How Churchill's Britain fought America First
The movement that the Special Operations Executive called 'the raw material of American Fascism'
Franlin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Atlantic Conference on 10 August 1941 (Imperial War Museum, public domain).
When Donald Trump reinstated Winston Churchill’s bust in the Oval Office last month, the co-chair of the British Conservative Party was quick to welcome the move as a sign of ‘the important links between the US and the UK.’1
Yet much of the symbolism embraced by President Trump has a more troubling resonance for British-American relations, above all his ‘America First’ slogan.
The Atlantic noted the phrase’s historical associations after Trump used it in his 2017 inauguration speech:
The America First Committee (AFC), which was founded in 1940, opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and was harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war.2
This platform naturally attracted the interest of British intelligence at the time. In November 1941 the Committee was the subject of a report from the American arm of Britain’s wartime covert action organisation, Special Operations Executive (SOE).3
This was a critical period. The US was providing vital aid to Britain but was not yet a combatant. Pearl Harbour was still weeks away.
SOE was relatively clear-eyed about the roots of the ‘isolationist’ movement, which it called ‘the major menace to the successful conduct of the war.’4
Irish and German communities were at the forefront, with the latter particularly setting the tone in the Mid-West, where Chicago was the citadel of the movement. Nevertheless, the report recognised that ‘American isolationism is bound up with a strong and simple anti-British sentiment which has always existed, and which is not necessarily confined to the Irish and German-Americans. The sentiment is build up of diverse elements’.
The first-named element on the list was ‘the tradition of the American Revolution, against the snobbish imperialism of Great Britain.’ Others included an array of political movements from ‘indigenous fascist organisations’ to ‘pacifism and feminism.’ The final element identified a more focused political significance for the movement as ‘the cloak of all those elements who hate the New Deal, from Big Business to the Labour Extremists.’5
The former provided key leaders of America First including Douglas Stuart Jr., son of the Vice-President of Quaker Oats and General Robert E. Wood, the head of Sears Roebuck. SOE’s analysis of AFC’s National Committee identified several ‘basic groups of opinion’ which ‘appear everywhere throughout the national organizations rubbing shoulders with less reputable elements.’
a. The most important is Chicago Big Business.
b. Prominent members of the Republican Party, and leaders of opposition to the New Deal.
c. The pacificism of Quakers, intellectuals, and liberal philanthropists. (Note the university connection).
d. Extreme left wing opposition of Roosevelt as represented by LEWIS.
e. The anti-Semitic Fascism of retired generals and ex-servicemen
f. Emotional Mothers.6
SOE saw the East Coast AFC as ‘more intellectual and left-wing’ while in the Mid-West, the ‘real centre of the movement’, it was ‘strongly right wing.’ The West Coast and South were ‘the scenes of the penetration of America First by the lunatic fringe, and strong elements of the Bund.’7
The German-American Bund was the main Nazi organisation in the US. SOE concluded that ‘It is possible to find many traces of minor Nazis in the ranks of America First, and the total evidence serves to discredit the movement. But the Nazi link is only one of the several diverse elements which together constitute America First.’ Nazi money was ‘not decisive. There is plenty of big American isolationist money.’8
By November 1941, SOE feared that America First might provide ‘the nucleus of a future isolationist party.’
a. The Old Guard of America First WOOD, MORTON and HAMMOND, are opposed to the development of America First into a political party. They have all announced their intention of withdrawing from AFC in the event of the U.S.A. officially entering the war.
b. This would mean both a crisis in leadership and organization within AFC. Would LINDBERGH and WHEELER attempt to maintain an organized opposition to participation in the war?
c. It is significant that the first big man on the National Committee to resign, Edward J. RYERSON has clearly stated the view of the Old Guard on the limits of legitimate opposition.
d. The danger therefore is that, with the more reputable elements removed from the organization, the remainder would constitute an extremist opposition party justifying its existence on the plea of the right of opposition in a democratic society in time of war, but in reality forming the nucleus of a Fascist party aiming at the Presidential election of 1944.
e. The recent anti-semitic lead given by LINDBERGH may be a deliberate attempt to drive the more reputable elements from the movement.9
The report’s conclusion denounced America First as ‘the raw material of American Fascism,’
However respectable the facade and a strong section of the membership may be, it has become the haven of the crooks and cranks of the American political scene and the instrument of the ambition of a small group of men playing for the highest stakes of all - the capture of the machinery of government.10
The report does not deal with counter-action, but many of the press cuttings in its appendices probably owed something to British influence. SOE America was part of the complex of agencies based at British Security Co-ordination in New York. A July 1941 account of its organisation shows that its propaganda work was primarily carried out through contacts with friendly journalists such as Dorothy Thompson and Walter Winchell, and through an array of interventionist groups, including the Friends of Democracy and the Fight for Freedom Committee, which SOE claimed as front organisations.11
In the end, however, America First’s demise owed less to British propaganda than to Axis action. Japan’s attack on American territory and Germany’s declaration of war cut the ground from under any movement of the kind which SOE feared.
