Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell

Author:Sarah Churchwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

by a common recognition that America’s security and welfare are in certain vital respects related to the security and welfare of other nations. They are ‘internationalists’ because they all believe that in the world today there are problems which have to be dealt with by international action. This, I take it, is what Mr. Hearst would like to deny.29

Sadly for Hearst, Garner had betrayed the great man’s trust by committing himself to internationalist policies. ‘This horrible experience ought to be a lesson to Mr. Hearst,’ Lippmann concluded. ‘It ought to teach him that there must be something the matter with his theories if nobody can stand by them.’30

Lippmann was not the only one to treat ‘America first’ with contempt. A Nebraska editorial, widely reprinted, suggested reconsidering its use as a motto. ‘The full extent of the perfidy behind the slogan through which the Republican party regained control of national affairs in 1918 and 1919 gradually is dawning upon the American people,’ it began, calling ‘America first’ the result of a ‘subtle and sinister attack planned and executed by a group of Republicans under the leadership of the late United States Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts’, an attack that appealed directly to xenophobia.

According to the editorial, Lodge deliberately popularised ‘America First’ because ‘he wanted to destroy Wilson’, and decided to exploit the fact that ‘inbred in the average Yankee [was] a deep aversion to Europe and the rest of the world. Out of this recognition was born the phrase, “America First.”’ The isolationism it led to represented ‘the real problem before President-elect Roosevelt. In some sections the cry of “America First” is heard still.’

‘We might as well be honest,’ the editorial finished. ‘We started it. We have heaped fuel on the flames for 12 years, until virtually we have closed the doors of trade the world over.’ If the United States had only followed Wilson’s dreams of internationalism, it would have averted much. Instead, America had been swayed by Republicans’ appeals ‘to ancient prejudices, carefully nursing instinctive suspicion’. It would take ‘stupendous sacrifice and Herculean effort’ for Americans to emerge from the ‘death valley’ of protectionist isolationism it had entered.31

The New York Times agreed. ‘The easiest way to get cheers is to wave the flag and shout for “America first,”’ it wrote at the beginning of 1932. Clearly Americans ‘are sick and tired of the company of the world’, while ‘the inconveniences of internationalism enrage every nation’. But this attitude could not last: the US was going to have to confront the international situation sooner or later, a reluctant, tacit realisation that had left Congress mired in ‘gloom’, ‘a sign that Washington at last faces facts. Worthy of a headline is this hopeful event: the official recognition of reality.’32

If enthusiasm for ‘America first’ was beginning, in some quarters, to wane, it was by no means dead. The New York State chairman of the Republican National Committee gave a speech just before Roosevelt’s inauguration in which he ‘expressed the hope that President-elect Roosevelt would dedicate himself to a policy of “America first”’.

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