Gore Vidal and America First

[Michael Pugliese]

http://www.independent.org/tii/media/pdf/tir64raico.pdf
. "THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW
608  RALPH RAICO
>...Communist Party (until June 22, 1941, that is, when the CPUSA turned on a 
dime
and became fanatically pro-war). Very sensibly, however, Doenecke pays the most
attention to the pacifist and, above all, the liberal and conservative 
opponents of war,
most of whom were associated in one way or another with the America First Com-
mittee
(AFC), founded in September 1940.
During its brief existence and ever after, the AFC was and has been subjected 
to
mindless smears. A recent example occurred in connection with Princeton Univer-
sity’s
unsealing of many of the papers of Charles Lindbergh, the committee’s most
prominent speaker, and of his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In a report for the
Associated Press (March 30, 2001), Linda A. Johnson informs us that “Lindbergh
gave numerous speeches at the time denouncing President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and Jews as ‘warmongers.’” As concerns the Jews, this statement is a lie or, 
more
likely, the product of a slovenly scribbler who could not be bothered to 
ascertain the
easily accessible truth (see Berg 1998, 425–27). Lindbergh gave only a single,
famous (or notorious) speech mentioning the Jews, in Des Moines, in October
1941. There he identified them not as “warmongers” but as, along with the Roo-
sevelt
administration and the British government, one of the main forces pushing us
into war with Germany.
It is noteworthy that among the hundreds of letters Princeton made public were
expressions of support for Lindbergh’s antiwar stance from well-known writers 
such
as W. H. Auden and, rather lower down the literary line (although she won the 
Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1938), Pearl Buck. Readers surprised by the appearance 
of
these names in this context would likely profit from consulting Bill Kauffman’s 
bril-liant
America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics (1995). As Kauffman shows, 
many
of the celebrities of the American cultural scene—outside of Manhattan and 
Holly-wood—
strongly sympathized with the AFC: Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings,
Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Henry Miller, Sinclair Lewis, Kathleen 
Norris,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Beard, and H. L. Mencken, among others. The total
membership of the AFC exceeded eight hundred thousand, and it had millions of 
fel-low
travelers. The young John F. Kennedy and Gore Vidal were junior members of
America First at their respective prep schools.
<SNIP>