America First Committee

Based on Wikipedia: America First Committee

The Largest Antiwar Movement America Has Ever Seen

In the fall of 1940, as Hitler's armies conquered France and began bombing London, a group of Yale Law students launched what would become the largest antiwar organization in American history. Within fifteen months, the America First Committee would grow to 800,000 members across 450 chapters, commanding the allegiance of senators, industrialists, and one of the most famous people on the planet.

Then Pearl Harbor happened, and the whole thing vanished in four days.

The rise and fall of America First tells us something important about how democracies argue with themselves during existential moments—and about the strange bedfellows that antiwar movements can attract. Because while most of its members were probably patriotic Americans with sincere beliefs, the committee could never quite shake the anti-Semites and fascist sympathizers who kept showing up to its rallies.

Born on a College Campus

The America First Committee emerged from Yale University, which in 1940 was a hotbed of isolationist sentiment. Its founder was R. Douglas Stuart Jr., a law student whose father had co-founded the Quaker Oats Company. Stuart had been organizing anti-intervention efforts since spring of that year, gathering signatures from fellow students who would later become remarkably prominent: Gerald Ford, the future president. Potter Stewart, who would sit on the Supreme Court. Sargent Shriver, who would run the Peace Corps under John F. Kennedy.

Stuart eventually dropped out of law school entirely to focus on the cause. During the summer of 1940, he and a classmate named Kingman Brewster Jr.—who would later become president of Yale—traveled to Washington and Chicago, building support among politicians and corporate executives.

The committee officially launched on September 5, 1940, just one day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain. The timing was no coincidence. The deal, in which America gave Britain fifty aging destroyers in exchange for military base rights, struck isolationists as exactly the kind of entanglement they feared would drag America into a European war.

A Corporate Headquarters in the Heartland

From the beginning, America First was a Midwestern operation. Its headquarters sat in Chicago, and two-thirds of its eventual membership lived within three hundred miles of that city. Illinois alone had 135,000 members spread across sixty chapters.

This geographic concentration wasn't accidental. The American South had almost no chapters at all—military service ran deep in Southern culture, and many Southern families traced their ancestry to Britain. The Midwest, by contrast, had large populations of German and Scandinavian descent, communities with no particular affection for the British Empire and plenty of reasons to stay out of a European conflict.

To run the organization, Stuart recruited Robert E. Wood, a sixty-one-year-old retired Army brigadier general who chaired Sears, Roebuck and Company. Wood brought credibility and connections. He also brought money. The committee's fundraising eventually pulled in about $370,000—roughly seven million dollars in today's money—with nearly half coming from a handful of wealthy donors like William H. Regnery and the publishers of the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune.

What They Actually Believed

America First wasn't pacifist. Its members didn't oppose war on moral grounds. They opposed this particular war because they believed it wasn't America's fight.

The committee advanced four core arguments. First, the United States should build an impregnable defense on its own shores. Second, no foreign power could successfully attack a well-defended America. Third, democracy could only be preserved by staying out of European conflicts. Fourth, sending aid to Britain—even aid "short of war"—would weaken American defenses and risk pulling the country into combat.

These weren't crazy arguments in 1940. The Atlantic Ocean was very wide. Hitler had no significant navy. America had stayed out of European conflicts for most of its history, and the last time it hadn't—World War One—the results had been disillusioning. Many Americans remembered the propaganda, the war profiteering, and the failed promise that it would be "the war to end all wars."

The committee profoundly distrusted Roosevelt. They accused him of lying to the American people, of making secret commitments to Britain while publicly promising neutrality. They were not entirely wrong about this. Roosevelt was indeed maneuvering America toward intervention while telling voters he would keep their sons out of foreign wars.

The Lend-Lease Fight

The biggest battle came over Lend-Lease.

In January 1941, Roosevelt proposed lending or leasing military equipment to Britain, which was running out of money to buy American weapons. The idea was elegant: instead of demanding cash, America would supply the tools and get them back when the war ended. Churchill called it "the most unsordid act" in history. Isolationists called it a backdoor to war.

