The events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath continue to haunt the United States. [1] The four coordinated attacks by 19 al-Qaeda-linked terrorists resulted in the immediate deaths of nearly 3000 people at the World Trade Center and two misguided "global wars on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of over 7000 American military personnel.. [2]

Sixty years prior, on the same day in 1941, a speech entitled “Who are the War Agitators?” was delivered in Des Moines, Iowa, by American aviator and national hero Col. Charles A. Lindbergh on behalf of the America First Committee, the leading American “isolationist pressure group against American entry into World War II.” [3]

The America First Committee should not be confused with the America First movement, a female-dominated network of reactionary mothers groups opposed to American involvement in World War II formed a year earlier in 1939. [4] Described by Whittier College Professor Laura McEnaney as a “right wing version of a peace movement,” the America First movement “defined patriotic duty not as involvement in a foreign war to ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ but isolationism in the service of preserving home, family and “good old-fashioned Americanism.” “America First, therefore, infused the political and diplomatic meanings of isolationism with a social meaning.”

As McEnaney astutely explained, 

“America First’s perception that war fundamentally disrupted the home front was accurate. Absentee fathers, husbands, and sons, unprecedented numbers of married women with children in the wage labor force, a perceived increase in juvenile delinquency, housing shortages, and rationing all signaled that the war had — at least temporarily — reordered gender and family relations.” 

Lindbergh's September 11 speech in Des Moines was similar to the one he gave throughout 1941, with one crucial difference. Previously, Lindbergh had spoken about unnamed "powerful elements" seeking to drag America into another European war. However, as the horrors of Nazi atrocities against Europe's Jews became known and as it became clear that a Nazi victory over Britain would have disastrous geopolitical implications for America, the America First Committee came under increasing scrutiny. President Franklin Roosevelt began calling members of the America First Committee “Copperheads,” a derogatory reference to the “Peace Democrats” of the 1860s who opposed Lincoln’s Civil War policy and sought “restoration of the Union through a negotiated settlement with the South.”

“The word Copperhead was first so used by the New York Tribune on July 20, 1861, in reference to the snake that sneaks and strikes without warning.” [5] Interestingly, a quarter century earlier, Theodore Roosevelt accused President Woodrow Wilson, who opposed universal military service, which Roosevelt believed was essential to American military preparedness, by equating Wilson to both the Tories of 1776 (who supported the King of England) and the Copperheads: [6]

The following two articles from the April 26, 1941, New York Times give an example of the escalating conflict between the Roosevelt and Lindbergh camps regarding American involvement in the war in Europe. In January 1941, in an appearance before the U.S. Congress, Lindbergh urged opposition to the Lend-Lease Act, which provided military and other aid to the United Kingdom and American allies deemed vital to the United States' defense.

Westchester County members of the Committee embraced Roosevelt's taunts, as seen in the photo below from the May 27, 1941, Daily Argus. This Mount Vernon-based newspaper merged with other local lower Westchester newspapers such as the Herald Statesman (Yonkers), The Standard Star (New Rochelle), and the Reporter Dispatch (White Plains) to form the current Journal News.

The fall of France, the Committee’s unyielding opposition to aiding America's allies, America’s growing knowledge of the brutal Nazi assault on Europe's Jews (found in newsreels and newspaper headlines detailing the punitive laws that targeted Jewish-owned businesses and denied Jewish citizens access to parks and theaters), pro-British propaganda, and political cartoons like the one below by Theodore Seuss Geisel (better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss), which ridiculed Lindbergh, all contributed to a decline in support for the America First Committee.

Consequently, Lindbergh became increasingly cosseted among what was viewed as a group of Nazi apologists and appeasers. [7] As Lindbergh’s biographer A. Scott Berg noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lindbergh’s refusal to condemn the moral depravity of the Nazis polarized audiences. By rubbing shoulders with fascist sympathizers and anti-Semites, he “became the symbol of an unfeeling and sinister isolationism.” [8]

Ironically, some of the chief opponents of the America First Committee belonged to the family of Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, “whose mother was an outspoken advocate for American involvement in the war and whose brother-in-law, a Welshman named Aubrey Morgan, happened to be one of the British government's top propagandists in the United States. While Anne Morrow Lindbergh supported her husband in his isolationism, her sister, Constance Morrow Morgan, worked with her husband in New York attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of Winston Churchill and the British.”

