Here's Where It Gets Interesting - America First with H.W. Brands

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

What role should the US play in international conflicts? Pulitzer prize finalist and historian H.W. Brands joins Sharon McMahon to discuss his latest book, “America First.” They dig into the America First movement inside the United States during the 1930s and early 40s. As World War II was raging, President Franklin Roosevelt was looking to gin up support for the US to help its allies fight the war. But celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee were standing in his way. Brands explains why Lindbergh’s anti-intervention message was so appealing to Americans at the time, and how that message compares to the America First movement that is playing out today. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With Uber Reserve, you can book your Uber ride in advance. 90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve, see Uber app for details. Hello friends, welcome. Delighted you can join me today. My guest is HW Brands. And he is a Pulitzer, finalist, welcome, delighted you can join me today. My guest is H.W. Brands,

and he is a Pulitzer, finalist, historian, and I have a really interesting discussion for you about Charles Lindbergh and FDR. His book is called America First, Roosevelt versus Lindbergh in the Shadow of War. And you can see so many of the arguments that people were having in the 1930s. We are still having them today.

History is alive. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon. And here's where it gets interesting. I am really excited to be chatting with HW Brands. Thank you for being here. My pleasure. You've written a number of books, sir. This is not your first rodeo.

I'm curious about how you arrived at the topic of America First. What about this was especially salient in your mind? What about this was like, this is a project I need to work on and I need to work on it now. I wrote a book about Franklin Roosevelt 15 years ago, and I was certainly aware of the debate that went on

in the United States over whether the United States should enter the war that broke out in Europe in 1939. And it was a debate that lasted two years and a few months until Pearl Harbor. For 150 years, the United States had steered clear of European affairs with the important exception of World War I, which by 1939, most Americans alive at the time deeply regretted.

They deeply regretted going into World War I, and they thought it was a mistake, and they were determined not to repeat that mistake. But then, two years later, they go back into Europe. But it took a lot of debating, it took a lot of politicking. And I wanted to examine that debate more closely. In particular, I wanted to do justice to the other side of the debate. Roosevelt was the arch-interventionist. He believed that the United States needed to get involved in the European war. This for the good of Europe, for the good of the United States,

for the future of world security. And in writing that book, of course, I had to nod in passing to the other side, but when you write a biography, you cannot help giving the impression that your subject is at the center of the universe. Your subject is on every page, and other people are cameos coming in from the outside. And I thought that wasn't fair to the other side

of the debate. The essence of the question in 1939 was what is America's role in the world? The narrow question was, should the United States join Britain in its fight against Germany? But the broader question was, should the United States be a leader, the leader of the world? The United States in 1940, 1941,

had the economic capacity to do that. The question was, did it had the economic capacity to do that. The question was, did it have the political will to do that? At the start of my story, where I focus, in 1939, the great majority of Americans said, no, we do not have the political will to do that. We do not have the political desire to do that. That would be a great mistake. At the end of my story, after Pearl Harbor,

the vast majority of Americans say, yes, we do. we must be a leader, the leader of the world. Now that was 1939 to 1941. When I was planning this book, this was a debate that had been reopened, not least by the fact that the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 had appropriated the label for the leading anti-interventionist voice from that earlier debate, America First, which became the title of my book.

And so it has historical reference. And in fact, in my book, it refers to the America First committee, of which Charles Lindbergh, who is one of my two protagonists, was a leading voice. But it also has contemporary resonance because President Donald Trump began to question America's commitment to its longstanding allies, began to question whether the United States needs to remain a leader of the world.

