Texas Standard

UT-Austin historian H.W. Brands is known for taking a very personal approach to history. This is an extended interview about his latest book, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War.

The full transcript of this episode of Texas Standard is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.

Shelly Brisbin [00:00:00] I’m Shelly Brisbin, a producer reporter with the Texas Standard. UT Austin historian H.W Brands is known for taking a very personal approach to history. He’ll often use a leader like Andrew Jackson or Ronald Reagan to contextualize the era in which they lived. That’s certainly the case with his latest book, America First, Roosevelt versus Lindbergh in the Shadow of War. In it, he stages a debate between the president of the United States, an aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh, an interventionist versus an isolationist. As World War Two was looming and as the question of U.S. involvement was by no means settled. Host David Browne recently spoke to H.W. Brands about his book. But there was just so much to the conversation that we weren’t able to get on the air that we thought we’d bring you this special podcast, Extra. You’ll learn more about Roosevelt and Lindbergh and how they developed their foreign policy philosophies and why they differed the way they did. You’ll also hear about America First. Both the committee and the slogan, as it is, continued to be used through the years and how the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh parted ways after controversial remarks he made. So here is the full conversation between David Brown and H.W. Brands.

David Brown [00:01:19] It’s the Texas Standard. I’m David Brown. 80 years on, we remember World War Two as a fight on which most Americans could agree. Germany and its fascist allies must be stopped at all costs. Right? But in the years before the war began, and even as European countries fell to Hitler’s tanks, the American public was fiercely divided. President Franklin Roosevelt believed U.S. involvement in the war was inevitable and critical to our future place in the world. Though he was quite reluctant to get involved. And that’s because many Americans still smarting from the suffering brought on by the Great Depression and the loss of so many fathers and sons in the First World War had no interest in entering the latest European conflict. One of the most recognizable voices in the movement to stay out of Europe’s latest mess was also something of a folk hero at the time. Pilot Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927, across the Atlantic alone in a tiny airplane. But the fight over whether America should enter the war would prove no small matter, that’s for sure. And the outcome would reshape America’s place on the world stage right up to today. The struggle is the subject of the latest book by Pulitzer Prize finalist and UT Austin historian H.W. Brands. It’s called America First, Roosevelt versus Lindbergh. In the Shadow of War. Professor Brandes, welcome back to the Texas Standard.

H.W. Brands [00:02:38] Delighted to be here again.

David Brown [00:02:40] Paint a picture for us of America in the late 1930s. Just how did this country see itself in relation to the rest of the world?

H.W. Brands [00:02:47] America had traditionally considered itself a country, a continent apart from Europe, from the 18th century to the end of the 19th and to the early 20th century. Americans really were grateful for the fact that the Atlantic Ocean was wide and the troubles of Europe were far away, and they intended that distance to remain briefly during World War One. Americans were persuaded to go in and basically rescue Britain, France from the imperialist designs of Germany. But the war ended and the peace ended badly. But for pretty much everybody it looked as though another war in Europe was inevitable. This by the early 1930s, and Americans had come to the almost universal opinion that their enterprise into Europe the first time around was a mistake. They shouldn’t have done it. And they were determined not to repeat it. And so it was a broad consensus. It was written into law by Congress In 1935, 36 and 37, Congress passed a series of laws called the Neutrality Laws that said in the event of a war in Europe or other overseas region, the United States would remain neutral. It would not get involved. It did not leave this to the discretion of the president had this had been the case in the first go round. They put it online and they let the world know. Europe, you can go to war, Britain, France, you can get yourselves into trouble, but we’re not getting you out of trouble this time around. And it was a broadly held view. And it was the case right up to the beginning of the Second World War. In the first part of September 1939, at which point all these Americans said, boy, we were sure smart to pass these laws and determined to stay out of this war because the war we thought was coming has come and we don’t want any part of it.

