Democratic nations seldom go to war
willingly. The natural instinct of voters is to preserve peace
whenever possible. Aided by a free press, there is also never a
shortage of those ready to suggest alternatives to conflict. Yet
sometimes war is inevitable. This is most obviously true when a
nation is attacked. For some there is no other legitimate reason for
war. Others believe that hostile intent on the part of other
countries is also sufficient cause. The legitimacy of this view, as
well as the question of how one measures intent, can be the subject of
much debate. Such times are painful moments in the life of a nation.
The United States faced such a crisis during the first years of the
Second World War. Following the fall of France in the spring
of 1940, some Americans wanted to enter the war on the side of Britain
against what they believed was a Nazi threat to democracy everywhere.
The great majority did not. Yet most also believed Germany would
eventually attack the United States.[1]
They therefore wanted to give Britain whatever it needed to survive,
in order to preserve it as a bulwark against eventual Nazi aggression.
The America First Committee,
created in September 1940, was not only against entry into the war.
It also opposed aid. Its program was simple.
Since the United States, if properly armed, was impregnable against
German attack, there was no reason to help England. Aid would not
only fatally weaken America‘s own defenses. It would also draw the
country into the conflict.[2]
The leaders of the AFC claimed they were motivated by concern for
American lives. For some, this was no doubt true. For others,
humanitarian rhetoric hid different motives. Many joined the AFC as a
way of attacking President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Still others
had more sinister reasons. The evolution of the America First
movement in the eighteen months of debate preceding Pearl Harbor
revealed xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiment both within the AFC
leadership, and among its supporters. This
study of the America First Committee is thus a cautionary tale. It is
a reminder that anti-war movements are not always, or entirely, the
humanitarian movements their supporters claim them to be. But it is
also a moral tale, asking an important question in international
relations - that of what one democratic nation owes another in times
of mortal danger.
Americans had been largely
indifferent to the beginning of Nazi dictatorship in 1933.
Opinion had begun to change only after kristallnacht,
the first important anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany in November of
1938, and the occupation of the Czech lands the following March.[3]
By the summer of 1939, when war between Germany and the western
democracies seemed inevitable, most Americans had assumed it would be
a long struggle, in which a British naval blockade would eventually
strangle Germany into submission. Opinion in the United States was
overwhelmingly in favor of staying out of the war. At the same time,
an October Fortune magazine poll showed 85% of Americans hoped Britain
and France would win.[4]
Assumptions about the course of the
war changed in the spring of 1940. The sudden collapse of France,
arguably the greatest surprise of the European conflict, left England
to face Germany alone. An even larger number of Americans as a result
came to believe Hitler would eventually attack them They were more
anxious than ever to make sure Britain would not lose, and wanted to
supply the munitions necessary to preserve the last important
democracy in Europe.[5]
Pro-British organization like Friends of Democracy, founded in 1937,
and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, created in
May of 1940, enjoyed increased support.[6]
A more stridently interventionist group, the Fight For Freedom
Committee, followed in April of 1941.[7]
Still, as late as November of 1941 only one American in four favored
an immediate declaration of war.[8]
This kind of anti-war sentiment was
not enough to reassure America First. Its leaders remembered how most
Americans had wanted to stay out of the First War. Wilson’s 1916
electoral slogan claimed “He kept us out of war.” In the end none of
it had mattered. Less than six months after being re-elected,
Wilson had brought the nation into the fight. America Firsters were
certain Roosevelt would do the same. The
greatest weakness of the anti-war movement before 1917 had been
widespread sympathy for Britain and France. It remained so in 1940.
The central task of the Committee therefore became to reduce support
for Britain. Building on the fears of the electorate, its leaders set
out to convince Americans that aid was synonymous with war. But
America First did much more. It claimed the nation could work
peacefully and profitably with Germany. It consistently minimized or
ignored Hitler’s crimes in Europe. At the same time the
Committee’s unceasing criticism of the British Empire helped convince
at least some voters that democratic England was not only an unworthy
recipient of American aid, it was also undeserving of American
sympathy.
The America First Committee
initially had seemed only the latest and most extreme example of
isolationist opinion in the United States that had grown up in the
1920s, and which had become stronger during the Great Depression.
