Sarah Churchwell, _Behold America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "The American Dream"_

 I PICKED THIS up because I was impressed by a Churchwell piece included in the recent collection Did It Happen Here? Born in the USA, she now teaches at the University of London and has also published on The Great Gatsby and Marilyn Monroe. On the strength of this book, I would guess her others are worth tracking down.

This book is about the braided history of the two phrases in the subtitle from the early 20th century, when they seem to have emerged, to the USA’s entry into World War II. 

The “American dream,” as one might guess, has been a mobile and mutable concept. Churchwell argues that in its earlier days it most often referred to the democratic and egalitarian dimensions of the American republic—“conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Lincoln put it. In the Progressive era, commentators feared the American Dream was threatened by the concentration of wealth, but by the Roaring Twenties it was more often invoked as the idea that anyone could become wealthy. There was a complementary migration in the term’s meaning from the idea that we would achieve the dream collectively, as a society, to the idea that it was achieved by individuals, especially entrepreneurs. Either way, the American Dream was what attracted talented and hard-working immigrants to the United States.

I always associated the phrase “America First” with the isolationists who argued against the USA entering World War II, as it was the name of the group led by Charles Lindbergh, but Churchwell explains that it goes back quite a bit further. It was a leading campaign slogan for Warren Harding in 1920, for instance, aimed mainly at keeping the USA out of the League of Nations. The slogan was also picked up a rallying cry by a variety of anti-immigrant groups, most notably the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. The 1920s Klan was as fierce about excluding Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants as it was about keeping down Blacks; it was gaining influence at the same time Fascism was taking power in Italy, and Churchwell notes that the similarity was pointed out even at the time.

Turns out—as any reader of Philip Roth’s Plot Against America will recall—that the Lindbergh-led America First movement was likewise inspired by white supremacist notions. Lindbergh was not a pacifist, but thought we should stay out of any fight between “white” peoples and instead prepare for war against the duskier races. Shades of Tom Buchanan!

In an epilogue and coda, Churchwell catches us up with the latest iteration of “America First” rhetoric in the campaign speeches of the Trumpster. 

I liked the way Churchwell marshals her evidence. She draws a lot on influential journalists of the time, especially Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson, and deftly handles such literary landmarks as Babbitt, The Great Gatsby, and The Grapes of Wrath. I was most struck, through, by her command of a massive array of anonymous editorials from a range of newspapers—big town, medium town, small town, from all across the nation. Even with digital search capabilities, her many quotations from the daily press suggest a heroic level of time in the archives. Scholarship lives!