Now, in 1940, the question was, should America become the leader of the world? And Americans voted in essence, yes, we should. In 2024, the question was, should America remain the leader of the world? And Americans voted in essence, yes, we should. In 2024, the question was, should America remain the leader of the world? And in the earlier case, Americans voted for the candidate, most devoted to intervention. In 2024, the Americans voted for the candidate who said,

no, we need to reconfigure our approach to the world. Yeah. The subtitle of your book is about this head-to-head Roosevelt versus Lindbergh in the shadow of war. And you certainly laid out a really interesting case for how Americans voiced their approval or disapproval for certain viewpoint on the United States' place on the world stage. But for somebody who is new to this conversation, who doesn't know the historical context of America first,

maybe they've heard the name Charles Lindbergh. Give us a little bit more background about who we're talking about, why such a man would have such an incredible amount of influence on the president, on Americans in general. I would love to hear a little bit more context about who Charles Lindbergh was and what he did. So I wanted to retell the debate from 1939 to 1941. I wanted to the extent that I could to put it in the words of principles for the opposing positions. The interventionist position, it was fairly obvious

who the principal spokesman would be, that would be Franklin Roosevelt, the president of the United States. And nobody needs to have explained why the president of the United States would be a part of this debate. He was the president of the United States. Charles Lindbergh was an unlikely antagonist for Franklin Roosevelt.

He was not a politician. He knew of politics. His father had been a member of Congress, but Lindbergh himself avoided politics. He thought that politics was where people went to lie and to deceive people. He thought that politics was low and mean. And he studiously avoided identification as a politician.

He was known to the world public because he had flown across the Atlantic solo in 1927. In fact, Lindbergh was probably as famous in other countries as he was in the United States because this was like landing on the moon. So Charles Lindbergh was in the 1920s, what Neil Armstrong was to America in the 1960s, the first to do this great thing.

He came along at a moment when it was possible for somebody to become a celebrity in the modern sense. Movie studios were beginning to make short movies called newsreels that would be five or 10 minutes of the latest stuff that happened this week, which show at Saturdays in the movie theaters, and people could see these figures. Before this, they'd only been able to read

about the President of the United States or maybe see a still photograph, but now they could see moving pictures. And Lindbergh was perfect for this. He was a good-looking guy, he was young, he had sort of a Midwestern reserve, and he didn't wear his celebrity too obviously. Now, what really brought him the attention

of the Americans though was a tragedy that occurred to him and his wife when their infant son was kidnapped and murdered in what immediately became known as the crime of the century and giving rise to the trial of the century. And this was covered wall to wall by the newsreel cameras, by the newspapers. And Lindbergh became this tragic hero.

And so that it's anything that sort of endeared him even more to Americans. Meanwhile, he maintained his expertise in aeronautical science. He was an expert in how planes flew. And because he was a celebrity, he was invited to examine the air forces of all the major powers.

He liked to fly himself around, he liked to travel. And so he would go to France and the French would say, come look at our air force, tell us what we're doing right. Tell us how we can improve. He was invited to Germany, he was invited to Russia, he was invited to Japan and Britain, and of course the United States. And so he was this leading authority on aircraft,

which looked likely to be the new technology in the next war, should there be one. But between his celebrity and his expertise, when this debate began, when Europe goes to war and immediately Americans are saying, should we get involved in the war or should we not? And when president Franklin Roosevelt begins to say, well, at least we need to assist the countries

that are fighting against Nazi Germany. Lindbergh, partly channeling his father's experience during World War I, when he was badly used for criticizing American involvement, but also because he firmly believed that America was best served by maintaining its distance from the affairs of Europe. Most Americans thought of Europe as a continent

that was always beset by wars. And these were wars that did not involve the United States. And when Lindbergh heard Roosevelt saying what Lindbergh took as, we ought to take the first steps toward getting involved, Lindbergh was sufficiently famous that he could call up the major radio networks and say, I'd like to give a radio speech

in response to what the president has said. And I think a bit to his own surprise, he discovered that he was actually pretty good at writing and giving these speeches and people responded. Now, early in this debate in 1939, Americans were largely on his side. And so they would say, that's exactly right. We ought to stay out of this war.

The last time was a big mistake. We're not going to make the mistake again. And so he became drawn into this discussion of contemporary politics, although he still considered himself not a politician, an anti-politician. He was asked on a number of occasions whether he would be willing to accept a nomination for Senator. People even talked about him as a candidate for president. He said, no, I don't want to do that at all. The first chapter in your book is something that I think is something that weighs in the

minds of many Americans. The first chapter is called The Allure of Neutrality. As a historian, what is your assessment of Americans being enamored with the allure of neutrality? Has that ultimately led the United States to more peace and prosperity? Has it led away from that? Just given like this sort of bird's-eye view of the sweep of history. The first president of the United States, George Washington, was for the first time confronted with the question of what should the American attitude be when Europe goes to war.