There had been a widespread belief in America since 1919 that the
country had gained nothing out of the First War. That this was not
true had little effect. The earliest important anti-war organization,
the Keep America Out of War Congress, had been created in 1938 by
Socialist Norman Thomas with the help of liberals like John T. Flynn,
Oswald Garrison Villard, the former editor of the Nation, and
Harry Elmer Barnes, revisionist historian of the First World War.[9]
Anti-war organizations on American campuses were similarly led by
liberals, Socialists and Communists. The Committee itself had been
created by two Yale students. (One, Robert Douglas Stuart Jr., a 24
year old Princeton graduate, and son of the senior vice president of
the Quaker Oats Company, was a law student sympathetic with New Deal
reforms.[10]
The other was Kingman Brewster.[11])
America First therefore appeared neither particularly conservative,
nor pro-German. It was not surprising that Thomas and Villard soon
joined the executive board.[12]
However, most AFC supporters were
neither liberal, nor Socialist. Many simply wanted to stay out of the
war. Since many also came from the Midwest, an area never as
sensitive to European problems as the east coast, isolationist
arguments was soon buttressed by more traditional prejudices against
eastern industrial and banking interests. (Almost two-thirds of the
Committee’s 850,000 registered supporters would eventually come from
the Midwest, mostly from a radius of three hundred miles around
Chicago.)[13]
Many AFC supporters were certain industry and the banks wanted war for
their own profit.[14]
Many other supporters were Republicans who flocked to the AFC for
partisan political reasons. Still others were covertly pro-German.
Some were German-Americans whose sentimental attachments had not been
diminished by the crimes of the Nazi regime. Others, whether of
German origin or not, were attracted to Hitler’s racism and
anti-Semitism.
Midwestern voters had long been
suspicious of eastern elites. The building of transcontinental
railroads, organized by New York bankers and financed with British
capital, had opened new markets for farm produce. Yet dependence on
them had also created fear and hatred in many farming states.[15]
By the 1890s, the struggle for a “cheap dollar” that would help
farmers pay off mortgages, and which led them to support a silver and
gold based currency, had brought them into open conflict with New York
bankers anxious to preserve a gold standard. William Jennings Bryan’s
“Cross of Gold” speech had stirred many farming communities. It had
done little to advance their cause. Farm fortunes had improved
dramatically during the First World War, when J.P Morgan and Company,
as official British purchasing agent, had paid inflated prices for
Midwest produce. But it was the subsequent collapse of farm prices
after 1920 (when the commodity price index fell from 205 that year to
116 in 1921) that was remembered in the decades before Pearl Harbor.[16]
The enduring anger this created would provide fertile ground for
anti-British and anti-eastern rhetoric.
Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota
was typical of those Western and Midwestern politicians who combined
support for farmers with hostility to the east. As chair of the
Senate’s Munitions Investigating Committee between 1934 and 1935, he
had delighted constituents by questioning the patriotism of industrial
and financial leaders like the DuPonts and J.P. Morgan.[17]
Convinced these same groups were again attempting to get America into
war, he became one of Congress’s most eloquent supporters of America
First. He was joined by Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, William
Borah of Idaho, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, George Norris of
Nebraska, Robert Taft of Ohio and Henrick Shipstead of Minnesota,
among others. All except Taft were Progressives who had supported
much of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda.[18]
Some, like Nye, who wanted a reorganization of the Federal Reserve
system for the benefit of farmers, had even found the president’s
first New Deal too moderate.[19]
They now opposed his efforts to bring America into the war. Like Nye,
they were certain it would hurt farmers, while helping industry and
the banks. They also wanted to avoid helping Britain. Some feared
war would detract from domestic reforms. Finally, all had become
suspicious of what seemed Roosevelt’s overweening ambition.[20]
The president’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term had
troubled many. That his decision had been made more acceptable
because of the war crisis made them angry.[21]
They suspected the president was pushing the nation towards war
primarily to get reelected. Like Nye, many Progressive senators
therefore turned against his anti-Nazi policies, and supported America
First.
