Throughout the New Deal years, Republicans and Democrats alike worked to expose these crimes, and to ensure that they could never be repeated. Also complicit were the arms dealers, for whom the phrase “merchants of death” now became standard. involvement in that earlier war arose because of the machinations of over-mighty financiers and plutocrats-what we might call the 1 percent-who deployed vicious and false propaganda from London and Paris. Rather, it arose from a widespread perception of the First World War as an unmitigated catastrophe. That had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, or with sympathy for Hitler. was through the 1930s, and how strongly that sentiment persisted almost to the outbreak of war in 1941. It is very difficult today to understand just how deeply and passionately pacifist the U.S. The AFC can be understood as the clearest institutional manifestation of the nation’s deep-rooted anti-war sentiment. The fundamental problem with that view is that on most critical issues, the AFC held positions that were close to a national consensus, and in these matters, it was FDR and the interventionists who were the minority. Any ideas associated with America First must, by definition, be regarded as anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, and toxic.

The impression we are left with is that the AFC was a deeply unsavory pressure group that tried to undermine the political will of a nation united behind the Roosevelt administration in its determination to fight Hitler when the proper time arose. In modern television documentaries, the movement is usually mentioned alongside authentic Nazi groups like the clownish German American Bund, whose members paraded in brown shirts and swastikas. That event, above all, fatally tainted the memory of America First. The speech was appalling-and worse, Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism really did represent the view of a small minority of AFC supporters. In all that time, though, historical attention focuses on just one shameful moment, namely the speech that Charles Lindbergh gave in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, when he openly attacked Jews as a force driving the country toward war. The America First Committee (AFC) was formed in September 1940 and operated until the Pearl Harbor attack. Its later stigmatization as a Nazi front group is tragic in its own right, but it also closes off legitimate paths of public debate that have nothing whatever to do with authoritarianism or bigotry. It was a sincere anti-war movement that drew from all shades of the political spectrum. Sidney Blumenthal is one of many to recall that the slogan “was emblazoned on the banner of the movement for appeasement of Hitler.” In reality, the original America First movement of 1940–41 was far broader and more complex than this critique might suggest, and was actually much more respectable and even mainstream. America first.” Liberal writers profess to find the phrase terrifying, a confirmation not just of Trump’s dictatorial instincts, but also of his racial and religious prejudice. In his inaugural address, Donald Trump used a slogan that he had already quoted approvingly in earlier speeches: “From this day forward,” he said, “it’s going to be only America first.