Setting the Isolationist Record Straight

Ruth Sarles
Edited with an Introduction by Bill Kauffman
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003
$65.00/p>

lvi + 238 pp.

Reviewed by Stephen J. Sniegoski

The America First Committee was the major anti-war group during the Roosevelt administration's preparations for American entrance into World War II. There was nothing novel about its stance. The idea of putting American interests paramount and of staying aloof from overseas conflicts had been the traditional foreign policy of the United States from the time of the Founding Fathers, and was most memorably articulated in George Washington's "Farewell Address."  Yet the America First Committee was smeared by the Roosevelt administration and the interventionist media as a subversive "Nazi-transmission belt."

That negative image persists today among the liberal and neoconservative punditry. However, this has not been the case in the scholarly literature, especially in the works of the pre-eminent historian of the American "isolationists,"¹ Wayne S. Cole, who evaluates America First as patriotic and principled:

The committee's leaders rejected rioting and violence.  They barred Nazis, Fascists, and anti-Semites from membership, and tried to enforce those bans.  The committee used orderly democratic methods in desperate efforts to keep the United States out of the wars raging abroad. The committee's positions on foreign affairs were consistent with traditions extending back to the beginnings of America's independent history and before.  When war burst on America with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the committee ceased its noninterventionist activities, pledged support to the war effort, and dismantled its organization.  Most of its members loyally supported the war against the Axis, and many, including some of its prominent leaders, served in America's armed forces.  The America First Committee was a patriotic and honorable exercise of democracy in action at a critical time in American history.²

The manuscript that provides the basis for the book under review was written during the early years of World War II by Ruth Sarles, who had been a staff member of the America First Committee.  The book was commissioned by William H. Regnery, a major financial backer of America First.  Sarles finished the manuscript in October 1942; its publication comes over sixty years later. Historian Bill Kauffman, a libertarian sympathetic to non-interventionism, was selected to edit the work.  Kauffman significantly shortened the massive 759-page manuscript but retained what he describes as "the pith of the manuscript: Sarles’s knowledgeable accounts of the America First Committee's founding, its work with congressional allies, its popularity as measured in public opinion polls, the difficulties of being a loyal opposition as the war clouds descend, and the central role played by Charles A. Lindbergh."³ Kauffman does not present the book as the definitive account of the America First Committee, but rather as a supplement to other works on the subject such as those by Cole and Justus D. Doenecke, with Cole's America First: The Battle against Intervention, 1940–1941 remaining the "standard history."⁴

Despite her close connection to America First, Sarles wrote in an objective manner; her interpretation does not significantly differ from Cole’s. Kauffman comments that such "Olympian detachment," which was recommended to her by Charles Lindbergh, "may suit a hero, but it does not always behoove an author.  Sarles's book is a valuable compilation of facts and speeches—this is what America First sounded like—but it might have benefited from a dash of partisanship."⁵

The America First Committee originated as a student organization at Yale University Law School in early 1940 under the leadership of Robert Douglas Stuart, Jr., a law student there. The initial intention was to establish a national organization of college students opposed to American intervention in the ongoing European war, which had broken out in September 1939, but this effort soon expanded beyond the college ranks to become a general national anti-war organization headquartered in Chicago.  Stuart served as its director, while its permanent "acting" national chairman was General Robert E. Wood, head of Sears and Roebuck.  In 1941, it attained a membership of around 850,000.  Prominent figures in America First included aviation hero Charles Lindbergh; liberal journalist John T. Flynn; the former head of the New Deal's National Recovery Administration, General Hugh Johnson; and Theodore Roosevelt's feisty daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.  Although its political and financial support came disproportionately from conservative Midwesterners, Sarles depicts the extensive diversity in the organization.  There were numerous liberals, and America First had significant regional support in every region of the country except the South.

Does the history of the America First Committee have relevance today?  The very idea of putting America first puts one on the fringes of the political right, in the realm of bone-headed chauvinism, if not malevolent racism.  Today America follows a policy of global imperialism through its "war on terrorism," and the stated American goal is to make other societies, especially in the Middle East, “democratic."  Like President Roosevelt, the Bush administration lied the country into war—in fact, in one sense, it was evidently a greater lie since the "weapons of mass destruction" invoked as the casus belli were non-existent, whereas Pearl Harbor really was attacked.  Once again it is "anti-Semitic" to mention that any Jews, in this case the neo-conservatives, have played a role in bringing the country into war.  It should be pointed out that the "anti-Semitic" standard has broadened beyond the prohibition of referring to Jews as a collectivity to actually silencing any reference to a particular small group of Jews. 

The ongoing global war/imperialist policy is being promoted by self-styled conservatives and a purportedly conservative administration.  The major opposition to the war has come from the radical left, which is characterized by support for revolutionary socialism, anti-Americanism, and general hostility to traditional Western culture.  While there has been opposition to the war from right-wing intellectuals—paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians—what has been lacking has been the grass-roots and financial support to develop a patriotic anti-war organization.   That nothing like America First could emerge in 2002-2003 shows how far the mainstream American populace has strayed from the republican principles that once served as the nation's foundation, and which were still largely extant in pre-World War II America.

Stephen J. Sniegoski holds a Ph.D. in American diplomatic history, is the author of several historical articles and a frequent contributor to The Occidental Quarterly.

Endnotes