The AFC found partisans in other
quarters as well. Progressive senators may have helped the Committee,
but its most important supporters were a core group of Republican
Chicago businessmen. Chief among them was General Robert Wood, CEO of
Sears, Roebuck, who had replaced the impossibly young R. Douglas
Stuart as president of America First. Wood had served during the
First World War as acting Quartermaster General of the army. After
joining Marshall Field in the immediate post-war period, he later
moved to Sears, Roebuck, eventually becoming president, and finally,
in 1939, chairman of the board. Like Nye, Wood had originally
supported some of Roosevelt’s policies, including the AAA, the SEC and
Social Security. But he had rebelled against excessive taxation that
he believed was undermining capitalism.[22]
Other Chicago businessmen, such as meat packers Jay Hormel and Philip
Swift, and William J. Grace, head of one of Chicago’s largest
investment firms, had never supported the president. All became key
Committee members. Colonel Robert J. McCormick, owner of the
Chicago Tribune, was the most influential of all. A passionate
Roosevelt hater and Anglophobe, his paper became an important
disseminator of AFC propaganda.
Ultimately, the Committee’s
executive board contained a more diverse group than even Progressives
and Republicans. Among them were Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Eddie
Rickenbacker, Kathleen Norris, the popular novelist, Robert Maynard
Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, Lillian Gish, and,
for a time, Henry Ford. The leadership of the New York branch was
even more diverse, with Norman Thomas and Charles A. Beard working
with Herbert Hoover and Joseph Patterson, conservative publisher of
the New York Daily News.[23]
Clearly, the anti-war movement won the support of many humanitarians
and pacifists, as well as others inspired by partisan politics,
provincialism and bigotry.
The leaders of the AFC had different
political beliefs, but once they decided to work together, they began
to sound remarkably alike. Like their supporters in Congress, many
believed war hysteria was being created to distract the public from
the failures of the New Deal.[24]
The second collapse of the economy in 1937, widely regarded as
the “Roosevelt depression,” had certainly hurt the president. His
prestige was at its lowest during the early part of 1939. Precedent,
as well as his failed economic record, had suggested that his second
term would be his last. Then came the war crisis, and the revival of
his fortunes. Many believed, in the words of John Flynn, that
Roosevelt wanted war because he found it a “glorious, magnificent
escape from all the insoluble problems of America.”[25]
In order to defeat the president’s
pro-British agenda, Committee members insisted the crimes of the
western powers were as great as those of Germany. Their arguments
usually began with a formulaic denunciation of Hitler, without any
serious examination of his actions. This was followed by a detailed
catalogue of the sins of the allies.[26]
Since the war initially was assumed by AFC spokesmen to be for the
preservation of the French and British colonial empires, and not for
the democracies themselves, they could claim that Britain and France
were as least as great oppressors as Hitler.[27]
This argument, however, did not change even when the situation of the
democracies became desperate. Thus, Norman Thomas had insisted in
1939 that “French imperialism is … a curse to mankind, and that the
anti-German phobia of the French did much to create the Nazi
movement.” Yet even after June 1940 he would continue to turn his fury
against Britain. Senator Nye in the same period called the British
empire “the very acme of reaction … and exploitation.”[28]
As late as July of 1941, with the Nazi invasion of Russia already
begun, Robert Maynard Hutchins could still write that there were more
victims of aggression before1939 than after. These included
“populations in Indochina, Africa, the Malay States, and especially,
India.” General Hugh Johnson, former director of the National Recovery
Act, also insisted that Britain’s sole war aim was “to maintain her
dominant Empire position with her own kinsmen (as well as) over black,
brown and yellow conquered and subject peoples in three continents.”[29]
One AFC pamphlet asked “when Britain is going to release the 30,000
political prisoners in India?“[30]
The verdict was clear. The European democracies, tainted by
imperialism, were not worth saving. But it took a sly politician like
Gerald Nye to strike the appropriate homely note. “The conflict in
Europe,” he said, was not “worthy of the sacrifice of one American
mule, much less one American son.”[31]
In making these arguments, America
Firsters chose to ignore fundamental differences between the western
empires and Nazi rule in Europe. Hitler in the first six months of
1940 had overrun six democratic states. He was determined to destroy
democracy wherever he found it.[32]
His rabid hatred of Jews and Slavs was already having affect in
Poland. The Holocaust had not yet begun. But the Polish educated
classes were already being systematically destroyed, and Polish
schools and universities permanently closed. Jews were being
ghettoized in horrific conditions. Anyone interested could have
discovered these things. The French and British colonial empires were
not democratic. But by the 1930s they had no central or consistent
policy of slavery and mass murder. Created in a earlier age
uninformed by Wilsonian principles, they were moving, however slowly,
towards more democratic government and greater respect for individual
human rights.
