Was America First Racist?
Charles Lindbergh making an address to the American First Committee.
Although the term “America First” was resurrected in the 2016 presidential campaign, its historical origins have been buried under years of American politics and sketchy history. The America First movement has been described as isolationist, anti-interventionist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and a bunch of know-nothings. That narrative fails on several levels. Another example of woke history gone wrong.
Charles A. Lindbergh was the famed-aviator and the most recognizable spokesperson of the America First Committee. Lindbergh’s greatest fear right to the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was that a great war would destroy a world that needed to be preserved.
“We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession,” he wrote in Reader’s Digest in 1939, “our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.”
To an audience today, and to some of his contemporaries, Lindbergh sounds like a racist.
Indeed, American ears had heard this all before. There is an undeniable racist strain in extremist American political rhetoric. At the height of the Americans’ stillborn imperial project (the occupation of the Philippines) at the turn of the century, there was an active anti-Imperialist league. Not every strand tied together liberal sentiments. Objections to American adventures in places like the Philippines included shuddering at the thought of “dark-skinned Asian immigrants polluting American racial purity.” These voices were explicitly racist.
Lindbergh, however, was saying something different. He was no extremist. While the America First movement exalted its populist roots, the leaders of the campaign consciously sought to distance their cause from political extremists. For Lindbergh, the term race was just populist shorthand for political solidarity.
So what really is the relationship between the America First Committee, racism, African-Americans, and the war effort. Well, we went back and asked our experts. Turns out, its complicated.
Why do we get the first America First wrong? Context is important. Almost any discussion of the war was an excuse for inflamed controversy and Lindbergh was a convenient target. “One of the saddest products of these years on peace and war,” recalled Herbert Hoover, the former president who had remained active in national politics, “was the passions aroused among our people. There were sincere persons on both sides, but emotion everywhere cloud reason.” He lamented the debate was overwhelmed with “[s]mear and characterization,” including men like Lindbergh. Lindbergh’s critics were quick to label him a racist if it helped with the argument.
To be fair, even in Lindbergh’s day terms like the “British peoples” and “white race” sparked misgivings, controversy, and sometimes revulsion. Lindbergh and his movement, for example, had a complicated relationship with black Americans. Some public intellectuals and civil rights activists shared Lindbergh’s anti-interventionist position. J. Finley Wilson, a national figure in the black community who headed the Elks Fraternal Organization served on the leadership committee of America First. In contrast, other notable black anti-war leaders wanted nothing to do with Lindbergh, appalled by what they interpreted as the racist tone of the Reader’s Digest article and his speeches.
Roy Wilkins, who became a key figure in the National Association for the Advanced of Colored People (NAACP) reacted in Crisis, the official journal of the NAACP. He argued the “prize” for Lindbergh’s “white race” was “the right to control and exploit the lands and destiny of hundreds of millions of black, brown, and yellow people.” Lindbergh further alienated black anti-interventionists after his infamous September 1941 speech attacking Jews for pushing America into the war. The remark was interpreted as not just anti-sematic, but broadly racist. One of Lindbergh’s defender in the black community, J. Finley Wilson promptly resigned from America First in protest.
Did all the black community shun America First? Not really, for example, during the years of the great debate before Pearl Harbor, there was scant coverage of foreign policy or the course of this great war in the pages of Crisis, the official journal of the NAACP.
Some black leaders thought it was the war, and not Lindberg that was racist. George Padmore, an expatriate American and avowed Marxist, penned a few articles portraying the conflict as imperialist venture. In contrast, however, two other articles in the journal disputed Padmore. One lauded the participation of “colored people” in defense of the British Empire and another expounded on the virtues of the French colonial system.
There were also some pro-Japanese feelings in the African American community, interpreting Japanese anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric as championship of the “darker races.” The Pacific Movement of the Eastern World founded in 1932 at times advocated for “a Japanese military invasion of the U.S. with the aim of securing black equality home.” The Colored American National Organization founded in 1939 praised Tojo as “a coming savior of the Negro from the American white….” The handful pro-Japanese African American organizations, however, never gained a national following. They disbanded or the authorities suppressed most of them after the outbreak of the war.
What happened after Pearl Harbor? Most America First leaders, including Lindbergh supported the U.S. War effort (Lindbergh flew combat air missions in the Pacific even thought technically he wasn’t in the military). Further, (as with most of the anti-interventionist sentiment in America) complaints from the black press and radical groups cooled after Pearl Harbor. Still, bitterness towards British imperialism occasionally appeared. An article that equated Western colonialism to “Hitlerism without Hitler,” appeared in the December 1941 issue. In 1942, Padmore wrote another piece for Crisis asserting “the treatment meted out to these defenseless Africans shows that British imperialists can also behave like German Nazis when they lord it over a subject race.” Such articles, however, appeared less often as the war went on.
On the other hand, there was also some ambivalence. For insistence, Office of War Information poll of blacks in New York City taken in early 1942 reported eighteen percent of respondents that African-Americans would be better off after a Japanese invasion.
In addition, agitation for civil liberties did not vanish in the United States. “Every lynching, every coldblooded shooting of a Negro soldier,’ declared Walter White at the NAACP, “every filibuster against an anti-poll tax or anti-lynching bill, every snarling reference…builds up debit balance of hatred against America….Southern whites utilized hatred of the Negro precisely as Hitler used prejudice against Jews, Catholics and Christians.” America was far from hate free.
What happened during the war? Most American firsters and African-Americans went willingly to war. In practice, black Americans for most part rallied to cause of winning the war, despite the imposition of segregation in the military, Jim Crow practices, race riots and unrest over civil rights. Only 125 African Americans were arrested for resisting the draft or sedition during the war. Over 1.2 million blacks joined the armed forces.