The original “America Firsters”

Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen interview H.W. Brands, author of America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindberg in the Shadow of War (2024) in this podcast from The Bulwark, a conservative but anti-Trump website. This gives some background on the original America Firsters, most though not all of them hardcore rightwingers, most famous of them the aviator Charles Lindbergh. After the Second World War, they formed the core of what was then called the Old Right. (1)

Lindbergh was a fan of eugenic ideas and was quite impressed with Nazi Germany:

In addition to being an innovator in the field of medicine, [Lindbergh’s associate, the French surgeon and 1912 Nobel Prize winner for his medical research Alexis] Carrel held some quite controversial views on the nature of man. A 1935 interview quoted him as saying, "There is no escaping the fact that men were definitely not created equal..." Carrel was in favor of eliminating from society criminals, the insane, and any others who, in his view, weakened civilization's foundation. Lindbergh was taken with Carrel's ideas and thought he had "the most stimulating mind I have ever met." Such notions concerning the superiority of one race over another, and the metering out of society's "weaker" members sounded to some too closely related to the ideas being promoted by Adolf Hitler's Nazi party in Germany.

The Lindberghs had seen the effect of Nazism on a revitalized Germany in 1936. That year, Charles was asked by the American military attaché in Berlin to report on the state of Germany's military aviation program. While in Germany, Charles and Anne attended the Summer Olympic games as the special guests of Field Marshal Hermann Goering, the head of the German military air force, the Luftwaffe. Lindbergh toured German factories, took the controls of state-of-the-art bombers, and noted the multiplying airfields. He visited Germany twice during the next two years. With each visit, he became more impressed with the German military and the German people. He was soon convinced that no other power in Europe could stand up to Germany in the event of war. "The organized vitality of Germany was what most impressed me: the unceasing activity of the people, and the convinced dictatorial direction to create the new factories, airfields, and research laboratories ...," Lindbergh recalled in "Autobiography of Values." His wife drew similar conclusions. "... I have never in my life been so conscious of such a directed force. It is thrilling when seen manifested in the energy, pride, and morale of the people--especially the young people," she wrote in "The Flower and the Nettle." By 1938, the Lindberghs were making plans to move to Berlin.

In October 1938, Lindbergh was presented by Goering, on behalf of the Fuehrer, the Service Cross of the German Eagle for his contributions to aviation. News of Nazi persecution of Jews had been filtering out of Germany for some time, and many people were repulsed by the sight of an American hero wearing a Nazi decoration. Lindbergh, by all appearances, considered the medal to be just another commendation. No different than all the others. Many considered this attitude to be naive, at best. Others saw it as an outright acceptance of Nazi policies. Less than a month after the presenting of the medal, the Nazis orchestrated a brutal assault on Jews that came to be known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Nazis and their sympathizers smashed the windows of Jewish businesses, burned homes and synagogues, and left scores dead. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The Lindberghs decided to cancel their plans to move to Germany. [my emphasis] (2)

Woody Guthrie told his own version of the story of Lindbergh and America First this way: (3)

“Wheeler, Clark, and Nye” in the lyrics referred to Senators Burton K. Wheeler (Montana), Gerald Nye (North Dakota) and D. Worth Clark (Idaho).

Those three heartland Senators were very upset that Hollywood was making movies that seemed critical of those nice Nazis in Germany:

[T]he 1939 Warner Bros. production of Confessions of a Nazi Spy was the first major film to bust the door open on the Nazis, but Warner Bros. had been making anti-fascist films for years. Black Legion (1937) and They Won’t Forget (1937) are both staunchly anti-Nazi allegories. By 1939, making a film about a nationally covered FBI investigation into Nazi espionage and the subsequent trial was impossible to ignore.

Other studios quickly followed suit. MGM’s The Mortal Storm (1940) and Escape (1940), 20th Century Fox’s The Man I Married (1940) and Man Hunt (1941), as well as UA’s The Great Dictator (1940) were among many passionately produced anti-Nazi movies prior to the U.S. joining the war. After Warner Bros. broke the dam, Hollywood realized they could (and should) break the industry’s self-regulating rule about attacking other nations. This influx of anti-Nazi movies, a small fraction of Hollywood’s output, raised the ire of the isolationist movement, became evidence for xenophobes that Lindbergh was right about Hollywood, and propelled the U.S. Senate to approve an investigation into Hollywood propaganda.

Sanctioned by Sen. Burton K. Wheeler’s (D-Mont.) Interstate Commerce Commission and led by senators Nye and Clark, the investigation gaveled in on Sept. 9, 1941. While much of the national press criticized the efforts of the isolationist senators, many letters of support were received during the days leading up to the hearings. Wheeler’s files at the National Archives contain missives from Jew haters around the country, praising him for finally doing something about America’s “Jewish problem.” One letter from Helen Connell in Chicago cited a made-up prophecy circulated by the Silver Shirts claiming that Benjamín Franklin wanted the “vampire Jews” written out of the constitution. Dozens of like-minded letters are saved in Wheeler’s files, a reminder that such anti-Hollywood sentiment was partly fueled by antisemitism. [my emphasis] (4)

Notes:

(1) Charles Lindbergh and the Ghosts of America First. The Bulwark YouTube channel 02/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/-6jzZ23Vcm8?si=YWKczojIybpYpoGc> (Accessed: 2025-08-02).