The most important
difference, however, was between the governments of France and Britain
themselves, and Nazi Germany. Britain and France (before Vichy) had
both valued humanitarian ideals, which, however poorly honored at home
and abroad, still assured the fundamental human rights of their
citizens. These, combined with a free press, had also come by the
1930s to mitigate the worst excesses of colonialism. It was the
British press that had made Gandhi a hero, and allowed his campaigns
of passive resistance to succeed. The 1937 Government of India Act
had hardly satisfied members of the Congress Party anxious for
immediate independence. But it was a step towards democracy and
self-government. Hitler’s dictatorship repudiated both democracy and
human rights. The Nazi empire was the arena in which Hitler’s master
race philosophy was to be put into practice. Censorship prevented the
German press from exciting the conscience of the nation. There could
never have been a successful passive resistance movement against the
Nazis. The inability of members of the AFC to recognize this,
especially men like Hutchins of Chicago, and Norman Thomas, is
remarkable.
It was fear - fear of war, and fear
of Communism - that created this failure. AFC propaganda never sounded
more genuine than when it warned about the effects of war. America
had entered the First World War late. Casualties had been relatively
light, and the country had emerged as the world’s industrial and
financial giant. This did not prevent the Committee leadership from
being convinced another war would have a devastating effect on
America. Many thought it would destroy both democracy and
capitalism. The Chicago Tribune assured readers it would cost
“four hundred billion dollars, a million deaths, and several million
ruined lives.”[33]
John Flynn warned that “our economic system will be broken. Our
financial burdens will be insupportable… The streets will be filled
with idle men and women. The once independent farmer will become a
government charge … and amidst these disorders we will have the
perfect climate for some … Hitler on the American model to rise to
power … .”[34]
The First War had led to dictatorship in Russia, Italy, and
ultimately, Germany. The lesson seemed plain. “If America goes to
war, we shall inevitably have fascism in this country,” Flynn
concluded.[35]
Robert Hutchins put it more simply. “The American people,” he wrote in
Scribner’s Commentator in April of 1941, “are about to commit
suicide.”[36]
Fear of war would drive America Firsters to increasingly extreme
rhetoric.
Charles Lindbergh was among the most extreme AFC
spokesmen.[37]
He also%20(2).jpg)
introduced a troubling new theme into the America First campaign. It
was support for Germany. Most AFC supporters opposed war. Many had
criticized Britain and France simply to balance the general American
dislike of the Nazis. To justify their position, they had noisily
opposed British imperialism. Some were also anti-English, but the
England they hated was largely the City of London’s financial
establishment. Many America Firsters, like
most Americans, still wanted Britain to win the war, even if they
didn’t want to do anything to help.[38]
Very few AFC members discounted the importance of democracy and
personal freedom. Lindbergh, with what one critic called an
“Olympian contempt for all democratic processes,” did.[39]
Despite formulaic protestations about its “excesses,” he found
much to admire in the new German state. He also shared many of its
leaders’ racial beliefs. Lindbergh was not against war. He simply
opposed war with Germany.
Lindbergh’s opinions were not shared
by all AFC leaders, or the membership. However, he was the
Committee’s most popular spokesman.[40]
His speeches were heard by hundreds of thousands within the
movement, and millions outside. As such, he was the Committee’s most
important asset, the one voice that was always assured a national
hearing. By the beginning of 1941 General Wood even began to
hope Lindbergh would replace him as head of the Committee.[41]
Lindbergh would ultimately decline, although he would remain very
popular with the leadership. By choosing to serve with him, Wood and
the others also chose to associate themselves, at least to some
extent, with his beliefs.
This decision would prove fatal.
