Before Donald Trump made America first a famous catchphrase, another larger-than-life celebrity made it popular in the early 1940s, the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. After piloting the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh was an international sensation. The most idolized man in the world. For Time Magazine's first ever man of the year in 1928, he was the natural choice. Barr laid his fame into politics, becoming the spokesman for the largest anti-war organization in U.S. history, the America First Committee.
It included people from all walks of life, from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright to Walt Disney. America First was the embodiment, the manifestation of this isolationist sentiment, and it was hugely important and popular. It was 1941 and World War II was raging. The Nazis had taken over most of Europe, but Americans wanted desperately to stay out of the war, 93% of them according to one poll.
The America First Committee grew to 800,000 members and Charles Lindbergh was its champion. We cannot win this war for England. That is why the America First Committee has been formed.
His biggest opponent, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Who knew that if Germany took over Europe, America could be next. It would take his most masterful political performance to ready a nation for war, a war that almost no one in America wanted to get involved with.
After the First World War and over 100,000 dead Americans, the United States had returned to its isolationist roots with a vengeance. There was a sense that we should be fortress America. Republican presidents signed a strict immigration law and a massive tariff, walling off the country from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, America's military was reduced dramatically. America was very, very weak, a smaller army than Romania.
Tariffs deepened the Great Depression in the 1930s, which had left... one in four Americans out of a job. It was an existential crisis. And into that moment came Franklin Roosevelt.
Hi, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt offered a new deal for the country. This nation is asking for action, and action now. A barrage of government programs to get folks working again.
But to pass his ambitious domestic agenda and save the country, Roosevelt needed the many isolationists in Congress on his side. The challenge for him is keeping them on board on the domestic policy side and not moving too fast on the foreign policy side. FDR followed Congress's lead on international matters, signing neutrality acts to prohibit arms sales to any warring country, friend or foe.
Roosevelt sent a letter to Adolf Hitler asking him to respect the sovereignty of 31 countries. The Nazis' response? Hysterical laughter. The Nazis laughed at Roosevelt's gesture just as they laughed at American power.
Hitler knew America would do nothing to stop the great German war machine. This country should heed the advice of its first president and avoid all foreign entanglements. Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. This nation will remain a neutral nation. But FD.
FDR knew that staying neutral would threaten America's security before long. You see FDR slowly maneuvering the U.S. population and policymakers towards intervention in the war. I ask this Congress for authority and for funds. Roosevelt convinced Congress to finally arm the embattled allies with an isolationist argument that they would like.
The idea was, let's build weapons and sell them to Britain and France so they can do the fighting. And Roosevelt said that will keep America out of war. Guns and munitions of all sorts bore into Britain.
Slowly, FDR began winning over the wary American public. Americans start realizing that they're going to have to sacrifice if they want to protect democracy at home as well as around the world. I think it's one of the great achievements of any U.S. president. But at the time, many accused FDR of...
warmongering and even demanded his impeachment. The struggle between interventionists in the late 1930s and isolationists dwarfed the divisions in the country during the Vietnam era. It was that ferocious. Roosevelt faced a rebellion in his own cabinet.
His secretary of war, Harry Woodring, was a committed pacifist who ignored direct orders from the president that he thought could drag the United States into war. In June 1940, Allied forces were routed at Dunkirk. Germany was rolling into Paris.
Next on Hitler's list was London. Roosevelt ordered bombers for a desperate Britain, but Woodring refused. FDR couldn't have an isolationist pacifist as your Secretary of War.
Woodring lost his job, but not his cause. He walked out of the White House and joined Charles Lindbergh's America First Committee. The committee would be remembered for the anti-Semites in its ranks, but its support ran well beyond just bigots. Gerald Ford, the poet Robert Frost, and the future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart were all associated with the group. Isolationism was so popular that it even threatened FDR's re-election in 1940, requiring a somewhat misleading campaign promise.
Your boy. He had to know that wasn't true, but he knew he had to get re-elected, so he went ahead and said that. FDR won the election, but around 80% of Americans still remained opposed to entering the war. It would change in a single day. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.
Japan's deadly attack on Pearl Harbor transformed America overnight. Americans rallied around the flag. Now, 97% of Americans supported going to war. The America First Committee disbanded. Isolationism in America was dead.
Or was it? Even after World War II, the Republican Party was still thinking America first. Until a war hero forced the parties about face.
That story, next.