So Britain and France and several other countries went to war as a result of the French Revolution. And so this is in the early 1790s. And George Washington believed that getting involved in that war on either side would be a mistake for the United States. And he did something that was not part of this constitutional authority, but he just decided to do on his own.

He proclaimed neutrality for the United States. He said the United States will be neutral. And the United States was neutral in that war. When George Washington left office, he delivered what has been called his farewell address. And his parting advice to Americans was, stay out of the troubles of Europe. And this became a touchstone for American foreign policy from the 1790s into the 1930s.

America did not get involved in Europe's wars, but for the one exception I mentioned earlier, World War I. And Americans looked on this 150 years of neutrality vis-a-vis the affairs of Europe as a great time for America. America grew from being a country with a population the size of modern Houston to a country with a hundred million people, to a country having the most powerful economy in the world and not having been involved in the wars of Europe, which to American eyes seemed endless. Most Americans could trace their ancestral roots to Europe and most Americans thanked their ancestors

for leaving that denited continent and coming to America. And George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, president after president said, maintain that Washington rule, maintain neutrality. The Atlantic Ocean is wide, keep it wide. The Pacific Ocean is wide, keep it wide. America is fortunate not having powerful neighbors that we have to worry about. If we go into Europe, it's because we choose to go, not because we have to go.

And most Americans in the late 1930s would have said that policy of neutrality has served the United States very well. Congress was so persuaded that starting in 1935, it passed a series of laws, the neutrality laws, that mandated neutrality, that made it nearly impossible for a president to lead the United States into a European war the way Woodrow Wilson had done the first time around.

So Congress took the position, okay, we were suckered the first time by being pulled into pull Britain's chestnuts out of the fire. We're not going to do it again. And moreover, we're not going to let a president move us closer and closer to war until war becomes inevitable. So if you had asked Americans in 1939, has neutrality served the United States well, overwhelmingly they would have said yes and don't mess with it. Hey friends, I'm excited to share a podcast with you that I think you're going to love. I recently joined Elise Lunen on her podcast Pulling the Thread to chat about historical

secrets and my approach to judging people from the past and my perspective on our current moment in time. I also tell a story that may convince you to work with instead of against your enemies. Each week, Elise sits down with today's leading thinkers, authors, experts, doctors, healers, scientists, to try to answer life's big questions. Why we do what we do, how we can know and love each other better,

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The Morning Meditation for Women podcast has short daily guided meditations that will help you start your day with intention and focus. It's the CBC app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's one of those situations that you have to think back to George Washington, how much of his proclamations about America should remain neutral was predicated on this idea of, listen, we don't have a standing army. We need both Britain and France to be trading partners. It would not behoove us to be like, we're only allied with one of these countries and screw the rest of y'all. How much of that was based on those ideas of like, we don't have, first of all, the means or desire to have a standing army to

fight these other countries anyway. Well, that was exactly it. Yeah. Yes, and so Americans looked at Europe and they said, they have to have standing armies because they're constantly going to war. We don't have to have a standing army and therefore we can use those resources

to develop our economy, to spread out the population, to build our cities, to build our industry. And if we mimic Europe by joining these wars, well, that's a cost that's gonna come out of American prosperity and of the American future. To what extent do you view Charles Lindbergh's motivations as a continuation of the motivations of George Washington? Charles Lindbergh has famously been associated with Nazis.

He's famously been associated with the anti-Semitic rhetoric. Do you think that his version of America First versus the George Washington version of America First was motivated by the same, hey, we can pour our own resources into our personal country's development as opposed to anti-Semitism or as opposed to anti-immigrant rhetoric. How do you assess the motivations of Lindbergh? The first thing I will say is that those people who called Lindbergh an anti-Semite, who called him a Nazi stooge, had political reasons for doing that because they wanted to discredit his argument. And they thought they could do so by discrediting the person who made the argument.

