It appears as though his first reference to the not-apparently-isolationist stance was to the New York Times in March 2016:
I'm not isolationist, but I am 'America First.' So I like the expression. I'm 'America First.'
Or in a tweet (there's always a tweet):
In his inaugural address, President Trump:In trade, military and EVERYTHING else, it will be AMERICA FIRST! This will quickly lead to our ultimate goal: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2016
We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first, America first.
By December 2017 "America First" became Trump's national security strategy, described by a "senior administration official" as having four main pillars:
a) Protecting the homeland and way of life
b) Promoting American prosperity
c) Demonstrating peace through strength (the subject of a future post on this here web site)
d) Advancing American influence in an ever-competitive world.
The official said the "principled realism takes a clear-eyed view of the threats we face," and that "the strategy promotes a world that is free, with sovereign nations and diverse cultures with their own aspirations, respecting the rights of those nations to do so but also finding ways to promote American values."
I'm not here to debate the validity of such a strategy or any underlying motives. I am here, however, to highlight the choice of the name of the strategy "America First."
You can look back to a congressional hearing in 1921, in which an "Imperial Proclamation" was submitted as evidence regarding the Ku Klux Klan:
[The Klan] stands for America first - first in thought, first in affections, and first in the galaxy of nations. The Stars and Stripes forever above all other and every kind of government in the whole world.
That said, Woodrow Wilson used the slogan as he was running for re-election in 1916, noting that by putting "America first" he had kept the United States out of World War I - a promise which would last less than a year.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II had a complicated early history, as the war erupted as the United States was still in the midst of the Great Depression. As Spain experienced a civil war starting in 1936, the United States pursued a policy of neutrality, even as fascism rose across Europe. Still, FDR and Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, but that included a concession to FDR that became known as Cash-and-Carry. Great Britain and France could buy war materials from the United States provided they (a) paid cash up front and (b) brought their own ships to transport them back to their respective countries. It was set to expire in 1939.
Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Still, unemployment in 1939 was 17%. The U.S.' GDP shrunk by 3.3% in 1938. It wasn't a great time, financially, to go to war. Especially a war that, at the time, didn't really impact the United States.
The America First Committee has its origins on September 4, 1940 - one year and three days after Hitler invaded Poland - founded at Yale University by R. Douglas Stuart. His grandfather was the founder of Quaker Oats. Stuart was a 1937 Princeton graduate (majoring in politics) and was enrolled at Yale Law School when he founded the committee, which was opposed to American intervention in World War II.
At its peak, membership in the America First Committee numbered 800,000. Prominent members included Gerald Ford, Sargeant Shriver (husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver - yeah, those Kennedys), future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, and Sears, Roebuck, & Co. chairman Robert E. Wood. Members of the right and the left joined. Counted in their numbers were also author Sinclair Lewis, poet e.e. cummings, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, socialist Norman Thomas, New York Daily News publisher Joseph Medill Patterson and his cousin, conservative Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
They asked aviation icon Charles Lindbergh, the first man to complete a trans-Atlantic solo flight, in 1927, to be their spokesman. Lindbergh was problematic. At a September 1941 rally, Lindbergh said:
No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany...the Jews are one of the principle forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war. The Jews' greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.
When people of course raised their eyebrows at the language Lindbergh utilized, he clarified:
I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.
Well. Lindbergh had spent 1937 in Germany evaluating German aircraft. In 1938 Lindbergh was presented with the Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by Herman Goring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and the creator of the Gestapo. Weeks after the dinner, in Germany, Kristallnacht happened. When Lindbergh was pressured to return the honor, he wrote:
It seems to me that the returning of decorations, which were given in times of peace and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins.
He wasn't giving that German medal back.
Lucky Lindy gave speeches, filled to capacity, in New York's Madison Square Garden and Chicago's Soldier Field. Hey look at this picture from Madison Square Garden in 1939 (to clarify, this isn't an America First rally. It's just a gathering of American Nazis in New York City):
To be fair, America First did kick out Henry Ford (you're up soon here, Ford) and Father Charles Coughlin (yep, you too) for anti-Semitism. Avery Brundage, who was the former U.S. Olympic Committee chairman and prevented two Jewish runners from competing in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, got booted, as well. But why even ask Lindbergh to be your spokesman?
The New York Herald-Tribune's Dorothy Thompson wrote of Lindbergh:
I am absolutely certain Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.
Cash-and-Carry was replaced by the Lend-Lease Act in October 1941, which allowed FDR to lend or, wait for it, lease war materials to Great Britain and France, rather than forcing them to pay cash up front. Lindbergh went before Congress to oppose it, and instead suggested negotiating a neutrality agreement with Germany, which led FDR to label Lindbergh as a "defeatist and appeaser" (New York Times, April 29, 1941). Lindbergh resigned his U.S. Army commission in response.
In "Aviation, Geography, and Race" Lindbergh wrote:
Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
The America First Committee voted to dissolve a few days after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, but the America First slogan continued to live on - particularly in 1992 when Pat Buchanan used the slogan in the first of his three presidential campaigns. Buchanan spoke of the America First Committee to NPR after President Trump was elected:
To me, it is an honorable group of American patriots who wanted to keep us out of the insane World War II where the British and German - all of them were killing one another - as we had mistakenly gotten into World War I and gotten all those Americans killed so that the European empires could expand.
My question, I guess, is, given the historical context of the term, why use "America First" at all?
