Book Club Who Put America First?

SARAH CHURCHWELL’S BEHOLD, AMERICA REVEALS THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF THE NATION’S MOST POWERFUL SLOGANS

When then-presidential candidate Donald Trump started using the slogan “America First,” many people traced its origin to Charles Lindbergh in the 1940s.

I found the earliest use of the phrase as a Republican slogan in the 1880s, but it didn’t enter the national discussion until 1915, when Woodrow Wilson used it in a speech arguing for neutrality in World War I. That isn’t the same as isolationism, but the phrase got taken up by isolationists. “America First” also became a prominent slogan of the KKK, which even claimed to hold the copyright. (That wasn’t true.)

You found that the backstory of “the American Dream” is also misunderstood.

“The American Dream” has always been about the prospect of success, but 100 years ago, the phrase meant the opposite of what it does now. The original “American Dream” was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the “American Dream” froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn’t occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.

How do the two phrases fit together?

When I began this research, I didn’t think of them as related, but they came into direct conflict in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the fight over entering the war. In that debate, “the American Dream” was shorthand for promoting liberal democracy, and “America First” was shorthand for appeasement.

Will these phrases continue to evolve?

“The American Dream” has long belonged to people on the right, but those on the left who are arguing for things like universal health care have a historical claim to the phrase, too. It can be liberating to discover that these powerful slogans can be redefined.