Lindbergh shared some of the stereotypes, some of the prejudices of his time. But the principal motivation for supporting the George Washington policy of neutrality, of maintaining a distance from the affairs of Europe was exactly that of Washington. This is not good for the United States. It might be good for American arms manufacturers. It might be good for a president who is eager to find an excuse for running for a third term previously forbidden. So there are interest groups in the United States who might want to promote

Warren and there are even honest citizens who might think it's a good idea. But Lindbergh said, I don't think it's a good idea and here's why I think it's not a good idea. Lindbergh had this very odd relationship with modernity. Of course, his celebrity came from the fact that he was at the cutting edge of modernity. He did this thing that had never been done before by means of modern technology. But he disliked cities. He didn't like technology. He didn't like crowds. He would have been much happier living a hundred years before the time he lived. He always used to talk about how America used to be unspoiled and life was slower and calmer, and he wasn't being chased around by his generation's version of the paparazzi.

So in certain respects, in certain important respects, the difference of opinion of whether the United States should become the leader of the world was, did you think that America's 19th century experience where the United States remained aloof, was that a good model? Did you like what that produced? And Lindbergh did.

And Lindbergh said, that's what got us to where we are today. But there were others who said the world has changed and the United States needs to join that change. The United States needs to move forward and expand its frontiers, expand its borders, expand its ambitions. Now that side won the argument,

not least because Japan did attack the United States at Pearl Harbor, but even absent that, Franklin Roosevelt had managed his policy of engaging the United States more and more in the affairs of Europe, particularly in support of Britain, until Americans were morally invested in Britain's survival and then Britain's defeat so that it would have been very difficult by the

summer of 1941 for Americans to say, we've done enough, we're not gonna go and we'll let Britain go down to defeat. So Roosevelt was exceedingly astute politically. He benched the rules of what most people would have called honesty and truth In terms of what he was doing, but he did bring Americans emotionally around to the idea that American interest required Engaging with Nazi Germany taking on Nazi Germany and defeating Nazi Germany. What about the very long-standing Germany, taking on Nazi Germany and defeating Nazi Germany. What about the very long-standing criticism on the part of historians? Even if one is

to accept the premise that there were people who benefited from painting Lindbergh as an anti-Semite because they had pro-war sensibilities, what about his actual anti-Semitic comments about how like, it's the Jews who are agitating us towards war and similar statements of that nature. The speech that Lindbergh gave that was widely cited as evidence of the anti-Semitism was delivered in Des Moines, Iowa in the autumn of 1941, in which he said, there are three groups primarily that are trying to get the United States involved in the war.

There is the British government, and the British government, said Lindbergh, understandably want the United States to get involved in the war. Of course. It will help Britain avoid defeat, and it's in their interests. The second group is American Jews. He said it's perfectly understandable that American Jews would want the United States to get involved in this war, considering what has happened to their loved ones, their relatives in Europe.

Perfectly understandable. The third group is the Roosevelt administration. The Roosevelt administration is the most powerful and the most insidious of these groups. And the Roosevelt administration wants the United States to get involved because Franklin Roosevelt wants to gain more power, and he wants to take the United States to get involved because Franklin Roosevelt wants to gain more power and he wants to take the United States to a place where the United States ought not to go. So this was the essence of the case that was made against Charles Lindbergh as an anti-Semite. He has identified that there is this influential Jewish lobby in the United States that would

like to see the United States go to war. He did make a point of saying that it's very understandable that they're taking this position. However, it's not a position that I think is in America's interest. And when Lindbergh was criticized by all sorts of people, not everybody, but all sorts of people for saying this, he was somewhat puzzled because he didn't say, I hate Jews or anything like that. He just said, they have an interest and I don't think it's the interest of the United States. And he went to Herbert Hoover, the former president,

and he said, what did I say that was wrong? And Hoover said, it's not that what you said was wrong, it's that you were wrong to say it because as soon as you mention a particular ethnic religious group, then you're going to be criticized as picking on that group, especially under the circumstances, picking on Jews. And so Lindberg became radioactive at that point.

