by Lynne Olson
Anticipating the campus divisions of the 1960s, antiwar students in 1940 squared off against the presidents and professors of their schools, many of whom were interventionists. Indeed, Yale’s president, Charles Seymour, and Harvard’s head, James Bryant Conant, were both members of the national committee of William Allen White’s organization. When, after the fall of France, Conant made a national radio broadcast urging the Roosevelt administration to do everything possible to defeat Hitler, he was deluged with abusive letters, a fair number from Harvard students. The school’s newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, ran a series of editorials urging a negotiated peace between Germany and Britain. “We are frankly determined to have peace at any price,” declared one Crimson editorial. “We refuse to fight another balance of power war.”
Antiwar students at Harvard also created an organization called the Committee for the Recognition of Classroom Generals. Its activities included sending tin soldiers and armchair citations to five interventionist professors and picketing an interventionist rally on campus with signs reading LET’S SEND 50 OVER-AGE PROFESSORS TO BRITAIN.
As was true on other campuses in 1940, Harvard’s spring commencement ceremonies served as a backdrop for the increasingly contentious debate. A member of the Class of 1915 was greeted by boos and catcalls from younger graduates when he told an alumni convocation that “we were not too proud to fight [in World War I] and we are not too proud to fight now.” Those who supported intervention responded with equal hostility when the 1940 class orator, in his commencement speech, denounced aid to Britain as “fantastic nonsense.”
Two articles in The Atlantic Monthly underscored how wide the split between American college students and their elders had become. In the August 1940 issue, Arnold Whitridge, a Yale history professor and the grandson of the famed British poet Matthew Arnold, wrote what he called an “Open Letter to Undergraduates,” under the headline WHERE DO YOU STAND? Whitridge, a World War I veteran, said he was bewildered and deeply troubled by the attitude of students at Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, and other colleges who opposed aid to the Allies, said they would never take up arms for their country, and insisted that “there is no preponderance of good or evil on either side.” Declaring those views myopic, Whitridge asserted: “I believe we shall have to do something besides hope for victory.… Much as we hate war, we shall have to fight, and the sooner we get ready for it, the better.”
In the magazine’s September issue, the nation’s undergraduates—in the person of Brewster, who was chairman of the Yale Daily News, and Spencer Klaw, president of The Harvard Crimson—delivered a scornful reply. Under the headline WE STAND HERE, Brewster and Klaw attacked what they saw as Whitridge’s “casuistry and acrimony,” which they labeled “unworthy” and “unjust.” The two student editors argued that only by staying aloof from the war could the United States preserve its democratic way of life. Americans must “take our stand on this side of the Atlantic … because at least it offers a chance for the maintenance of all the things we care about in America.”
As Brewster’s biographer, Geoffrey Kabaservice, noted, the twenty-one-year-old Yale junior was fast becoming “one of the most controversial undergraduates of his day.” In addition to coauthoring the Atlantic Monthly article, he gave frequent anti-interventionist speeches on campuses throughout the East and took part in a national radio debate on NBC’s “America’s Town Meeting of the Air.” Several of his Yale Daily News editorials opposing intervention were picked up by the national press.
But Brewster was doing much more than writing and lecturing. He had emerged as a leading figure in a group of Yale undergraduates and law students who had come together in an effort to combat what they viewed as America’s inexorable march toward war. Night after night, the students gathered to discuss ways to counter the growing strength of the interventionist movement, exemplified by the White Committee and the Century Group, which had been so successful in rousing public opinion to support the destroyer transfer and conscription.
The Yale students were convinced that isolationists were still a majority in America. Yet the movement was splintered, with no one group able to tap the country’s strong isolationist mood and give it political cohesiveness. While Charles Lindbergh had attracted national attention with his antiwar views, he remained a loner, showing little interest in belonging to or heading any of the existing isolationist organizations.
In the students’ view, the American people were being stampeded into war by the Roosevelt administration and the citizens’ groups supporting the president. Since no one else was apparently able to provide a rallying point for resistance, they decided to take the lead themselves.
These Yalies could hardly be considered disaffected radicals. Like Kingman Brewster, virtually all of them were or had been top campus leaders. Also like Brewster, a number would go on to have celebrated careers. They included Potter Stewart, a future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and his close law school friend, Sargent Shriver, who two decades later would be appointed first head of the Peace Corps by his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy. Another participant was Gerald Ford, a former All-American football player at the University of Michigan and future president of the United States.
Their leaders were Brewster, who was considered “the idea man,” and law student Robert Douglas Stuart, son of a Quaker Oats executive in Chicago, whose talents lay in organizing and administration. The group kicked off its campaign by circulating nonintervention petitions on campuses throughout the East and recruiting other students and recent graduates to lead opposition to American involvement in the war in their hometowns.
