by Lynne Olson
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.
The archreactionary McCormick hated Roosevelt and the New Deal with an unadulterated passion. The Democratic Congress, he declared, was “dominated and driven by Red members who are working to destroy our government and civilization, and who in turn are supported by that group of scholastic morons calling themselves progressives and Liberals, whose principal concern is to make private enterprise unprofitable.” When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, Tribune telephone operators were instructed to answer each call with the greeting: “Did you know that there are only [X] more days to save the country?”
One of McCormick’s great pleasures in life was to come up with new ways to bait the president, who had been his classmate at Groton. In 1937, the publisher learned that FDR was to make a speech in Chicago, directly opposite a Tribune warehouse on the north bank of the Chicago River. McCormick dispatched several workers to the warehouse, where, in letters ten feet high, they painted the single word UNDOMINATED over a sign reading CHICAGO TRIBUNE “THE WORLD’S GREATEST NEWSPAPER.”
Along with William Randolph Hearst, McCormick and his two first cousins—Joseph Patterson, owner of the New York Daily News, and Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, who ran the Washington Times-Herald—were the foremost isolationist publishers in the country. With its million-plus circulation and readership throughout five states, the Tribune in particular was a force to be reckoned with. Its huge staff included reporters in four domestic bureaus and a dozen bureaus in Europe and Asia. Among the paper’s journalistic alumni were such distinguished foreign correspondents as William L. Shirer, Vincent Sheean, Floyd Gibbons, George Seldes, and Sigrid Schultz.
Inevitably, however, the high quality of these stars’ reporting came into conflict with McCormick’s insistence that Tribune stories reflect his own peeves and prejudices—particularly his hatred of Roosevelt, the East Coast, and the British, whose imperialism, he claimed, was no different from Nazi aggression. “The Tribune hammers away violently on the theme that the Roosevelt Administration is willfully ruining the country and purposely sabotaging democracy,” a Life article noted in December 1941. “Just plain, common, ordinary hatred of Roosevelt is a factor in isolationism that, particularly in parts of Chicago, is a definite cult.”
According to those who knew McCormick, his loathing of Britain and the East had roots in his childhood; as a boy, he had spent several unhappy years in both places. Early in his life, his father had been named U.S. ambassador to Britain, and young Robert, who was tall, shy, and awkward, was shipped off to a British boarding school, where his upper-class schoolmates looked down on him as an uncultured, bumbling American.
A few years later, McCormick attended Groton, where he received the same scornful treatment. “Condescension shot from his classmates like ink from a squid,” McCormick’s biographer, Richard Norton Smith, wrote. “It left [him] permanently embittered against New Englanders as latter-day colonials infatuated with their mother country.”
Curiously, despite his antipathy toward Britain, McCormick as an adult adopted the lifestyle of an English country squire. He wore Savile Row suits, ordered his shoes from the eminent London firm of John Lobb, spoke with a quasi-British accent, played polo, and rode to hounds. One can only speculate how different the future might have been for McCormick, the Tribune, and the fight over the war if the boys at his English school had been a little kinder to him.
As it was, he and his paper were, without doubt, the most strident journalistic voices in the isolationist movement, as well as strong backers of America First. Although McCormick never joined the organization, he gave it considerable money and favorable coverage and was a close friend of several of its leaders.
IN EARLY 1941, Fortune sent an investigative reporter to Chicago to look into America First. In a long memo that was passed along to the White House, the correspondent wrote that “the backbone of this committee are the vitriolic Roosevelt haters associated with ‘big business.’ It is they who supply most of its funds; they who shape its policy; and they, who with the support of the Chicago Tribune, have made it virtually impossible for any prominent Chicagoan to assume the leadership of the interventionist drive here.”
Actually, the chairman of America First, General Robert Wood, had vigorously supported FDR and the New Deal in the first few years of the president’s tenure, one of the few top business executives in the country to do so. Chief executive of the merchandising giant Sears, Roebuck, Wood was a graduate of West Point who had helped organize construction of the Panama Canal and served as quartermaster general of the Army during World War I. In the 1920s and 1930s, he had turned Sears into the country’s leading retail store chain, shifting its emphasis from mail order sales to retail outlets.
In the late 1930s, Wood broke with FDR over his Court reform plan, as well as what he considered the administration’s increasingly antagonistic attitude toward business. He also opposed Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy, believing that American capitalism would collapse if the United States became involved in another war. Wood equated a U.S. alliance with Britain to “a well-organized, money-making business deciding to take a bankrupt firm in as partner.” The British, he thought, should make a negotiated peace with Germany, leaving America free to go its own way.
At first, Wood had been reluctant to take the job as America First chairman, declaring that his work at Sears left him little time to do anything else. But Robert Stuart, who helped recruit Wood, convinced him that his participation was vital to the anti-interventionist effort. Wood’s high standing in Chicago’s business community lured other prominent corporate leaders—most of them Republican and anti–New Deal and several from Chicago’s great industrial families—to the organization’s fold. Among those joining its executive committee were Sterling Morton of Morton Salt and Jay Hormel, president of Hormel Meat Packing Co. The group’s most significant financial backer was the textile manufacturer William Regnery, another early supporter of Roosevelt who abandoned him in the late 1930s. (Regnery’s son, Henry, would go on to found the conservative publishing company that bears his family’s name.)