And the America First Committee says, just stop giving speeches. You're really not doing the cause any good. And Lindberg remained sort of mystified by this. He said, I got nothing against the Jews, but basically I'm being silenced for saying that they want America to go to war. Did he have nothing against the Jews though? Because he's really good friends with Henry Ford. Henry Ford later reported that when Charles Lindbergh comes visit me, all we talk about is the Jews. That's all Henry Ford talked about, yeah.

Well, of course, Henry Ford openly anti-Semitic. But your assessment is that Charles Lindbergh was not anti-Semitic. Is that your contention? No, I'm not saying that. I am saying that in a world where there were, what shall I say, grossly violent anti-Semites, namely Nazi Germany, Lindbergh's anti-Semitism

was at the end of the spectrum of he said that Jews have a lot of influence in the media. Well, actually, I mean, that was true. They control most of the Hollywood studios at the time, which put out the newsreels. So he was prone to stereotyping, but it was a time when all sorts of people were doing this. Remember, this was a time when the United States legalized racial segregation. But furthermore, and sort of the larger point is that wasn't the motivation behind the position that he took. And there were plenty of people who took the same position

as Lindbergh did that no one accused of being anti-Semitic, except sort of in the same way that some people will contend that criticism of Israel's government today is by that fact anti-Semitic. So the term anti-Semitism has meant lots of things at various times, but it wasn't Lindbergh's motivation for the position that he took. How does one ascertain Charles Lindbergh's motivation?

How does a historian like you arrive at the conclusion that his motivation was X? Okay, this is a very good question. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know what motivates you. I don't know what motivates somebody else. Sometimes I don't know what motivates myself. So I have to go on the evidence. Okay? And I will say that the evidence is overwhelming that Lindbergh was motivated

by strategic concerns, by concerns that if the United States got involved in Europe, it would find itself up to its neck in commitments for the foreseeable future. For example, that if the United States went in Europe a second time, it would never get out again. And here we are 80 years after the end of World War II, and the United States has thousands of troops in Europe and the United States is in the thick of a war between Ukraine and Russia. And if you had put that possibility to people in 1938, the United States will have taken upon itself responsibility for Ukraine in a war against Russia. 99.9% of Americans would have said, you're out of your mind.

America has no business being involved in a war in the middle of Eurasia, thousands of miles from the United States and over nothing that has any effect on the United States. And Lindberg predicted this sort of thing. This is exactly what's going to happen once we start down that road. Once we say that American security depends on the state of strategic power in Europe, then once you go there, then we'll be forever getting out. How does this debate between Lindbergh and the representation of the America First movement, and the representation of the America First movement, how does that come to a head in the interventionist viewpoint of FDR?

What does that look like to the average American? If you can just describe, are they writing opposing op-eds in newspapers? Are they giving speeches being like, FDR is totally misguided? I hate that Charles Lindbergh, dude. Obviously, I'm not being historically accurate with any kind of language, but you take my

point. How does the average American experience this debate between these warring factions? They can hear Roosevelt give radio addresses. So some of them are broadcast when he's addressing Congress. They can read the transcripts in the newspaper so they can hear what the president says. Roosevelt gave fireside chats where he goes directly into people's houses via radio.

They could hear Lindbergh give his side of the story by radio. So this is the first time in the radio age when Americans can listen to the debate unfold in real time. In previous decades, they could follow along, but it would be the next day, the soonest, and they would read what the remarks of the president were, what the remarks of Lindbergh in this case were.

They could still do that if they weren't listening on the radio, but now they could listen to it on the radio. And most of them at the beginning of this debate thought that war in Europe was far away, and most of them hoped it would remain far away. You asked about Lindbergh's motivation. So the question of Roosevelt's motivation is in some ways even more opaque because I could read Lindbergh's diary. Lindbergh wrote a diary, copiously.

With Roosevelt, there's nothing comparable. Roosevelt didn't keep a diary that was anything like that. He intended to write his memoirs after he retired, but he died in office, so he never wrote his memoirs. Roosevelt had a habit of telling people that he was talking to what they wanted to hear. So somebody would come into his office, pitching this policy, and Roosevelt would nod,

and that person would leave thinking, the president agrees with me. The next visitor to the White House would be somebody pitching just the opposite, and Roosevelt would nod and that person would leave thinking the president agrees with me. The next visitor to the White House would be somebody pitching just the opposite and Roosevelt would nod and that person would leave saying, I think the president agrees with me. Roosevelt was a master at gauging his audience and figuring out how to use them.

