America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War
By H. W. Brands.
Doubleday, 2024.
Hardcover, 464 pages, $35.
Reviewed by John C. “Chuck” Chalberg.
With the first Trump administration still a lively memory and a second Trump presidency just getting underway, what could be more timely than an account of the first national “America First” campaign? And who should provide this accounting but historian H. W. Brands whose long string of solid books brands him as one of our most important and most prolific chroniclers? Now he has chosen to strike a current chord of sorts as well.
To be sure, there are some crucial differences between an “America First” campaign in the shadow of war in the late 1930s and a call to “Make America Great Again” nearly a century later. At issue then was whether or not the United States should join the fight against Nazi Germany. And the issue today is, well, less clear. Perhaps it boils down to this: Should the United States remain the great power that it came to be during and following the war that the original “America First” movement sought to avoid? And if so, what will that mean? This issue persists in the shadow of two wars—and with the strong possibility of a war over the fate of Taiwan looming as well.
Future historians will not have the advantage that H. W. Brands has had. Then it was the “Lone Eagle” versus the sitting president. Then it was one highly popular yet controversial figure (Charles Lindbergh) versus another highly popular yet controversial figure (Franklin Roosevelt). Today, it is a re-elected President, Donald Trump, versus—well, versus whom? There really is no comparable one-on-one match-up. Rather, it is Trump versus the thrust of the current Democratic party establishment. Or is it Trump versus what’s left of the once robust neocon uniparty establishment?
While Brands has done his best to be even-handed in his treatment of both Roosevelt and Lindbergh, the central argument of the book tilts toward the president. Nonetheless, the author has also done his best to give each combatant a chance to make his case. If there is an advantage here, it belongs to Lindbergh, or more accurately, it belongs to what Brands has borrowed from the aviator’s diary. This product of a one-room Minnesota school house was not just a skilled, thoughtful, and daring pilot, but he was also a skilled, thoughtful, and, yes, even a daring writer as well.
The book has also been organized in a way that has been designed to capture the drama of it all. Despite its fairly ordinary length, it has been divided into an extraordinary seventy-three chapters, plus an epilogue. Not only does the story jump back and forth between the pilot and the president, but it leaps into and out of the war itself, as well as into and out of both the immediate story of the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship and the lengthier story of the ties between America and England.
While Brands is intent on portraying Lindbergh as something other than a tool of or fool for Hitler, there is little doubt that he regards his “America First” crusade as at once understandable and yet mistaken. In a sense, the title he gives to Part One suggests as much: “The Allure of Neutrality.” After all, anything alluring can often prove to be both understandably and mistakenly so.
Actually, Brands turns his cards face up in the prologue. Roosevelt, he tells us, “considered himself as much an America-firster as Lindbergh . . . he simply had a clearer view of where America’s interests lay.” Brands continues: “Aid to Britain wasn’t for the sake of Britain; it was for America’s sake, to keep Britain’s fleet afloat and Britain itself viable. . .” More than that, Roosevelt “silently acknowledged an essential part of the isolationists’ argument,” namely that American military aid to any country fighting Nazi Germany increased the likelihood of direct American military participation in the conflict. An essential part? This truly was the essential point of their argument, especially during the debate over lend-lease.
Brands acknowledges that FDR was often less than candid, whether with reporters or in his “fireside chats” or, for that matter, in his more formal speeches. The thrust of his communication was always to stress that he sought to prevent the necessity of ever having to send American troops to Europe when he knew that there was a strong likelihood that such would eventually be the case, no matter what he did or didn’t do.
Did Roosevelt plot us into war? No, concludes Brands. Did he knowingly lie to the American people? No again. Did he withhold crucial information? Yes. Does Brands defend or criticize FDR’s occasional, if crucial, silences? Not really. He simply explains them, which in its own way amounts at least to a semi-defense. And perhaps, at times, a semi-criticism.
Two examples confirm the essence of Brands’s approach. He details a “secret British operation that would have shattered Roosevelt’s credibility and jeopardized his entire approach to the war had it become known.” This was the William Stephenson operation in the United States through which FDR sought to achieve what Brands characterizes as the “closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence.”
