The “America First” Committee
In modern-day history classes, America’s involvement with World War II is painted as a moment when the heroes show up to save the day. In our own aggrandizing version of events, the Allies may have never won the war without American fire power. Looking back, many veterans of World War II were proud to have done their duty. This was one of the very few wars where people actually felt that they had a reason for going.
This was good versus evil. It’s pretty obvious how Americans felt about it at the time, when we think about characters like Marvel’s Captain America. In 1941, Marvel published a comic of him very literally punches Hitler in the face. On the flip side, Americans didn’t really start to care about taking down Adolf Hitler seriously until the war came to their own front door. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1940, public opinion suddenly shifted towards helping the Allied Forces, even though the majority of the population had voted against it just a year earlier.
However, some people argue that the Allies could have won the war all on their own, without America’s help. Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor, not everyone believed that the United States should go to war, and they clung onto the opinion the majority of the nation held a year earlier. A group called “The America First Committee” argued that the United States needed to worry about their own country’s problems first, instead of getting themselves involved with issues in the outside world. The group was established by students at Yale University just a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1940.
The America First Committee was a pacifist, anti-war group. They didn’t care that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese. They still believed that the US needed to stay out of World War II, because the outside world just wasn’t their problem, and they did not want to send American soldiers to die if it wasn’t even totally necessary. The fact that a group of college students started this organization is very telling. High School and college aged men were the ones who would be drafted into the war, and it only made sense that they did not want their friends and family members to die. The group expanded far outside of Yale, and at one point, the organization totaled 800,000 members.
Critics of the committee pointed out the obvious- by staying out of World War II, it would be a sign of weakness that America does nothing to defend itself after an attack. It would have also been turning our backs on the victims of Nazi Germany completely. In 1941, Dr. Seuss made a political cartoon that perfectly summed up the situation. A woman wearing a sweater that says “America First” is reading a bedtime story to two frightened children. The story she is reading is a book called “Adolf the Wolf”. She says, “…and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones… But it was foreign children, so it didn’t really matter.”
As the saying goes, “better late than never.” The United States finally joined in the war to help as much as they could, and the Allies won the war. Arguably, if the US had never stepped up at all, thousands – or even millions – more civilians may have continued to die, and maybe, just maybe, Hitler would have taken over the world. But the fact that the nation had once turned their backs on European orphans has been conveniently swept under the rug. However shameful these memories may be, they should never be forgotten, because it gives powerful perspective about the world we live in today.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
When The U.S. Turned Away 20,000 Jewish Children Fleeing Nazi Germany. Sean Braswell. Ozy.
America First Committee. Wikipedia.
Life in the Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.