For its advertising and publicity campaigns, America First could draw on the talents of three Madison Avenue legends, all of whom had helped transform the country’s advertising industry into a corporate behemoth. Bruce Barton, a founder of the New York firm Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, was a wizard at selling his ideas to the American people, among them the concept that Jesus Christ was in fact the founder of modern business. In his enormously popular book The Man Nobody Knows, Barton, who in 1936 was elected to Congress as a Republican, wrote that the parables of Jesus “were the most powerful advertisements of all time,” and that if Jesus were alive today, he would be the head of a national advertising agency.
Joining Barton were William Benton and Chester Bowles, who, unlike the New York congressman, were liberal Democrats. Classmates at Yale, the two came together in 1929, five years after their graduation, to found Benton & Bowles, another powerhouse firm on Madison Avenue. Flourishing throughout the Depression, Benton & Bowles was the first advertising company to produce radio programs for networks, taking on the job of packaging casts, directors, scripts, and sponsors. By the mid-1930s, the firm was responsible for most of the top-rated shows on radio.
Benton had always vowed that once he made $10 million, he would abandon advertising for public service. At the age of thirty-six, he did so, becoming vice president of the University of Chicago and adviser to its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Benton was part of Amer
ica First’s intellectual brain trust, counseling the group on strategy and serving as an intermediary between it and Hutchins.
Bowles stayed on at Benton & Bowles, although, as he soon found out, it was not easy being a well-known supporter of America First in New York. “Several of our clients feel very emphatic against the stand that I have taken,” he wrote an acquaintance. “Advertising is one helluva business—you can never call your soul your own. And whether you like it or not, you are usually more or less owned by the clients for whom you work.”
Gerald Ford, as it happened, also discovered the hazards of espousing isolationism in the interventionist East. Just a few months after helping to found America First, Ford resigned from the committee, explaining he’d been warned by Yale officials that he might lose his part-time job as the school’s assistant football coach because of his connection with the group. While no longer officially part of America First, Ford vowed to continue working on its behalf, adding, “As a matter of fact, I shall probably spend more time just as a bit of spite.”*
Among the few other prominent easterners willing to take on leadership roles in the group were two children of Theodore Roosevelt—Alice Roosevelt Longworth and her brother Theodore Jr. A longtime isolationist, the wasp-tongued Alice had worked alongside her lover, Senator William Borah, to defeat Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations in 1919. Indeed, Borah and the League’s other senatorial opponents met at her Washington house to plot strategy.
Although ideology played an important part in the Roosevelt siblings’ connection to America First, it was also fueled by a sharp personal animosity toward their distant cousin in the White House and his wife, Eleanor, their first cousin. Both Alice and Theodore Jr. thought of Franklin Roosevelt as a usurper who had no right to follow in their father’s footsteps. “Alice has the outstanding Oedipus complex in American public life,” noted a confidential report prepared by the White Committee on America First. “Having glorified Theodore and his service, [she feels] that any man in the White House since then has been, by definition, an impostor.” At the 1940 Republican convention in Philadelphia, Alice spread the word that the initials “FDR” really stood for “Fuehrer, Duce, Roosevelt.” Her brother, for his part, “always felt that Franklin was getting everything he was entitled to,” a relative recalled. “Ted was always the instigator of anti-Franklin feeling.”
As useful as the Roosevelts and others were in promoting the mission of America First, Robert Wood wanted one man above all—Charles Lindbergh—in the group’s leadership. Over the next year, Wood tried repeatedly to step down as chairman, hoping that Lindbergh would succeed him, but was continually thwarted. Although Lindbergh admired and supported the work of the organization, he insisted, as usual, on going his own way. When asked to attend the 1940 Republican convention as a delegate, he declined, saying that to do so would compromise his nonpartisan position.
In the end, Robert Stuart thought it was just as well that Lindbergh kept his distance. Although the flier remained a hero of his, Stuart was uneasy about the extreme conservatism of some of Lindbergh’s closest associates, particularly Truman Smith and former undersecretary of state William Castle. He also worried that if Lindbergh became too closely associated with America First, “the smear campaign which had been leveled against him throughout the country” would be directed at it as well. Another lightning rod was the last thing that the organization needed.
DESPITE EFFORTS BY ITS leaders to keep their distance from any groups or individuals likely to bring discredit on it, America First faced problems in maintaining an image of moderation and respectability almost as soon as it moved to Chicago. There was little doubt that most of its leadership and members were, as one historian wrote, “decent, honest, sincere citizens who passionately believed that foreign entanglements were bad for the United States and that, if menace to their safety came from overseas, they were better off meeting it alone.” The group, which was described by a staffer as “American as the hot dog,” officially banned anybody who belonged to Communist or pro-Fascist groups.
