Presentation as prepared for delivery on July 13, 2016, at the Institute for the Study of Strategy and Politics symposium on “American Strategy: The Way Forward,” available at strategyandpolitics.org
I am speaking today about the life and times of “America First” as a political idea.
Three quarters of a century ago, it was seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans as a means of mustering popular support through a vigorous public debate to resist powerful forces, seen but mostly unseen – for example, British and Communist propaganda and influence operations – seeking to drive, pull and trick the United States into the second world war.
Reading about the 1940 formation of the America First Committee, one is impressed by the wide cross section of notables drawn into this cause of strong defense but anti-intervention;
from the original contingent of students at Yale, including future Yale president Kingman Brewster, future president Gerald Ford and future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, to New Dealers and anti-New Dealers, to socialist party leader Norman Thomas.
There were many other political figures, from Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, Democrat, to Sen. Gerald P. Nye, Republican, many leading business men, from Hormel meat to Morton salt to railroad and steel tycoons, William J. Grace, head of one of Chicago’s largest investment firms, newspaper publishers Col. Robert J. McCormick (Chicago Tribune), Joseph Patterson (New York Daily News), also William Regnery, whose son Henry would later found Regnery Books.
We see a lot of military brass – the chairman of America First was General Robert E. Wood, sergeant quartermaster in World War I and innovative head of Sears Roebuck, a West Point grad and actually an early New Dealer; at least one movie star, Lillian Gish; heroes such as Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh; Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, and novelists, journalists and celebrities of the day, including architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Outside the group itself, but within the same anti-intervention cause, were such leading Republicans as former President and world class humanitarian Herbert Hoover and “Mr. Republican,” Sen. Robert Taft.
A lot of star power, a lot of people power, too.
When we look at “America First” today, we see the idea as manifested in the highly unusual political instincts of one national figure – a one-man political movement, to be sure – but still, one individual, Donald Trump, who has revived the slogan as a battle cry against the global system and obligations the United States entered into really ever since the America First Committee disbanded after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
For the America First idea then, a steep downward trajectory even to this point of unexpected revival.
This suggests that the notion of putting America first — giving priority to American interests over rest the world’s; even recognizing that America has separate interests from the rest of the world — has become antiquated, and, to many, nothing less than anathema, certainly among political professionals, journalists, and academics.
Then again, there are those many millions of Americans who have already cast a vote for America First, having made Donald Trump the presumptive GOP nominee.
If we stop and think – – – Is it not the most natural thing in the world for a politician to put his country first?
I would say yes, but not so much in our world.
How did such a world come to be?
This latest chapter in the annals of America First probably began as a set up, when a New York Times reporter asked Donald Trump if it was correct to say that what Trump was describing was – “if not isolationist, then at least something of `America First’?…