Whether America should enter the war in Europe was bitterly contested. The current universal consensus that the "Greatest Generation" willingly fought World War II ignores the pre-war period that author Lynne Olson refers to as "those angry days." As stated in the Introduction to Olson's book "Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941," [9] about the little-known but contentious era when American neutrality was hotly debated: 

“The passions engendered by the debate were as high as its stakes. The CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid remembered the period as ”bitter” and "heart-burning." Arthur Schlesinger said the dispute was ”the most savage political debate in my lifetime." He added: "There have been a number of fierce national quarrels — over communism in the later Forties, over McCarthyism in the Fifties, over Vietnam in the Sixties - but none so tore apart families and friendships as this fight.”

The principles of the America First Committee varied slightly over its roughly fifteen-month existence from its founding in September 1940 at Yale University. However, the below membership application roughly corresponds to what the Committee stood for:

Initially, the Committee barred pacifists from joining but later reversed this position and “not only accepted pacifists as members but also co-operated informally with leading pacifist organizations.” [10] “Its early supporters included novelists and poets like Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and E.E. Cummings. There was the First World War air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, actress Lilian Gish, architect Frank Lloyd Wright {and flying ace Charles Lindbergh, possibly the most celebrated living American}.  Among its student partisans were two future presidents, Gerald R. Ford and John F. Kennedy (who donated a hundred dollars to the cause), and future novelist Gore Vidal.”

Faced with the growing possibility that America's isolationist stance would soon come to an end, Lindbergh took a fatal leap, perhaps influenced by the dwindling coterie of extremists around him as well as his stubbornness and political naiveté, and answered the title of the speech by naming the alleged "war agitators."

According to Lindbergh, the war agitators were the Roosevelt Administration, the British, and American Jews. [11] Lindbergh did “soften” his remarks about the Jews by observing:

“It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”

Lindbergh then argued that leaders of both races (i.e., the British and the Jewish) … for reasons… which are not American, wish to involve us in the war but that: 

“We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

“Jews,” according to Lindbergh, “pose a particular danger to this country because of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” 

Of course, Lindbergh’s charges about Jewish control of the press were nonsense and further evidence he was now firmly under the spell of the anti-Semitic wing of the America First Committee. As Olson wrote in “Those Angry Days":

“Lindbergh’s claim that Jews dominated the media also turned out to be erroneous. Fewer than 3 percent of U.S. newspaper publishers were Jewish, and those who were tended to be extremely cautious in their handling of the question of U.S. involvement in the war. A case in point was Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, who, while inclined toward interventionism, was far less outspoken than the publishers of the Herald Tribune, PM, the Post, and other New York newspapers. In September 1941, Sulzberger told Valentine Williams, a British propaganda official working for William Stephenson, that “for the first time in his life he regretted being a Jew because, with the tide of anti-Semitism rising, he was unable to champion the anti-Hitler policy of the administration as vigorously and as universally as he would like.” The Times publisher added that “his sponsorship would be attributed to Jewish influence by isolationists and thus lose something of its force.”

“As it happened, Lindbergh was undoubtedly correct in believing that most American Jews championed Britain’s cause and that many wanted the United States to get into the war. But he was woefully mistaken in alleging that Jewish organizations and individuals were key “war agitators” among the American people. While prominent Jews did indeed belong to such interventionist organizations as the Century Group and Fight for Freedom, they comprised only a small minority of those groups’ members, most of whom were upper-class East Coast Protestants. In July 1941, the German chargé d'affaires, Hans Thomsen, noted to his country’s foreign ministry that because of fears of scapegoating, “far-sighted Jewish circles are avoiding taking an active part in warmongering and leave this to radical warmongers in the Roosevelt cabinet and to English propaganda.” [12]

“Press reaction was immediate, and explosive.  The Des Moines Register observed that “it may have been courageous for Colonel Lindbergh to say what was in his mind, but it was so lacking in appreciation of consequences - putting the best interpretation on it — that it disqualifies him for any pretensions of leadership of this republic in policy-making.”  The speech was “so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this crisis.”The Kansas City Journal was more succinct. “Lindbergh’s interest in Hitlerism is now thinly concealed.”  The isolationist Hearst newspapers were equally critical. 

