Readers of my previous articles here will have noticed a heavy focus on history: historical periods as intriguing analogies to current events; distorted history as propaganda; history as warning; perhaps above all, the question of who gets to control our history.
Contrary to the common belief, Americans are not less historically conscious than Europeans; in fact, the reverse is true. The Franco-Prussian War or the Italian wars of unification were roughly contemporaneous with the American Civil War, yet the former events are largely relegated to academic works, whereas the latter continues to create an unending flood of popular overviews, biographies and unit histories — with Abraham Lincoln being the most written-about figure in American history.
For Western Europeans, at least (in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the past is all too present in contemporary life), the two world wars were so horrific that after 1945, a kind of willed forgetting created a caesura between those events and the everyday life of the present. (This is described in the late Tony Judt’s outstanding book, “Postwar.”) Contrast that with the Civil War, whose causes and symbols are still very much in the American consciousness. We're deeply aware of history, but the problem is that we often get it wrong because of deliberate political distortion.
JD Vance, the Republican aspirant to the second-highest office in the land, has even invoked the Civil War as a morality play in which Southern slaveholders were the good guys and the North consisted of woke socialists. Using the supposed lessons of history to prove some inane or horrifying right-wing talking point is also performed with other defining events: the founding of the country and the framing of the Constitution, the Great Depression and World War II, Vietnam and Watergate.
As I have described before, the right has for many years attempted to substitute its own politicized narratives for the nation’s pivotal events and render them into received historical wisdom. This phenomenon has now broken out of the pseudo-intellectual underworld of right-wing thinktanks and institutions like Hillsdale College to compete with established academic histories. In some Republican-run states like Florida, with its rewritten school curricula and book bans, right-wing historical counter-narratives are attaining the force of law, after the fashion of Hungary or Russia.
It’s been a bit unnerving to see how quickly this process has metastasized. In 2008, former Nixon and Reagan staffer Pat Buchanan wrote a book restating the argument of the 1940-41 America First movement that Adolf Hitler’s military aggression in Europe was none of America’s business (or of Britain’s, for that matter), and that the world would have been better off, and the U.S. more secure, had the German dictator not been forcefully opposed.
The book was panned by almost every reviewer this side of Stormfront; even the American Conservative, with which Buchanan was associated in those days, published a generally negative review.
That presents an unfortunate contrast to the present, when the Washington Post, the daily diary of the Beltway illuminati, has now published an opinion piece by a seemingly reputable historian vindicating by implication the America First argument with a lot of hypothetical what-ifs, and whitewashing the movement’s most prominent advocate, Charles Lindbergh.
A separate article in the Post promoting the op-ed headlines it this way: “The ‘America First’ debate is raging again.” What? Did someone at the Post suddenly discover this fact in 2024? “America First” has been a ubiquitous slogan of the Trump wing of the Republican Party (meaning, for all practical purposes, the entire party) since 2015.
Anyone who was remotely aware of Donald Trump’s threats when president to withdraw from NATO, or the Vladimir Putin-friendly statements of key Republicans (including Trump and Vance), would have to be willfully blind not to comprehend the obvious ideological connection between the current GOP and the America First movement of the opening stages of World War II.
The historian writing the op-ed, H.W. Brands, engages in a discreet laundering of Lindbergh’s views and expertise, such that a reader who is not conversant with historical details might be inclined to accept his version at face value. He leads off with this assessment of Lindbergh:
Lindbergh loathed politics, but he was the world’s foremost expert on air power, and he felt obliged to correct the common misperception that planes had rendered America suddenly vulnerable to foreign attack. If anything, he explained, intelligently deployed air power made America more secure. With data and logic, he mocked the idea that American defense might require sending troops to Europe. A perimeter defense on the western side of the Atlantic, he argued, would be surer and less likely to produce permanent American entanglement in European affairs.
Let’s unpack Brands’ statement. The notion that America was secured by two unbreachable moats, the Atlantic and the Pacific, was already about to be invalidated. In the period when Lindbergh made those statements, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and his staff were assiduously planning an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor.
And while the Third Reich had no serious ability to assault the United States by air in 1940-41, suppose Congress had rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease proposal (as Lindbergh advocated) and Britain had fallen; what might have happened? Nazi Germany would have had the time and resources, and an improved strategic position occupying the British Isles, to develop bombers with intercontinental range, as it still tried to do even when under enormous pressure from Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the closing phase of the war.
Whatever Lindbergh’s expertise regarding aircraft, he clearly did not grasp the role of seapower. Immediately after Hitler declared war on the United States (and not the other way around, as isolationists implied when seeking to condemn Roosevelt’s “warmongering”) U-boats began assembling off the shores of America.
From the Gulf of Maine to Galveston, beachgoers could watch oil tankers bursting into flames, sunk by German submarines. Gasoline rationing was instituted: There was no lack of product from the oil fields, it was simply being torpedoed by U-boats, causing severe shortages along the East Coast. The waters off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, a focal point for convoy navigation, was a graveyard for so many ships it became known as “torpedo junction.”
Operation Drumbeat (as the Germans called the U-boat campaign against the U.S. coastline) was a major event in World War II, and could have been a show-stopper had it severed the lifeline between America and Britain. By a hair’s breadth, it didn’t, although the Germans sank 455 ships in the operation.
Lindbergh’s whole notion of hemispheric defense was flawed. The Germans landed reconnaissance and weather forecasting units in Greenland as late as 1945 (weather forecasting was vital for operations on land, sea and air, and the prevailing westerlies gave the Allies a forecasting advantage — unless the Nazis could land teams in the Western Hemisphere). The Germans even set up a weather station in Canada. The idea that war could be kept out of this hemisphere was an illusion.
