What is the historical origin of the America First movement and when was it founded?
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Executive summary
The historical America First movement traces to an organized isolationist campaign launched in 1940, when a group of Yale students and other noninterventionists founded the America First Committee on September 4, 1940, to oppose U.S. entry into World War II [1] [2] [3]. The phrase "America First" has deeper and contested roots in earlier nativist and isolationist currents of the 1920s–1930s and has been repurposed in the 21st century by political actors and new organizations, including groups founded around 2020 [4] [5] [6].
1. The concrete founding: September 4, 1940, and the America First Committee
The movement most historians mean by "America First" began as the America First Committee (AFC), which convened on September 4, 1940, founded by Yale Law students including R. Douglas Stuart Jr. with other organizers such as Kingman Brewster Jr., and quickly crystallized into a nationwide anti-intervention pressure group opposing aid that might drag the United States into war [1] [7] [2]. The AFC claimed broad support—reportedly hundreds of thousands of sympathizers and as many as 800,000 paying members across hundreds of chapters—and it became the principal organized voice of U.S. noninterventionism in 1940–41 [5] [2] [3].
2. Origins before 1940: isolationism, nativism, and competing histories
While the AFC’s formal founding is a single date in 1940, the "America First" idea drew on longer currents of interwar isolationism, nativism, and post–World War I retrenchment in American public life; scholars note that variants of the phrase and the sentiment were in circulation during the 1920s and 1930s and were sometimes used by nativist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, contributing to later controversy over the term [4] [8]. That longer lineage means historians treat the 1940 committee as both a culmination of earlier noninterventionist sentiment and as a distinct, highly visible organization with its own leadership and tactics [3] [7].
3. What the 1940 movement stood for — and why it became controversial
The AFC argued that a well-defended United States could avoid foreign entanglements and that measures such as destroyers-for-bases or Lend-Lease risked pulling America into war; prominent spokesmen like Charles Lindbergh lent celebrity to the cause while also drawing accusations of anti‑Semitic and pro‑German bias that helped make the movement controversial and historically fraught [1] [3] [9]. Major institutions and historians have documented how strains of xenophobia and antisemitism appeared in parts of the movement’s rhetoric and constituency, even as the committee also attracted mainstream political figures and a wide array of supporters [5] [2] [7].
4. Aftermath, dissolution, and the phrase’s afterlife
The AFC dissolved after the United States entered World War II, but the slogan and its associations never entirely disappeared; subsequent debates about American foreign policy periodically resurrected the phrase "America First" and its baggage, and contemporary politicians’ reuse of the label—most visibly in the 2016 presidential campaign and administration—prompted renewed scrutiny of the 1940 origins and the phrase’s unsavory associations [5] [8]. Commentators and historians emphasize that while policy parallels can be debated, the original AFC’s public record and controversies remain the primary reference point for evaluating modern invocations [8] [4].
5. New organizations and modern claims to the name
In the 2020s the name has been adopted by different actors who claim lineage or ideological affinity: for example, the America First Foundation — associated with Nicholas J. Fuentes and founded in 2020 — explicitly positions itself as carrying forward a version of the modern "America First" political agenda, illustrating how the phrase has been repurposed and rebranded in multiple, often ideologically divergent, ways [6] [10]. Reporting and primary-source material show that the label now covers a wide spectrum—from historical scholarship about the AFC to contemporary political movements—making careful distinctions essential when discussing "America First" in any era [5] [4].