senators including Wheeler, Robert A. Taft (who would later run for the GOP presidential nomination, only to be defeated by Dwight D. Eisenhower), and Robert La Follette. Former secretary of state William Castle Jr. showed sympathies for the cause and had already been in touch with Charles Lindbergh about the prospect of launching a similar movement, but their plans had gone nowhere.9 Now they would both be pulled under the America First umbrella.
More important than the politicians, however, was the fact that Stuart was able to recruit the support of corporate leaders with major name recognition: Jay C. Hormel, president of the meat-packing empire responsible for Spam (which would ironically become widely known for its place in the American soldier’s standard diet during World War II); William Regnery, a wealthy cloth manufacturer whose son would launch a conservative publishing empire; and General Robert E. Wood, the first and only national chairman of the organization. Wood was in some ways the most distinguished and well-known of all America Firsters except Lindbergh. He had served as a solider in the Philippines and as quartermaster general during World War I before embarking on a high-flying corporate career that included positions in the powerful Panama Rail Company, the United Fruit Company, and Montgomery Ward. He also served as a deputy chairman for the Federal Reserve in Chicago. In 1939 he became the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company and was known as a major player in the Republican Party. Between him and Regnery, the financial stability of America First was immediately assured. In the summer of 1940 temporary offices were opened in the same building that housed the headquarters of Quaker Oats. America First was quite literally owned and operated by some of the country’s most powerful corporate interests.10
In September 1940, America First was officially incorporated as a nonprofit organization and began its formal activities. Organizationally, it was run as a national body with local chapters. At the top of the organizational chart was a Chicago-based executive committee that included Wood, Regnery, Stuart (who served as national director and was responsible for most day-to-day operations), Hormel, and three others. Surrounding them was a wider national committee of around fifty people who were chosen for their economic power or sheer prestige. Some did very little to help the cause beyond lending their names, including Henry Ford (though he did promise “to do everything possible for us” and offered a donation, according to Lindbergh).11 Among the most active and significant national committee members would of course be Lindbergh, who consistently refused invitations to take Wood’s job; and Senator Wheeler’s wife, who served as the treasurer of the Washington, DC, chapter and was, according to the British, a “forceful and dangerous woman.”12
The heart of America First was therefore found in Chicago, where many of its elite corporate leaders were based and a substantial staff of around one hundred worked to keep operations running. The Midwest was also the natural place for such an organization to be headquartered. As British intelligence put it, Chicago was the “obvious centre of any nation-wide isolationist movement” because of “the strong concentration of Americans from German origin here … This area is naturally the focus of opposition to active aid to Great Britain with its ultimate danger of involving the United States.”13 The Midwest would indeed remain the America First Committee’s geographical base, with two-thirds of its members located within three hundred miles of Chicago.14
There were many other chapters around the country as well, however. Procedurally, anyone could launch their own local chapter simply by simply writing to the Chicago headquarters. This led to the obvious problem that some chapter leaders might take their organization in undesirable directions—as Fritz Kuhn had found, to his dismay, with the Bund. Over the course of 1940 the national headquarters began promulgating rules and regulations to prevent local chapters from becoming national embarrassments. Several state chapters were even formed to keep an eye on the activities of other local leaders, and larger groups were amalgamated from smaller ones in urban areas, including Los Angeles, to prevent the proliferation of many groups competing for the same membership (and in the case of LA, perhaps to prevent small groups from falling under the influence of the powerful Bund–Silver Shirt alliance in the area).15
By Pearl Harbor, nearly every major city in the country would have a functioning chapter of some description, though some areas proved more receptive then others. The Committee had terrible difficulty organizing in much of the South, including Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and both Carolinas. One reason for this may have been the relative lack of German and Irish immigrants in those areas, the competing influence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the fact that the Committee was a fundamentally Republican and Northern big business undertaking while the South was heavily Democratic (it is also interesting to recall that Louisiana was the only state in which the Silver Legion had been unable to organize, likely because of the residual influence of the Huey Long political machine).16 At its peak, the America First Committee probably had a total of more than eight hundred thousand members, making it by far the largest organization of its type in the country.17
British intelligence astutely, if bluntly, divided the membership of America First into six categories, most of which also corresponded to the main factions of Hitler’s American friends:
1. Big business men in Chicago (“The most important” group)
2. Republicans and “leaders of opposition to the New Deal”
3. “The pacifism of Quakers, intellectuals, and liberal philanthropists (Note the university connection.)”
4. “Extreme left wing opposition” to the Roosevelt administration, including labor leader John L. Lewis and his daughter, who became a prominent leader in the organization
5. “The anti-Semitic Fascism of retired generals and ex-servicemen”
6. “Emotional Mothers”18
Members of America First could expect to receive a healthy dose of mailings and other promotional material, along with invitations to regular local meetings. Those living in or near major cities might also be able to expect a visit by one of the organization’s leading figures, or even several of them.
America First’s most popular speaker, by a long margin, was Lindbergh. Lucky Lindy’s speeches became so popular with America First audiences in 1941 that he would frequently receive ovations lasting for minutes. At one point national headquarters held a contest offering a Lindbergh speech to the local chapter that could recruit the most members.19 Events featuring Lindbergh could attract crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, and British intelligence described him as “the one man who commands the support of the masses in the AF [America First] movement,” though he was also “politically immature,” “untrained in democratic argument,” and possessing a “messianic view of politics.” At the same time, his “apparent and adolescent honesty has a definite appeal.”20 Lindbergh was really the only name in America First that mattered.
In large part, this was because Lucky Lindy was the perfect celebrity spokesman. He was still regarded by many as a national hero for his daring 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. The subsequent kidnapping and death of his son just a few years later led to one of the greatest outpourings of national sympathy and grief in American history.21 Yet Lindbergh’s path to becoming America’s best-known isolationist was anything but straightforward. Following the kidnapping case and the resulting trial, Lindbergh and his family moved to England to escape the limelight. His European exile was hardly destined to be quiet and uncontroversial.