The response was extraordinary. Nearly half the undergraduates at Yale signed the petitions, with similar numbers reported at other colleges. Hundreds of students agreed to spend the summer of 1940 working to organize antiwar opposition, and many more sent money to help the effort. Among the donors was Harvard senior John F. Kennedy, whose $100 check was accompanied by a note that said, “What you are all doing is vital.” Kennedy’s older brother, Joe, meanwhile, helped organize a Harvard branch of the America First Committee, as the Yale-sponsored group was now called. Another student organizer was fifteen-year-old Gore Vidal, who established an America First chapter at Phillips Exeter, the prep school he attended in New Hampshire.
Brewster and Stuart then set out to make America First a nationwide crusade. Traveling throughout the country, they urged isolationist members of Congress and others to lend them support. But the man whose backing they wanted most was Charles Lindbergh. Not only was he the best-known isolationist in the country, he also had been the childhood hero of virtually every young American their age. These students had been little boys when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927, and he instantly became their role model. As a child, Robert Stuart used to daydream that Lindbergh would land his plane one day on the three acres behind the Stuarts’ home and “I would get to meet him.” Kingman Brewster would later note that he had been “a bug on flying” all his life, thanks to his hero worship of Lindbergh. But there was another reason why Stuart, Brewster, and their fellows were so drawn to Lindbergh: he was a rebel who, with “his courage and straightforwardness,” defied authority and could not be bought or intimidated. He was, in other words, what they aspired to be.
Yale junior Kingman Brewster, a founder of the America First Committee (on left) welcomes Charles Lindbergh to Yale in October 1940. On the right is Richard Bissell Jr., a Yale economics instructor who went on to become deputy director of the CIA after World War II.
When Stuart and Brewster invited Lindbergh to deliver a major address at Yale in the fall of 1940, he was inclined at first to turn the invitation down, believing that his reception at such a bastion of the East Coast establishment would be hostile. But he was greatly impressed by the two young men and their budding movement, and he finally accepted.
On a cool October night, more than three thousand Yale students packed Woolsey Hall to hear Lindbergh speak. Instead of the heckli
ng he half expected, he was interrupted again and again by thunderous cheers and applause. “Most of us were for the first time in the flesh-and-blood presence of the most famous American of our childhood, and you could feel the electricity because of that and because of the sheer magnetism of his presence,” recalled the historian Richard Ketchum, one of the Yalies who attended the speech.
The month before, America First had made its official debut as a national organization. The principles it espoused were close to those of Lindbergh: an impregnable defense for America; preservation of democracy at home by staying out of foreign wars; no aid for Britain beyond “cash and carry.” “When the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa, ravaged by all the horrors of modern war, turn to Peace at last, America’s strength will help rebuild them and bring them back to health and hope,” the group’s founders declared. Until then, Americans must focus on maintaining their own freedoms and way of life.
With its emergence on the national stage, however, America First became a very different organization from the one created by the students at Yale. Of its initial founders, only Robert Stuart remained heavily involved on a day-to-day basis, emerging as America First’s executive director. Its national headquarters was transferred to Chicago, Stuart’s hometown, after his father agreed to provide rent-free space in the Quaker Oats executive offices there.
From then on, most of America First’s leaders would be midwestern businessmen whose social and political views were considerably more conservative than those of the group’s founders. Although most of the Yale students came from privileged backgrounds, they regarded themselves as moderates or liberals. Kingman Brewster, for one, applauded many of FDR’s New Deal reforms in his Yale Daily News editorials and rejected membership in Skull and Bones, the school’s most exclusive and revered secret society, because he considered it undemocratic.
In organizing America First, Brewster and Stuart had worked hard to make it a moderate, bipartisan group, whose ideas were “in agreement with the great majority of Americans of all ages.” When it moved to Chicago, Brewster, who would remain as chairman of its Yale chapter, warned Stuart not to overload the organization with conservatives. Its leading members, he said, should be known and respected throughout the country—“substantial and prominent, but not stuffy and corporate. You need laborites and progressives. It would be awful if the committee turned out to be the instrument of one class.”
Initially, America First lived up to Brewster’s expectations, attracting people with widely varying social and economic views. The group encompassed conservatives and liberals; Republicans, Democrats, and independents; Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Among the liberals who supported its aims were longtime pacifists such as the former Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard and Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party, who in 1938 formed an antiwar organization called Keep America Out of War Congress. Like other liberal pacifists, Villard and Thomas feared that going to war would greatly damage American democracy, giving rise to severe restrictions on civil liberties, destruction of New Deal social reforms, and a resurgence of right-wing sentiment.
Increasingly, however, the organization encountered difficulty in persuading prominent liberals, particularly intellectuals, to join. Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago’s outspokenly isolationist president, was one of many such figures whose views coincided with those of the group but who declined to become members.
As a result, within months of its founding, America First had become the conservative-dominated organization against which Kingman Brewster had warned.
