H.W. Brands
Subject: America First
Bio: American historian
Reading: America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history.
Today’s topic is America First.
Our speaker will be H. W. Brands who is the author of the book America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War. Trump has indicated that his foreign policy will place America’s interests first following a long tradition in this country. We need to reexamine the debate prior to America’s entry into World War 2 and hear Lindbergh’s arguments about why we should stay out of wars in Europe.
Bill, can you please open with six minutes of opening remarks.
H. W. Brands:
The origins of American participation in World War 2 began with a presumption that the United States would not get involved. America from the 1790s until the 1910s had assiduously avoided involvement in the affairs of Europe. Most Americans were quite content with this.
A change occurred in the decade of the 1910s when Woodrow Wilson talked Americans into entering World War I. The American participation in the war was 18 months and within six months after that, they decided we made a mistake. Americans’ opposition to repeating the mistake grew deeper during the 1930s as it became apparent that Europe was likely to go back to war. So, Congress passed a series of laws called the neutrality laws saying if a war breaks out in Europe or elsewhere, the United States is going to stay out, and the President is prevented from drawing us into World War II.
The question for me is how did this happen and what does it mean for us today? When Donald Trump was elected president the first time, he adopted a position that put him at odds with the consensus that the United States must be the leader of the world. This had been taken for granted by every president from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama. Donald Trump starts talking in a manner that sounds like the United States is no longer committed to, for example, NATO.
The issues that were raised during that period of what the American rule should be are very much akin to issues that we face today. So if there is trouble in Europe, let's say a war in Ukraine that has no direct bearing on the United States, but does challenge the international order established that came out of World War II, is it in the American interest to make sure that that war ends in a particular way or succeed if a war should break out over Taiwan? The United States spent the 1930s ignoring Japanese aggression against China. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans decided, we can't let that happen again.
Is there anything that Taiwan represents that is intrinsically threatening to American security? Well, arguments are made has to do with we cannot let China disrupt the status quo that has developed in the Western Pacific out of World War II.
The United States has been trying to prop up this status quo for 80 years. The question is, is that still a good idea? Americans decided after Pearl Harbor, it was a good idea, but it took a direct Japanese attack on American soil killing thousands of Americans to bring them to this conclusion. Today should the United States continue to lead the world in the way it has for 80 years?
The anti-interventionist argument, which was quickly labeled isolationist was discredited by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and then confirmed by the discovery of the death camps. That epithet isolationist had been damning for so long that almost ends the argument. I think that's a lazy way of doing it. Once again, there are contemporary reasons why American policy should be assertive, but I think the argument needs to be made on evidence today rather than what happened in the 1930s and 1940s.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to start with the American entrance into World War I. Wilson ran in 1916 for a second term for president based on that he was going to prevent us from getting into the war. And sure enough, a year later we are in the war. There was significant disappointment among those voters who said, I'm voting for you to keep us out of the war. When we relate it to the 1940 election, Roosevelt ran on, I'm going to support the allies, but make sure we don't get into the war. It's like the same story over again. Tell us about learning from World War I as it relates to campaigning on preventing us getting into the war but resulting in us getting into it.
H. W. Brands:
This might sound like splitting hairs, but Woodrow Wilson was incredibly careful in his choice of words. They used the past tense when he was running in 1916. They said he kept us out of war. They didn't say he's going to keep us out of war because Wilson understood that something could happen that would draw the United States into war.
Franklin Roosevelt was not so careful on the eve of the 1940 election, Franklin Roosevelt said, I will not send American boys to fight in foreign wars. In both cases they understood the message they were conveying, reelect me and we will not be going to war. Now, Americans, after the experience with Woodrow Wilson, they felt they had been misled.
They felt they had been used by Woodrow Wilson, and Americans’ response to this was to decisively defeat the Democrats. In the 1920 election, Wilson wasn't running, but the Democratic ticket went down to defeat. And Franklin Roosevelt was on the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. Americans thought they had been deceived by their president, and they also thought that they had been suckered by the British and the French who had gotten themselves into this war that they quite clearly could not win on their own. So, they drew the United States in, and the United States saved their day. But then at the Paris Peace Conference, the British and the French proceeded to pursue narrow British and French interests for the post-war order.