David Brown [00:04:29] Well, having said that, Roosevelt was elected in 32. Took office in 33. Yeah. Where was he on that?

H.W. Brands [00:04:38] So Roosevelt had been in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, right. So Woodrow Wilson, when he ran in 1912 and won. He didn’t say much at all about foreign affairs. And when World War One broke out, he tried to keep America neutral. Right. But as that war progressed, Wilson became convinced that it was in American interests to get involved, to make sure that the British French side defeated the German Austrian side. And so in 1917, he went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war. Now, this was two and a half years after the beginning of time. Right. And so there was this long gestation period. American participation in the war lasted only 18 months. And Wilson thought that he could get a peace treaty that would remake Europe and make future wars impossible. Well, that didn’t happen. And Franklin Roosevelt was part of that cabinet. He shared the internationalist beliefs of Woodrow Wilson that America had this mission to the world. But he was a canny politician than Wilson was. And after Americans turned their backs against Europe in the 1920s, in the 1930s, Roosevelt remained an internationalist. But he kept his mouth shut because he realized this would not sell well with the American people. He had a plausible excuse to say little about foreign affairs, because what he could say is we’ve got domestic problems at home. The Great Depression. I’ll focus on the Depression. And during his first term, from 33 to 37, he said almost nothing about foreign affairs. And when he did say something about foreign affairs, he would say, we’re going to stay out of that. But once the war came, then he concluded that the United States is going to have to get in this one, too. He was a believer that. What happened in Europe would have effects on the United States. Beyond that, though, he was a believer in America’s destiny to become the leader of the world. And the United States had put his toe in the water in the 19 tens didn’t work. But Roosevelt concluded that this time around, the United States was going to go in and stay in. He didn’t say that in public, though, because he realized it was a tough sell. Yeah, and voters wouldn’t go for it.

David Brown [00:06:41] Yeah.

H.W. Brands [00:06:41] He decided he was going to run for a third term in 1940, and he certainly wasn’t going to say elect me. Breaking the George Washington to term limit rule. Yeah. And carrying the country to war. No, no, he said just the opposite.

David Brown [00:06:52] Yeah, of course. Washington said something else, too, about foreign intervention. Right. But. But let’s talk about the other character, the other player in your book, and that is Lindbergh. Lucky Lindy, as he was known, Charles Lindbergh was known as an aviation hero at the time. He was very much against the idea of the United States going to war and had visited Berlin. And I think some people attributed certain sympathies to the to the Nazi regime to to Lindbergh. Where was he in all of this? And, in fact, has that story about Lindbergh’s affinity for Hitler’s regime? Is that true?

H.W. Brands [00:07:39] So Lindbergh was this American celebrity. He became a hero to many Americans for conquering the Atlantic. Yeah. He became the subject of tremendous sympathy when his child was abducted and killed. He, meanwhile, became probably the world’s leading expert on aviation. He wasn’t simply a pilot. He was a designer of planes. He was an engineer of planes. Right. And because he was so well-known and because he was so knowledgeable, the Air Force, the air forces of the major countries of the world, they wanted him to come around, take a look at our planes, tell us what you think, how they how can they be improved? And during the 1930s, this was perfectly unobjectionable because the United States was at war with nobody and nobody was really war with anybody else. And Roosevelt also could bring back what he had learned about the German air force, the Russian Air force, the British Air Force, the French Air force, the Japanese air force bring it back to the United States. He was a reserve colonel in the U.S. Air Corps. And so he would tell American manufacturers, designers what the competition was doing. And so it was by virtue of this that he became this extremely, as I say, a knowledgeable person on aviation. Most people expected that aviation would be the the modern weaponry that would decide the next war. And it almost did during World War Two. And so he was he was an authority on the subject, but he was almost the least likely spokesman for any political position because he disliked publicity. In fact, he had a great aversion to publicity, in part because he was the the subject, the victim of sort of the first wave of paparazzi, of photographers, of newsreel people who would put the cameras in his face, follow them everywhere, harass his kids. In fact, things got so bad for his children that he up and moved the family to England. Right. To get out of the way of all of this stuff. And so Lindbergh, he only stepped forward to talk against intervention when he thought that Franklin Roosevelt, whom he had met at first hoped that he could work with, but discovered now Roosevelt simply wanted to use him to further Roosevelt’s agenda. Lindbergh decided somebody had to speak out against the direction that Roosevelt was taking the country, because Lindbergh inferred pretty early on that Roosevelt had this design of getting the United States into the war. Despite everything Roosevelt said about doing his best to keep America out of the war.