In June 1936, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, received a letter from Major Truman Smith, the American military attaché in Berlin. Smith wanted to know whether the aviator would be willing to visit the country and produce a report for the United States government about recent developments in German aviation. Smith himself was a Yale graduate and an infantryman by training, making him intellectually well-qualified for his post but ill-prepared to evaluate the military implications of air power. “There’s the man who could help me if he would!” Smith exclaimed to his wife, Kay, when he heard that the Lindberghs had arrived in England. Indeed, Lindbergh’s fame and personal expertise seemed to make him perfect for the task at hand.22 Smith’s proposal for the visit was approved in advance by Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring, who was no doubt eager to reap the publicity benefits of a visit by the world’s most famous aviator and, as has been seen, also seemed to meet every prominent American who came to town. Lindbergh accepted the invitation on the condition that press access to the event be severely restricted because “what I am most anxious to avoid is the sensational and stupid publicity which we have so frequently encountered in the past; and the difficulty and unpleasantness which invariably accompany it.”23
The visit took place in July 1936 and included trips to airfields, aircraft factories, and research facilities. There were social functions as well, including a luncheon packed with government officials in which Lindbergh delivered a lengthy speech on the destructive potential of aerial bombardment. The speech received widespread attention, with American newspaper columnists overwhelmingly praising its sentiments. The New York Times used a quotation on its editorial page and reprinted the speech in its entirety starting on the front page.24
Lindbergh, Smith, and their wives later paid a social call to Göring. After lunch the Luftwaffe chief gave the group of Americans a tour of his art-stocked residence before introducing them to his pet lion, Augie. The excited three-foot-tall feline jumped onto Göring’s lap like a house cat and started licking his face, only to abruptly become frightened when it noticed the other humans present and urinating on his immaculate white uniform. Lindbergh tactfully turned to study a painting on the wall as the scene unfolded, sparing his host additional embarrassment.25 Göring changed clothes and continued the tour. He showed Lindbergh an impressive sword from his collection and invited the aviator to hold it. Fearing that an unflattering photo might be taken if he held such a menacing weapon, Lindbergh sensibly declined.26
Lucky Lindy’s caution was not without reason. Despite his eagerness to avoid the press, the entire visit had become a minor sensation in the United States. The New York Times reported his daily movements, noting on July 26 that Lindbergh’s visit to an aviation research center had taken place “almost secretly.” It nonetheless managed to report most of his travel itinerary and threw in an anecdote about him signing an autograph for a famed German airman later in the day. The press, it seemed, could simply not be dissuaded from reporting on his every move.27 Lindbergh’s final major stop was a visit to the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. This was not part of his original itinerary, but was added when Lindbergh “became so interested that he decided to accept the invitation of the German Government to stay for the opening day as a guest in the official box,” as Kay Smith put it.28 In the box he sat “within speaking distance” of Hitler himself but evidently did not do so. The Times remarked caustically that “Nobody, apparently, made any effort to introduce them. In American diplomatic quarters it was explained ‘no time could be found that was convenient to both for which to arrange a meeting.’”29 (The source of this quote was almost certainly Truman Smith, who had been hoping to arrange this exact meeting.)30
Lindbergh’s public and private sentiments toward Germany were nearly identical following his visit. The Times reported that he was “intensely pleased by what he had observed in Germany” in the area of aircraft innovation.31 Privately, he told Smith that his admiration of the country extended to “many other standpoints as well.” Specifically, “The condition of the country, and the appearance of the average person whom I saw, leaves with me the impression that Hitler must have far more character and vision than I thought existed in the German leader, who has been painted in so many different ways by the accounts in America and England.”32
As already seen, this sentiment was not unusual in the heady days of 1936. Hitler had indeed led the country to rapid economic recovery that had dwarfed the accomplishments of Roosevelt’s New Deal and economic recovery efforts in most other countries. The Berlin Olympics was seen as a major propaganda coup for the German government. The Lindberghs’ visit had been entirely stage-managed by Göring and his underlings, so it actually would have been more surprising if Lindbergh and his wife had not come away impressed. Truman Smith himself believed Lindbergh’s visit had helped improve German-American relations substantially and also gave the US military new information about the Luftwaffe’s development.33
The Lindberghs would visit Germany twice more in the coming years. Through early 1937 Lindbergh continually fed Smith information about what he believed was taking place with German aircraft production (“I would expect the Junkers factory to be producing twin-engine bombers rapidly at the present time, unless they have greatly reduced the number of their workmen”) while planning his next visit.34 In October, the Lindberghs arrived in Munich. More tours of aircraft production plants followed over the coming days, including several that were considered off-limits to most foreign visitors. Lindbergh was enthralled. “I shall not attempt to outline in this letter how greatly I was impressed with the progress of German aviation during the last year and the general conditions of the country,” he told Smith.35 By March, he told Smith that he was “almost convinced that they [the Germans] have the strongest air force in the world and that it is growing more rapidly than that of any other country. Our aviation development in the United States is still rapid but it does not seem to be holding pace with the Germans.”36
The Munich visit was not all about work, however, and the Smiths and Lindberghs decided to take the opportunity to visit to the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition being held in the city. The art on display had been taken from other German museums and was chosen for its supposedly anti-German qualities. Modern art was heavily represented, as were pieces by Jewish artists. The exhibition had been strongly condemned in much of the American press and elsewhere as a heavy-handed attack on artistic expression. The Smiths and the Lindberghs disagreed. As Kay Smith remembered, “The continuous viewing of ugly distorted faces and forms, with blood and vomit spewing from them, produced a definite physical reaction. I felt nauseated.” Lucky Lindy apparently felt the same way. “For the first time in my life I feel like having a drink,” the famously teetotal aviator remarked after leaving the venue. Lindbergh’s affinities for Nazi Germany now apparently extended beyond purely economic and technical matters. “As for me I heartily supported the name Degenerate Art which Hitler had applied to it,” Kay Smith remembered.37
Lindbergh’s final, and ultimately most important, visit to Germany would come almost exactly a year later. It took place in the immediate aftermath of the 1938 Munich crisis, when tensions over the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia had nearly pushed Europe into war. Lindbergh told Smith from France that “I have always felt that the Germans were too intelligent to permit war this year over Czechoslovakia, but I am greatly concerned about the possibility of a European war developing in the fairly near future.” The key to averting conflict, he rather naively believed, was “getting the German problem better understood in America and Europe” and making the Germans realize that “they could accomplish more with a different attitude toward other nations.”38 Privately, Lindbergh was also pessimistic about British chances in a war against Germany. “The English have, as usual, been asleep and are in no shape for war,” he confided in his journal. “They do not realize what they are confronted with. They have always before had a fleet between themselves and their enemy, and they can’t realize the change aviation has made.”39 The idea that Britain was doomed would later become a driving force behind his involvement with America First.
