America First!: Its History, Culture, and Politics.

• Author: Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.

Bill Kauffman Prometheus Books, $25.95

By Arthur M. Schiesinger, Jr.

In the great debate of 1940-41 about whether to enter World War H, the America First Committee was, of course, the bastion of isolationism. I must declare an interest: I was on the interventionist side in that debate. In later times, however, I have not been without sympathy for neo-isolationist positions. Though Bill Kauffman lists "the Schlesingers, the Achesons, and the Rusks" as the miscreants who have tried "to entangle us in wars that Middle America does not want," I was in fact opposed to the Vietnam and Gulf Wars and to the assaults on Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama. Indeed, Max Ascoli denounced me 40 years ago as an isolationist in his magazine, The Reporter. So I approached this book in a mood of curiosity rather than of condemnation. I wondered how the debate of 1940-41 might look after half a century of America's excesses and failures in the role of world savior.

But America First! is neither systematic history nor analytical political science. It is rather a meditation on American isolationism and populism in the interests of constructing a genealogy and a usable past for a nationalist revival today. The real purpose of America First! is not to explain the past, but to rally forces for the future.

Accordingly, Kauffman gives an exceedingly sketchy account of the origins of the America First Committee, vastly inflating the importance (in this connection) of Hamlin Garland and Amos Pinchot and not even mentioning R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., and General Robert E. Wood, the committee's moving spirits. Anyone interested in the history of the America First Committee must turn to the introduction of In Danger Undaunted, a selection of the Committee's papers edited by our premier student of American isolationism, Justus Doenecke.

Kauffman is not concerned with defining the issues in the debate of 1940-41. The dividing line did not run, as he sometimes implies, between hardheaded, national-interest advocates and mushy would-be world saviors. It ran between those who believed that the national interest of the United States required action to prevent Hitler from taking over Europe and those who believed that the United States could live at peace with a Nazi Europe. But Kauffman eschews questions of national security and geopolitics. He does quote isolationist prophecies of disaster in that period--intervention will "impose a dictatorship and turn us into a totalitarian...