David Brown [00:10:04] Was Lindbergh. I mean, his diaries reveal that he was he had anti-Semitic feelings. He was he gave a speech in Des Moines that was particularly infamous. To what extent was his desire to keep America out of the war related to his own feelings about, well, anti-Semitism or his affinity for for the leadership in Berlin?

H.W. Brands [00:10:30] When Lindbergh is described as an anti-Semite, there are things that he said, you know, to the speech in Des Moines that is usually used as Exhibit A, But it’s striking in that that speech was really not anything that the average American would have said at the time. American policy at the time was. Well, one of the things that Lindbergh said, not for public consumption, but in his diary, he said, I hope we don’t get any more Jewish immigrants in America. Well, that exactly was the policy of the Roosevelt administration at a time when Jewish refugees were trying to get away from Hitler and get to America, American doors remain closed. What Lindbergh said in that speech was there is a Jewish lobby in America and that is trying to get American. Involved in the war. And he said, I understand their position, but I don’t think that should be the position of the United States. But the mere mention of Jews in a public speech at a time when this issue, this question of anti-Semitism, what should be done about the Jews, if anything, by America, it allowed Lindbergh’s enemies to tag him. You’re an anti-Semite, and that’s why you take the position that you take.

David Brown [00:11:40] What’s fascinating to me is that America first, as a kind of saying or as a kind of bumper sticker idea, means different things to different people. But here you’re really talking about this idea of interventionism or lack thereof. I mean, yeah, foreign policy, the right. The framing of well, the facts.

H.W. Brands [00:12:00] So the America First Committee. Right. They chose a label for themselves and it was.

David Brown [00:12:05] Already.

H.W. Brands [00:12:05] Apparent nicely. It’s a pretty good label. Right. Right. Because, you know, if you live in America, if you’re president America, you’ve got to think of America first.

David Brown [00:12:12] That’s, by the way, it’s pretty late in the game, too. We’re talking about September of 1940.

H.W. Brands [00:12:16] They’re right. Yeah.

David Brown [00:12:17] Yeah. And so people had already been using talking about America first. Do you get the sense that when Lindbergh joins the America First Committee, that they want him out? They’re not comfortable with him as the spokesperson?

