It's Donald Trump's – President Trump's – catch-phrase. A reminder of its history:
the center of his foreign policy vision, Donald Trump has put “America First,” a phrase with an anti-Semitic and isolationist history going back to the years before the U.S. entry into World War II.
Trump started using the slogan in the later months of his campaign, and despite requests from the Anti-Defamation League that he drop it, he stuck with it.
Friday, he embraced the words as a unifying theme for his inaugural address.
“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” Trump said on the Capitol steps. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First. America First.”
Those same words galvanized a mass populist movement against U.S. entry into the war in Europe, even as the German army rolled through France and Belgium in the spring of 1940.
A broad-based coalition of politicians and business leaders on the right and left came together as the America First Committee to oppose President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for France and Great Britain. The movement grew to more than 800,000 members.
While the America First Committee attracted a wide array of support, the movement was marred by anti-Semitic and pro-fascist rhetoric. Its highest profile spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, blamed American Jews for pushing the country into war.
"The British and the Jewish races," he said at a rally in September 1941, "for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war."
The “greatest danger” Jews posed to the U.S. “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” Lindbergh said.
It is unclear if Trump is bothered by the ugly history of the phrase….
“It is such a toxic phrase with such a putrid history,” said Susan Dunn, professor of humanities at Williams College and an expert in American political history, in an interview.
Lindbergh and other prominent members of the America First organization believed democracy was in decline and that fascism represented a new future, Dunn said.
Those words “carry an enormous weight,” said Lynne Olson, author of “Those Angry Days,” a book about the clash between Lindbergh and Roosevelt over entering the war.
“That time was strikingly familiar to now,” Olson said. “There was an enormous amount of economic and social turmoil in the country, anti-Semitism rose dramatically as well as general nativism and populism.”
Mick Hartley 
Leave a reply to Mick H Cancel reply