Lindbergh arrogantly concluded that a visit to Berlin was the only appropriate response to the unfolding international circumstances. In mid-October he abruptly flew to the German capital and stayed again with the Smiths. On the evening of October 18, he attended a dinner at the American embassy that included Göring and other German dignitaries. Without warning, Göring was handed a small note and began delivering a speech. In it, he announced that the Führer had decided to award Lindbergh the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle in recognition of his services to aviation. This was a prestigious award—in theory, the second highest in the Reich—and was generally awarded to foreign diplomats who had assisted the Reich’s interests and other notable non-Germans. It was also similar to the award that had been so controversially given to Henry Ford. Thinking little of the gesture and unable to understand Göring’s speech, Lindbergh stuffed the box holding the medal into his pocket and continued socializing.40 Later that night, Kay Smith translated the note for him and the group realized what had taken place. Anne Morrow Lindbergh remarked immediately that the medal was an “albatross.” Her husband would end up wearing it metaphorically for the rest of his life.41
The backlash in the United States began immediately. The New York Times ran the medal story on the bottom of page 1, alleging that Lindbergh had “displayed an embarrassed smile and thanked Marshal Goering but proudly wore the decoration during the evening.” (According to Kay Smith’s account, Lindbergh never actually wore the medal that night.)42 In Britain, Everybody’s Magazine, a weekly periodical with a tabloid bent, advised Lindbergh not to bother returning to the country. “And though we have no wish to be rude,” the periodical editors wrote, “we would feel happier if he went home.”43 Two weeks later, the Times reported on the front page that the Lindberghs were considering moving from France to Berlin “to continue his aviation and other scientific studies in collaboration with German scientific circles.” The medal again made an appearance in this article, reinforcing the growing perception that America’s most famous aviator was growing dangerously close to the Nazi regime.44
Lindbergh assiduously recorded his thoughts about international affairs in a series of journals that provide an unmatched insight into his thoughts and activities during this critical period. As the medal episode suggests, one recurrent theme is Lindbergh’s naïveté about Nazi intentions and objectives. Reflecting on anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht that erupted shortly after his 1938 visit, Lindbergh remarked:
I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans. It seems so contrary to their sense of order, and their intelligence in other ways. They undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it so necessary to handle it unreasonably? My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this. What is the object in this persecution of the Jews?45
This was hardly the analysis of a man with a deep understanding of Nazi ideology. Lindbergh would continuously demonstrate a similar lack of understanding toward his own actions as the decade proceeded.
Back in America, the damage continued to mount. In early December, TWA, the national airline which Lindbergh had helped establish after his 1927 flight, dropped its then-famous nickname of “The Lindbergh Line.” Rumors spread that the change had been made because of the bad publicity his name was bringing. The airline president quickly issued the usual denials, but Lindbergh’s reputation was clearly taking major damage.46 More ominously, in late December, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes told a Jewish group meeting that anyone accepting a decoration from a dictator “automatically foreswears his American birthright.” He then explicitly named Lindbergh and Ford as the men he had in mind.47 The German embassy demanded an official apology, but the Roosevelt administration said nothing in reply.48 Lindbergh sensibly decided to use this moment return to the United States and address the unfolding crisis. He arrived in April to face an inevitable media storm.
Docking in New York, Lindbergh was mobbed by reporters and photographers. He eventually slipped away into a waiting car. Over the coming days he accepted an active duty commission in the Army Air Corps and met with Roosevelt personally to discuss German aviation. Lindbergh, the president drily told the press, told him nothing that the US government had not already known.49 Over the coming months, Lindbergh worked with the United States military on aviation-related issues. At the same time, however, his views about the need for America to stay out of the coming war hardened.50 On September 1, 1939, this question became more than theoretical when the German military plunged into Poland.
Lindbergh now faced a decisive choice. He could easily have continued his defense work and quietly helped prepare the country for a war he hoped it would not join. Alternatively, he could use his fame to argue against the war, running the risk of further damage to his reputation. On September 15, he opted for the second route and accepted time on all three of the nation’s radio networks. Speaking from a Washington hotel suite, he warned listeners that “If we enter fighting for democracy abroad, we may end up losing it at home.” If the United States were to enter the war, he predicted, “a million men, possibly several million” would be killed, and the country would be “staggering under the burden of recovery during the rest of our lives.” The better path was to remain neutral, with a strong army and navy to deter invasion. More sinisterly, he advised Americans to be skeptical of the news they were hearing from Europe and “ask who owns and who influences the newspaper, the news picture and radio.”51 This sentiment would soon take darker implications.