One of Stephenson’s assigned tasks was to “organize American public opinion in favor of aid to Britain.” While Brands does not reveal who the assigner-in-chief was, he does say that Stephenson “monitored the growth of the America First movement,” which by the late spring of 1941 had 700 chapters and upwards of a million members. That growth spurred Stephenson to move from monitoring to disrupting the movement, whether by casting America Firsters as traitors, sponsoring bogus polls, packing America Firster rallies—or producing what Brands terms a “dodgy map.”
Having claimed to possess a “secret map” of South and Central America that divided everything into “five vassal states” for Hitler’s “new world order,” Roosevelt refused to reveal it, and for good reason. The map was a Stephenson invention. Did Roosevelt know that it was a forgery? Brands isn’t certain, but he concedes that the possibility had “certainly occurred” to FDR. Or at the very least, it certainly must—or certainly should—have occurred to him.
Roosevelt’s public handling of the Greer incident is a clear-cut instance of his withholding what he knew to have been the truth. On September 4, 1941, the U.S.S. Greer was hit by torpedoes from a German submarine off the coast of Iceland. The president informed his fellow Americans that the attack had been unprovoked when in fact the American ship had been serving as a spotter for British planes trying to depth-charge the German submarine, which Brands notes was “in keeping with existing orders that Roosevelt had not revealed to the American public.”
The next chapter immediately shifts the focus to Des Moines, Iowa, where on September 11, Charles Lindbergh was slated to deliver a major address to a large gathering of fervent America Firsters. If Roosevelt could be less than candid with the American people, Lindbergh could at times be all too candid, as he surely was on that September evening.
There actually would be two nationally broadcast speeches on that late summer night. The death of his mother had delayed FDR’s talk to the nation on the Greer incident to that same evening. Lindbergh and his fellow Firsters considered postponing their event but instead decided to pump the president’s address into the auditorium before he would speak.
As Brands puts it, “a more artful politician” might have played off the president’s remarks. But Lindbergh, the anti-politician, simply “plunged ahead” with his prepared script. His opening words noted the “ever-increasing effort to force the United States into the conflict,” a conflict for which the United States was unprepared, as well as a conflict that Lindbergh was convinced would change America for the worse—and possibly forever, whether we entered and won or entered and lost. He then added that the effort to achieve American entry had been spear-headed by “foreign interests” as well as “by a small minority of our own people.”
Those very words “revealed” to Brands that Lindbergh had finally come to understand that his side was losing the debate, “if it hadn’t lost already.” After a short pause, Lindbergh called attention to what he regarded as the key difference between America Firsters and the Roosevelt administration: “We have not led you on by subterfuge and propaganda.”
With the country on the verge of war, Lindbergh felt that he had “no choice but to speak out as strongly as he could.” And so he did: “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” At that point, Lindbergh quickly added that he was referring only to the “war agitators” and not the “sincere but misguided” who followed them.
The initial villain was an England that had “persuaded America to rescue it from its folly once before.” (Brands’s words) Lindbergh’s next target was American Jews, even as he emphasized that he was “not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire.” Nonetheless, he went on to note that American Jews wielded influence well beyond their numbers: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
That left one more target, namely the Roosevelt administration, which Brands contends Lindbergh regarded as the “most sinister faction pushing for war.” But what made matters much worse in Lindbergh’s mind was the fact that the three groups were working together. If any one of them had stopped agitating for war, Lindbergh was convinced that the remaining two would not have been powerful enough to “carry this country to war,” a war in which “the only victor would be chaos and prostration.”
As Brands sees it, “few speeches have had a more enduring effect on American history.” More than that, nay worse than that, in those few minutes Charles Lindbergh “not only destroyed his own reputation—he expected this—but simultaneously discredited the antiwar movement and killed any plausible alternative to the globalist vision of Franklin Roosevelt.”