Lindbergh gave voice to Nazi fellow travelers and anti-Semites who
were among the least worthy elements within America First. They
repaid him with enthusiastic support. His appearances at Committee
rallies were always charged with excitement. But he also attracted to
the AFC extremists and bigots who previously had been discouraged from
joining.[42]
Popular to the end, his reckless rhetoric would fatally wound the
Committee in the eyes of the nation. Some members of the leadership
would eventually repudiate him. Most did not, and chose to follow him
into the moral wilderness. This decision would destroy the reputation
of the AFC.
Lindbergh, like the rest of
the Committee, had been driven by fear of Communism. But while the
others also feared for American democracy, Lindbergh was concerned
about the future of the white race, and what he called “western
civilization.” That his definition did not include democracy soon
became painfully apparent. “Our bond with Europe is a bond of race,
and not of political ideology,” he would insist.[43]
Neither did it include freedom for the smaller nations of Europe. The
great western nations, in which he included Germany, were the only
ones of importance for him, since they alone demonstrated the
industrial and technological superiority that he admired, and which he
believed was proof of racial superiority.[44]
The only real danger to civilization, Lindbergh believed, was from
lesser breeds, the “pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown” who were
incapable of technological progress. The Soviet Union‘s “semi-Asiatic
hordes,” being the best organized and armed, were the most dangerous.
Long before the war began, Lindbergh believed he had found the means
of defeating this threat. It was Nazi Germany.[45]
Lindbergh had long admired
German engineering, industry and “efficiency.“ He also believed these
had improved under Hitler’s dictatorship.[46]
Best of all, Nazi Germany was the Soviet Union‘s greatest enemy.
Lindbergh had begun to worry even before the war that “the potentially
gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical
idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without
realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape,
loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the
fatal wounding of western civilization.”[47]
After the war began, he still hoped bloodshed between Britain, France
and Germany, could be avoided. In the Fall of 1939, with Poland
already overrun, but with the western powers not yet engaged, he
lamented that “the heirs of European culture are on the verge of a
disastrous war … which will reduce the strength and destroy the
treasures of the White race … (and) which may even lead to the end of
our civilization.” Its preservation could only be guaranteed by a
united “Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a
Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.”[48]
Since the war in Europe was between western nations, it was not only
pointless, but suicidal. Neither the freedom of Poland, nor the
destruction of the Nazi dictatorship, seemed worth the struggle. Even
after the invasion of Poland, he refused to blame Hitler for the
conflict. “No one, not even Germany,” he asserted, “is more
responsible for the conditions that caused this war than England and
France.”[49]
This was pretty strong
stuff. Lindbergh’s racial beliefs were probably not very different
from those of many Americans convinced by arguments about northern and
western European racial superiority made in Madison Grant‘s The
Passing of the Great Race and similar works. But the emphasis he
gave them, and the vulgarity with which he expressed himself, made
some members of his audience, like some Committee members,
uncomfortable.[50]
That his beliefs did not discredit him with a larger American audience
says much about opinions in the period.[51]
Most members of the AFC leadership refused to denounce him. Some
agreed with him. Others, like Norman Thomas, Oswald Villard and John
Flynn were willing to go along in order to achieve their goal - the
preservation of American neutrality.[52]
The unity of the anti-war movement, they were certain, was worth the
sacrifice.
The moral implications of
Lindbergh’s position were not entirely apparent in January 1941. What
did seem clear was the need to remain united. The Committee faced its
most important battle - the debate over Lend-Lease. The president’s
previous changes to the Neutrality Act of 1937, which had originally
prohibited America from selling arms to anyone in the European war,
had reflected the mood of the nation.[53]
But Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s proposal to provide arms to Britain
without payment, was practically a declaration of war against the
Axis. America First was determined to stop it. Burton Wheeler warned
the Senate that “the lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s
triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American
boy.“ “Never before,” he complained, “has the United States given to
one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses.“[54]
Lindbergh’s Washington testimony
also received national attention. “It is not the duty of the United
States to police the world,“ he had declared.[55]
This would become a refrain taken up by men as different as Gerald Nye
and Charles Coughlin, head of the anti-Roosevelt and anti-Semitic
Christian Front movement.[56]
However, Lindbergh’s stated hope for a negotiated peace rather than
an English victory hurt him.[57]
The majority of Americans, contrary to AFC hopes, wanted to support
Britain, even if it led to a much dreaded participation in the war.