The response of the Republican national leadership was as severe.  Wendell Willkie called it “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.” Thomas Dewey said it was “an inexcusable abuse of the right of freedom of speech.” Even conservative Republican Robert Taft was no gentler, styling Lindbergh’s reference to “the Jews, as if they were a foreign race, and not Americans at all, a grossly unjust attitude.” [13] His hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, removed Lindbergh’s name from their water tower.

According to Matthew Continetti, a journalist and intellectual historian, in his most recent book, "The Right: The Hundred Year War For American Conservatism," “By defining Jews as “not American,” Lindbergh effaced more than a century of American religious toleration.” [14] Continetti’s claim is debatable. Anti-Semitism had found a welcome home in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper which, beginning in 1920, published the fictitious hoax, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” containing minutes of a fictional meeting where Jews planned world domination and in the anti-Semitic radio broadcasts of extreme isolationist Father Charles Coughlin (known derisively as the “Depression Demagogue”) in the 1930s. Coughlin, who reached a mass audience of millions, repeatedly attacked “international bankers,” who anyone with a pulse understood to mean Jews. Given the anti-Semitic views held by most Americans at the time of Lindbergh’s September 11, 1941, speech, it is perhaps difficult to comprehend the widespread outrage it caused.

An explanation may be found in the September 17, 1941, resignation letter of Edward L. Ryerson, Chairman of the Board of the Inland Steel Company, sent to the America First Committee, in which he wrote that the country faced an emergency “that may mean active participation in the war at any time” and national unity was demanded in this situation, “whether at peace or war.” “We can never develop a united nation in peace or war by accusations that develop hatred and bitterness among the groups or races that have united together to make this nation a great democracy.” The adults (i.e., members of the "Power Elite," as defined by sociologist C. Wright Mills in his book of the same name as those in command of modern society's major hierarchies and organizations, who rule the big corporations and run the state's machinery and claim its prerogatives), were finally entering the room.

Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had counseled her husband about singling out the Jews in his Des Moines speech, as she explained in an interview for an American Experience television program on Lindbergh:

Q: How did you feel about the Des Moines speech?

AML: Well, I was very distressed about it because he mentioned the Jews and said he felt the Jews were responsible for getting us into the war. Which I guess they were, which one can certainly understand. But I didn't want him to mention the Jews, because I felt he would be called anti-Semitic, which he was. I was very upset by his mentioning the Jews. And he never got over that label. And he didn't feel that way at all, he wasn't anti-Semitic and in fact his best friend was Harry Guggenheim. I mean, he just wasn't, but anything was used to tear him down. I was against his making that speech. And he said, "But why? It's perfectly true, isn't it?" I said, "Yes, but it's like lighting a match next to a heap of excelsior {excelsior, also known as wood wool and consists of wood shavings used in packaging}. That's what you're doing." And which it turned out to be.

Whether or not Charles Lindbergh was an anti-Semite has long been a source of contention. Following the publication of his diaries in 1977, it was discovered that sections relating to his anti-Jewish attitudes had been omitted.

There is a parallel between Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's wife, who begged her husband to do more to help Jewish refugees. Instead, Roosevelt concentrated on defeating the Axis, which historians believe harmed his reputation. Ken Burns' upcoming documentary (the "U.S. and the Holocaust") on America's response to the Holocaust will air over three nights beginning September 18, 2022. A recent New York Times review of the series states that:

“It highlights the racism and antisemitism . . . laced through the nation’s purportedly democratic institutions and led to their inaction in response to Germany’s persecution of Jews.”