H.W. Brands [00:12:33] They were happy to have him up until the Des Moines speech. And then they were getting so much flak from that speech because until that point. The charges of antisemitism, pro fascism. They were aimed at America first, were only vague, and the evidence was circumstantial. Once Lindbergh gives that speech, then everybody. Who is at all inclined to favor Roosevelt just kind of blows up over it. And their claims of anti-Semitism are exaggerated for political effect, just as claims today of anti-Semitism as they apply to pro-Palestinian protest today. You know, they’re slung around that way. In the case of Lindbergh, he was a stubbornly proud guy, and he would never apologize for anything or say that I might have misspoken. So he refused to retract anything in this speech. And if you read the speech carefully and I cover the speech in the book, I mean, I described it a bit ago, but basically what he said is that there is there are three groups that are trying to get the United States involved in the war. One is Britain. And they have their own obvious reasons or they want American help. A second is American Jews who they have quite understandable reasons for wanting America to get involved in the war. And then there’s the Roosevelt administration. And Lindbergh was most critical of the Roosevelt administration. But all of the commentary in the speech was about focusing on American Jews. So. And Lindbergh. Went to talk to Herbert Hoover, of course, who’d been president. And he said, Did I say anything? That’s not true. And Hoover said, no, he didn’t say anything. And that’s true. You said some things were really impolitic. Yeah. And he said, you know, you got to understand politics. But Lindbergh. Was proudly anti-political. And when he was writing the speech in his diary, he talks about the speech. He’s going to give you this. I know people are going to blow up over this. But he refused to tone it down. And and for that reason, you know, he he just sort of ignored all the comments about you’re a pro-Nazi, you’re anti-Semitic. And he just went about his business and said, you know, that’s exactly the kind of reaction that I that we were going to have. But at that point, the America First Committee says, yeah, you gotta go your own way because we’ve got to we got to try to carry on this campaign. But that was only a few months before Pearl Harbor. And as soon as Pearl Harbor happened, America First Committee just disbanded. And actually they all went and joined the Army, as Lindbergh tried to do. And one of the things that’s the striking about all this is and this is one of the things that Lindbergh complained about was he was being called a traitor. By the president of the United States and Roosevelt’s cabinet members. Yeah. Before the United States was at war. And you can’t be a traitor unless your country is at war. So he was simply articulating a political point of view different from Roosevelt’s, and he thought it would have been entirely in bounds for the president to say, I disagree with Colonel Lindbergh, and here’s why I disagree. But to cast him as a traitor, that seemed that seemed a little bit over the top to Lindbergh.

David Brown [00:15:57] Let me ask you one other question. This gets to the title of the book, An America First. America First means different things to different people. But it has largely been perceived, I think, in the popular press as meaning a kind of American retreat from the world and in a kind of a naive way, in a way that serious foreign policy thinkers wouldn’t dare to express.

H.W. Brands [00:16:25] There’s no question that the term America First and the related term isolationist, they are meant as pejorative. And anybody who holds those views really as is, as you said, naive. Those people just do not understand how power works, how the world works.

David Brown [00:16:42] Is that fair?

H.W. Brands [00:16:43] No, it’s not fair at all. Because what Lindbergh was saying is we should not fight Europe’s wars. We should fight America’s wars. But America’s wars don’t have to be fought in Europe. He said that the United States should build a much more robust, robust defense of the Western Hemisphere. We should wait for our enemies to come to us, and then we will defeat them near at home on our own terms.

David Brown [00:17:07] Okay. Now, what does that mean in a modern context? When people talk about America first, it’s often reduced to. Well, that’s a phrase that Nazi sympathizers would use.

H.W. Brands [00:17:17] Well, certainly it was a phrase that Nazi sympathizers would use, but it was also used by a lot of people who weren’t Nazi sympathizers at all. And it’s that conflation that Roosevelt supporters intended and purveyed. But what the Lindbergh side was saying is that we can defend America as we have defended America ever since the 1790s. We shall defend our shores. He said, for example, that these wild claims of the interventionists that German bombers will come across the Atlantic and bomb New York. Those are ludicrous. There’s no bomber that can make that flight. And any plane that can make that flight can’t carry enough weaponry, can’t carry enough payload to do any damage. Yes, there could be raids like the raid on Pearl Harbor, but the raid on Pearl Harbor, it it certainly damaged American ships, but it couldn’t it couldn’t lead to the invasion of Hawaii, for example. So Lindbergh said that airplanes make America more defensible within its own area rather than less defensible. And he had the evidence to make that argument compelling. But what he said was, is I mean, to put it in a current context. He said the idea that it is a vital interest of the United States to defend Ukraine against Russia in the middle of the old Soviet Union is ludicrous because if Russia is going to damage the United States, well, let them come try to damage the United States. He said. If we go into Europe a second time, we will never get out. And 80 years later, we’re still in.

David Brown [00:18:56] As someone who has studied this, how do you hear America First? Well, in the contemporary conversation.