NEITHER THE MIDWEST NOR the East was homogeneous in regard to their residents’ attitudes toward America’s involvement in the war. The country’s heartland, with Chicago as its hub, contained a fair share of interventionists, just as isolationism maintained a strong presence in New York and on the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. Nonetheless, America First drew its greatest strength from the traditionally isolationist Midwest, while the White Committee and the Century Group continued to find their greatest support among the internationalist East Coast establishment. Of the nearly one million people who joined America First in the fourteen months of its existence, nearly two-thirds lived within a three-hundred-mile radius of Chicago, an area encompassing Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and parts of Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota, and Iowa.
The differences between Chicago and New York—and their outlook on the war—were evident in the two cities’ disparate reactions to the release of a provocative British film, Pastor Hall, in the summer of 1940. Based on the true story of Martin Niemoller, a German Protestant minister who was sent to the Dachau concentration camp for speaking out against the Nazis, Pastor Hall featured graphic scenes of Nazi brutality—“an apocalyptic vision of horror seen through a barbed wire fence,” as The New York Times put it.
Initially, no Hollywood studio would agree to distribute the controversial film. Through the intercession of FDR’s son James, who fancied himself an independent producer, United Artists was finally persuaded to do so. The American print of the movie contained a short introduction written by Robert Sherwood and read by Eleanor Roosevelt, which called Pastor Hall “a story of the spirit of hatred, intolerance, suppression of liberty, which is now sweeping over the face of this earth.”
When the movie opened in New York, it sparked not only critical acclaim but an anti-Nazi demonstration in Times Square. In Chicago, however, the city’s film censorship board barred Pastor Hall’s release because it depicted Nazi Germany in an unfavorable light. German Americans made up a large percentage of Chicago’s population, and, under considerable pressure from German American organizations, the censorship board issued its ban, citing a city ordinance that prohibited the “display of depravity, criminality or lack of virtue in a class of citizens of any race.”
Pastor Hall was not the first anti-Nazi film to be barred by the board; in the previous two years, it had prohibited at least seven other such movies from being shown. At the same time, however, it allowed the release of Feldzug in Polen, a propaganda film produced by the German government that depicted the Wehrmacht’s vanquishing of Poland in 1939 and portrayed Poland as the aggressor.
Noting this discrepancy, several Chicago organizations, including the local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Jewish Congress, protested the banning of Pastor Hall, as did a number of women’s clubs. Frank Knox’s Chicago Daily News attacked what the paper called the “Nazi sensibilities” of the board. Faced with a barrage of unfavorable publicity, Chicago’s mayor, Edward Kelly, ordered the censorship group to reconsider. Reluctantly, it reversed itself and cleared the film for showing.
Unquestionably, the sizable number of German Americans in Chicago, along with its significant (and generally anti-British) Irish American population, helped make the Windy City a center of isolationist sentiment. But other key factors, including geography, were also at work. Living in the middle of the country as they did, many if not most residents of Chicago (and other parts of the Midwest) had never had much to do with the rest of the world, nor did they worry about threats from abroad. In their view, the seemingly boundless spaces of America, protected by two oceans, offered a security available to no other country.
Also playing a role in the area’s isolationist attitude was the resentment that many Chicagoans and other midwesterners felt toward what they viewed as the effete, snobbish East, with its close ties to the equally arrogant British. The second-largest city in the country and a stronghold of American industry, Chicago gloried in its bustle, swagger, and energy and considered itself, not New York, as America’s dominant metropolis. It had nothing but contempt for critics such as British writer Rudyard Kipling, who, after a visit to Chicago, declared, “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”
In 1927, the city’s mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, whose informal alliance with the gangster Al Capone had helped produce an explosion of violen
t crime and government corruption, told his supporters that America’s No. 1 enemy was George V. If the British king ever dared to set foot in Chicago, Thompson declared, he would punch him in the face.
Although sharply critical of Thompson’s “moronic buffoonery” and “triumphant hoodlumism,” Chicago’s leading newspaper, the Tribune, and its flamboyant publisher, Robert McCormick, shared the mayor’s implacable Anglophobia, as well as his belief that Chicago, rather than the hated East, was the center of the universe. Journalist John Gunther, a Chicago native, once described the Tribune as “aggressive, sensitive in the extreme, loaded with guts and braggadocio, expansionist, and medieval.” It was an apt description of McCormick as well.
McCormick dubbed the Tribune “the World’s Greatest Newspaper” and told his staff, “We are the most vital single force at the center of the world.” Proudly provincial, he had nothing but contempt for anybody and anything east of the Mississippi. “The trouble with you people out there is that you can’t see beyond Ohio,” he remarked to a New York Times reporter. “And when you think of taking a trip farther west than Ohio, you think you’re Buffalo Bill.”
Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick.
To McCormick, New York was “a Sodom and Gomorrah of sin.” He described its youth as “immoral and its mature people burned out. It is the reservoir of evil from which disintegrating revolutionary doctrine spreads over the country.” In his view, Washington and the Roosevelt administration were equally wicked. He once urged that the nation’s capital be moved from Washington to a more representative American city, like Grand Rapids, Michigan.
