Numbers

America First Committee

The America First Committee (AFC) was a group established in 1940 to keep the United States out of the World War II, which had been raging in Europe since Germany's invasion of Poland the year before. The AFC counted as members such prominent Americans as Charles Lindbergh, Sinclair Lewis, E.E. Cummings, and Walt Disney as well as the heads of Sears Roebuck, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News.

How It's Used

“This group will study the political background of America’s entry into the Second World War, including the activities of the America First Committee, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the Neutrality Acts, the Presidential Campaign of 1940, the Destroyer Deal, and the Lend-Lease Program.”

“When I was a boy, during World War II and well beyond, the Chicago Tribune was not allowed in our house. The paper was owned and run in those days by Colonel Robert McCormick, whose Anglophobia defined his psychology and worldview, his philosophy and religion. The Colonel was an American-Firster, which is to say an isolationist during the war, which is further to say that he thought the Nazis were Europe's and not our problem.”

“His first taste of politics came almost seven decades ago, during the prelude to World War II. The Buckleys, like their counterparts the Kennedys, were stoutly isolationist: Buckley's mother wore an America First Committee (AFC) pin, and his older brother James, later an American senator, belonged to the AFC chapter at Yale. The 15-year-old Buckley was in the audience at Madison Square Garden on the night his first political hero, Charles Lindbergh, made his final major antiwar speech before Pearl Harbor.”

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