America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“In an era more susceptible than ever to cults of personality elevating the foolish and the dangerous, America First recounts a cautionary tale well worth knowing.”

In his rousing call to pro-democracy internationalism on the last night of the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condemned presidential candidate Donald Trump’s expressed intent to sit back and let foreign dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin “do whatever the hell they want” to America’s putative NATO allies. In doing so, Panetta invoked 20th century isolationists who carried the “America First” banner that Trump recently re-mainstreamed. The World War II-era America Firsters advocated turning a blind eye to Nazi aggression and oppression as a preferable alternative to becoming entangled in a European war.

“Trump would abandon our allies and isolate America,” Panetta said. “We tried that in the 1930s. It was foolish and dangerous then, and it’s foolish and dangerous now.”

Thanks to the endurance of what historian Richard Slotkin has termed the “Myth of the Good War”—which was not a myth in the pejorative sense but a faith that until recently united most Americans in the shared belief that banding together to defeat Hitler was necessary and right, and propelled “the nation’s emergence as a multiracial and multiethnic democracy, as well as a world power”—few in Panetta’s audience would dispute that appeasing or ignoring Hitler was “foolish and dangerous then.”

Today, appending the phrase “America First” to even the most confounding and evasive word salad elevates it to an applause line for Trump. In the late 1930s, the phrase carried enormous weight, and the debate over whether or not to provide material aid to America’s European allies—let alone send American forces into battle against Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo—raged without stint in America, with considerable popular support on both sides. It ended fairly abruptly following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, although if Hitler hadn’t opted to declare war on the United States shortly after the U.S. entered the war against Japan, it’s not entirely clear whether the interventionists would have had the support they needed to go all in against Germany.

In America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War, historian H. W. Brands, whose luminous Franklin Delano Roosevelt biography A Traitor to His Class was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, dives deep into the interventionist-isolationist debate, and particularly the two protagonists who came to personify the debate: the interventionist Roosevelt and the isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, a wildly popular aviator who had become an international hero when he completed the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927. Lindbergh emerged a highly visible spokesman for the isolationist movement and the arch-isolationist America First Committee when it formed in 1940.

In the years before the United States joined the war effort, isolationists widely portrayed Roosevelt’s calls for selling or lending American ships, planes, and munitions to America’s allies for the fight against the Axis powers as an alternative to deploying American soldiers as masking his true intent, which was to draw the nation fully into the war and make himself a dictator for life. Likewise, Roosevelt and other leading interventionists, including key members of his cabinet, cast America Firsters in general and Lindbergh in particular as appeasers whose policy of pursuing hemispheric defense while leaving Europe to its fate masked Nazi sympathies and strident antisemitism.

Roosevelt was no dictator, and Lindbergh no card-carrying American Bundist, but neither side was entirely wrong about the other. America First expertly dissects their rivalry and uses it to chart America’s journey from isolationism to intervention. The book unfolds in large measure as a meticulously curated, guided journey through Roosevelt’s and Lindbergh’s own discourse on the subject, comprising voluminous journal entries and speeches, and often places the two in dialogue, however indirect their traded blows. Lindbergh’s journals prove a particularly rich resource for understanding the evolution of his thinking and the formidable challenge he posed to Roosevelt.

Lynne Olson, author of 2014’s terrific Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939–1941, draws parallels between Lindbergh’s brittle, mechanically minded disposition and his admiration for Nazi Germany’s cold efficiency, high productivity, and engineering prowess—its Luftwaffe in particular, which he had examined first hand (along with other European air fleets that he found comparatively wanting). Olson argues that these inclinations made him both sympathetic to Hitler’s territorial ambitions and doubtful that England, the United States, or anyone else could do much to stop them (so why bother trying?).

Brands focuses less on Lindbergh’s personality than his own extensive private and public musings. He traces the Lone Eagle’s isolationist bent to his father August Lindbergh, a Minnesota congressman from 1907–17 who publicly “denounced American participation in the [First] World War with such vigor that federal agents raided the publisher that was printing his book Why Is Your Country at War? and destroyed the printing plates.”