The response was immediate. Hundreds of messages, most of them supportive, flooded the Lindbergh residence. The press was less sympathetic, with left-wing columnist Dorothy Thompson denouncing Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer who had, after all, accepted a medal from Göring.52 The FBI began collecting mail from outraged citizens who denounced him as a possible threat to national security.53 The Mutual radio network was forced to defend its decision to make the initial arrangements for the speech (the other networks had simply joined Mutual’s plans and set up their own microphones). Lindbergh’s views were “entirely his own” and had not been “sponsored by a group or organization,” Mutual’s president assured the public.54
A month later, Lindbergh addressed the nation over the airwaves again. This time he laid out a series of policy measures to ensure American neutrality. Specifically, he proposed a complete embargo on the sale of “offensive” weapons to the belligerent nations while allowing them to buy “defensive” weapons. American shipping to the war zone would be immediately cut off, and US credit would be withheld from all “warring nations or their agents.” He concluded by arguing that if Canada—part of the British Empire and at war with Germany already—was directly attacked the United States would come to its aid, but Americans should not be drawn into the conflict simply because its northern neighbor was already involved. “Have they the right to draw this hemisphere into a European war simply because they prefer the Crown of England to American independence?” he asked the audience.55
This second radio address set off an even greater furor. Letters again poured into the Lindbergh residence and the press had a field day. The US Senate, then in the midst of a fractious debate over the Neutrality Act, jumped on the bandwagon. Democratic senator Key Pittman of Nevada, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, denounced Lindbergh and argued the speech “encourages the ideology of totalitarian governments and is subject to the construction that he approves of their brutal conquest of democratic countries through war or threat of destruction through war.”56 The British response was even more furious. The Sunday Express ran the salacious headline “Hitler’s Medal Goes to Lindbergh’s Head” and alleged that the “honored and decorated visitor of Hitler’s, fervent admirer of Nazi strength, is now apparently developing the Hitler mind.” His references to Canada, the paper went on, were tantamount to saying that “Canada has no right to go to war unless with the permission of the United States.”57 A week later, British politician and former diplomat Harold Nicolson—from whom Lindbergh had rented his house in England—published an article in British magazine The Spectator defending the aviator’s right to say what he liked about Canada, but arguing that his worldview had fundamentally been warped by “fame and tragedy.” Lindbergh was, he continued, “a fine boy from the Middle West … He is and always will be not merely a schoolboy hero but also a schoolboy.”58
The two radio addresses rapidly catapulted Lindbergh into becoming “the nation’s symbol of neutrality,” as one of his biographers has put it.59 The British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian, summarized the debate astutely in July 1940, telling Conservative MP Victor Cazalet, “The defeatists ask ‘What is the good of our helping Great Britain which cannot now win?… Underlying the whole is the natural instinct of every democracy to avoid war if it possibly can, which is the ultimate explanation why Hitler has been able to take them one by one without any of them learning experience from the rest.”60 He might well have had Lindbergh in mind while writing these lines. American opinion was rapidly splitting on the issue of intervention, and Lindbergh was at the center of the debate. A poll in August 1940 found that an astonishing 51 percent of Americans had heard or read about Lindbergh’s most recent radio address calling for nonintervention. Of those, 24 percent agreed with his sentiments while 56 percent disagreed.61
The Roosevelt administration now turned up the heat. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson denounced the aviator as a “modern protestor against democracy” and publicly alleged that his statements only served to weaken American resolve and help the country’s enemies.62 These criticisms were at least somewhat unfair to Lucky Lindy. While he certainly believed that the Nazis were likely to win the war, in large part because of the air power he had seen, he never explicitly said he hoped that this would be the case. An unnamed friend of the Lindbergh family told the New York Times in 1939 that his views were based in his “pacifist’s horror at the mere fact of war” in addition to his belief in German air superiority. Lindbergh therefore hoped to “see the war end at once, avoiding the dreadful waste of a long struggle against a fait accompli which could not be reversed.”63
Yet the wider political context of late 1940 must not be forgotten. Lindbergh was one of the country’s most famous celebrities, and his radio speeches commanded great attention. Debates over neutrality were not the only political show in town: Roosevelt was also running for his unprecedented third term, in part explaining the sharp rebukes leveled from the White House toward the aviator. Lindbergh himself had been seen as a potential rival to the president, though only 9 percent of Americans reported wanting him to run in an August 1939 poll (of that small minority, 72 percent thought he would make a good president).64 Later that year, 26 percent of Americans told Fortune magazine pollsters they wanted Lindbergh to be appointed to a high public office such as secretary of war.65 These results were hardly overwhelming endorsements of Lindbergh’s political potential, but they did indicate that he was taken seriously by a sizable constituency. Lindbergh’s name had been mentioned as early as 1937 as a potential GOP steering committee member by a group of young Republicans who were concerned that the party had become “hopelessly reactionary and an incubator of Fascism.” His association with Republican politics was clear, and for Roosevelt his speeches had to be viewed through a partisan lens.66 There is no doubt the Nazis used Lindbergh’s remarks for their own purposes as well. In Costa Rica, for instance, the head of a local Nazi organization printed leaflets quoting Lindbergh’s speeches and distributed them around the country. It was difficult for the Nazis to get their propaganda printed in the Costa Rican press, the Times noted, but Lindbergh’s speeches gave them an easy means to spread seemingly credible antiwar sentiment.67
In October 1940, less than a month before the election, Lindbergh accepted a fateful invitation to speak at Yale University under the auspices of the America First Committee. Nearly three thousand people packed a lecture hall for the event. He quickly launched into his usual themes, warning that intervention in the European war would mean long-term commitment to European affairs and denouncing the Roosevelt administration for “deliberately and ineffectively” antagonizing Germany by encouraging Britain and France to continue fighting. The speech ended with a standing ovation and made the papers the next day, with left-wing writers pillorying his remarks.68 The speech was a major turning point, however, not because of what was said, but because it marked the beginning of Lindbergh’s direct collaboration with America First. If his previous views had been even somewhat abstracted from the organization’s official activities, this would no longer be the case.