But the majority of Americans, encouraged by antisemitic voices like those of the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, the automobile magnate Henry Ford and the lionized aviator Charles Lindbergh, scarcely altered their views, even after Kristallnacht — the brutal “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938 — during which 1,400 synagogues were torched, hundreds of Jewish businesses ransacked and at least 91 were killed.”

In an interview about the film with Burns in the Boston Globe, he was asked:

Q. In your film the United States before World War II is full of antisemitism, racism, eugenics, the Chinese Exclusion Act, forced deportation of Mexicans who had become American citizens, attempts to restrict immigration to Nordic races. This is so different from the history I learned in high school. Should this be part of the curriculum?

Burns replied:

A. Nell Irvin Painter [historian quoted in the film] is smart about this: We are an exceptional country, but sometimes we’re not. If you say, as Lincoln put it, you are the last best hope of Earth, you’ve got to be tougher on yourself than anybody else.

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The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in the near immediate dissolution of the America First Committee and Lindbergh’s anti-war position. [15] As Professor Thomas A. Bailey accurately asserted: "The torpedoes that sank the American battleships in Pearl Harbor also sank American Firstism.” [16]

Lindbergh, who never denounced the Nazis’ atrocities against the Jews, died from cancer in Hawaii at 72 on August 26, 1974, while Gerald Ford, an early supporter of America First, was President. An August 28, 1974, New York Times editorial entitled “Passing of a Hero” opined:

“In the years leading up to World War II, Lindbergh unfortunately proved once more how wrong it is to expect oracular wisdom from popular heroes. Out of a genuine antipathy toward war he allowed himself to claim the invincibility of the Luftwaffe and some harmfully exaggerative notions of Jewish influence in American affairs. In this less admirable phase of his life, he was as much the victim of his own fame as he was in the awful loss of his first child to kidnap and murder.”

One other impact of the demise of the America First Committee was that membership was consistently left out of obituaries, curricula vitae, and accounts of regional religious and peace organizations, as can be seen in the 1957 obituary of Allan Campbell, Chairman of the Bronxville Chapter of the America First Committee.

As related in The Right, former President Herbert Hoover, a member of the America First Committee, defended Lindbergh publicly but admonished him in private. “Lindbergh wrote in his journals, “I told him [Hoover] I felt my statements have been moderate and true.  He replied that when you had been in politics long enough you learn not to say things just because they are true.” [17]

Hoover’s advice on political etiquette calls to mind the biting lyrics of Bob Dylan’s epic “Idiot Wind,” the fourth song on his glorious 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks”:

Now everything's a little upside down

As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped

What's good is bad, what's bad is good

You'll find out when you reach the top

You're on the bottom

On September 11, 2001, Dylan released his 31st studio album, Love and Theft, a coincidence that has drawn both scholarly attention [18] and yet another period of his career when some critics ascribed Dylan as having a prophetic quality:

“Interestingly, it does not need a great effort on the part of the reader to read “Love and Theft” in relation to the events of 9/11. War, disaster, violence, and doom are prominent themes throughout the album. For example, the song “Mississippi” starts with the lines, “Every step of the way, we walk the line / Your days are numbered, so are mine.” Throughout the album, we find Dylan painting a claustrophobic, dark, and fated world: in “Sugar Baby,” we are warned that “every minute of the day / the bubble could burst”; in another song, “Moonlight,” “the earth and sky melt with flesh and bone.” The universe of “Love and Theft” is a violent, even apocalyptic one, something also evidenced by the fact that the first-person narrator often finds himself in life-threatening situations. In “Mississippi,” he is shipwrecked: the sky is “full of fire, pain pourin’ down”; his ship is “split to splinters” and “sinking fast.” In “High Water (For Charley Patton),” he finds himself amidst a flood. Coffins are “droppin’ in the street / like balloons made out of lead,” and the narrator warns us: “it’s bad out there—high water everywhere.” [19]

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In the search for answers after 9/11 (the term 9/11 itself is an example of what French philosopher Jacques Derrida describes as an attempt to respond to the ungraspable events and unimaginable and unprecedented qualities of the day that we cannot otherwise express), many commentators turned to a 1951 book entitled The True Believer -Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer. 

