America First
Rodell, Fred
America First America First: the battle against intervention, 1940-1941, by Wayne S. Cole. University of Wisconsin Press. 305. pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Fred Rodell AT THE start—before it got...
...It would make an exciting story— this tale of what began as a young men's crusade (need a crusade be belligerent...
...indeed (and I confess I love to shock my friends by telling this) America First was born, in a sense, in my living-room...
...Let me make clear that I was one from start to finish...
...Some day...
...But America First needed money, which the youngsters didn't have...
...press and by a doggedly, and often dishonestly, interventionist Administration, including President Roosevelt himself...
...And where else would you find (and you will kindly leave this paragraph in...
...gradually, despite Stuart's heroic efforts to keep it clean, it fell into bad company...
...I would bet that Mr...
...on any pretext than to keep the United States out of war—America First was an exciting political experiment...
...Today, although such highly respected liberals as Chester Bowles and Philip C. Jessup were once vocal and active in the movement, "America Firster" is still, in most quarters, a term of opprobrium...
...Wliere else would you find such back-handed, cliche-ridden, pseudo-scholarly stuff (read it twice, word by word) as this gem: "In selecting members for the national committee, efforts were made to secure persons who were widely known and respected in the United States...
...Some day, maybe, American scholars will learn that a tiny drop of perceptive insight, of verve, of style, is worth a magnum of flat facts and sterile statistics—indexed and footnoted...
...most significantly, as it gained strength, it was libeled and lied about by an overwhelmingly interventionist U.S...
...Members were sought with varied political and economic views and from different lines of endeavor...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, and Who's Who in America...
...Reviewed by Fred Rodell AT THE start—before it got all cluttered up with real native fascists and with reactionary rich Republicans, far more anxious to lynch or impeach F.D.R...
...That is where young Bob Stuart, then a student at the Yale Law School, came with a couple of" his cronies on a soft evening in the spring of 1940...
...America First began as an exciting experiment because it was, I believe, the only important U.S...
...Maybe...
...I know because I was in it at the start...
...Then came Pearl Harbor—and incidentally, Stuart and his like-minded young friends enlisted as fast as, if not faster than, the pro-war boys...
...and whence they left with my blessing...
...and ended as a fortuitous fiasco...
...where they wondered out loud if they couldn't, along with presumed millions of their bomb-and-flak-fod-der age group...
...Cole is an earnest and decent fellow—trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent...
...I would also bet—and I have not cheated by checking—that this book was originally written as a Ph.D...
...Where else would you find a footnote to one simple sentence—"He [General Wood] became president of Sears in 1928 and has been chairman of the board since 1939...
...But like too many American academicians, he hasn't the faintest feeling for writing—which is at best an art, at least an effort, and never, no, never, a stereotyped technical exercise...
...thesis...
...which footnote literally cites, by volume and page, Fortune magazine, Current Biography, the St...
...where they told me that hundreds upon hundreds of Yale students wanted no part of a foreign war that their inept and comparatively safe elders seemed about to shove them into...
...Editor Rubin) a bibliography for a book on the pre-Pearl Harbor anti-war agitation which lists 44 "newspapers" plus 33 "periodicals" and does not even mention the most eloquent and effective spokesman in print of us accursed isolationists...
...Where else would you find less than 200 pages of text hobbled by over 100 pages of Notes, Bibliography, and Index...
...political movement ever sparked and kindled by youngsters...
...Some day, maybe, someone who is not a scholar will tell the exciting story of America First as it deserves to be told...
...Do Something About It...
...Unfortunately, Wayne Cole, who has just "authored" (his word) a book called America First, has not written it...
...Bob Stuart went home to Chicago that summer, got America First going, and became and remained—for all the letterhead sponsors and headlined speakers—the brains, the balance-wheel, and the working boss of the organization...
...I mean, of course, The Progressive...
Vol. 17 • July 1953 • No. 7