America First dissolved and its leaders gave their support to a war effort which portended the brief global ascendancy of Roosevelt’s New Deal politics. In Europe and America, leadership on the centre-right devolved on those who could claim early support for the allied cause, evading the labels of isolationist, appeaser or collaborator.
The breakdown of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union saw Roosevelt’s ambitious agenda refashioned as Truman’s Cold War liberalism. Anti-communism provided the isolationist right with an opportunity for rehabilitation. Yet it retained its hostility to interventionist institutions even as those institutions were redirected to fight the Eastern Bloc. Joe McCarthy’s attack on the CIA may be the paradigmatic example of this.
Though the isolationist strand on the American right has always been significant, it did not achieve national political leadership until the Trump era. A glance through the SOE file suggests significant continuities with the latter-day America First movement, both personal and political.
Among the former was William H. Regnery, identified by SOE as the one important member of the original AFC with German connections.12 His son Henry would become the most important publisher of post-war American conservatism, and his grandson, William Regnery II, was a key funder of the 21st Century Alt Right.13
Among the political threads are a brand of isolationism that is quite compatible with annexations and interventions within the Western Hemisphere. One of the organisations allied to the AFC was the Islands for War Debts Committee, which coveted British colonial possessions in the Caribbean and was financed by Nazi agent George Viereck.14
The AFC’s General Wood had significant Central American interests as a director of United Fruit and Panama Railroad Company.15 In making his case against intervention in the European war, Wood told the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations that ‘I would unhesitatingly say to throw everything we have into a war to defend the United States of our own sphere of influence, which is the North American continent and part, if not all, of the South American continent.’16
One of his few points of agreement with the Roosevelt administration was on its commitment to defend Greenland from Germany as part of the Western Hemisphere.17
The AFC’s most prominent spokesman, Charles Lindbergh believed that ‘the answer is not in war among Western nations but in sharing influence and empire among a sufficient number of peoples.’18
If this was an argument for multipolarity it was not a case for multilateralism. In a 1940 article for the Atlantic Monthly, Lindbergh condemned the League of Nations on the grounds that ‘no system of representation can succeed in which the voice of weakness is equal to the voice of strength.’19
The United Nations would attempt to address that criticism by the institution of permanent membership of the Security Council for the great powers. The first step to the UN’s creation took place even before US entry into the war, at the August 1941 conference where Roosevelt and Churchill issued the declaration that became known as the Atlantic Charter.
The first article of the charter foreswore territorial aggrandisement, and it went on to guarantee self-determination for all peoples. Axis conquests were the immediate object of this pledge, but it was quickly taken up by colonised peoples everywhere, including in the colonies of Britain and America.
The fleeting wartime alliance of New Deal America, Coalition Britain and Stalin’s Soviet Union defined the imagination of the American far right long after it had broken up. The institutions which emerged from the Atlantic Charter’s vision of international collaboration provide much of the content behind the bugbear of ‘globalism.’
This is perhaps not well understood in the UK. British conservative historian Andrew Roberts last year accused Churchill’s critics on the American right of ‘ignorance and disregard for historical fact.’20 He was correct, but the errors he identified were the product of a deeper ideological opposition. On the early evidence of Trump’s second term, the kernel of America First is still a movement against the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
Nigel Huddleston MP, X, 21 January 2025,
Krishnadev Kalamur, A Short History of ‘America First’, The Atlantic, 21 January 2017.
U.S.A. - America First Committee, Special Operations Executive, REPORT No. SO/540, 19 November 1941. UK National Archives HS8/54. Hereafter ‘SO/540’.
SO/540, p.1.
SO/540, pp.2-3.
SO/540, p.10.
SO/540, p.16.
SO/540, p.21.
SO/540, pp.29-30.
SO/540, pp.30.
S. Morrell, SO1 New York Organisation, 10 July 1941, UK National Archives FO 898/103. SO1 was the propaganda arm of SOE, which during 1941 was detached to form the nucleus of the Political Warfare Executive.
SO/540, pp.30.
Clay Risen, William H. Regnery II, 80, Dies; Bankrolled the Rise of the Alt-Right, New York Times, 16 July 2021.
SO/540, pp.18.
SO/540, p.5.
GENERAL ROBERT E. WOOD’S SPEECH TO THE CHICAGO COUNCIL OF FOREIGN RELATIONS - OCTOBER 15TH 1940. Archived in UK National Archives HS8/54.
Interview given by General Robert E. Wood to ‘P.M.’ May 25th, 1941. Archived in UK National Archives HS8/54.
Cited in P.M., 5 October 1941. Archived in UK National Archives HS8/54.
Cited in P.M., 5 October 1941. Archived in UK National Archives HS8/54.
Andrew Roberts, No, Churchill Was Not the Villain, Washington Free Beacon, 6 September 2024.
Nicely done, Tom. Well told. Put a fresh and newly relevant face on a story that’s largely forgotten.
Stark parallels between the SOE's assessment of America First thinking at the time and the Trump 2.0 regime today. A very illuminating read, Tom!