Charles Lindbergh saw his father attacked as pro-German simply for being “for America first, last and all time,” and his career destroyed by his wartime dissent. So it should come as little surprise that he saw history repeating itself in his own life two decades later. As Brand writes, August Lindbergh’s “son couldn’t help concluding that a prophet was indeed never honored in his own country, at least if that country was America.”

Brands gives a full airing to the notorious September 11, 1941, radio speech delivered in Des Moines, Iowa, in which Lindbergh declared racial solidarity with all European whites (including Germans), and warned American Jews of the retribution they would face if they (by leveraging the outrageously outsized power Lindbergh ascribed to them) pushed America into a war that the majority of Americans opposed. Brands quotes the appalling speech at tremendous length, commenting that it took self-destructive missteps that a “more artful politician” would have known to avoid.

But Brands does much more than simply expose Lindbergh for talking “the way the Nazis talked” and finally saying the quiet part out loud in a speech that effectively ended what remained of his life as a national hero and influential political actor. America First explores in depth the many facets of Lindbergh’s opposition to the war expressed in other radio speeches and newspaper op-eds published over the preceding years that made his arguments—however poorly they’ve aged—resonate with so many Americans at the time.

Much of Lindbergh’s appeal, of course, stemmed from his celebrity and charisma. But Brands contends that there was more to it than that, and Lindbergh knew it as well. “Lindbergh understood why people tuned in to hear him,” Brands writes. “They wanted to hear the voice of the reclusive airman, the survivor of the horrible kidnapping and murder [of his 20-month-old son in 1932]. He realized that his credentials were thin in the realm of foreign policy. He knew aviation, and he had seen more of the latest airplanes than anyone else. But he was no student of government or diplomacy. Yet neither were the vast majority of Americans. To them he spoke; for them he would speak, if they would let him.”

One undeniable reason Lindbergh’s attacks on Roosevelt and other interventionists hit home, Brands concedes, was because they recognized Roosevelt’s duplicity in taking successive actions designed to move America closer to war while pretending that their purpose was to help England win without putting American soldiers in harm’s way. If Lindbergh went too far in imputing dictatorial ambitions to the three-term American president, he correctly guessed that Roosevelt wasn’t showing all his cards.

Seeing more or less eye to eye with Winston Churchill on the necessity of a full-throttle U.S. effort to defeat the Axis, Roosevelt well understood that he couldn’t set aside his “Dr. New Deal” persona and declare himself “Dr. Win the War” without the majority of Americans’ support, and he had to tread cautiously and methodically to avoid getting too far ahead of public opinion. (In Those Angry Days, Lynne Olson attributes Roosevelt’s hesitation to his diminished political capital following the Supreme Court-packing fiasco of 1937.)

While decorum prevented him from impugning Lindbergh openly or personally, Roosevelt understood the threat Lindbergh’s speeches posed, and recognized the need to find other ways to discredit him, whether through indirect jabs or retorts by proxy. Brands chronicles the many stratagems the president deployed for refuting the aviator’s attacks and weakening his position without appearing to confront him directly.

America First is an insightful and worthy addition to the growing body of literature on the heated battle over American involvement in World War II, and the formidable obstacle that opposition at home presented to Roosevelt’s efforts to save democracy abroad. It also does much to demonstrate why America First proved such a pervasive ideology in its time, as well as exposing its darker undercurrents that have resurfaced with its revival in recent years.

America First doesn’t investigate the deeper, older roots of the America First movement as Sarah Churchwell does in Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” (2018), or examine how Nazi-sympathizing media moguls like Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst advanced appeasement and isolationism as Kathryn Olmstead does in her eye-opening transatlantic study The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler (2022).

But Brands does a masterful job of revealing how two enormously influential figures came to personify the conflict over the impending war. In particular, he shows how a man like Lindbergh, who claimed to “disdain politics,” posed such a potent threat to Roosevelt that his rapid rise as an anti-interventionist hero inspired the most frightening counterfactual history novel in recent memory in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). It didn’t quite happen here, but it could have.

In an era more susceptible than ever to cults of personality elevating the foolish and the dangerous, America First recounts a cautionary tale well worth knowing.