A source that was very useful for me were Roosevelt's press conferences. Now press conferences in those days were not like press conferences today. They were not broadcast. They were press for the newspaper. And reporters sit there and they would scribble stuff down. The rules were that the reporters could quote

Roosevelt, the president, only when the president said, you can quote me on that. For the rest, it was on background. They couldn't even say it was a senior White House official, that he was just giving them information. A result of this was that Roosevelt, who held his press contrages twice a week for 12 years, made reporters essentially feel like co-conspirators, almost members of the administration, because they knew if they crossed him, if they broke the rules, if they said something they weren't supposed to say that he couldn't be quoted on, if they said

something that was too hostile toward him, they wouldn't get an invitation to come back. And of course then, as now, access to news sources is crucial for reporters. So Roosevelt would tell the reporters more than he would say in public. He would, for example, question Lindbergh's loyalty to the United States. Now it's one thing to question the loyalty of somebody when your country is at war, but this was before the United States. Now, it's one thing to question the loyalty of somebody when your country is at war, but this was before the United States went to war.

And when Lindbergh would say that intervention in the European war is a bad idea for the United States, and Roosevelt would criticize him as disloyal to the United States, and this would come out in the reporting of the newspapers or at the press conferences. And Lindbergh would hear about this. He would say, well, this is kind of unfair because how can I be disloyal?

I have a right to say what I want to say. Every American has these First Amendment rights. But Roosevelt gradually ramped up the criticism of Lindbergh. He turned the FBI loose on Lindbergh and encouraged members of his administration to call Lindbergh a traitor. Again, this before the United States as it were, when Lindbergh's just stating his point of view. It's pretty well known that it was the Pearl Harbor attack that really forced FDR to become

public with his more overt plans to become involved in the war. And of course, he had been preparing and planning and ramping up production and planting the seeds and all these things in advance of Pearl Harbor. But I would love for you to talk a little bit more about what is Charles Lindbergh's reaction after the Pearl Harbor attack and after a United States declaration of war when it's clear we've been attacked on our territory, we have to get involved. How does he react to that?

Lindbergh immediately volunteered for service in the Army Air Corps. He was an accomplished pilot, and he thought he could do a good job for the United States. His application was rejected by Roosevelt. The last thing Roosevelt wanted was for his principal critic on the war to become a military hero

So that just didn't look good even before Pearl Harbor Lindbergh began to say in his diary I wish this debate would come to an end It's really difficult to be arguing this position when it's pretty clear I've lost the public that we're going to war He said I would much rather be fighting this war even though though I disagree with the war, I'm a loyal American. If the war is gonna come, I wanna be there and fight. So he wasn't allowed to fight in the war. He wasn't officially allowed to fight.

However, when Roosevelt rejected his application to rejoin the Army Air Corps, he had been in it earlier, Lindbergh signed on with aircraft manufacturers to offer advice on how to improve their fighter planes and the bombers. And he went out to the Pacific to show pilots how to fly them and without the explicit approval of the War Department, he began to fly missions against the Japanese himself. So he did get into the war, but not official. You know, I don't want to give too much away. I want people to read the book. But what are the long-term effects of this debate between FDR and Charles Lindbergh? Of course, we have sort of a new America First movement that has become ascendant in the United States.

It's something that, you know, Americans decided for probably a variety of reasons when you're choosing a candidate, you take them as a package deal. And so perhaps even if people chose to vote for Trump because they feel that inflation is too high and that's negatively impacting their family or whatever their motivations are, part of that package deal is an adoption of this more America first orientation of a foreign policy view. What are the long-term effects of America first in the United States? And how is today's America first movement different or the same as it was in the 1930s, early 1940s?