Nonetheless, it suffered from an insuperable handicap: its objective—keeping America neutral—was also the goal of Hitler and those who supported him. “Because it was to Germany’s advantage for the United States to stay out of war, it was inevitable that America First would be accused of pro-Nazism,” acknowledged Ruth Sarles, the organization’s Washington director. “Likewise, it was inevitable that real pro-Nazis would attempt to get on the America First bandwagon.”
As the committee gained influence, a host of extremists, most of them right-wing, flocked to enlist under its banner. Initially, they were turned away. But many local chapters—there were more than four hundred by December 1941—were extremely relaxed in their membership standards and accepted people who, under the organization’s guidelines, should have been rejected. The small, overworked national staff in Chicago found it impossible to provide proper supervision. As a result, the local committees varied widely: in some cities, as one observer noted, they were “a typical hodgepodge of sincere citizens, disillusioned supporters of Wendell Willkie, and inveterate joiners,” while in other places, the chapters were dominated by “either a crust or core of bigots.”
The organization, Ruth Sarles conceded, was particularly bedeviled by anti-Semitism. “There is no doubt,” she wrote, “that there were anti-Semites among the rank-and-file members.” Indeed, “there is evidence that some passionately anti-Semitic individuals deliberately sought to further anti-Semitism by working through the America First Committee.”
In the beginning, at least, Robert Wood tried hard to avoid any hint of anti-Jewish prejudice. He had a personal reason for doing so: his company was owned by a Jewish family, the Rosenwalds, with whom he had a close relationship. At the same time, he and America First’s other leaders created some of their own problems by appointing to the national committee two men who were regarded as flagrantly anti-Semitic.
The first was Avery Brundage, a wealthy Chicago construction executive who was also president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. In 1936, Brundage had created a national furor as a result of his actions at that year’s summer Olympic games in Nazi Germany. Not only did he reject proposals from American Jewish organizations and other religious groups to boycott the Berlin Olympics, he gave in to German pressure to prevent Jewish athletes from participating in the games. At Brundage’s insistence, the only two Jews on the U.S. teams—both of them track and field athletes—were replaced just before the 400-meter relay race.† Shortly after the Olympics were over, Hitler’s government awarded Brundage’s construction company a contract to build a new German embassy in Washington.
Embarrassing as it was, the uproar over Brundage’s appointment to the America First Committee was minor compared to the fury aroused by the other choice: car manufacturer Henry Ford, whose blatant anti-Semitism had been praised by Hitler in Mein Kampf. In the early 1920s, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper published by Ford, ran dozens of virulently anti-Jewish articles, including the text of the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fraudulent document purporting to be the proceedings of an international Jewish conference plotting world domination. According to the historian Norman Cohn, the Independent “probably did more than any other work to make the Protocols famous.”
The Independent and its publisher swiftly attracted the attention of Hitler, still a relatively unknown political agitator at that point, who displayed copies of the paper in his modest Munich office and hung a portrait of Ford on the wall. In the preface to Mein Kampf, Hitler praised Ford for the “great service” he had provided America and the world through his attacks on the Jews. In a 1923 interview with the Chicago Tribune, the future German leader declared: “We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America.”
Given Ford’s decidedly unsavory background, it was astonishing that Wood could be so obtuse as to believe, as he apparently did, that the car maker’s appointment migh
t be accepted by the Jewish community if a prominent Jewish businessman—Sears director Lessing Rosenwald—was named to the committee at the same time. America First announced the two new members simultaneously, apparently hoping to demonstrate that people with widely varying views could put their differences aside to band together in the anti-intervention cause.
If that was the group’s expectation, it failed spectacularly. The announcement touched off a deluge of attacks on America First, culminating in Lessing Rosenwald’s resignation from the organization and its executive board voting to drop Ford from the national committee. In what turned out to be a massive understatement, Robert Stuart wrote: “I am now convinced that we made a grave mistake.” From then on, no prominent Jew would agree to be affiliated, at least publicly, with America First.
FOR A NUMBER OF anti-Semitic, isolationist fringe groups in America, Henry Ford was both an inspiration and a patron. His well-publicized, if brief, membership in America First helped bring many of their members into the committee’s ranks.
This ragtag collection of extremists was united only by their tendency to blame the country’s problems on those they considered threats to true Americanism, particularly Jews and Communists (usually conflated into one group), immigrants, the Eastern elite, and the Roosevelt administration. Such misplaced nativism had been fueled in large part by the massive social and economic upheaval that sent shock waves through America in the 1920s and 1930s. The Depression, the relaxed standards of conduct of the Roaring Twenties, and the collapse of Wilsonian idealism all produced tension, anxiety, and anger not only among the unemployed and dispossessed but in all social classes. The historian Richard Ketchum, who grew up in a middle-class home in Pittsburgh, recalled that “beneath the generally serene surface of life on my quiet street … was a layer of insecurity, a fear of the unknown and the unacceptable, an instinctive shying away from the alien.… A kind of thoughtless prejudice was the way of our carefully structured world.”