(2) Fallen Hero. PBS American Experience n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/lindbergh-fallen-hero/> (Accessed: 2025-08-02).

(3) Lindbergh. Woody Guthrie-Topic YouTube 05/19/2015. <https://youtu.be/BzLOTHciIKI?si=glWsO_EE2ZXehgB8> (Accessed: 2025-08-02).

(4) Yogerst, Chris (2022): When Hollywood Was Punished for Its Anti-Nazism. Hollywood Reporter 09/22/2022. <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/when-hollywood-was-punished-for-its-anti-nazism-1235225578/> (Accessed: 2025-08-02).

Paleocons we have with us always? America First isolationism from right to "left"

Every time a war becomes big news and looks to go on for a while, which the Russia-Ukraine was does, I find myself rehashing some recurring phenomena in American public discourse about war.

There's a trend of political thought that runs from the pre-World War II rightwing isolationists who morphed into the original American Firsters. It's postwar incarnations later came to be known as the Old Right, who continued their American First kind of criticism as postwar rightwing revisionism on the war. Harry Elmer Barnes were Percy Greaves, Jr. were notable figures in the Pearl-Harbor-was-a-Roosevelt-conspiracy school of thought. Progressive historian Charles Beard climbed on this kind of rightwing isolationist bandwagon and continued it after the war with his book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), a sad "classic" of this school of thought.

Sarah Churchwell gives an interesting history of "America First" as a political slogan in 2021 Twitter thread and this 2016 Twitter document.

In more recent decades, this view has been represented by the Pat Buchanan/"paleo-conservative" niche that is basically hardline militarism and nationalism dressed up with America First rhetoric of the Bircher "Git US out of the UN" attitude. While this tend shares some positions with antiwar liberals and more consistent left-leaning anti-imperialists. But the core of the perspective is a rightwing militarist one.

The Antiwar.com website is a good example of this trend. That does not mean they don't run some useful material. Although I myself check the site much less often than I once did. As their Mission Statement shows, they come from a fundamentally conservative-reactionary foreign policy position. Being aware of the source's perspective is important.

This view is popular among some self-identified libertarians. The rightwing father-son Paul duo, Ron Paul and Rand Paul, aka, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, are good examples of this trend. Part of the America First perspective is a deep suspicion of foreign countries, which combines xenophobia against immigrants and very often white racism against other ethnic groups. That typically translates into opposition to the general liberal-internationalist concept of international law, including nuclear arms-reduction agreements. They are chronically suspicious of formal international alliances, e.g., "Git US out of the UN."

This is where the overlap in the libertarian/isolationist/MAGA foreign policy view often turns out to be incidental, even coincidental. The peace movements in America and Europe would generally support the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement with Iran that the Trump-Pence administration unilaterally withdrew, because the regard nuclear nonproliferation as vital, and they see it reducing the likelihood of war. But the MAGA crowd, of course, was totally fine with the US ending its participation for no good reason.

Similarly, the America Firsters may criticize the neoconservatives for particular wars or military interventions. But the unilateralist view of how the US should conduct its foreign and military policies of both groups is fundamentally the same.

This "libertarian" strain of foreign policy criticism also provides a good narrative for people who want to rebrand themselves from left to right. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example of someone who made that shift since her 2020 Presidential bid. One "tell" in her previous dovish posture was her hardline, Islamophobic positions.

This is also the route that what we might call the "Jimmie Dore" trend. Their basic play there is strike a superficially dogmatic-left foreign antiwar position and use it go on rightwing programs like Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and criticize the Democrats and pass off Trumpista MAGA positions as somehow antiwar. Dore and Glenn Greenwald are two current practitioners of this tack. In Greenwald's case, even in his more left/anti-imperialist days there was always a dubious "libertarian" streak, as David Neiwert has documented at some length. (The Tale of the Pontifex Maximus and His Lawyer: Glenn Greenwald's strange far-right blind spot Daily Kos 05/21/2019)

There's something of an analogy here to the path that Charles Beard took.

Tulsi Gabbert even recently guest-hosted Tucker's show, griping like a loyal Trumpista about the FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property seeking stolen classified documents. She also referred to "the Unaparty - the permanent Washington and the Biden regime." (Is "Unaparty" supposed to be a play on "Unabomber"?)

I've written about Matt Taibbi's political evolution in Matt Taibbi rants against Herbert Marcuse 02/25/2021.

In a more general sense, it's also important to remember that media sources of all sorts change and evolve over time. The New Republic when it was run by Andrew Sullivan, for instance, was notably different than today's New Republic. And that was very much a change for the better!