From a recent article in Time Magazine
On Thursday, Sept. 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh—American aviation hero and leading isolationist—stepped to the microphones at an America First Committee rally in Des Moines, Iowa. He had long taken it upon himself to speak, as he had once put it, for “that silent majority of Americans who have no newspaper, or newsreel, or radio station at their command.” Now it was time, he had decided, to make himself very clear on what he saw as a critical issue facing the nation as it debated whether to go to war against Adolf Hitler: the role of American Jews. “No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany,” Lindbergh said in Des Moines. “But”—and the but here is epochal—“no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them . . . Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
Outright Nazi sympathy was evident in America in the prewar years. “When we get through with the Jews in America,” Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest, said, “they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” Pro-Nazi groups held huge rallies at Madison Square Garden; one sponsored by the German-American Bund in February 1939 featured a 20,000-strong crowd chanting cries of “Heil Hitler.”
Isolationism was a complex phenomenon, but fear was a fairly common theme among its disparate elements: fear of entanglement; fear of sacrificing American blood and treasure for the advantage of others; fear of putting foreign demands ahead of national needs. Even after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. in December 1941, there were still those who peddled a toxic blend of anti-Semitism (which came to include Holocaust denial) and virulent anticommunism and racist ideology. Eventually, Cold War anxieties were oxygen to the flames of neo-Nazism. Just as the Klan had benefited from the fears of the 1920s after the Russian Revolution, white supremacists after World War II linked their cause with the apocalyptic rhetoric of right-wing anticommunism. These were the years of Joseph McCarthy and of the John Birch Society, of IMPEACH EARL WARREN billboards and White Citizens’ Councils. In a November 1963 lecture that formed the basis, a year later, of a Harper’s cover story and later a book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the historian Richard Hofstadter discerned a pattern of extreme conspiratorial theories about fundamental threats to the country.
“The paranoid spokesman . . . traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy.” Ranging from fears of the Bavarian Illuminati in the 1790s to the dark anxieties of the anticommunists of the 1960s, Hofstadter identified the recurrent tendency to see powerful forces at work to undermine American life or politics or, often, both. (Immigrants, Jews and international bankers were favorites.) Hofstadter’s point: there’s always a war on to make America great again, for there are always those who believe American greatness is under assault from “the other.”
