AMERICA First Committee violent revolution by red-blooded Americans

AMERICA First Committee violent revolution by red-blooded Americans

Established in September 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was ostensibly an isolationist group opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II.

Although its membership included prominent Americans of every political stripe, the group’s public tone was set by inclusion of outspoken bigots including Henry FORD and one-time hero aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Both men were bitter racists and anti-Semites: Ford had spent the 1920s reviling Jews in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, while Lindbergh was compromised by visits to Nazi GERMANY, where he fathered three illegitimate children and accepted a medal from Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring in October 1938.

A public endorsement from Jew-baiting Rev. Charles Coughlin in April 1941 cinched the AFC’s reputation as a thinly veiled pro Nazi propaganda vehicle. Lindbergh himself confirmed that judgment in a speech at Des Moines, Iowa, where he declared that the “three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” Soon after, in another public statement, Lindbergh said that “the Jewish people are a large factor in our movement toward war.”

Flagrant bigotry notwithstanding, the AFC attracted some 800,000 members to 450 local chapters by autumn 1941. Many recruits were die-hard enemies of the NEW DEAL, seeking any vehicle to punish Franklin Roosevelt for “socializing” America.

Some sources claim that the AFC formally dissolved on December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese raid on PEARL HARBOR, but Lindbergh and company seemed unaware of that fact when he addressed an audience of 50 AFC members in New York City on December 17. Wound up to fever pitch by the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and JAPAN, Lindbergh railed that there was “only one danger in the world, namely, the Yellow Danger.”

Japan and CHINA (at war with Tokyo for the past decade, now America’s ally) were really “allied together against the white race,” Lindbergh claimed, lamenting that

Washington had missed a chance to use Germany “as a weapon against this alliance.” (Lindbergh’s genius apparently did not extend to recognizing Germany’s alliance with Japan against the United States.)

Instead of joining ADOLF HITLER to preserve a white world, Lindbergh ranted, U.S. troops were “fighting on the side of the Russians and Chinese.” Worse yet, he said, Washington had “no plan and does not know what it is fighting for.”

The federal government knew whom Lindbergh supported, however. On February 23, 1934, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION Director J. EDGAR HOOVER reported to Roosevelt that the AFC was funded by Nazi supporters, including Axel Wenner-Gren, a pro-German financier in Sweden. As recently as November 1941, Hoover noted, AFC spokesman (and former Wisconsin governor) Robert La Follette had called for violent revolution by “fearless red-blooded Americans to overthrow the government.” Such revelations, coupled with the extremist remarks of AFC leaders themselves, combined to destroy the group’s once-substantial public influence by 1943.