There is a thread of isolationist sentiment that runs through discussions of America’s foreign affairs, and that thread is often woven into the fabric of the nation’s foreign policy. From Washington’s admonition to avoid foreign entanglements, to the Monroe Doctrine, even to the Anti-Imperialist League, Americans have often rejected foreign engagement and opposed American intervention abroad.

H. W. Brands’s newest book, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War, is a timely and insightful look at American isolationism viewed in the context of the nationwide noninterventionist movement from 1939–41 to oppose US engagement in the war in Europe. Brands is an accomplished historian. He has written a dozen well-regarded books, two of which—The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for biography. 

With a solid biographer’s knowledge of Roosevelt, Brands is well-positioned to offer readers a dual biography of the main protagonists at the time of the America First movement. Brands describes Roosevelt’s cautious, but deliberate actions to oppose Nazi Germany and support the Allied Powers. The author also portrays the sometimes reticent and usually press-averse Lindbergh, and his growing role as the leading figure of the American First isolationist movement. Brands uses Lindbergh’s own writing to describe him as a noninterventionist opposed to virtually every step Roosevelt took to bind the US to the beleaguered Allies before entering the war.

The Annotated Lindbergh

Brands relies heavily on Lindbergh’s pre-war journal in this character-driven book. Nearly half of the content of America First is composed of lengthy direct quotes from Lindbergh’s journal, of verbatim transcripts of his radio addresses and speeches, and quotations from his published articles. If the chronicles cited were from a lesser pen, this would be a ponderous book overwhelmed with lengthy and only tangentially relevant quotes.

Lindbergh, however, wrote in a direct, lucid, and unadorned style. Given that the passages were from the famous aviator’s personal journal, readers might well expect candor. But there is more here than disarming candor. Lindbergh’s journal features observations and keen judgments that make even long passages worthwhile for the reader. They provide both background and insight. Lindbergh, for example, recognized that the early years of Hitler’s control of Germany would have been the best opportunity to check the Fuehrer’s plans without going to war. He clearly understood that delay was a mortal threat to the European powers and especially, England. “Why in heaven’s name,” he wrote in a 1939 journal entry, “did not England move in 1934 if she intended to stop Germany? These last five years of indecision may well bring the end of her empire, if not all of Europe.”

Lindbergh’s fame from his solo flight across the Atlantic and his renown as an aviation pioneer and engineer also opened doors to him in business, industry, and government. He met personally with Roosevelt, members of Congress, leading industrialists (among them Henry Ford), and media magnates of the age (Roy Howard for one). This unparalleled access gave him unique reach and a broader understanding of the forces impelling American interventionism. Brands puts Lindbergh’s recollections in chronological context and so enriches the whole of the narrative with a true insider’s point of view.

Roosevelt Ripostes

Lindbergh held an enduring celebrity status in America unlike anything in today’s frenzied marketplace for fleeting adulation. At once humble and heroic, average Americans admired Lindbergh’s courage and accomplishments even as they found sympathy for a man who had lost a child to a kidnapper and murderer. In America First, Lindbergh emerges as an everyman, reluctantly thrust into a role he did not relish because he saw it as a matter of conscience. Writing in 1941, Lindbergh put it directly, “I was appearing on public platforms now only … because I felt so strongly we should not enter the war that I could not in justice to my own conscience remain inactive.”

Roosevelt, in Brands’s account, suffers no pangs of conscience. He is portrayed as both an able executive leader and as a canny—if sometimes disingenuous—politician, wise in following the prevailing winds of public opinion. Roosevelt was then a practitioner of what is called realpolitik today. Lindbergh failed to understand this. Instead, he saw in Roosevelt a president with “the ability to persuade himself that whatever he wants is also in the best interests of the country.”

America First positions Roosevelt as Lindbergh’s opponent in a great national debate: internationalism vs. isolationism. While Roosevelt often had the upper hand as President, Lindbergh’s charismatic appeal attracted millions to his radio broadcasts and magazine articles. He soon took center stage as a prominent spokesman for the cause of the non-interventionists. Roosevelt understood Lindbergh’s appeal and the broader appeals of the isolationist movement. The aftermath of the (First) World War shattered the idea that America fought to make the world safe for democracy, as fascism and communism took hold in Europe. Then, fighting in Asia and Europe made mockery of the claim the war was waged as “the war to end all wars.”

Americans concluded they had been played for suckers—that the hundred thousand of their compatriots who died in the war had lost their lives to capitalist greed and imperialist folly. The capitalists were American bankers and arms manufacturers who made a killing from all the killing; the imperialists were the leaders of Britain and France who expanded their empires in Asia and Africa by the victory secured with American blood and treasure.

Brands describes how Roosevelt first used the broad appeal of noninterventionism—to anti-war activists, pacifists, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists and socialists, and ethnic groups in America—to brand isolationists “as small, selfish groups or individuals at home,” who sought common cause with “powerful enemies abroad.” It would prove to be the opening round of salvoes that would eventually target Lindbergh when Roosevelt accused him of appeasement and treason. The accusations prompted Lindbergh to resign his commission in the Army Air Corps.

America First also describes the gradual shift in public opinion as Congress approved a series of measures that repealed the Neutrality Acts, first lifting the ban on arms sales (to Britain and France), then permitting arms shipments on US-flagged vessels, and finally adopting Lend-Lease that provided direct financial aid to the Allied Powers. Brands makes a well-illustrated case that the tide of events was running against the isolationists. At that point, Lindbergh stumbled badly, “destroyed his own reputation” and “simultaneously discredited the antiwar movement and killed any plausible alternative to the globalist vision of Franklin Roosevelt.” 

In his September 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh assailed “the war agitators,” saying, “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” These groups, he claimed before an audience of 8,000 people and millions of radio listeners, “have marshaled the power of their propaganda, their money, their patronage,” to carry the country to war. American Jews, Lindbergh asserted, pressed for intervention, but “their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” Lindbergh’s conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes were immediately and widely condemned. While Brands recounts the outrage among the American public, the press, politicians, and the clergy, he fails to capture the immensity of the reaction and the devastating damage it did to Lindbergh’s stature. It was his undoing as an American hero. A far more complete accounting appears in A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Lindbergh.

With its chief spokesman discredited, the newly formed America First Committee fought a failing rear-guard action, plagued by accusations of pro-fascism, defeatism, communist leanings, and antisemitism. Not for the last time, the Administration directed the FBI to open investigations of its political opponents, including members of the Committee and Lindbergh. In the end, the broad political support for isolationism, especially in the face of increasingly active US measures to support the Allied Powers, dwindled away. The argument that intervention—armed and active support for belligerents—only begets a wider war was made mute when the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and became irrelevant when Nazi Germany declared war on the United States.

Today, after more than eight decades since the demise of the America First Committee and Lindbergh’s fall from grace, Brands’ obiter dictum for the verdict of history on their movement rings true: “Isolationism remained a concept approachable only at peril to one’s reputation for seriousness in foreign policy.”