Trump wants his exclusionary America to cower behind walls. He would erect metaphorical barriers against immigrants (excluding Muslims from entry to the United States until they can be "properly and perfectly" screened) and trade. And of course, he would build a literal wall along the Mexican border. None of which is to say Trump's isolated America would decline to fight wars: Trump would increase bombing of the Middle East and fight "fast and furious for a short period of time" against the terrorist enemy.
This is what Trump's "America First" means: a white America (committed, to be sure, to "take care of our African American people"), living behind higher walls and screens, lashing out to prove its strength and then retreating again - not a government suspiciously tolerant of foreign threats.
And this is also largely what "America First" has historically meant.
During the early 1930s, as the Nazis consolidated control over Germany, the US media baron William Randolph Hearst began touting the slogan "America First" against President Franklin Roosevelt, whom he saw as dangerously likely to "allow the international bankers and the other big influences that have gambled with your prosperity to gamble with your politics". Hearst regarded Roosevelt's New Deal as "un-American to the core" and "more communistic than the communists" - unlike Nazism, which he believed had won a great victory for "liberty-loving people" everywhere in defeating communism.
With the beginning of World War II in Europe and the Germans' swift conquest of the continent, Roosevelt began to commit his administration more firmly to the aid of the those fighting Nazism. He incurred the ire of various anti-intervention constituencies, ranging from committed religious or principled pacifists to American communists, who supported the Nazi-Soviet pact and therefore the notion that the United States should stay out of the European war.
But the most prominent of his opponents were the founders of the America First Committee, formed in September 1940. The committee opposed fighting Nazism and proposed a well-armed America confined largely to the Western Hemisphere. It soon afterwards adopted the noted aviator and enthusiast of fascism, Charles Lindbergh, as their favoured speaker. Lindbergh accepted a medal from Hermann Goering "in the name of the Fuhrer" during a visit to Germany in 1938, and "proudly wore the decoration", the New York Times reported. He thought democracy was finished in Europe, that the western powers could not effectively resist the Nazi war machine and that the United States had better make terms with Adolf Hitler.
Lindbergh wasn't against wars per se; he could support fighting if it came to "a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion". His definition of the white race apparently had little room for Jewish people, about whom he thought Hitler had a point: "We are all disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio, and motion pictures," Lindbergh believed, though he allowed the country could benefit from "a few Jews of the right type" - just as Trump would presumably allow Muslims who could pass a perfect and proper screen.
The famed automaker and celebrity anti-Semite Henry Ford also joined America First. Like many others, they fought the "groups" who, Lindbergh said, were pushing the country into war, "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration".
As with the Trump campaign, not all America First Committee supporters in 1940 were so egregious as their most visible spokesmen. But also as with the Trump campaign, neither did the moderate anti-Roosevelt anti-interventionists quite repudiate their fascist-friendly leaders.
The subsidiary labels may have shifted, but the general idea of "America First" remains the same: the United States should arm itself against foreign threats and stay within carefully defined borders, using the might of the state only to defend a very specific, rather white idea of "America" that excludes certain racial and religious minorities. Then, as now, the phrase offered strength through cowardice. Defeating this defeatism was essential to victory over dictatorships in the 20th century, and it is essential to preserving the institutions of democracy today.
- Eric Rauchway is professor of history at the University of California at Davis and the author, most recently, of The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace.
