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 20th
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.
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