Title: Behold, America
Rating: 3 Stars
The theme of this book is the struggle in the US between two ideas. One is the American Dream. The other is America First. Although the book did a good job discussing the background of each of these two ideas, I really didn’t get a great sense of the interplay between them.
The history behind both ideas is interesting. On the one hand, when we think about the American Dream, we probably think of it as something that germinated back in the early founding father days of our country. When we think about America First, a lot of people probably think about Donald Trump. Those who have a bit more knowledge of history will think about Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee in the time immediately before the start of World War II.
What’s actually surprising is that, according to Churchwell, both ideas came to fruition in more or less about the same period of time. They both sprang up around the turn of the twentieth century. The American Dream is much younger than most people think while America First is much older.
The American Dream, as an idea, has gone through multiple variations. In the early days, the American Dream was used primarily as rhetoric. The American Dream could refer to giving everyone land to farm. It could refer to acquiring an education. It was used as the term for an aspiration.
Churchwell gives a lot of credit to a columnist named Walter Lippman. Now pretty much lost to history, he was a significant intellectual force for some sixty years. In the 1910s, he began to put out the idea that the US should stand for larger concepts and be a beacon for other countries. It was Lippmann that first began to associate the American Dream with noble concepts like liberty, justice, and equality for all.
From these high ideals, the 1920s, with its dramatic rise in stock prices, sketchy business practices, government scandals, and growth in inequality, came along and knocked the American Dream askew. Typified by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the emphasis became more on personal consumption as opposed to abstract ideas like equality for all. With the collapse of the economy during The Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal brought back some of Lippmann’s high ideals. In the 1980s, the pendulum swung again and still hasn’t swung back. In the year 2022, we lionize Jeff Bezos while his employees are treated like machines and have to rely on government assistance for food. Free enterprise is prioritized above social justice. That is the American Dream in which we continue to live.
America First has not gone through similar gyrations. From the beginning, the movement was racist, anti-immigration, and anti-Semitic. It espoused the single drop theory, where if you weren’t of pure Anglo Saxon blood, you weren’t a real American. Thanks to Tucker Carlson and a mass shooting, replacement theory has been all over our news. In the world of racism, there really is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the replacement theory was alive and thriving.
It wasn’t always just a Republican position. At one time, both parties espoused America First. In the 1916 election, both the Democratic Woodrow Wilson and the Republican Charles Evan Hughes claimed the mantle of America First. What makes this even more jarring to me is that you think of Woodrow Wilson as this great liberal progressive thinker that wanted to create a new world order in the aftermath of World War I and Charles Evan Hughes later became a Supreme Court Justice. Unfortunately, if you scratch just a little bit at the exterior of Wilson, you’ll find a hard core unrepentant racist, so I shouldn’t have been too surprised.
Even more bizarrely, it was apparently Woodrow Wilson that first invented the term ‘Fake News’. You wouldn’t think that there’d be that many connections between the internationalist Wilson and the isolationist Donald Trump, but you’d be wrong.
One thing that’s interesting about reading, what I like to call, a near past history is that you learn odd things like Wilson inventing the term Fake News. I like to think that I know about the twentieth century, but I had no idea. This book had several other such facts that knocked me for a loop.
Dorothy Thompson was another columnist that had a pretty long run. Now largely known as the most scintillating quipster at the the ever so quippy Algonquin Table, she’s most famous for her bon mots (eg, asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she said “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”).
Well, in her columns she was a formidable anti-fascist. She fearlessly took on Charles Lindbergh. After he visited Hitler, Lindbergh became convinced that the US could never win a war against Germany. Wanting to make sure that the ‘white’ (ie superior) people didn’t destroy themselves, he toured the country preaching racist America First principles. In her columns, Thompson repeatedly attacked him, accused him of not just being a fascist, but having designs of being an American Hitler. It was a side of her that I never knew.
This is a deeper cut, but Hugo Black was a significant force on the Warren Supreme Court. He sided with many of the important decisions of the Warren Court that greatly expanded our civil rights. This is interesting because, during his confirmation, his previous membership in the Ku Klux Klan was brought out. He admitted it but claimed to no longer be a member. First of all, his journey from Klansman to civil rights judge is pretty amazing. Secondly, say what you will about Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett, even Donald Trump wouldn’t dare to nominate a known Klansman to the Supreme Court. Although if somehow he manages to win in 2024, all bets are off.
Speaking of Trump, the America First sections are essentially a nonstop sub tweet at Donald Trump. Whenever Churchwell talks about some of the ideas and practices of America First in the past, she does everything but draw a big red line to a picture of Donald Trump.
This brings me to one of the more minor pieces of trivia that I found interesting / amusing. Most people know that Donald Trump got his start by inheriting the business from his father Fred Trump. Well, way back in the 1920s, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally. He has never been identified as a member of the Klan, but there were relatively few people (less than ten) arrested at this rally, and the others were all Klan members, so maybe you can draw an inference.
Fred Trump made his fortune in apartment buildings. The Trumps (both Fred and Donald) were notorious for illegally refusing to rent to people of color. That’s obviously horrible, but one weird thing did come out of it.
Woody Guthrie actually wrote a song about Fred Trump’s housing. The song was called “Old Man Trump”. Here is the first verse:
I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
I find it amazing that one of the great legends in radical folk music wrote a diss track going after Donald Trump’s father.
This machine kills fascists indeed!
dorkenstein 