Wilson observed Europe from 1914 to 1917, the three-year period where the United States was not in the war. And he said there's no way civilization can survive. We need a new international order, and the only way the United States is going to get a leading role in this post-war international order is to take part in the war. And this involved the League of Nations which committed the United States to the defense of this international order, regardless of whether American interests narrowly conceived, were directly threatened.
And this is what Americans said no to after the war, partly because it was such a break with the past. Until the 1910s American took the position that Europe's problems are not our problems. And many Americans congratulated themselves and their forefathers and mothers for leaving Europe and getting away from that continent that always seemed to be at war.
Larry Bernstein:
Wilson's out of office in 1921 and the Republicans go in a different direction. World War I did not feel great to the American voters; it was not a war to end all wars. They didn't want to be the policeman for the world. So it becomes bipartisan before the war starts.
H. W. Brands:
In the 1920 election, James Cox, the Democratic nominee for President and Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for vice president, out of loyalty to Woodrow Wilson, campaigned in favor of the League of Nations in favor of this internationalist view of the world. And they were trounced. And because of that, they abandoned it. By the mid- 1920s, this anti-interventionist position was quite bipartisan. Strikingly, the Republicans were a little bit more interventionist than the Democrats; they were willing to intervene financially. The United States had loaned a lot of money to the European governments, and they wanted to make sure they got it back. Under Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce, the Republicans were interested in promoting American trade abroad.
The Democrats split down the middle between their relatively liberal urban wing and their very conservative southern wing. If anything, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, because it included so many immigrants, it was more sensitive to what was going on in Europe than the Southern conservatives; they did not have close connections with Europe. But in the 1930s, the idea that we're not going to get involved in Europe's war was a thoroughly bipartisan position.
Larry Bernstein:
What surprised me in the book was that there were Democrats, you mentioned Borah from Idaho, Burton Wheeler, Harry Byrd. This wasn't just like a local southern conservative opposition to intervention. It was quite broad across the United States and included their most progressive wing of the party and not just the conservatives.. Tell us about why the isolationist part of both parties represented a supermajority of the voters.
H. W. Brands:
It gets back to this question of what did intervention in World War I accomplish for the United States? And by 1925, there was not a positive answer that was persuasive to large numbers of Americans, regardless of political party.
There was almost nobody in the United States in the mid-1930s who was saying that experience in World War I was a good thing, and we ought to do it again. There was an entire literature of what was wrong with American intervention in the First World War. Basically, American Doughboys went over and got killed to preserve the profligates of Wall Street or to inflate Woodrow Wilson's sense of self-importance. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was nobody saying, we ought to do it again.
Larry Bernstein:
Your book is an intellectual and verbal battle between Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why did you choose Lindbergh as the protagonist representing the interests of the anti-interventionists?
H. W. Brands:
Lindbergh before September 1st, 1939, nobody would have picked him to be the voice of the anti-interventionist point of view. He was not a politician. He never ran for office. In fact, he despised politicians and everything politics stood for. However, he was a celebrity. He was one of the best-known people in America at first by virtue of having flown across the Atlantic solo in 1927, the first person to do this, which made him for his time for the 1920s, the equivalent of American astronauts during the 1960s. Someone who has clearly accomplished this technological feat.
He comes along just when the movie studios are creating news reels, and he's a good-looking guy. Lucky Lindy was this great celebrity and was famous outside the United States as well. He was given the French Legion of Honor. He was invited to review the Air Force of all the great powers.
His celebrity was made more complicated by the fact that the infant's son of Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered in the early 1930s. Lucky Lindy became unlucky. Lindbergh was the center of much more attention than he wanted to be. He was driven out of the United States by constant harassment, by reporters, filmmakers. And he spent a few years living in England during this time.
Larry Bernstein:
I want you to expand on that time in the London because it's critical to his decisions to pursue this anti interventionist policy.
H. W. Brands:
Lindbergh moves in the governing circles in England. Now it's important to note there were differences of opinion in Britain regarding the appropriate response to Germany's breaking their rules of the Versailles agreement. If there is another war, should British young people go fight? Lindbergh concludes that Britain's glory days were behind it. Britain was stuck with this worldwide empire that it no longer had the capability or even the will to defend. But because Lindbergh saw the British Air Force, saw the German Air Force, saw that the Germans were much farther down the road than the British were.