As summarized in Wikipedia, “Hoffer argues that fanatical and extremist cultural movements, whether religious, social, or national, arise when large numbers of frustrated people, believing their own individual lives to be worthless or spoiled, join a movement demanding radical change. But the real attraction for this population is an escape from the self, not a realization of individual hopes.” Thus, a mass movement attracts followers “not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”

In our current era, as we look for answers as to the psychology behind the widespread belief in the conspiratorial myths that gave rise to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, we should pause on 9/11 to consider some of Hoffer’s penetrating insights on the human mind: 

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

Significantly, many of the participants in the January 6 siege of the Capitol were veterans, especially in the numerous right-wing militia groups present, such as The Oath Keepers and The Three Percenters. The extensive presence of recent veterans in these militias should not have been surprising, coming on the heels of two decades of war waged after 9/11. As Hoffer explains:

“A prolonged war by national armies is likely to be followed by social unrest for victors and vanquished alike. The reason is neither the unleashing of passions and the taste of violence during war time or the loss of faith in a social order that could not prevent so enormous and meaningless a waste of life and wealth. It is rather due to the prolonged break in the civilian routine of the millions enrolled in the national armies. The returning soldiers find it difficult to recapture the rhythm of their prewar lives. The readjustment to peace and home is slow and painful, and the country is flooded with temporary misfits.

Thus it seems that the passage from war to peace is more critical for an established order than the passage from peace to war.”

The so-called "QAnon Shaman" (Jacob Chansley) and Ashli Babbit, two of the most well-known insurrectionists at the January 6 siege, had both served in the military and, in line with Hoffer's analysis, had a difficult time adjusting to civilian life. More recently, “scholar of the present” Kathleen Belew, currently a professor at Northwestern University and an international authority on the white power movement, revealed n her book Bringing the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018) how the Vietnam War shaped the contemporary white power movement, whose members were prominently visible on January 6,

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Finally, on this solemn day, we should remember the words spoken by esteemed 20th-century jurist Learned Hand (1872–1961), who served as a federal district and appellate judge for more than fifty years, in a speech delivered in Central Park in New York City on May 21, 1944, while America was engaged in World War II on two fronts and just a few days before D-Day (the largest military invasion in human history), at an “I Am an American” ceremony granting American citizenship to 150,000 persons:

“What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow. 

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. [20]

Endnotes:

[1] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-9-11-changed-the-world/

[2] Brown University's "Costs of War" project estimates the global war on terror cost at 8 trillion dollars and 900,000 lost lives. https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee. Former President Trump employed the phrase “America First” to describe his foreign policy, which can be fairly described as “nationalist, isolationist, non-interventionist, and protectionist.” Trump questioned the need for NATO, withdrew the United States from Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal and imposed an immigration ban on certain Muslim countries, which the Supreme Court upheld.

[4] McEnaney, Laura. “He-Men and Christian Mothers: The America First Movement and the Gendered Meanings of Patriotism and Isolationism.” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 47–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24912600. University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee History Professor Glen Jeansonne’s “Women of the Far Right: The Mother’s Movement and World War II (University of Chicago Press 1996) tells the fascinating story of the right-wing women in the anti-war movement (such as Elizabeth Dilling and Lyrl Clark Van Hyning) who were “motivated by a complex, ironic mixture of maternal love and fanatical prejudice” to oppose American participation in the war.