H.W. Brands [00:19:05] In the contemporary conversation, it is almost never applied favorably. So the pro-Trump people who used as a slogan in 2016, they don’t use it as a slogan anymore. They’ve switched to MAGA. They dropped America first because they realize that it allows them to be associated with positions that don’t reflect well on Donald Trump or on his supporters. So when somebody uses America first, it’s usually used as a synonym for isolate. ISM, and that is meant to convey that these people are wrong headed. It’s I exaggerate a little bit when I say that the way it’s often used is the allegation is Charles Lindbergh was an anti-Semite. Therefore, the United States has to defend Taiwan against China. Now. It’s kind of a leap of imagination, but there’s as much emotionalism in this debate as there as anything else, because one could very easily debate the merits of an American defense of Taiwan or not. And one doesn’t have to overlay them with the emotional debates about who the isolationists of the 1930s were. That has nothing to do with it. But the way it’s often conveyed is this is the same kind of thinking that would have led to Hitler conquering Europe if the United States had an intervened them. Well, you know, 2024 is a different time than 1940. I would just add something and that is that, yeah, World War Two is remembered as this great triumph of the United States and democracy. Except that the United States allies were Britain, which was an imperialist power, and certainly did not extend democracy to India. And the other principal ally and the one that did most of the damage against Germany was the Soviet Union. And what World War Two did was, yes, release the Nazi yoke on Europe, but basically impose the Soviet yoke on Europe for nearly half a century. And. This is the sort of thing that Lindbergh was predicting. So its history is always more complicated than the people who debate about it for political purposes in the present. Allow it will will allow it to be.

David Brown [00:21:16] To what extent was the divide between the way Roosevelt saw America’s place in the world and the way Lindbergh saw it? To what extent was that known by the public? Was that part of the conversation?

H.W. Brands [00:21:27] So the book is largely arranged as a debate between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh. Now, they never debated each other on the stage. They only spoke to each other once or twice directly. But what would typically happen is Roosevelt would give a speech saying we need to weaken the neutrality laws. And Lindbergh would then go on the radio. He didn’t hold office, so he couldn’t command the airwaves by that means. But he was sufficiently well known that people would tune in and so the radio stations would give him airtime and he would say, we should not weaken new neutrality laws. And then Congress would do it was going to do, and then Roosevelt would propose something else, another step toward war. And Lindbergh would say, we shouldn’t take that, because each step that we take, that the president says is going to keep us out of the war by letting the British and the French do the fighting for us. No, no, that’s going to lead us closer to war, because when the aid that we give them doesn’t work. Well, if you said that the principle of America ought to be to defend Britain and France, if they can’t do with American weapons, then they’ll have to do it with American soldiers.

David Brown [00:22:30] Of course, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A lot of this was settled. But, you know, and in the aftermath, the discovery of death camps cemented this idea that America’s decision to enter the war was morally right. And in fact, in the years since, anti-interventionist have been characterized as not, as you write. Not just mistaken, but wicked. But here we are 80 years later. And it seems like a lot of what was decided with America’s intervention in World War Two had become a part of the way that we engage the world. Right. You look at, for instance, the fact that I believe after since World War Two, I don’t believe Congress ever voted for war without the president sort of bringing us there.

H.W. Brands [00:23:21] Well, formally, the U.S. Congress has not declared war since the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. So presidents have taken control of American foreign policy.

David Brown [00:23:29] And this was something that Lindbergh actually predicted.

H.W. Brands [00:23:31] Yes. Yes. He said, you know, if we let the president gain such authority as he has, then the president, any president will be the one who’s going to determine whether at war or not.

David Brown [00:23:41] This was part of what he feared.