Lindbergh believed that the British were going to get themselves involved in a war that they could not win. This would have been a repetition of World War I. Here it's worth noting that Lindbergh's father had been a member of Congress during World War I and had opposed American intervention in World War I and his political career had ended badly. It's one of the things that kept him out of politics. Lindbergh saw that this is just the same thing happening again. The British are promising more than they can deliver. They kid themselves to think that they won World War I when it was America that bailed them out.
They are going to make these promises to Czechoslovakia to Poland that they could not keep. And then they are going to come up to us and we will bail them out again if we are foolish enough to do so. Lindbergh made a point of telling the British, do not count on this. And the American ambassadors in Britain at the time, Joseph Kennedy was telling him the same thing.
We were your allies in World War I, but don't count on it again. When the time comes, America will make its decision based on what America's interests are, not what Britain's interests are. And for this, Kennedy was especially later accused of being an appeaser is telling the British, you need to get along with Germany.
Kennedy's position was if the British get in this war alone, they are going to lose. And so, they probably should not get into this war at all. They should cut some deal with Hitler. Appeasement at the time was a perfectly honorable means of conducting business. If you are not prepared to fight a war, then you must come up with some solution short of war. But after the fact, people said, how could we ever compromise with Hitler because we saw what he turned out to be. Lindbergh gets connected with Joseph Kennedy, and the two of them are this anti-interventionist nucleus that are warning people back in Washington.
Larry Bernstein:
In a typical American high school textbook of this period, the description of FDRs policies before the war is he is trying to pull the American public into the war and that he recognizes that he does not have full public support. So, he is constantly pushing the edge with lend-lease or the base trading with convoys up to a certain point. But the story you tell is slightly different than that in that Roosevelt is much more disingenuous with his public announcements now that his private correspondence and diaries are available to historians. He says one thing in private and a different thing in public.
H. W. Brands:
Franklin Roosevelt firmly believed that American involvement in the war in Europe was necessary for American security and for the peace of the world, then it's easier to understand why Roosevelt would believe that a white lie in service of that great truth could be justified.
This is common in politics somebody running for office believes that my election is absolutely critical to the future of my country, and therefore almost anything that contributes to my getting elected is justified. To this day, there's essentially nobody who says that American intervention in World War II was not a good thing, And so nearly everybody accepts that the place Roosevelt got America to was where America needed to be.
Larry Bernstein:
If Roosevelt had asked Congress for a declaration of war on December 6th, 1941, I'm not sure he would've got it.
H. W. Brands:
No, he wouldn't have.
Lindbergh's complaint against President Roosevelt, he can manufacture emergencies. In the Atlantic, American warships were cooperating with British warships in attacks on German submarines. Roosevelt wasn't admitting to it, but that was happening. And when a British submarine fired back at one ship, the USS Greer Roosevelt utterly-
Larry Bernstein:
Mischaracterized.
H. W. Brands:
Yes, he said it was unprovoked. The American ship was working hand in hand with the British. Roosevelt was hoping for an incident that would kill enough Americans that Congress would have to respond.
By the way, there is a long history of this. The United States went to war against Mexico in 1846 after President James Polk had ordered Zachary Taylor into a territory disputed between Mexico and the United States, so that then I can say that American blood has been shed on American soil. Roosevelt was hoping that was going to happen in the Atlantic, but the Germans, they weren't going to be provoked at this point into a direct attack on American ships, but the Japanese were.
Larry Bernstein:
Lindbergh in my community has always been viewed as a deeply problematic character. Someone who may be espousing an anti-intervention policy doing so probably because of a latent antisemitism and maybe a German bias in his decision making. But when I read your book, I did not feel it as strongly as I expected. I was surprised by Lindbergh's position.
Did antisemitism drive his behavior? And did he have a pro-German bias or instead he just did not want to get involved in a European war for the benefit of America?
H. W. Brands:
Lindbergh's position was characterized by the Roosevelt administration as being pro-German. And one could argue that it was objectively German in the sense that Lindbergh thought the United States should not enter the war against Germany. The more appropriate question was, did that drive his argument? And the answer is no, least certainly not by my reading it. One of the first things that a lot of people think they know about Charles Lindbergh is that he was a raving antisemite. And I will give you the evidence it comes overwhelmingly from a speech that Lindbergh gave in Des Moines, Iowa in August 1941.