Seventy-two percent, according to one poll, regarded “defeating
Nazism” as “the biggest job facing the country;” 70% preferred war to
Allied defeat.[58]
Most Americans still believed a declaration of war was not yet
necessary. But Lend-Lease was. The bill was passed in March by 260
to 165 in the House, and 60 to 31 in the Senate.[59]
“This decision is the end of … appeasement in our land,“ Roosevelt had
triumphantly announced. It is “the end of urging us to get along with
the dictators. The end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of
oppression.”[60]
The Committee was to prove him
wrong. America First had lost a battle It was still determined to
stay out of the war. Its reputation as the country’s chief
anti-interventionist organization had grown during the Lend-Lease
debate. So had its membership. New chapters grew up all over the
country. The Committee developed a mass following for the first time.[61]
The AFC leadership therefore remained optimistic. The large margin by
which the bill had passed only made them more aggressive. Lindbergh
was especially pugnacious. By the summer of 1941 he was denouncing
the president as a greater threat to peace than Hitler. He ridiculed
Roosevelt’s assertion that the safety of the United States depended on
control of the Cape Verde Islands. “Even Hitler never made a
statement like that,” Lindbergh charged. “Mr. Roosevelt claims that
Hitler desires to dominate the world. But it is Mr. Roosevelt himself
who advocates world domination when he says that it is our business to
control the wars of Europe and Asia, and that we in America must
dominate islands lying off the African coast.”[62]
Hitler‘s invasion of Russia in June
increased Committee optimism. The war at last had seemed to become
what the Committee had always claimed it to be, a struggle between two
totalitarian systems, in which one was destined to dominate Europe.
It was no longer necessary to dismiss Britain, as Harry Elmer
Barnes had done, as an example of “democratic dry rot.”[63]
The sins of colonialism were now forgotten. The AFC now had a more
useful opponent - Stalin. The leadership was certain the Nazi-Soviet
war would prevent the United States from entering the war on either
side.[64]
John Flynn’s Should America Fight to Make Europe Safe for
Communism? contained anti-interventionist statements from Herbert
Hoover, Norman Thomas and Senators Taft, Clark, Wheeler and La
Follette.[65]
But it was Lindbergh, as usual, who was willing to go further, and
explicitly state his preference for the Nazis. On July 1, 1941, only
ten days after the German invasion of Russia, he was already
complaining about “the murderers and plunderers of yesterday (who) are
accepted as the valiant defenders of civilization today.” “I tell
you,” he continued, “ I would a hundred times rather see my country
ally itself with England, or even with Germany, with all of her
faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that
exist in Soviet Russia. An alliance between the United States and
Russia should be opposed by every American, by every Christian, and by
every humanitarian in this country.”[66]
The effect of the invasion
was not what the Committee had hoped. Most Americans sympathized with
the Soviet Union. German support in the country was further reduced
by the desertion of their erstwhile Communist party allies. The Nazis
more than ever appeared to most Americans the country’s most dangerous
enemy. The invasion also had a bracing effect on Churchill. Up to
the last the Soviet Union had supplied Germany with supplies that made
the British blockade ineffectual. The invasion had thus not cost
Britain a potential ally. It had cost Germany a real one. It also
had given England its first major partner in the war since the fall of
France. Despite the initial fears of many in Britain and America,
Russia did not collapse. The result was that Hitler seemed more
vulnerable than ever. American determination to oppose him increased.
The summer of 1941 was a curious
time for the AFC. Pro-German elements in the country waited anxiously
for Hitler’s blitzkrieg to succeed. The majority of Americans,
sympathetic to Russians defending their own country, hoped for a
German defeat. America Firsters continued to be troubled by the
popular mood. American concern about Britain was now joined with that
for Russia. This they feared could only strengthen interventionist
forces. That realization, combined with the passage of Lend-Lease,
inspired a new tactic. Previously, most AFC propaganda had been
directed against Britain, its American friends, and the president.
The largely Protestant banking establishment, from J.P. Morgan to the
Rockefeller controlled Chase National Bank, had been attacked without
charges of bigotry. Roosevelt had always been a legitimate target.