America First threw everything it had into defeating the bill. General Wood promised opposition "with all the vigor it can exert." The committee organized rallies, bought newspaper advertisements, and deployed its growing roster of celebrity speakers.

They lost. After two months of fierce debate, Lend-Lease passed both houses of Congress by solid margins. Roosevelt signed it into law in March 1941.

This defeat exposed a fundamental weakness in the America First position. Public opinion had shifted since the fall of France. Most Americans still wanted to stay out of the fighting, but they also wanted Britain to win. They were willing to help, as long as American boys didn't have to die. Lend-Lease threaded that needle perfectly.

The Problem With Charles Lindbergh

No figure loomed larger in America First than Charles Lindbergh, and no figure caused it more trouble.

Lindbergh was arguably the most famous person in America. In 1927, he had become the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, landing in Paris to a hero's welcome that made him an international celebrity. The subsequent kidnapping and murder of his infant son in 1932 turned him into a figure of national sympathy.

But by 1940, Lindbergh had become something more complicated. He had visited Nazi Germany multiple times in the late 1930s, inspecting the Luftwaffe at the invitation of Hermann Göring. He came away impressed by German air power—and by German society. He accepted a medal from the Nazi government and declined to return it even after Kristallnacht, the coordinated attacks on Jews across Germany in November 1938.

Lindbergh had been giving radio speeches against intervention since September 1939, reaching audiences of millions through all three major networks. By the time he officially joined America First in April 1941, he had already delivered thirteen speeches on the committee's behalf. His presence electrified the organization's rallies. It also electrified its critics.

The Anti-Semitism Problem

America First struggled constantly with accusations of anti-Semitism, and the accusations were not entirely unfair.

The committee did have Jewish members. Lessing J. Rosenwald, heir to the Sears fortune, sat on the national committee. Florence Prag Kahn, a former California congresswoman, was a member. The first publicity director of the New York chapter was Jewish.

But Henry Ford also sat on the national committee. Ford was perhaps the most notorious anti-Semite in America, a man who had published a newspaper dedicated to warning about Jewish conspiracies and who had received a medal from Nazi Germany. When Rosenwald resigned in protest, America First removed Ford from the committee—along with Avery Brundage, whose conduct at the 1936 Berlin Olympics had also been associated with anti-Semitism.

It wasn't enough. Local chapter leaders continued making anti-Semitic accusations. Some chapters invited anti-Semitic speakers. The popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, who had fascist sympathies and regularly blamed Jews for various national problems, remained connected to the movement despite the national committee's attempts to keep distance.

And then there was Lindbergh's speech at Des Moines.

Des Moines

On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh addressed an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa. He had given many speeches before. This one would destroy his reputation.

Lindbergh identified three groups he said were pushing America toward war: the British government, the Roosevelt administration, and "the Jewish race." He acknowledged that Jewish persecution in Germany was wrong. But he warned that Jews' "greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government."

The reaction was immediate and devastating. Newspapers that had been sympathetic to the isolationist cause condemned Lindbergh. Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie called the speech "the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation." Even some America First leaders were horrified.

The Des Moines speech didn't end America First—the committee continued holding rallies through the fall of 1941. But it confirmed what critics had long suspected: that the movement's most prominent spokesman held views that were, at best, uncomfortably close to the enemy's.

The Strange Coalition

One of the most remarkable things about America First was the sheer diversity of its membership. The isolationist cause attracted people who agreed on almost nothing else.

Democrats and Republicans. Liberals and conservatives. Communists and anti-communists. Pacifists and militarists. Wealthy industrialists and union leaders. College students and newspaper publishers. Farmers from the Midwest and socialites from the East Coast.

The national committee included Chester Bowles, who would later serve as ambassador to India under Kennedy and Johnson. It included Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt's daughter and a fixture of Washington society. It included Eddie Rickenbacker, America's most decorated fighter pilot from World War One. It included the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the actress Lillian Gish and the novelist Kathleen Norris.