H.W. Brands [00:23:43] Yeah. And it was part of all one of the reasons that the campaign of 1940 was such a big deal, because Roosevelt was running for a third term, an unprecedented third term, breaking the Washington rule against third terms. And Lindbergh said if Roosevelt is elected the third term, he’ll probably get elected for a fourth term. He’ll probably president for the rest of his life, which is exactly what are right. And furthermore, Congress, by allowing the president to get away with this, because much of the legislation that Congress passed, the Lend-Lease legislation, for example, let the president decide who was going to get that weaponry. Right. They didn’t have to come back to Congress. And so what Lindbergh was saying is that a president can put us in a position where by the time he goes to Congress, Congress has no choice but to endorse what the president has already done. And Lindbergh didn’t explicitly predict the war in Korea or the war in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf or the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. But those unfolded in the manner that he did predict.

David Brown [00:24:42] Of course. So Roosevelt’s vision of America’s role in the world becomes the dominant theme for the next 80 years. But here we are, concerns about America’s involvement in wars without end. For example, our role in Ukraine is something that we’re having a big conversation over in the Middle East as well, is the consensus that we’ve lived with since that time. Is that an unwinding a bit.

H.W. Brands [00:25:09] Now, I would say, is certainly on the line in this election. So from 1940 till 2024, we’ve never had a presidential election in which the two candidates took such very different views on this broad aspect of America’s position in the world. There have been differences on what does America’s leadership of the world mean. But we have two candidates. Kamala Harris hasn’t exactly said what her foreign policy platform is going to be, but one can assume that is going to be what she inherits from Joe Biden, which is it’s part of the Roosevelt in consensus. Donald Trump as president and Donald Trump as candidate now has taken a very different view. He threatened to pull out of Naito to hand Ukraine other American allies over to Russia to have their way with him. So what former President Trump has portrayed is a very different vision of the world in which the United States is not the leader of the world. The United States does not necessarily take the part of countries beleaguered by other countries. And it’s for the first time since 1940 up to American voters to make that decision. Now, people cast their votes this fall for reasons in addition to foreign policy, But never since 1940 has there been such a clear difference on foreign policy. So at the center of a presidential election.

David Brown [00:26:34] It’s interesting that it hasn’t become more of a conversation point, it seems to me.

H.W. Brands [00:26:39] But a lot of things have been sort of overwhelmed by Donald Trump’s personality.

David Brown [00:26:43] That’s true. Yeah. And, of course, the chaos in the summer with the Democratic Party as well. Lindbergh, though, you write, saw this path, saw where America was headed, and you. Right. Found it appalling. Americans trod the path and found it irresistible.

H.W. Brands [00:27:04] So this is actually the secret of Franklin Roosevelt’s success. He understood where Americans could be persuaded to go. He told Americans before it became a reality that America needs to be the leader of the world. And this will be a great thing. Before then, no president ever said that. And Americans would have said we don’t. We don’t think that’s our job. You know, we want to worry about things that are going on here at home. So Roosevelt made it appealing to America and he made it a reality. And once it became a reality, then Americans for three generations since have absorbed it. And so these days, most Americans tend to think just sort of reflexively, without even thinking about it, that, yeah, if something bad happens in the world, the United States ought to think about fixing it, that the United States ought to be involved in all of these big issues. And this is diametrically opposite of what it was as late as the mid 1930s. But then the decision was made in 1940 with Roosevelt getting elected in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. And Americans really haven’t revisited that since. And I think that no matter what your view on this is, whether you are in favor of continued American world leadership or you think it’s time to reconsider, we live in a democracy, and democracies ought to rethink these things every now and then and put them to voters to see what voters think. Otherwise, you make decisions by default, and that’s not a good thing.

David Brown [00:28:33] We’re going to have an extended version of this conversation over at Texas Standard. George H.W. Brands is Jackie’s Blanton senior chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin, an award winning author of many books on American history. And his latest is titled America First Roosevelt versus Lindbergh in the Shadow of War. Professor, thanks so much for joining us.

H.W. Brands [00:28:52] My pleasure.

This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.