Lindbergh had by now reached the stature of almost godlike proportions among Americans in the noninterventionist camp. He was flooded with letters from average citizens praising his radio addresses and public appearances. Many referred to him as an agent of destiny. “The future of this Nation depends on Men as you,” a letter writer from the Bronx told Lindbergh in October 1940, “so do not let any one discourage you, but keep up the addresses till the White House makes it impossible for you to get Radio Time [sic] as they have Father Coughlin.”69 A correspondent in Los Angeles was even more gushing: “You are meant by Destiny as another link in the chain of America’s great.… The odds which you confront may be greater than the ones which stood before other American leaders; greater also is the prize to be won.… Not you are lacking in any way, but we, the people, who must rally to your support and give you the moral encouragement which is essential to the growth of any leader as well as artist.”70
In November, Roosevelt cruised to reelection despite the attempted interference of William Rhodes Davis and John L. Lewis. The Republicans had admittedly run a reluctant interventionist (and former Democrat) in Wendell Willkie rather than an outspoken isolationist, but it was still indisputable that much of the country had endorsed the president’s policies. Within days of starting his third term, Roosevelt asked Congress to pass a Lend-Lease bill that would allow him to directly “lend” weapons and other supplies to any country, without the need for payment. This was a clear attempt to send weapons to the British and the French, and the response from Congress was predictably virulent. Congressman Hamilton Fish—soon to be embroiled in the George Sylvester Viereck congressional franking scandal—sent a cable to Lindbergh asking him to testify before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, which the aviator duly did. The questioning turned nasty at points, with Lindbergh admitting he believed both England and Germany were to blame for the outbreak of war. He was interrupted by applause from the audience at times, but the press reaction was predictably split. Lindbergh subsequently crossed the Capitol to testify before a Senate committee, with similar results. Neither appearance had any effect on the Lend-Lease legislation, which passed the House by nearly 100 votes and the Senate by 29.71
In April 1941, Lindbergh was officially named to the national committee of America First, formalizing his direct involvement in the group. Membership numbers immediately exploded across the country. Throughout the spring, Lindbergh spoke at standing-room-only venues, attacking Roosevelt and urging full American neutrality. The president himself soon became convinced that Lindbergh was a fascist with dictatorial designs, and in late April Roosevelt launched a direct attack by comparing him to Southern-sympathizing Copperheads during the Civil War, and defeatists in George Washington’s army at Valley Forge. Lindbergh, outraged, resigned his commission in the Army Air Corps Reserve.72 Crowds at his rallies continued to grow, and in late May he packed Madison Square Garden with more than twenty thousand people. Thousands more listened on loudspeakers in the streets.73 The presence of Bund members, various anti-Semites, and other extremists was widely reported in the press, as were scuffles between participants and protestors. Organizers deemed the event a success, but the publicity was far from completely positive. Life magazine observed that the audience had burst into deafening cheers for even the smallest aspects of Lindbergh’s speech, including when he mopped his brow with a handkerchief. An unnamed Lindbergh associate was quoted referring to the phenomenon as “Führer-worship.”74
As the summer of 1941 unfolded, America First chapters across the country began to feel serious political heat. Cities began denying organizers permits for their events. The president of the Brooklyn Dodgers refused to grant permission for a rally at Ebbets Field. Streets named for Lindbergh were renamed, and some libraries even removed books about his storied career.75 Reverend Leon Birkhead, the antifascist campaigner who had helped end Gerald Winrod’s political hopes in Kansas, published a pamphlet branding America First as “The Nazi Transmission Belt.” “The America First Committee, whether its members know it or not and whether they like it or not, is a Nazi front!” the first page proclaimed. “It is a transmission belt by means of which the apostles of Nazism are spreading their anti-democratic ideas into millions of American homes!” It went on to note that in January 1941 a Nazi propaganda broadcast had hailed the organization as representing “true Americanism and true patriotism,” and claimed German propaganda was being distributed at meetings.76
America First’s leaders understandably resented these claims. They consistently tried to present themselves as patriotic Americans only concerned with their country’s future and the lives of its young men. With isolationist sentiment still running high, arguments for caution in the face of the United States entering a faraway war still seemed plausible to many Americans. Open Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism were becoming far less popular, however. A September 1941 poll found 74 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement that “if the United States is to be a free and democratic country, the Nazi government in Germany must be destroyed.”77 An overwhelming majority of Americans consistently told pollsters they would oppose a campaign of oppression against Jewish Americans.78 Being too closely associated with the Nazis or racial prejudice was effectively the worst trap the America First Committee could fall into, and yet it would prove unavoidable. In the meantime, though, there were some hopeful public opinion indicators for its leaders. In August 1941, one month before the most disastrous speech of Lindbergh’s life, Gallup polled Americans on their voting intentions in the 1942 midterm elections, with the addition of a hypothetical third party called “Keep Out of War” led by “Lindbergh, Wheeler, Nye and others.” The results were telling: 40 percent of respondents said they would vote Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 18 percent “Keep Out Of War.” Depending on how this vote broke down nationally, this hypothetical party might have been expected to pick up a fair number of seats in Congress, especially in the America First stronghold of the Midwest.79
Yet the reality was that by 1941 the America First Committee had become the last political refuge for Hitler’s American friends. Extremists swelled the organization’s ranks as the war grew nearer. Lindbergh had long been iconic in these groups, and his presence in America First meant it now seemingly became the vehicle for the revolution the far right thought he would bring. Years before Lindbergh had even returned to the United States, a German American Bund leader told the undercover John C. Metcalfe that Lucky Lindy would return and become the leader of a far-right, pro-Nazi coalition that would sweep into power “at the right moment.” “You know he would carry the public with him very easily. The Americans like him,” Metcalfe was told. “You may not know it, but there is someone behind Lindbergh.… He was sent there for a specific purpose—to study conditions in Europe, to learn how dictators run their countries.” When he returned, the Bundist predicted, Americans would “call on him to lead them.… Yes, there are a lot of things being planned that the public knows nothing about as yet.”80 Lindbergh was thus seen as the savior that Hitler’s American friends had been waiting for. He was now the only man who could unite the far right, from uniform-wearing Bundists to Coughlinite brawlers and Nazi-sympathizing students. Lindbergh had the last, and best, shot at becoming the American Führer.
