In the 1930s the United States was an empire, in the sense that a large number of its Native American and African American subjects were not full citizens. Whether or not it would become a democracy was an open question; many of its influential men thought not. George Kennan, an American diplomat who would become his country’s outstanding strategic thinker, proposed in 1938 that the United States should “go along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.” Using the slogan “America First,” the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh called for sympathy with Nazis.
