The America First Committee, or AFC, sought to keep the United States out of World War II, on the basis that the fight against fascism was not America's fight.
The same tropes that Hitler and Goebbels used in their own anti-Semitic propaganda. When Trump resurrected “America First” worried observers pointed to the most notorious iteration of the phrase – the America First Committee of 1942/1941, eventually led by Charles Lindbergh, whose anti-Semitic prejudices were well known at the time, and clearly demonstrated historically in the publication of his diaries and correspondence, where he privately mused about the so-called “Jewish problem” and the “Jewish question”, but also in public speeches he made, drawing on anti-Semitic tropes from the notorious forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which claimed that a Jewish conspiracy of bankers and media moguls was controlling the world. What may seem at first glance merely a patriotic or nationalistic slogan – one that implies economic protectionism – in fact has a much longer and darker history in American political discourse than many people realise. When Donald Trump chose “America First” as one of his favourite political slogans – a phrase he went on to emphasise not only on the campaign trail but in his inaugural address and countless times during his presidency, many observers pointed to the troubling history behind the slogan. For this special Summer Showcase 10-Minute Talk, I'm going to give a brief history of the slogan “America First” and its relation to lesser-known histories of American fascism.
I'm the Director of the Being Human Festival, the UK's national festival of the humanities, and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where I research and write about American cultural history. Professor Sarah Churchwell offers a brief history of “America First” and answers the perennial question of American fascism: can it happen here? Transcript
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