Accordingly, no matter how much America First and Lindbergh may have hated and denied it, extremists kept flocking to their banner. In Los Angeles, the local Bund encouraged its members to buy bumper stickers reading “Keep U.S. Neutral” and, “if you have the courage,” told them to place them alongside ones reading “Buy and vote Gentile.”81 Advocating for neutrality had always been an important part of the political cover Nazi sympathizers used to make their activities seem respectable. Lindbergh did not seek to become the titular leader of the American far right, yet he had already been accorded that status whether he was aware of it or not. His affiliation with America First inadvertently made the organization a natural successor to the Bund and other extremist groups, and their former members were flooding into what they believed would become the “third party” to bring about fascist revolution. The fact that America First was fond of holding mass rallies reminiscent of their own organization’s uniformed rallies in the same venues only increased its appeal for the Nazi-minded. Lindbergh himself recognized the odd ideological makeup of the movement he was heading. “It is a heterogeneous mass of Americans who have banded together in this anti-war movement,” Lindbergh recorded in 1941. “We would break up in an instant on almost any other issue.”82
The Nazis themselves recognized America First’s potential importance in keeping the United States neutral in the unfolding conflict. Famed aviator Laura Ingalls, once as renowned as Amelia Earhart before her political involvement turned celebrity into notoriety, flew over the White House in September 1939 and scattered antiwar pamphlets across the lawns. She soon became a fixture on the America First lecture circuit. Less known was the fact that she was receiving payments from the German consulate to act as a Nazi propagandist. Her handler, German embassy second secretary Ulrich von Gienanth, instructed her to support America First and speak at its events because it was “the best thing you can do for our cause.”83 At his behest, she traveled the country giving speeches at America First meetings attacking Roosevelt while collecting payments from the German embassy for her troubles. She would eventually be imprisoned for failing to register as a foreign agent.84
It was Lindbergh himself, however, who ultimately made America First the final refuge of Hitler’s increasingly demoralized American friends. On September 11, 1941, Lucky Lindy took to the stage in Des Moines to deliver the most infamous speech ever given by a twentieth-century isolationist. The timing could hardly have been worse. Public opinion was already beginning to move against America First’s isolationist positions generally, and the increasing publicity given to the presence of former Bund members and other radicals at its meetings was doing little to help. Anti-Semitism was not gaining popularity, and polling confirmed that the overwhelming majority of Americans disagreed with the German treatment of Jews.85 Lindbergh walked straight into a controversy he might have had the foresight to sidestep had he possessed a deeper understanding of American public opinion, and better-honed political instincts. As it turned out, he had neither. Before a crowd of thousands, he denounced “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” for pushing the country toward war. “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other people to lead our country to destruction,” he concluded. If America were to enter the war, he warned darkly, Jews would “be among the first to feel its consequences.”86
The maelstrom began immediately. Lindbergh himself was on a train to New York the following day and only became aware of the unfolding controversy when he arrived home. Since leaving Iowa, he had already been denounced by voices across the political spectrum and by most of the country’s newspapers.87 America First’s headquarters was feeling the pressure as well. Several sponsoring members of its powerful New York chapter resigned immediately. Senator Burton K. Wheeler publicly clarified that he was not actually a member of the organization, though he spoke at its events and his wife was a leader in its Washington, DC, chapter.88 The organization’s most respectable voices were running for cover. Chicago lawyer and national America First leader Clay Judson urged his colleagues to make a public statement about the speech. In his view, they could not fully repudiate Lindbergh because doing so would “play directly into the hands of the war mongers which have been attacking him bitterly.” At the same time, “Any statement must make clear that the question of religious tolerance or intolerance is not involved.… It must bring the discussion back to the principal issue … the big question of War or Peace.”89
One of the few major politicians to defend Lindbergh was Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, the isolationist Republican who had rebuffed George Sylvester Viereck’s overtures the year before but now showed far worse judgment. Nye insisted that Lindbergh was not an anti-Semite, and that the interventionist side was using a “red herring” to distract Americans from the real issue at hand. The senator was widely denounced in the press as a result. Pro-interventionist groups inserted ads in North Dakota newspapers accusing the senator of bigotry and of injecting “the racial issue” into American politics.90 Nye’s days as a senator were numbered.
Why did Lindbergh deliver such an inflammatory address? Surely it would have been far safer to stick to his usual themes and avoid courting unnecessary controversy. There are no conclusive answers, but Lindbergh’s journals suggest an answer based on the company he kept after returning to the United States. In August 1939, Lindbergh had dinner with right-wing Mutual Broadcasting System radio personality Fulton Lewis Jr., who regaled him with stories about “Jewish influence on our press, radio and motion pictures. It has become very serious.” Lindbergh’s conclusion was that “Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to inevitably occur.… If an anti-Semitic movement starts in the United States, it may go far.… When such a movement starts, moderation ends.”91 He then struck up a friendship with the openly fascist Lawrence Dennis, whom he referred to as “a striking man—large, dark complexioned, strong and self assured … he has a brilliant and original mind—determined to the point of aggressiveness. I like his strength of character but I am not yet sure how far I agree with him.”92 This was a bold statement about a man who was on the record predicting imminent fascist revolution in the United States. “He is brilliant, radical, and extremely interesting,” Lindbergh wrote of Dennis in November 1940. “He told me that he was anxious to help in any way possible to build opposition to our involvement in the war.” Given that Dennis was a paid German agent, this offer was hardly surprising.93
Just weeks before the Des Moines speech, Lindbergh spent the afternoon with Dennis again.94 Lucky Lindy was effectively submerging himself in the intellectual milieu of Hitler’s American friends. “We feel that the Jews are among the most active of the war agitators, and among the most influential,” Lindbergh recorded in his journal exactly two months before Des Moines. “We feel that, on the one hand, it is essential to avoid anything approaching a pogrom; and that, on the other hand, it is just as essential to combat the pressure the Jews are bringing on this country to enter the war. This Jewish influence is subtle, dangerous, and very difficult to expose.” As “a race,” he continued, “they seem to invariably cause trouble.” The only solution was “frank and open discussion” about “the Jewish problem” and “Jewish war activities.”95 Lindbergh’s address was therefore no fluke: It was an expression of the anti-Semitic views he had been developing in conjunction with Hitler’s American friends since his return to the country.
