How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace

America First
By David Gordon

Eric Rauchway, a historian at UC Davis, does not like the slogan “America first,” used by Donald Trump in his campaign for president. “America First”, Rauchway says in an articleappearing in today’s Washington Post, “was the motto of Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s.” The America First Committee held that “the United States should arm itself against foreign threats and stay within carefully defined borders, using the might of the state only to defend a very specific, rather white idea of ‘America’ that excludes certain racial and religious minorities.”

Of course, this is nonsense. The America First Committee  included among its members and sympathizers former President Herbert Hoover, the socialist Norman Thomas, the renowned historian Charles Beard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Sinclair Lewis. One of the leading members of the group, John T. Flynn, attacked Roosevelt’s New Deal for its affinities to fascism, hardly behavior one would expect from a fascist sympathizer.

Rauchway is the author of a recent book, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace.  As the Duke of Wellington said to someone who confused him with the painter George Jones, “if you believe that, you will believe anything.”

(The above originally appeared at LewRockwell.com)