America First was right

Can you name the largest, most broadly based anti-war organization in American history? Do you know the percentage of the American people that supported its aims during its short life? Although the phrase “anti-war” is now inseparable from the movement opposed to the Vietnam War, the answer to the first question is the America First Committee, founded in 1940 to counter the massive interventionist propaganda of those in favor of involving America in the latest European war. And unlike the Vietnam anti-war movement, which slowly built support, at the time America First was organized, an astounding 80% of the American people fully supported keeping America out of the war.

America First attracted liberals and conservatives, pacifists and generals, all united by their belief that Europe’s war was not America’s war. But more than that, opponents of intervention recognized that democracy at home was more threatened by going to war than by a victorious Hitler.

From the America First Creed:

“I believe in the preservation of this Republic. Embroiled again in European affairs, we shall lose it. We shall be destroying the heritage our fathers fought for and sacrificed to leave us. In an effort to destroy totalitarianism, we shall become totalitarian ourselves.”

Back in those days, there were still senators who could eloquently call the executive branch to heel, as did Republican Hiram Johnson of California, speaking May 31, 1941:

“We have seen, little by little, power concentrated in one man’s hands. We have soothed our perturbed spirits by pretending that those powers were needed to be thus concentrated in order to meet the crisis, but when you are meeting crises on practically all lands of every continent, what will become, the ordinary citizen will ask, of the good old United States? … Is it not plain that all this fighting on every shore, and in practically every country will mean but one thing, perhaps the destruction of a dictatorship in other lands, but the certainty of the creation of a dictatorship in our own.”

America was at a crossroads, as the American aviator and homegrown hero Charles Lindbergh pointed out:

“We are faced with the stark fact that we have been carried to the verge of war against the opposition of a majority of our people—a war not of defense, but of attack; a war not in America, but in Europe and Asia… The question arises whether we any longer have a representative system of government in this country, whether we any longer have any right to know about, and to vote upon, the fundamental policies of our nation… Freedom for us lies today in the question of whether or not the action of our Government in America is controlled by the will of our people. If we are represented in Washington, we are free men; but if we are ruled by Washington, we are not.”

And Lindbergh again, in a speech he was scheduled to deliver on December 12th, 1941:

“There is one word that describes better than all others our danger in America. It is not invasion; it is not intervention; it is not Germany or Russia or Japan; that word is subterfuge—subterfuge in our government, subterfuge in our political campaigns…Our nation has been led to war with promises of peace. It is now being led toward dictatorship with promises of democracy.”

Lindbergh never gave that speech because of a stunning example of subterfuge.

Roosevelt wanted to take us to war, but Congress would not let him, because the country was so opposed to the war (a steady 80% in the polls). Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into attacking us at Pearl Harbor (see Day of Deceit for a full report on how Roosevelt allowed the attack to take place, refusing to alert the Navy that the attack was coming). And in the war hysteria that followed, America First was dissolved, its ideals vanquished. The America its members tried to hold onto was lost.

Roosevelt pulled us out of the Depression by putting the American economy on a permanent war footing, and the monster has grown ever since. In the face of an American public always hesitant to sacrifice American blood and treasure on the altar of the imperial oligarchy, every now and then new Pearl Harbors need to happen, like the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” and of course, most recently, the inside job of 9/11. (Wouldn’t you like to see a man like Charles Lindbergh investigate the truth of that day, rather than shills like Hamilton and Kean?)

But imagine what might have been. Imagine removing the economic incentive for war. That’s exactly what supporters of America First tried to do as far back as 1934:

“Through the pressure of veterans’ groups and others, the antiwar feeling of this period took the form of a demand to take the profits out of war, which emerged in Congress as the McSwain war profits bill. This measure (passed by the House but not the Senate) provided for wartime commandeering of industrial plants and executives, for price freezing, for a 100% tax on profits ‘shown to be due to wartime conditions’ and for the regulation of business. The bill obviously was so full of loopholes that a real war profits control bill was introduced and endorsed by practically half the Senate, a measure designed to take all but $10,000 of individual earnings per year during wartime.”

Do you think the Carlyle Group would stay in business for a paltry 10K per head?

The members and supporters of America First foresaw the future.

Dr. John A O’Brien, University of Notre Dame professor, June 24th, 1941:

“You and I have a faith to keep with those who gave us America. We are trustees of liberties which we alone can keep alive. Not in China, Russia, Africa, or other foreign lands—which neither know nor want our way of life—but here, here in a free and independent United States.”

Those who led us into war, who now lead us into wars, those who promote perpetual war, have not kept that faith.

Source:
A Story of America First: The Men and Women Who Opposed US Intervention in World War II, Ruth Sarles, 2003