'America First' is an old and honorable tradition

It never ceases to amaze me how little educated people seem to understand history — let alone learn from it.

A salient case in point is the “fake news” narrative that the left-wing media has parroted for the last year about President Trump’s “America First” policy.

The main thrust of these stories is that Trump is a deranged Nazi because he used the same slogan as the “America First Committee,” which for one brief year had urged the United States government to stay out of World War II. This ignores two very relevant points. First of all, Charles Lindbergh and the other supporters of the America First Committee were isolationists who wanted to avoid the use of American military force at all costs. In this regard, they were much closer to the modern left than to Donald Trump.

But more importantly, the America First Committee did not invent the idea of “America First,” nor do they own it. This concept is part and parcel of our national heritage.

Without going all the way back to the earliest Founding Fathers, who certainly would have weighed in favorably on the ideal of putting our country ahead of all others, we can still refer to James Monroe, our fifth president and the author of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. As part of the surge of nationalism that had followed the creation of our country out of a disparate collection of colonies and peoples, Monroe expressed the idea of “America for the Americans.” Moreover, he expressed his sense of U.S. policy with regards to Europe as being “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.”

Such a sense of proud isolation from European politics, outside of our own hemisphere, remained the rule for the United States during most of the next century. It was always America’s interests that came first. Indeed, even at the eve of America’s entrance into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was beating the drum to avoid the intricate entanglements of Europe’s internecine warfare. On Oct. 11, 1915, he told the Daughters of the American Revolution that he would campaign for re-election on a platform of “America First.” Wilson made it clear that he was not excluding naturalized citizens from his vision of America, but he saw a threat from those who did not put America first in their allegiance.

“Is it America first or is it not?” he asked. As described by reporter Arthur Henning in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Wilson called upon the Daughters of the American Revolution to “wither with their scorn those hyphenated Americans who think of the welfare of other countries before that of their adopted land.”

Wilson was worried at that time about Americans urging the entrance of the United States into the European war based on their divided loyalty with their homelands, but it was Wilson himself 18 months later who led the U.S. into World War I. Not surprisingly, the swirling loyalties of that time led to the creation of the America First Association, which was founded on Nov. 16, 1917, at a meeting pledging loyalty to Wilson’s war effort.

It is also not coincidental that the group was created just one month following the October revolution in Russia that led to the Soviet Union. Those dedicated to American ideals were finding a common enemy in the new communistic regimes.

The America First Association continued throughout the next several years to promote the Constitution and to fight communism, and yes this all happened before there even was a Nazi Party. America First is not a reflection of Nazism any more than it is pro-Russian. The supremacy of America is not measured against any other form of government but against the standards of natural law, where it has no peer.

It should be noted also that the America First Committee led by Charles Lindbergh had disbanded immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that Americans of all stripes united against our common enemies. During World War II, another program was formed to promote Americanism, and though today it would probably be considered an example of extremist nationalism, it was then just one more instance of patriotic pride.

The Keep America American program was started by the Kiwanis Clubs of America as a way to remind U.S. citizens what we were fighting to protect in our fight against Japan, Germany and the other Axis powers.

As a 1943 advertisement said, “Our boys are fighting to keep America American. They want to come back to the America they left, their homes, churches, schools, their service clubs, their friends and buddies. They want to come back to their jobs — and take up where they left off — they want to be able to carve their own futures in their own way — unmolested.”

An November 1943 editorial supporting the movement in the Norwalk (Ohio) Reflector-Herald praised the Kiwanians for safeguarding American ideals “in time of war and confusion.” It spoke proudly of how those ideals “inspire men of all races and all countries who cherish liberty and respect the dignity of man as an individual.”

Those words suggest an inclusive and open-hearted approach to humanity, but today’s critics of Donald Trump and his “America First” policies would probably shudder at the next paragraph:

“For centuries, our land has been a haven of refuge, a land of opportunity, for oppressed peoples, and millions have flocked from the old world to the new. It is no longer practicable for us to welcome hordes of immigrants, but it is still possible for us to help other peoples to achieve and safeguard their freedom.”

Amen. We live in a land of boundless ideals, not a land of unlimited means.

Sadly, the common sense of that editorialist did not prevail in the succeeding decades. Instead, America put its future at risk by assuming that its ideals would take root in any immigrant who set foot on our soil. That foolishness is the greatest failing of the post-war generations, and recognition of the downward trajectory caused by our open borders and lack of assimilation is exactly what led to Donald Trump’s unexpected election.

Indeed Trump’s campaign for president might well have been channeling that editorial writer of 1943. If we are to help other people, they both said, “we must protect our own institutions and keep our own ideals uncontaminated. In short, we must keep America American … Some observers may think that a campaign of this kind is only a political move. There are those who may think that it is only a phase of revolt … But these observers will be mistaken. Since when has it become mere politics to champion the American way of life? If we are not fighting for the ideals that constitute our heritage, what are we fighting for?”

Those last two questions should be asked of everyone who is working to undermine Donald Trump and his America First agenda. Although Trump is a political outsider, he is not outside the mainstream of American history and thought. American First may be nationalistic, but America Second is treason.