Brands ends his story with the United States entering the war that Charles Lindbergh was determined to avoid. That would also be the war that Franklin Roosevelt presumably thought that America could not avoid. Should it also be presumed that FDR possessed a “globalist vision?” Brands apparently thinks so. What was that vision, and does Brands approve of it? Here the author’s silence reigns.
The epilogue opens with this sentence: “Sooner or later, countries get the foreign policy they deserve.” As far as Brands is concerned, “this is as close to a law of history as the uncertain study of human idiosyncrasy allows.” But this law can take time to play out. In fact, it is Brands’s contention that the “assertion of power trails years or decades behind the power itself. But the assertion inevitably comes.”
Brands then connects his sweeping historical observation to the life of FDR, who came of age “amid” the 1898 American war against Spain and who would hold his first national office during the war against Germany. At that point Roosevelt “understood what America’s industrial power permitted” and, presumably, what it did not yet permit. Now fast forward to the late 1930s. By that point in our history Roosevelt “and most of his generation” understood that the United States did not have to accommodate “rogue nations like Nazi Germany.”
More than that, Roosevelt understood that the United States had the potential to destroy such regimes. “And because Hitler’s regime offended Roosevelt’s and America’s standards of decent behavior, America must destroy Germany.” Did that mean that Roosevelt must have also possessed a globalist vision? H. W. Brands seems to presume such to have been the case.
And Lindbergh? While much younger than his adversary, the aviator/hero was an “older soul,” who, despite his technological “virtuosity,” thought “like a premodern.” More than that, he had come to realize that he was fighting a losing battle. Brands also suggests that Lindbergh was essentially asking Americans to pretend that they didn’t have the power to settle the affairs of Europe on America’s terms. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, understood then what H. W. Brands understands now, namely that America could have—and has had—that very power.
Brands, however, credits Lindbergh for getting this much right in his “campaign against modernity”: “He understood that if America waded into European affairs again, there would be no getting out.” Finally, Lindbergh was also right to worry that a failure to resist Roosevelt’s assertion of executive control of American foreign policy could mean that legislative authority to declare war would be lost forever. Therefore, Brands cannot resist noting that since World War II, America has fought five wars, none of which have been declared by Congress.
In the debate over lend-lease, Charles Lindbergh, of course, had also been right to contend that any American shepherding of American weaponry to Europe via lend-lease would eventually mean that American soldiers would be fighting and dying in Europe. That stipulated, Brands hastens to add that Lindbergh “got one big thing wrong,” namely his belief that the “American people would be willing to settle for the modest American role that had suited their grandfathers.”
In (mostly) Brands’s words, Charles Lindbergh was convinced that his fellow Americans “could be persuaded to ignore Roosevelt’s call to American greatness.” In fact, Americans did not “recoil” from that call. Nor did they express many “regrets” while their country became—and remained—the great power that Lindbergh had “warned the American people against.”
H. W. Brands sums it up this way: “Lindbergh saw the path ahead and found it appalling. Americans saw the path ahead and found it irresistible.” Or at least unavoidable.
Well, here we are eight-plus decades down the very path that Charles Lindbergh found so troubling. And here we are in the midst of a different sort of America First campaign, albeit one that is also taking place in the shadow of war. The irony of it all is, in its own way, both irresistible and unavoidable: Is Donald Trump the second coming of Charles Lindbergh? Or will the president-elect turn out to be the President Roosevelt of this story instead? Or will he prove to be some combination of the two?
Recall H. W. Brands’s cautionary words: Sooner or later, countries get the foreign policies they can afford. Will that mean that this “America First” campaign to “make America great again” could succeed to the point that the United States will have been restored to its status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower? If so, would that status be consistent with FDR’s “globalist vision?” If so, will the quasi-Charles Lindbergh of today, an America Firster by the name of Donald Trump, sooner or later prove to be the Franklin Roosevelt of the twenty-first century instead? If so, will Trump be as candid as Lindbergh or as cagey and closed mouth as FDR?
At this historical moment, meaning in this shadow of war, only time and events will provide answers to these questions.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg has performed as H. L. Mencken. He writes from Bloomington, MN.
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