Even John F. Kennedy, whose father Joseph had been offered the chance to lead America First after resigning as ambassador to Britain, contributed $100 with a note saying, "What you are doing is vital."

This coalition held together because its members shared one conviction: that America should not fight in Europe. They disagreed about almost everything else—why America should stay out, what kind of country America should be, what the war meant for the world. But for fifteen months, that single point of agreement was enough.

The Opposition

America First faced organized opposition from the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. This group made the opposite argument: that helping Britain wouldn't drag America into war but would actually make American intervention less likely. If Britain could hold out with American supplies, American soldiers might never need to fight.

The debate between these two positions consumed American politics throughout 1941. It played out in newspaper editorials, radio broadcasts, congressional hearings, and public rallies. Both sides accused the other of lying. Both sides were probably right.

Roosevelt was indeed maneuvering toward intervention while publicly promising peace. And many isolationists were indeed motivated by sympathies—for Germany, against Jews—that they preferred not to state openly.

December 7, 1941

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended the debate overnight.

America First held its last meeting on December 10, 1941. The next day, Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States, and the committee voted to dissolve itself.

The statement announcing dissolution urged members to support the war effort. Lindbergh tried to get a military commission but was blocked by the Roosevelt administration. He eventually flew combat missions in the Pacific as a civilian consultant, though this was kept quiet at the time.

The speed of America First's collapse is striking. Eight hundred thousand members. Four hundred fifty chapters. Fifteen months of passionate organizing. And then, in four days, gone.

This is what happens when an antiwar movement is overtaken by events. The arguments that had seemed so compelling—that America was safe behind its oceans, that the war in Europe wasn't America's business—suddenly looked naive or worse. The people who had made those arguments spent the rest of their lives explaining themselves.

The Memory

America First has not been forgotten. The phrase itself has been revived periodically by politicians who want to signal skepticism about international commitments. Donald Trump used it as a slogan during his 2016 campaign, prompting historians to point out the original movement's uncomfortable associations.

But the historical judgment on America First is complicated by what we now know about the war it tried to prevent. The Holocaust was happening. Six million Jews would be murdered, along with millions of others, in an industrial genocide without parallel in human history. Britain really was fighting for its survival against a regime of genuine evil.

Does this mean America First was wrong? The isolationists couldn't have known the full extent of Nazi atrocities in 1940 and 1941. Their arguments about the costs and risks of intervention weren't irrational. Many sincere patriots believed that American boys shouldn't die in another European war.

But the movement also attracted—and never fully expelled—people whose opposition to the war stemmed from darker motives. The anti-Semites. The fascist sympathizers. The people who thought Hitler had some good ideas. They were a minority of America First's membership, but they were a visible and vocal minority, and the organization's leaders never found an effective way to purge them.

This is the permanent dilemma of antiwar movements: you often can't choose your allies. The cause attracts everyone who opposes the war, for whatever reason. Some of those reasons are noble. Some are not. And sorting them out, in the heat of political battle, may be impossible.

What We Can Learn

The America First Committee existed for just over a year. It was the largest antiwar organization the United States had ever seen, and it failed completely. Every measure it opposed eventually passed. The war it tried to prevent eventually came.

But its failure wasn't inevitable. Public opinion was genuinely divided in 1940 and 1941. A majority of Americans wanted to help Britain, but a majority also wanted to stay out of direct combat. The isolationists lost the argument not because their position was unpopular but because events kept proving them wrong. France fell. Britain survived. Lend-Lease worked. And then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Germans declared war, and the whole debate became moot.

History is contingent. The isolationists might have won if events had broken differently. America might have stayed out of the war, at least for longer. The consequences—for Britain, for the Jews of Europe, for the postwar world—would have been profound.

We don't live in that timeline. But the debate of 1940-1941 reminds us that our current timeline wasn't inevitable either. It was fought over, argued about, decided by margins that were not always comfortable. Democracy is the process of making those decisions in public, with all the messiness and moral ambiguity that entails.

The America First Committee lost that argument. Given what we now know about the war they tried to prevent, most people would say they deserved to lose. But they deserved to have the argument. That's what democracy means.