The Committee would now attack Jews.[67]
The unstated charge was disloyalty.
Since Americans of undivided loyalty, Committee members reasoned, had
to see that neutrality was the only rational course for the nation,
pro-interventionists had to be working for alien interests. Lindbergh
had already suggested this.[68]
America First itself had been careful to keep those of divided
loyalties out of its own ranks. Neither members of the
German-American Bund nor Communists, anxious to oppose war before June
22, had been welcome.[69]
Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Fronters were also discouraged
from joining.[70]
The Committee was now ready to apply its own high standards to its
opponents.
Anti-Semitism was the most
inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason
to hate Hitler. Their loyalty was suspect by some for that very
reason. Since most Americans assumed the country was safe from German
invasion, American Jews, they concluded, were also safe. Jewish
interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help
co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to
sacrifice American lives. This to many seemed more than just a case
of divided loyalties. It was pernicious. The fact that
interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally
conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population,
had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the
drive for war.[71]
(So great was the antipathy for America First in the south,
and so complete the consensus in favor of support for Britain, that
its few sympathizers had been intimidated into silence.)[72]
Interventionist organizations, fearful of being labeled the tools of
Jews, had been careful to keep Jewish membership on their governing
boards small.[73]
The AFC, which since its creation had been careful to avoid appearing
anti-Semitic, had the opposite policy. General Wood had been very
pleased when Lessing Rosenwald, a member of the Sears, Roebuck board,
had joined the executive committee. But Rosenwald had resigned to
protest the presence of Henry Ford, and no Jews had been found to take
his place.[74]
At a time when the Committee was being attacked in much of the press
as a tool of Hitler, charges of bigotry had to avoided at all cost.[75]
That many American anti-Semites, anxious to avoid fighting Germany,
had joined the AFC, made this task more difficult. AFC chapters in
the east from the beginning had struggled to keep out Christian
Fronters.[76]
The Committee leadership was painfully aware they had not always
succeeded.[77]
Jews in much of the world had become by 1940 a beleaguered minority
threatened with mass murder. Most Committee members, as people of
conscience, did not want to add to Jewish tribulations. Some AFC
supporters had in the past occasionally expressed hostility to Jews.[78]
But they had kept these views private. This reticence would now
come to an end.
Burton Wheeler, chair of the Senate
Interstate Commerce Commission, announced in August of 1941 that he
would investigate “interventionists” in the motion picture industry.
Most studio heads, he would soon be surprised to learn, were Jews.[79]
Gerald Nye, who accused Hollywood of attempting to “drug the reason of
the American people,“ and “rouse war fever,“ was particularly hostile
to Warner Brothers.[80]
Wheeler questioned why so many foreign born were allowed to shape
American opinion, causing Roosevelt to observe that the Bible, too,
had been written “by mostly foreign-born and Jewish people.” But the
industry knew how to fight back. It retained Wendell Willkie, the
Republican party’s 1940 presidential candidate, as counsel. He soon
ridiculed the Committee into silence.[81]
The Committee’s first overt
anti-Semitic attack came in September. Charles Lindbergh was its
author. More than a year earlier Thomas Lamont, senior partner of
J.P. Morgan, had asked him to name the “powerful elements” he claimed
were working for war. “We must not broadcast suspicions and
accusations unless we have complete basis for the charges,” he had
warned.[82]
Since then, the AFC situation had become more desperate. Lend-Lease
had been followed by a more aggressive anti-German campaign. On
September 1 President Roosevelt had promised every effort to defeat
Germany to prevent “Hitler’s violent attempt to rule the world.“
[83] On September 11,
following a U-boat attack on the American destroyer Greer,
Roosevelt ordered the navy to shoot on sight any German vessel
threatening American ships or convoys.[84]
That same day, having previously been goaded by Secretary of the
Interior Harold Ickes and columnist Dorothy Thompson, who had called
him a Nazi fellow traveler, Lindbergh struck back.[85]
Lindberg Des Moines
“The three most important
groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he told a Des
Moines audience, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt
administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance,
are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who
believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the
domination of the British Empire …These war agitators comprise only a
small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous
influence.” Of the Jews he said “it is not difficult to understand
why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany… But no person
of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today
without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and
for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this
country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be
among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that
depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive
war and devastation… Their greatest danger to this country is in
their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press,
our radio, and our government.”[86]
Lindbergh’s threat was obvious. Its most unfortunate aspect was
his (perhaps unconscious) paraphrasing of Hitler’s “warning”
delivered in the Reichstag in 1939.