Lindenberg's side lost the debate and they lost the debate in a way that made it nearly impossible for anybody to take up their side of the debate for 80 years. They lost the debate and in doing so, their chief spokesman Lindbergh was criticized and generally understood to be this Nazi stooge, this anti-Semite, this all around bad guy. And the anti-interventionist side was labeled isolationism and isolationism became a curse word in American politics. So for 80 years after the Briggs side loses this debate until really the 2010s,

that position was considered not simply misguided, but somehow evil. And if you could be labeled an isolationist and you were in that circle of people who debated these kinds of topics, then it was a career ending label. So Lindberg's side lost the debate and they lost it for the next 80 years, nearly.

Occasionally Americans would say, do we really need to do all that stuff? Do we really need to fight this war in Vietnam? And after the war in Vietnam ended in a deceit, then Americans said, well, I don't know, maybe we don't have to be the leader of that part of the world. And when the war in Iraq turned sour,

when the war in Afghanistan ended in deceit, then Americans were saying, well, if this is what leadership of the world entails, well, we ought to dial it back a little bit. So there's that aspect of it. And as your comics suggested, Lindbergh became the poster child for bad isolationism. Not only was it misguided, but he was a bad person.

And that was the understanding of Lindbergh. Now, we've never lost the importance of considering what America's role in the world ought to be. But Americans have reflexively taken that we are the leader of the world and that's in the world ought to be. But Americans have reflexively taken that we are the leader of the world and that's the way we ought to be. But the debate was raised again by Donald Trump in 2016 and during his presidency.

So he launched a tariff war. That was new, because part of the leader of the world approach was, well, we lead the world's economy by opening our economy to trade and building this, well, the term was globalization. And Americans began to sour on that by the end of the 1990s. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

Americans began to question whether the United States really needs to be fighting these wars in faraway places, wars that go on forever and cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and that contributed to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Now, somebody in the Trump campaign decided that they would adopt the America First label, so there was a real connection to that earlier time.

So we have had the debate in the election of 2024, and it looks like the United States is moving in that direction. How far it will go remains to be seen, but there's a big difference between the debates in the 1930s and debate today. The debate from 1939 to 1941 was whether the United States should become the leader of the world.

Today, the debate is whether the United States should remain the leader of the world. It's the same debate, but from different perspectives. And so in either case, the question that Americans should consider is, what does this entail? Does it mean that the United States is responsible for the welfare of Ukraine? Does it mean the United States is responsible for the welfare of Taiwan? And the answer to that could be yes. The answer could be no. But the value of looking at the debate the first time around is

to acknowledge that there is and could be a debate. So it doesn't do, at least it seems to me, it doesn't suffice to say that the United States needs to defend Taiwan in 2025, because the United States went to war against Germany in 1941. If the United States is going to go to war against China over Taiwan, it should be debated in those terms. It's essentially the same debate, but there's new evidence, and the new evidence has to support the arguments today. You can't simply rely on evidence that's 80 years old. What do you hope the reader who is reading America first, what do you hope they take away and tuck into their pocket after they close the last page? Something they share with their friend or they continue to ruminate on

or they adopt as a new way of looking at the world. What do you hope some of the takeaways are? We are fortunate enough to live in a democracy where ultimately the policy of the government of the United States reflects what a majority of Americans want. The United States went to war in 1941 in part because Japan attacked the United States

at Pearl Harbor, but primarily because Franklin Roosevelt had persuaded most Americans that an advanced view of American security was in America's interest. And so the same attitude ought to apply today, namely that voters need to think about this. We choose people in part because of their views on foreign policy, as you said, not exclusively for their views on foreign policy, but the officials that we elect, they are responsible to us. Indirectly, imperfectly, what they do in foreign policy is what voters want them to do in foreign policy. So the responsibility ultimately is on us. LESLIE KENDRICK Thank you so much for your time today. I always love learning new perspectives on a

time period that has been well documented. This is a time period around which thousands and thousands, like I want to say upwards of 9,000 books have been written about this time period in the United States. And it's always interesting. Of course, I haven't read all 9,000, but I've read a few. I've read a few hundred probably. It's always interesting to have a new and interesting set of viewpoints to consider when building out this big puzzle of how history might work together. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for being here. Delighted to join you. You can find America First wherever you buy your books. If you want to support a local bookshop you can go to

yours or you can head to bookshop.org. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show? That helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon.

Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.