Those who are reacting negatively to #Trump and #AmericaFirst as a foreign policy: what would be “first” in your view? Help me understand.
(CNN)”My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”
It is extremely unfortunate that in his speech Wednesday outlining his foreign policy goals, Donald Trump chose to brand his foreign policy with the noxious slogan “America First,” the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.
The America First Committee actually began at Yale University, where Douglas Stuart Jr., the son of a vice president of Quaker Oats, began organizing his fellow students in spring 1940. He and Gerald Ford, the future American president, and Potter Stewart, the future Supreme Court justice, drafted a petition stating, “We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.”
Their solution to the international crisis lay in a negotiated peace with Hitler. Other Yale students — including Sargent Shriver, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Kingman Brewster, the chairman of the Yale Daily News, future president of Yale and ambassador to the Court of St. James — joined their isolationist crusade.
It’s amazing that a philosophy of putting America first ostracizes you from America’s elites. Supporters of Israel, for instance, have no problem putting Israel’s interests first. But when gentiles do the same thing for their country, oh the horror.
All gentile nationalisms tend to exclude Jews and so Jews tend to fear when gentiles become religiously, racially or nationally cohesive.
Nobody described the pain of social exclusion better than Charles Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. From her diary (as quoted in Culture of Critique):
September 11, 1941:
Then [he gave] his speech—throwing me into black gloom. He names the ‘war agitators’—chiefly the British, the Jews, and the Administration. He does it truthfully, moderately, and with no bitterness or rancor—but I hate to have him touch the Jews at all. For I dread the reaction on him. No one else mentions this subject out loud (though many seethe bitterly and intolerantly underneath). C. [Charles], as usual, must bear the brunt of being frank and open. What he is saying in public is not intolerant or inciting or bitter and it is just what he says in private, while the other soft-spoken cautious people who say terrible things in private would never dare be as frank in public as he. They do not want to pay the price. And the price will be terrible. Headlines will flame “Lindbergh attacks Jews.” He will be branded anti-Semitic, Nazi, Führer-seeking, etc. I can hardly bear it. For he is a moderate. . . .
September 13, 1941:
He is attacked on all sides—Administration, pressure groups, and Jews, as now openly a Nazi, following Nazi doctrine.
September 14, 1941:
I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through? Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid?
I do not know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have the greatest faith in him as a person—in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness—his nobility really. . . . How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it? He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name “Jew” is un-American—even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why? Because it is segregating them as a group, setting the ground for anti-Semitism. . . .
I say that I would prefer to see this country at war than shaken by violent anti-Semitism. (Because it seems to me that the kind of person the human being is turned into when the instinct of Jew-baiting is let loose is worse than the kind of person he becomes on the battlefield.)
September 15, 1941:
The storm is beginning to blow up hard. America First is in a turmoil. . . . He is universally condemned by all moderates. . . . The Jews demand a retraction. . . . I sense that this is the
beginning of a fight and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known before. . . . For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more criticism and coldness and loneliness.
September 18, 1941:
Will I be able to shop in New York at all now? I am always stared at—but now to be stared at with hate, to walk through aisles of hate!5 (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 220–230)
FROM CHARLES LINDBERG’S WIKIPEDIA ENTRY:
In late 1940, he became spokesman of the antiwar America First Committee.[133] He soon became its most prominent public spokesman, speaking to overflowing crowds in Madison Square Garden in New York City and Soldier Field in Chicago. His speeches were heard by millions. During this time, Lindbergh lived in Lloyd Neck, on Long Island, New York.
Lindbergh argued that America did not have any business attacking Germany and believed in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, which his interventionist rivals felt was outdated. In his autobiography, he wrote:
“ I was deeply concerned 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.[134] ”
In his January 23, 1941, testimony in opposition to the Lend-Lease bill before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lindbergh proposed that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany.[135] President Roosevelt publicly criticized Lindbergh’s views on neutrality three months later during a White House press conference on April 25, 1941, as being those of a “defeatist and appeaser” and compared him to U.S. Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham (D-OH), the leader of the “Copperhead” movement that had opposed the American Civil War. Three days later, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps in an April 28 letter to the President in which he said he could find “no honorable alternative” to his taking such an action after Roosevelt had publicly questioned his loyalty.[136]
In a speech at an America First rally at the Des Moines Coliseum on September 11, 1941, “Who Are the War Agitators?”, Lindbergh claimed the three groups, “pressing this country toward war [are] the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration” and said of Jewish groups,
“ 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.[137] ”
In the speech, he warned of the Jewish people’s “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government”. He went on to condemn Nazi Germany’s antisemitism: “No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany.” Lindbergh declared,
“ I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.[138] ”
The speech was heavily criticized as being anti-Semitic.[139] In response, Lindbergh stated again he was not anti-Semitic, but he did not back away from his statements.
Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had concerns about the reaction to the speech and how it would affect his reputation, wrongfully in her view. From her diary:
“ … I have the greatest faith in [Lindbergh] as a person — in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness — his nobility really … How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it? He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name “Jew” is un-American — even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?[140] ”
Interventionists created pamphlets pointing out his efforts were praised in Nazi Germany and included quotations such as “Racial strength is vital; politics, a luxury”. They included pictures of him and other America Firsters using the stiff-armed Bellamy salute (a hand gesture described by Francis Bellamy to accompany his Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag); the photos were taken from an angle not showing the flag, so to observers it was indistinguishable from the Hitler salute.[141]
President Franklin D. Roosevelt disliked Lindbergh’s outspoken opposition to intervention and his administration’s policies, such as the Lend-Lease Act, and said to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in May 1940, “if I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.”[142] On April 26, 1941, Roosevelt wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “When I read Lindbergh’s speech I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by [Nazi propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.”[143]
Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs about the white race in an article he published in Reader’s Digest in 1939:
We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.[144]
Because of his trips to Nazi Germany, combined with a belief in eugenics,[145] Lindbergh was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer.
Lindbergh’s reaction to Kristallnacht was entrusted to his diary: “I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans,” he wrote. “It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult ‘Jewish problem’, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?”[146] Lindbergh had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938–39, after Kristallnacht, a time when many Americans reacted with revulsion at Nazi barbarism.[citation needed] He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews,[147] it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer, who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted. On the advice of his close friend, the eugenicist Alexis Carrel, he cancelled the trip.[147]
In his diaries, he wrote: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence … Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.”
Lindbergh’s anticommunism resonated deeply with many Americans, while eugenics and Nordicism enjoyed social acceptance.[132]
Although Lindbergh considered Hitler a fanatic and avowed a belief in American democracy,[148][149] he clearly stated elsewhere that he believed the survival of the white race was more important than the survival of democracy in Europe: “Our bond with Europe is one of race and not of political ideology,” he declared.[150] Critics have noticed an apparent influence of German philosopher Oswald Spengler on Lindbergh.[151] Spengler was a conservative authoritarian and during the interwar era, was widely read throughout the Western World, though by this point he had fallen out of favor with the Nazis because he had not wholly subscribed to their theories of racial purity.[151]
Lindbergh developed a long-term friendship with the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who was well known for his anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent. In a famous comment about Lindbergh to Detroit’s former FBI field office special agent in charge in July 1940, Ford said: “When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews.”[152][153]
Lindbergh considered Russia to be a “semi-Asiatic” country compared to Germany, and he found Communism to be an ideology that would destroy the West’s “racial strength” and replace everyone of European descent with “a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.” He stated that if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia. He preferred Nordics, but he believed, after Soviet Communism was defeated, Russia would be a valuable ally against potential aggression from East Asia.[151][154]
Lindbergh said certain races have “demonstrated superior ability in the design, manufacture, and operation of machines.”[155] He further said, “The growth of our western civilization has been closely related to this superiority.”[156] Lindbergh admired “the German genius for science and organization, the English genius for government and commerce, the French genius for living and the understanding of life.” He believed that “in America they can be blended to form the greatest genius of all.”[157] His message was popular throughout many Northern communities and especially well received in the Midwest, while the American South was anglophilic and supported a pro-British foreign policy.[158] The South was the most pro-British and interventionist part of the country.[159]
Holocaust researcher and investigative journalist Max Wallace in his book, The American Axis, agreed with Franklin Roosevelt’s assessment that Lindbergh was “pro-Nazi.” Wallace finds the Roosevelt Administration’s accusations of dual loyalty or treason as unsubstantiated. Wallace considers Lindbergh a well-intentioned, but bigoted and misguided, Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people.[160]
Lindbergh’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, A. Scott Berg, contends Lindbergh was not so much a supporter of the Nazi regime as someone so stubborn in his convictions and relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering that he easily allowed rivals to portray him as one. Lindbergh’s receipt of the German medal was approved without objection by the American embassy; the war had not yet begun in Europe. The award did not cause controversy until the war began and Lindbergh returned to the United States in 1939 to spread his message of nonintervention. Berg contends Lindbergh’s views were commonplace in the United States in the pre–World War II era. Lindbergh’s support for the America First Committee was representative of the sentiments of a number of American people.[149]
Yet Berg also notes that “As late as April 1939 – after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia – Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Hitler. ‘Much as I disapprove of many things Hitler had done,’ he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, ‘I believe she [Germany] has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations … in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history.'” Berg also explains that leading up to the war, in Lindbergh’s mind, the great battle would be between the Soviet Union and Germany, not fascism and democracy.
Wallace noted that it was difficult to find social scientists among Lindbergh’s contemporaries in the 1930s who found validity in racial explanations for human behavior. Wallace went on to observe that “throughout his life, eugenics would remain one of Lindbergh’s enduring passions.”[161] In Pat Buchanan’s book A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny, he portrays Lindbergh and other pre-war isolationists as American patriots who were smeared by interventionists during the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Buchanan suggests the backlash against Lindbergh highlights “the explosiveness of mixing ethnic politics with foreign policy.
After the war, while touring the Nazi concentration camps, Lindbergh wrote in his autobiography that he was disgusted and angered…
With most of Eastern Europe having fallen under Communist control, Lindbergh believed most of his pre-war assessments were correct all along. But Berg reports after witnessing the defeat of Germany and the Holocaust firsthand shortly after his service in the Pacific, “he knew the American public no longer gave a hoot about his opinions.”
