Book Review: Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” by Sarah Churchwell

An Etymological Essay at Book Length

Churchwell's 2018 book looks at these two tropes, from their origins around 1900, the peak of “America First” in the speeches of isolationist Charles Lindbergh in 1941, to the proclaimed “death” of the American Dream and renewed promotion of “America First” in 2015 by the loser of the 2020 Presidential election. Churchwell examines these two terms through their use in public discourse throughout the 20^th century, focusing on their definition over time. She argues that “The American Dream” is the social contract, a moral economy, that balances liberty and freedom, equality and justice, but that its meaning has been diverted and perverted, especially since the Second World War, to mean the possibility of becoming exceedingly, excessively rich. That America and Americans have redefined Calvinism as “If you are rich, it is God rewarding you for your virtues” and making “The American Dream” synonymous with that redefined doctrine. On the other hand, “America First” and its close relative “100% American” = “100% white” – and Nordic or “Aryan”* white at that. (Lindbergh's public leadership of the “America First” campaign collapsed a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor after he delivered an anti-Semitic speech in Des Moines.)

I rather liked the opening of Chapter 6, “America First 1920-1923: The Simplicity of Government” which opens with the tale of President Harding, who in “his 1920 'America first' campaign,[] notoriously announced that 'government is a very simple thing,'” further “promising to run the American government like a business.” Now, where have we heard that lately?

Churchwell reminds us of the lasting value of the works of Sinclair Lewis, Walter Lippman, and Dorothy Thompson. All were pronounced anti-Fascists, and their observations hold true today as applied to the heirs of the reactionary “100% American” & “America First” legacies.


* “Aryan” was a term applied to themselves by ancient Indo-Iranian peoples. Somehow I am not surprised that its misapplication as a synonym for “Nordic” was popularized by a graduate of the University of Geneva (who was born in England, raised in France, and settled in Germany), whose B.Sc. thesis was shown to be mystical nonsense.