[5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Copperhead-American-political-faction

[6] The New York Times (January 26, 1917), p.6. Roosevelt Renews Attack on Wilson Curiously, the America First Committee was unable to achieve the same success in the South as it had in the Midwest (especially around Chicago and cities like Boston and New York, where it garnered a national membership of roughly 800,000). As explained in Wayne S. Cole’s Cole’s “America First and the South, 1940-1941.” The Journal of Southern History 22, no. 1 (1956): 36–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/2955258, the South’s pro-British orientation, its military heritage, and other ethnic and religious factors made it somewhat immune to the non-interventionist message of the America First Committee. On the other hand, Westchester County had active America First Committee chapters or units in Bronxville, Yonkers, and Hartsdale-White Plains-Scarsdale. A similar organization against American involvement in another European war, the Committee to Defend America and its Allies (CDAAA), differed from the America First Committee’s complete neutrality position by seeking to persuade the American public that the United States should supply the Allies with as much material and financial aid as possible to keep the U.S. out of the war. Box 333 of the America First Committee’s records stored at the Hoover Institute Library & Archives at Stanford University indicates members in both Ardsley and Dobbs Ferry. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf9s20075g/entire_text/?query=ardsley

[7] The America First Committee tried to avoid the stigma of anti-Semitism. Lessing J. Rosenwald, a Jewish director of Sears Roebuck and Company, became an America First national committee member in September 1940. However, Henry Ford was made a member of the national committee at the same time. Ford had conducted an anti-Semitic campaign through his Dearborn Independent from 1920 to 1922 and from 1924-1925. This campaign included publishing the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ford publicly denied that he was anti-Semitic in 1927, but his name continued to be identified with anti-Semitism in the minds of many. His association with America First brought the charge of anti-Semitism upon the Committee and increased the difficulty of getting Jewish support for the organization. Ford's presence and the consequent pressure led Rosenwald to resign from the national committee early in December 1940. Incidentally, Lessing was the son of Julius Rosenwald, a visionary philanthropist who constructed in the South more than 5,000 schools and shops for African-American children, as well as homes for their teachers. https://rosenwaldfilm.org 

[8] A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh, Berkley Books, 1998, p. 418

[9] Random House Trade Paperbacks: New York (2014)

[10] Cole, Wayne S. “The America First Committee.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984) 44, no. 4 (1951): 305–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40189171.

[11] Coincidentally, on the day of Lindbergh’s controversial speech in Des Moines, President Roosevelt, In his September 11, 1941, fireside chat (which America First Committee leader North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye (1892-1971) derided as “fire-alarm” chats), advised the nation that in response to an incident which a German submarine had fired on an American destroyer (the U.S.S. Greer) near Iceland which Roosevelt stated was simply carrying mail Citing the incident as an act of aggression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued what became known as his "shoot-on-sight" order. Roosevelt publicly confirmed the "shoot on sight" order on September 11, 1941, effectively declaring naval war against Germany and Italy in the Battle of the Atlantic three months before America’s official entry into World War II.https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1941-fireside-chat-18-greer-incident. Historian and Professor Charles A. Beard, known for his controversial 1913 book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, written while teaching at Columbia, and a leading non-interventionist and opponent of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, believed Roosevelt was fishing for an excuse to trick America into war.  A few days after the revelations about the Greer incident, testimony presented by Admiral Harold A. Stark directly contradicted Roosevelt’s claim. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, reported that the Greer‘s “legitimate business” was that it had trailed the German sub for three hours, during which time the Greer had broadcast the sub’s position to a British plane. The plane had then dropped death bomb charges in the vicinity of the sub. Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York, Simon and Schuster 1975), p. 48-9.; Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 581-582. Beard and his wife Mary (1876-1958), an American historian, author, women’s rights activist, and collaborator with her husband, are buried in Ferncliff Cemetery, located on Secor Road in the Hartsdale section of the Ardsley School District.

[12] Lindbergh’s claims about Jewish control over Hollywood were also risible. While the heads of many studios were Jewish, the aftermath of the Depression resulted in actual ownership of the studios being in the hands of non-Jewish bankers. Lindbergh’s speeches weighing in against shadowy “powerful elements” favoring American intervention in World War II were broadcast over the same radio networks he absurdly claimed were controlled by Jews. 

