America First Quotes

“Sooner or later, countries get the foreign policies they can afford.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“Lindbergh saw the path ahead and found it appalling. Americans trod the path and found it irresistible.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“The country’s economy had outgrown its hemisphere, which fact helped explain the duration of the Great Depression, when overseas markets for American products collapsed; yet Lindbergh and the other reactionaries refused to believe this mattered.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“In other words, the Axis not merely admits, but the Axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“An elected official from the Midwest who said that the troubles of Europe weren’t America’s problem could expect to anger relatively few constituents; an elected official from New York who said the same thing could count on angering many.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“Roosevelt hadn’t written the rules of American politics, but he understood them. “You play the game the way it has been played over the years, and you play to win,” he told James.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“Shippers protested, and the protests echoed among the many Americans who disliked or distrusted the British. Irish-Americans, as always, and German-Americans, of late, were two large constituencies of Anglophobia; anti-interventionists were another.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“We are participating in mass murder by the Japanese in China today,” Pittman declared. Japan imported American raw materials, allowed under current law, and converted those materials into weapons that China, the victim of Japanese aggression, was prohibited by the embargo from purchasing.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“The Spanish conflict seemed a portent for Europe and perhaps the world, as the fascists and communists locked in a death embrace of rival despotisms.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War

“There is an added technique for weakening a nation at its very roots, for disrupting the entire pattern of life of a people,” he went on. “It is important that we understand it. The method is simple. It is, first, a dissemination of discord. A group—not too large, a group that may be sectional or racial or political—is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals. The aim of those who deliberately egg on these groups is to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. Sound national policies come to be viewed with a new and unreasoning skepticism, not through the wholesome political debates of honest and free men, but through the clever schemes of foreign agents.”
― H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War