Given how deeply he had been drinking in the atmosphere of the American far right, it is perhaps unsurprising that Lindbergh was shocked by the response to the Des Moines speech. “I felt that I had worded my Des Moines address carefully and moderately,” he reflected in his journal. “It seems that almost anything can be discussed today in American except the Jewish problem.”96 Days later, he bemoaned that “The Jewish press, and Jewish organizations are still striking at my Des Moines address.”97 The America First national committee soon made this situation worse by issuing a tone-deaf statement echoing Nye’s sentiments and accusing Lindbergh’s detractors of trying to conceal “the real issues.”98
This was not the reassuring message most Americans needed to hear at this moment, but it was the one America First’s members wanted. In the days after the speech, around 90 percent of the letters delivered to its Chicago headquarters praised the speech, often using anti-Semitic language.99 “We wish to express our approval of Col. Lindbergh’s speeches; all of them,” one Minneapolis couple wrote to America First headquarters. “He speaks the truth. In regard to his last speech exposing the war agitators, he only said what everyone knows—that every Jew you talk to wants to [go to] war on Hitler for purely revengeful purposes.… They did wrong in Germany and Germany got rid of them because of it.”100 Given that America First’s anti-Semitic orientation had only increased with the influx of former Bund members and other less-than-reputable elements in the previous year, the appearance of these views was hardly surprising. As historian Wayne Cole has written, after Des Moines “many anti-Semites within America First ranks and on its fringes interpreted the address as an invitation to use the Committee as a vehicle for spreading their anti-Semitic ideas.”101 Lindbergh himself was unapologetic for the controversy. “I feel: (1.) that the people of this country should know what Jewish influence is doing; and, (2.) that the Jews should be warned of the result they will bring onto their shoulders if they continue their current course,” he reflected a week after the Des Moines address.102
America First’s membership may have overwhelmingly supported Lindbergh’s sentiments, but most other Americans did not. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, an advocate of American intervention, cabled America First headquarters to ask its leaders to repudiate Lindbergh. “It is clear by now that fascist devices are being used fight the Administration and we sincerely hope you will join all decent Americans regardless of your war stand in denouncing such tactics and their authors,” he telegrammed. “Will you demand that the America First Committee divorce itself from the stand taken by Lindbergh and clean its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country[?]”103 In Los Angeles, a heartland of both the Bund and America First, anonymous posters appeared bearing the text “Adolf loves Lindy” inside a heart with an arrow piercing it.104 Alarmed by the growing controversy and the popularity of America First in the state, California’s government took action on its own. Earlier in the year the state legislature had formed its own version of the Dies Committee, run by state senator Jack Tenney, to investigate subversion. Like its national counterpart, the Tenney Committee mostly focused on communism, but, unlike Martin Dies, Tenney quickly put America First on his radar. Traveling around the state, he summoned America First leaders to testify, humiliatingly often back-to-back with Bund leaders.
A month after the Des Moines speech, Tenney’s committee summoned several Southern California America First leaders to testify about the objectives of their organization. The America Firsters retaliated by bringing a recording apparatus to the hearing, which the Committee forbade from use, and packing the venue with its supporters, including John L. Wheeler, son of the isolationist senator and head of the local chapter.105 The tenor of the hearing was confrontational from the start. One witness, America First attorney Frank J. Barry, unsuccessfully demanded to cross-examine the Committee’s witnesses and then turned the hearing into a spectacle:
MR. BARRY: I would like to say at this time that America First Committee has no objection whatsoever in so far as I am concerned as a member of its Executive Committee, to any honest investigation of its affairs and we challenge anybody to show that the America First Committee is lacking in true Americanism or patriotism or [sic] in any subversive, it is truly American.
CHAIRMAN TENNEY: We make no accusations of that kind, Mr. Barry. We feel that many fine, honest people are very definitely opposed to war. I think we are all opposed to war. But we are interested only in whether or not the pro-Germans, the pro-Nazis—might be using any organization for their own purposes.
MR. BARRY: How about pro–Imperialistic British?
(Applause from audience.)
CHAIRMAN TENNEY: We are interested in democracy. I have repeatedly warned this audience about demonstrating. Officers, clear the Auditorium.106
Outside the hearing, two hundred demonstrators sang the national anthem, “God Bless America,” and other tunes.107 This had become a circus, no doubt, but the Tenney Committee’s persistent questioning, and the fact that it was calling America Firsters to testify immediately before and after communists and Bund members, spoke volumes.
In the remaining months before Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh tried to salvage his reputation, telling a crowd in October that he had not spoken out of hatred for “any individuals or any people.” He continued to draw large crowds, and held a final rally at Madison Square Garden at the end of the month. Attendance was again estimated above twenty thousand people.108 The CBS radio network refused to carry the event live, telling organizers “We know of no reason why Lindbergh should have a nation-wide network every time he speaks.”109 Leon Birkhead used the opportunity to ask a group of motion picture industry bigwigs for $10,000 in donations to launch a publicity campaign branding Lindbergh as a Nazi and “the perfect type of American Hitler.”110 The man who had helped derail Gerald B. Winrod’s changes in the Kansas Senate race was turning his sights on Lucky Lindy.