[13] David Gordon. America First: the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War https://bobrowen.com/nymas/americafirst.html  

[14] New York, Basic Books 2022

[15] In “The Right,” Continetti sharply observed that “The non-interventionists were so busy trying to stop war in Europe that they gave little thought to events in the Pacific” p. 58 

[16] Thomas A.Bailey, A  Diplomatic History of the American People (Fourth ed.; New York, 1950), 798. Nevertheless, some isolationists persisted in opposing American involvement in the war, including Father Charles Coughlin, who commanded a vast radio audience for his often anti-Semitic and anti-Roosevelt views. “Coughlin was an isolationist from the beginning of his career. During World War II, he blamed Jews for inciting the strife in Europe. Even after the Japanese navy and air force attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Coughlin denounced the entry of the United States into World War II. He claimed that Jews had planned the war for their own benefit and had conspired to involve the United States.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/charles-e-coughlin. Tragically, the same conspiratorial ideology is promoted by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, who nonsensically blames Jews for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.  https://www.timesofisrael.com/farrakhan-lying-murderous-zionist-jews-behind-911/ and like Lindbergh, who falsely contended the Jews were the chief “war agitators,” Farrakhan reprehensibly publishes fake historical accounts that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. This defamation has repeatedly been debunked. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-and-the-african-slave-trade/ Farrakhan’s ostensibly unauthorized presence on a Town of Greenburgh sponsored mural project celebrating Black History on an underpass of the New York State managed Interstate 287 on Manhattan Avenue in the Fairview section of Greenburgh has ignited a firestorm of controversy and demands by Town officials for its removal. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/greenburgh-town-board-wants-portrait-of-louis-farrakhan-removed-from-taxpayer-funded-black-lives-matter-mural/ 

[17] Cited in The Right, p. 58 (quoting from Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, p 45, n. 10 (available on the internet archive) Justus Drew Doenecke, in his history of the Committee, titled In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-interventionist Movement of 1940-41 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee, concludes that though the committee or its factions may have been controversial politically, as a movement it represented core values of democracy, free speech, and the right to dissent. Doenecke posits that:

“Overall, the committee contributed to the nation's political vitality. By rallying dissenting opinion, it forced debate on major administration measures and did so amid attacks that were often as sweeping as they were unfair. The health of any democracy depends on the degree of tolerance it grants its dissenters.... If Americans had failed to speak out against what they saw as threats to the nation's security they would have been abdicating their responsibilities as citizens.” https://www.amazon.com/Danger-Undaunted-Anti-Interventionist-Committee-Documentaries/dp/0817988424. Perpetual “paleo-conservative “ presidential candidate and former Nixon staffer and conservative journalist Pat Buchanan ran on a campaign slogan of “America First, Second, and Third,” and praised the efforts of The America First Committee: “The achievements of that organization are monumental. By keeping America out of World War II until Hitler attacked Stalin in June of 1941, Soviet Russia, not America, bore the brunt of the fighting, bleeding and dying to defeat Nazi Germany. Thanks to America First, no nation suffered less in the world's worst war.” https://web.archive.org/web/20080203051758/ http://www.theamericancause.org/patamericafirst.htm Like Lindbergh, Buchanan has been branded as an anti-Semite.arising most significantly from his accusations that American Jews had pushed America into war with Iraq. http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,444259,00.html Buchanan’s view that echoed Coughlin and Lindbergh that Hitler was benign has been criticized by a former acolyte: https://providencemag.com/2017/07/pat-buchanan-blames-america-first/

[18] Doolaard, Jesper. “YOU CAN’T REPEAT THE PAST?: BOB DYLAN’S ‘LOVE AND THEFT’ AND THE EVENTS OF 9/11.” In Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century, edited by NINA GOSS and ERIC HOFFMAN, 73–84. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv5jxnpc.8.

[19] https://academic-oup-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/22495/chapter/182798597 Love and Theft won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk album at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards (2002) and generally received glowing critical reviews.

[20] https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/special-collections/the-spirit-of-liberty-speech-by-judge-learned-hand-1944/