Lindbergh’s most historically significant statement about military strategy was his assertion, in 1938, that the German air force was vastly superior to any other. Brands may be correct that Lindbergh knew a lot about airplanes, but his assessment of German air power was faulty. Hitler ran a regime that engaged in elaborate charades to bamboozle sympathetic and influential foreigners about the nature of the Nazi state.
This theater was already on display in the 1936 Olympic games, when all the “Juden unerwüscht” signs disappeared, and Nazi bullyboys were on their best behavior. In fact, Lindbergh’s first visit to Germany was to attend the Olympics; as American foreign correspondent William L. Shirer wrote in his book “Berlin Diary”:
The Lindberghs are here, and the Nazis, led by [German Reichsmarschall Herrmann] Göring, are making a great play for them. . . . The talk is that the Lindberghs have been favorably impressed by what the Nazis have shown them. He has shown no enthusiasm for meeting the foreign correspondents, who have a perverse liking for enlightening visitors on the Third Reich, as they see it, and we have not pressed for an interview.”
On a later trip to Germany (when he was awarded a medal by Göring), Lindbergh was squired around on a tour of the German aviation industry. In September 1938, just as the Munich crisis was heating up, he told the French government that the Luftwaffe possessed 8,000 aircraft and could produce 1,500 per month. He had been duped by a Nazi sham.
This was seven times the actual number that the Nazis had, but Lindbergh’s statements helped convince both France and Britain that German airpower was invincible. Thus it was that during the crucial period when Hitler was mainly operating by diplomatic bluff and intimidation and did not — yet — possess the military force to fully back up his threats, Lindbergh’s pronouncements had the pernicious effect of leading the Western powers toward submitting to Hitler’s demands at a time when the cost of resistance would have been significantly less than in September 1939, after a year of feverish German rearmament.
All of this suggests that Brands knows little of the military-strategic background of the run-up to the war, or the conflict’s early phase, and instead simply accepts Lindbergh’s claims at face value.
What of Brands’ assertion that Lindbergh “loathed politics?” Lindbergh's father was a congressman whose isolationism and views about banking conspiracies (read: Jewish influence) the son eagerly adopted; during his father’s stint in Washington, Charles attended Sidwell Friends School, the nursery of offspring of the political elite. That hardly sounds like an apolitical Mr. Smith going to Washington.
Lindbergh may well have loathed politics as practiced in a democracy, but his public admiration for the Nazi regime clearly suggested a political orientation. Brands hand-waves this away by describing his politics as “a stubborn respect for German order and occasional trafficking in stereotypes.” In fact, Lindbergh was decorated by the Nazi regime and repeatedly expressed admiration for that regime.
As for “trafficking in stereotypes,” he was a strong and inveterate antisemite, a sentiment he repeatedly expressed in public, as in his notorious Des Moines speech of September 1941, when he blamed Jewish media control for wanting to bring America to war.
Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi views and antisemitism are almost certainly the most significant facts about his politics. This has been played down by his admirers as a kind of genteel, country-club antisemitism somehow distinguishable from the bad kind. His actual views have been described as somewhat less refined:
Lindbergh may or may not have been simply a genteel antisemite, but he certainly was appreciated by more virulent types. He enjoyed a long professional and personal relationship with Henry Ford — who, in July 1940, told Detroit’s former FBI bureau chief that “when Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews” — and Father Coughlin appropriated Lindbergh’s image for the cover of his inflammatory tabloid, Social Justice.
Authoritarian politics seem to have been a cottage industry for the Lindbergh clan. In 1940, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published a pamphlet entitled ”The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith,” which quickly became a best-seller with the America First crowd. In it, she argued for a U.S.-German nonaggression treaty similar to one Germany had concluded with the USSR (and which Hitler would soon violate with the most massive land attack in history). She also wrote that totalitarianism might have a few rough edges, but it was an inevitable wave of the future, to which Americans should submit.
Brands concludes by suggesting that post-World War II foreign-policy disasters ensued for the U.S. largely because of capricious acts by overmighty chief executives who presumably followed FDR’s example, and that foreign policy “stability” would result from “[r]eturning Congress to the center of the decision-making process.”
But at the most critical points — the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the blank check issued to the Bush administration after 9/11 and the authorization of the use of force before the invasion of Iraq — Congress gave the executive everything it asked for. The legislature voluntarily, nay, eagerly, abdicated its responsibility when it could have used skepticism and restraint.
Brands says that we need “a serious and searching” debate about foreign policy, just as we did in the early 1940s. That would be welcome, but how is that even conceivable? One of our two political parties has, during the last two decades, descended into such unseriousness and gross irresponsibility as to beggar belief.
Its members now talk about Jewish space lasers causing wildfires in California and Italian satellites changing vote totals in U.S. elections, and has engaged in so much demagoguery over COVID as a deliberate Chinese bio-warfare instrument that it obscured the very real threat of pandemic disease transmission from wild animals to humans. If Congress can't do its primary constitutional job of passing a budget, why should it be entrusted with running foreign policy?
Absent the American people suddenly waking up and refusing to elect dangerous crackpots to Congress, Brands’ pious wish for congressional reassertion of power is a non-starter. But far worse, particularly at a time of increased antisemitism, xenophobia and political violence, as well as a rising tide of admiration within the Republican Party for foreign dictators, his airbrushing of Charles Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi views in order to make a case for America First is historically unprofessional and morally unconscionable.
