BEHOLD, AMERICA

A HISTORY OF AMERICA FIRST AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

SARAH CHURCHWELL Bloomsbury, 356pp, £20, Oldie price £15.20 inc p&p

The term America First emerged in 1916 when President Wilson used it in relation to keeping American boys out of the European conflict. Later, it was adopted by the Ku Klux Klan, and later still by fascist sympathisers and isolationists. The term American Dream also emerged in the First World War to denote personal liberty and equality rather than material advancement. ‘Given her background as a literary critic, it is no surprise that Churchwell is in her element when discussing F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), in which Gatsby’s version of the American Dream collapses in ruins, or Sinclair Lewis’s satire It Can’t

Happen Here (1935), in which a populist demagogue called Buzz Windrip wins power, outlaws opposition and forms a paramilitary force,’ wrote Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. ‘But her handling of the social and political context is no less impressive. There is some memorably dreadful stuff about the atrocities of the Klan: it is astounding to read, for example, that between 1918 and 1921, at least 28 people were publicly burned at the stake.’ Sandbrook found the book ‘enormously entertaining’ and praised Churchwell as ‘a careful and sensitive reader, [who] writes with great vigour and has a magpie’s eye for a revealing story.’ For the

Observer’s reviewer, Robert Mccrum, it is ‘an enthralling book… passionate, well-researched and comprehensive’ and ‘much of its force derives from the echoes of the present it finds in the thunderous caverns of the past, blurred by the distortions of history’.