“If international finance
Jewry in and outside of Europe should succeed in thrusting the nations
once again into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization
of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of
the Jewish race in Europe.”[87]
Softened for an American audience, Lindbergh’s words were
unmistakably, and uncomfortably, similar.
Press reaction was immediate, and
explosive. The Des Moines Register observed that “it may have
been courageous for Colonel Lindbergh to say what was in his mind, but
it was so lacking in appreciation of consequences - putting the best
interpretation on it - that it disqualifies him for any pretensions of
leadership of this republic in policy-making.” The speech was “so
intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it
cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his
influence in this crisis.”[88]
The Kansas City Journal was more succinct. “Lindbergh’s
interest in Hitlerism is now thinly concealed.”[89]
The isolationist Hearst newspapers were equally critical.[90]
Frank Gannett told General Wood his newspaper chain could no longer
afford to be associated with the Committee. Even the Chicago
Tribune hastened to condemn the speech.[91]
The response of the Republican
national leadership was as severe. Wendell Willkie called it “the
most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national
reputation.” Thomas Dewey said it was “an inexcusable abuse of the
right of freedom of speech.”[92]
Even conservative Republican Robert Taft was no gentler, styling
Lindbergh’s reference
to “the Jews, as if they were a foreign race, and not Americans at
all, a grossly unjust attitude.”[93]
Lindbergh’s speech destroyed the
unity of the AFC. Norman Thomas, long troubled by Lindbergh’s
bigotry, could stand no more. He refused for a while to appear at
America First rallies.[94]
Oswald Villard resigned from the Committee.[95]
John Flynn, although furious, remained.[96]
The anti-Semites in his New York chapter, he lamented, were
“uproariously delighted,” and warned the task of keeping bigots out of
the movement would now be much more difficult.[97]
The majority of the Committee
leadership was not troubled.[98]
Most even refused to admit the speech was anti-Semitic.[99]
The membership was equally supportive.[100]
While some had regrets about the tone, 85 to 90% of the letters
received at national headquarters were favorable. Robert Taft
likewise refused to condemn Lindbergh entirely, citing the greater
intolerance of organizations like the Fight For Freedom Committee.[101]
The AFC nonetheless had been
severely damaged. Its chief speaker was now roundly pilloried in the
press. Lindbergh was no longer the target of shrill interventionists
alone. Public opinion had turned against him. The rest of the
leadership, by supporting him, inevitably came in for a share of
criticism. The New York newspaper PM had already characterized
a Lindbergh audience as “a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists,
anti-Semites, crackpots and just people,“ in which the “just people
seemed out of place.“[102]
This now seemed increasingly true. America First appeared more than
ever an organization of bitter Progressives, opportunist Republicans
and outspoken anti-Semites. Lindbergh’s remarks may have been
satisfying to most AFC members. But they offended mainstream
opinion. Discredited among the larger electorate, the Committee was
further than ever from winning its battle for strict neutrality.
The last months before Pearl Harbor
were disappointing for America First. On September 16 the U.S. navy
began formal convoy duty, escorting British as well as American ships
as far as Iceland.[103]
That same month Anglo-American negotiations were begun in Moscow to
determine Soviet military needs.[104]
The president in October offered Russia a one billion dollar interest
free loan to buy American military equipment.[105]
This was soon followed by a request to repeal key sections of the
Neutrality Act, thereby allowing American merchant ships to be armed,
and to enter combat zones.[106]
Congress quickly approved.[107]
German reaction was equally swift.
On October 17 the destroyer Kearney was torpedoed while on
convoy duty off Iceland. Eleven sailors were killed. At the end of
the month the destroyer Reuben James was sunk, with the loss of
115 lives.[108]
Most Americans still refused to go to war. This might have reassured
isolationists. But there was always the danger that additional
attacks could change the national mood. By the end of the year, some
AFC supporters were apparently willing to do anything to stop the
drift to war.
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