We are just months away from Pearl Harbor. And Lindbergh realized that he and his side are losing the debate that Roosevelt and the interventionists are gaining ground, that with each month something new is coming, we're in the moment of lend lease, which includes shipments of American weapons to communist Soviet Union. And Lindbergh was tearing his hair out at this because Roosevelt was characterizing this conflict as democracy against the autocrats. And Lindbergh said, well, who are we sending these weapons to? Communist Russia. That is not a democracy.
In this speech, Lindbergh said there are three groups that are most behind this movement to get the United States involved in the war in Europe. The first group is the British government. he said, I don't begrudge Britain taking this position, but that's not the position of the United States now. I do not think it should be.
The second group is Jewish Americans. And he said it's quite understandable that they feel the way they do regarding Hitler and what the Nazis have done. And I do not begrudge Jewish Americans the right to say what they want to say. He did add that the Jewish voice is magnified by the large influence they have in American media. And he said first with the movie studios, and it was well known that Jewish Americans were the leaders of several of the Hollywood movie studios, the ones who were producing the news reels that cast the news in a particular light. And again, Lindbergh said, I do not begrudge their position, but I do not think that is the position or should be the position of the United States.
But he saved his special criticism for the Roosevelt administration, and he thought the Roosevelt administration, he's doing this primarily for the personal political influence of Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt wants to be president for life. If he now, by this time he'd been elected a third time, Lindbergh predicted he'd be elected a fourth time.
He will be president until he dies, which in fact is what happened. This was the speech that Lindbergh gave, and the next day there were newspapers all around the country and people around the country saying, what a horrible antisemite, and therefore we shouldn't listen to what he says.
Lindbergh was antisemitic in the way the American Congress was antisemitic then for not allowing any more Jewish refugees from Europe into the United States that the Roosevelt administration was by not making a special provision for Jews.
Larry Bernstein:
I read the Des Moines speech that Lindbergh made in 1941, and by today's standards of antisemitism, it seems so benign reading any anti-Israel piece about the war in Gaza has so much overt antisemitism usually in its attacks that the Lindbergh's comments seemed almost pedestrian in comparison.
H. W. Brands:
Yeah, he is saying basically there is a Jewish lobby in America.
Larry Bernstein:
You ended your opening remarks by applying America First isolationist policies to Donald Trump. Since December 7th, 1941, there has been a bipartisan interventionist view of America's role in the world, not only being the policemen, but being the guarantor of NATO.
And when the people who have opposed that it has been narrow. We do not have to be America's policemen in Vietnam or in Nicaragua. Tell us about the history of anti-interventionism as it relates to Trump.
H. W. Brands:
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, It was unthinkable that the United States would revert to the position it had had in the mid-1930s where it would recede entirely, bring everybody home and leave Europe to its own affairs if only because so many American lives had been invested this second time around.
Franklin Roosevelt made a point during the war to commit the United States to the successor to the United Nations After the demise of the Soviet Union, people started to think NATO did what it's supposed to do. Let's declare victory and go home.
The complaints that the United States was paying too much that the Europeans were getting a free ride comparatively. Why was America still paying 5-6% for defense and Germany paying 1%?
And it was hard to make a case in 2010 that the United States needs to keep spending so much money. And so the question is, does this mark a change in American policy or is this just idiosyncratic to Trump? And this is what the world is waiting to see.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to this ongoing debate between the anti-interventionists and the interventionists?
H. W. Brands:
The United States is a big country with lots of institutions and interests. It is bigger than any single person, and the United States has shown a remarkable ability to stumble its way through from one crisis to another. Very often in American history, we have thought this is a terrible crisis. Things are worse now than they ever been. But we managed to get through the Civil War through the divisiveness of the Vietnam War. We will survive this one. I am optimistic that it will continue because I think it is bigger than any individual.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Bill for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast the topic was The Spectacular Growth of Private Credit Markets. Our speaker was Jim Zelter who is the co-President of Apollo. Jim discussed the growing dominance of Private Credit lending and the disintermediation of the banks. Current corporate capital expenditures require enormous sums of long-term capital to build computer chip factories, data centers, and energy projects. Jim argues that these long duration assets should be funded by insurance companies with annuities instead of by short-term bank depositors.
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