There would be no time for such a campaign to get underway. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Lindbergh took his son Jon to a Massachusetts beach. On the way home, he let Jon sit on his lap and drive the car. They were quickly pulled over by a Massachusetts state trooper, who let the nine-year-old off with a warning. This charming morning was interrupted by the news from Pearl Harbor. “How did the Japs get close enough, and where is our navy?” Lindbergh wondered in his journal, before musing that perhaps the navy had been sent to aid Britain rather than protect Hawaii.111 The following day, he phoned America First head Robert Wood, who remarked simply, “Well, he [Roosevelt] got us in through the back door.”112 Lindbergh himself now saw no option but war. “We have brought it on our own shoulders,” he wrote, “but I can see nothing to do under these circumstances except to fight.”113
America First was finished. “Our principles were right. Had they been followed war could have been avoided,” the organization’s last official statement read.114 Leading members of the national organization, including Wood, entered war work immediately. Lindbergh attempted to rejoin the Army Air Corps but was rejected at the Roosevelt administration’s behest. While Lindbergh’s assessments of German air power had been valuable, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told him, he would not put American airmen under the command of a man “who had such a lack of faith in our cause as he had shown in his speeches.”115 America’s most famous aviator would be denied the opportunity to lead his country in the greatest air war ever fought.
America First had not set out to represent the views and interests of Hitler’s American friends, but by early 1941 it was effectively doing so. Just days before Pearl Harbor, a British intelligence official concluded it was “the most effective weapon at the disposal of the enemy for the purpose of keeping the United States out of the war.” Pro-intervention groups were “unable to counteract the growing propaganda of this powerful isolationist body.”116 British agents conducted extensive studies of individual chapters and concluded that in some areas of the upper Midwest, “management and membership of AFC is of German Americans of more or less pronounced Nazi sympathies. In Indiana, we estimate it at one-third; in Michigan, at least one-half.” In the West, “personal links between the Bund Headquarters and America First are strong.” Its goal, British agents concluded, was nothing less than “the capture of the machinery of government.”117
These conclusions reflected the reality of how America First functioned in American political discourse at the time. As the most respectable anti-intervention group in the country it was able to command press attention and substantial donations. It had no shortage of prominent supporters even before Lindbergh joined its ranks. A combination of government investigations and self-immolation among more openly pro-German groups left it as, effectively, the last organization standing to represent those who opposed entry in the European War. America First thus became the last refuge of those who sought to help the Nazi cause in the United States. This was far from the objectives of the organization’s leaders, but it was increasingly the reality as war approached.
America First was ultimately discredited by a combination of events and Lindbergh’s own missteps. Even the most sympathetic historians have found it difficult to conclude that the Des Moines speech was anything other than a catastrophe for America First generally and Lindbergh personally. There is little doubt that if Lindbergh had died prematurely in the mid-1930s he would be widely admired today. After 1941 his reputation would be permanently tarred with the stain of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies. The fact that he had long been a figure of fascination on the American far right—the ideal figure to serve as a future American Führer—only served to magnify the danger his actions posed. It was fortunate for the United States that Lindbergh was not yet ready to run for president in the 1940 election when he might well have been able to do better than Wendell Willkie and possibly even defeat Roosevelt. He also would have almost certainly received the backing, and money, of William Rhodes Davis and John L. Lewis. The nightmare scenario for Roosevelt and the Democrats would have been Lindbergh obtaining the GOP nomination and tapping into the support of Hitler’s American friends and the corporate establishment. Even if Roosevelt had prevailed, such a vicious campaign would have left deep scars on the country at a key moment in American history. Such an opportunity for Lindbergh to seek the nation’s highest office would never come around again.
Seventy-five years later, Americans would again hear the slogan “America First” from candidate and president Donald J. Trump. Whether Trump himself was personally aware of the slogan’s history has never been sufficiently answered, but undoubtedly some in his campaign must have been. As then-candidate Trump said at the time, for him America First primarily meant putting his own country’s interests above those of others. “Under a Trump administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of a foreign country,” the future president told an audience in April 2016. “I will view as president the world through the clear lens of American interests. I will be America’s greatest defender and most loyal champion.”118
This was a generally Lindbergh-esque argument, but lacked many of the undertones present in its 1940s equivalent. The original America First was not merely interested in protecting US interests or staying out of the war. As Lawrence Dennis’s quote earlier in this chapter makes clear, America First was as much about opposing Roosevelt and the New Deal than it was nonintervention. These goals also aligned with those of Hitler’s American friends, making a de facto alliance inevitable. Similarly, Trump’s version of America First certainly signified more than foreign policy considerations for many supporters. Like Lindbergh, however, Trump’s message was far larger than himself. Extremists inevitably flocked into both men’s political camps. Lindbergh himself proved unable to control his own impulses and ended up discrediting himself to most Americans on a stage in Des Moines. It must be remembered, however, that his sentiments that night were greeted with overwhelming praise by his most vocal supporters. This served to only convince him further that his views were right, despite growing criticism. Lindbergh’s personal echo chamber proved to be his downfall. Whether Trump was deliberately trying to evoke the darker aspects of America First’s legacy is uncertain, but certainly some in his orbit must have been aware of the parallels the slogan would invite.
The original America First had never been just about nonintervention in the European war. It had always been an organization based in visceral opposition to internationalism, Roosevelt, and the New Deal. Its members overwhelmingly saw Lindbergh as their collective political voice, even when he digressed into crude anti-Semitism. The first verse of a 1941 America First campaign song summed up the organization’s views:
The skies are bright, and we’re all right,
In our Yankee Doodle way,
But it’s up to us,
ev’ry one of us,
To stand right up and say:
AMERICA FIRST! AMERICA FIRST! AMERICA FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS!119
Over the course of its short existence, America First became the collective political voice of Americans who believed their government had lost its way and was ignoring their concerns. The fact that its aims also aligned with those of Hitler’s American friends made it extraordinarily threatening to the country’s national security.