America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

A cunning “globalist vision” squares off against wrongheaded but earnest isolationism in this head-scratcher from historian Brands (American Colossus). Recapping how President Franklin Roosevelt, in order to support Britain against Nazi Germany in the 1930s, had to outmaneuver isolationist sentiment at home, Brands paints Roosevelt’s initiatives, which included calling for peace while playing up German plans for world domination, as patiently devious. Brands contrasts Roosevelt with Charles Lindbergh, the celebrated aviator, whose anti-war activism Brands depicts as principled if misguided; he even casts a speech Lindbergh gave that blamed Jews for warmongering as a matter of “willful political innocen[ce]” and not a sign of pro-Nazi sentiment. It was Roosevelt, Brands argues, who, in order to discredit isolationism, caricatured Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer. While Brands covers how Nazi cash clandestinely funded America’s isolationist politics, he downplays its significance—“The criminality involved was minor,” he pointlessly assures, when the money crime is clearly less at issue than the political influence. Similarly off-kilter and opaque assurances appear throughout (“One didn’t have to conjure conspiracy—though some people did—or assume political favoritism on the part of the network—though owners certainly had political opinions—to realize that certain views would be favored over others,” he writes, clearing up the matter of a radio network’s political leanings with such non-specificity that it arouses suspicion). Readers will come away with more questions than answers. (Sept.)