Early in World War II, a battle of words was fought by an unlikely political alliance headquartered in Chicago and determined to keep the United States out of the conflict. The message received a quick and enthusiastic response. “From early yesterday until late last night the four telephones (another will be installed today) rang constantly. Postmen dumped bags of mail on the floor every few minutes. Messenger boys delivered batches of telegrams. Long eager lines stood outside waiting to sign petitions,” a Tribune reporter wrote after visiting the local chapter of the America First Committee at 80 E. Jackson Blvd. The Tribune, led by isolationist publisher Robert McCormick, painted a politically tinged word-picture of the America Firsters’ opponents on Sept. 7, 1940: “It will be interesting to watch the attempts of the New Dealers, Washington and Long Island cookie pushers, and other war mongers to try to smear the members of the newly formed America First Committee with their customary cries of ‘fifth columnist’ ‘appeaser’ and ‘Nazi’.” The putdown of New Dealers reflected the anti-war group’s birth as a reaction to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to strengthen Great Britain’s resistance to Adolf Hitler. The previous year, the Nazi dictator’s armies conquered Poland, and in the spring of 1940 forced France to surrender.  Britain’s army barely escaped destruction by being withdrawn from Europe.  Forced to leave its equipment behind, it was rearmed by the United States. America must be “the arsenal of Democracy,” FDR argued. America First’s members thought the country was being sucked willy-nilly into a second World War, barely two decades after the first one ended in 1919. At his 2017 inauguration, Donald Trump echoed the 1940s anti-war movement.  “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First,” he promised. Despite their differences, the America First movement that flourished before World War II and Trump’s stated vision share a similar belief: Other nations make chumps of us, with help from home-grown saboteurs. Trump calls them the “deep state.” In 1941, the Tribune proclaimed them “Chicago’s “professional bleeding hearts.” America First has been a rallying cry for politicians and others of various stripes dating back to at least 1850. President Woodrow Wilson used it to lay out a plan for America’s neutrality on the eve of World War I. Despite that, the country was eventually dragged into the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” as Wilson put it. Only two decades later, Europe was again at war. The America First Committee was started in 1940 by a group of Yale Law School students opposed to the U.S. entering the war in Europe. Their leader had establishment credentials: Robert Douglas Stuart Jr.’s  father was vice president of Quaker Oats. Barbara Edwards, wife of America First Committee founder Robert D. Stuart Jr., holds a poster in early 1941. (Chicago Herald-American) That connection yielded rent-free space in Quaker Oats offices in the Chicago Board of Trade Building.  The America First movement sent out birth announcements and took out a full-page ad in The New York Times: “Peace at home or war abroad? You can decide if you act now.” Supporters of U.S. aid to Britain had their own group, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, led by famed Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White.  Cracks began to appear in the group, and White’s reportedly saying “The Yanks aren’t coming,” a twist on a rallying cry from World War I. America First, on the other hand, was having great success. At its peak, it claimed 450 chapters and up to 850,000 members. Each time FDR extended aid to England, America First got an opportunity to recruit. On Dec. 17, 1940, Roosevelt belatedly announced what British negotiators were doing in the White House. Britain was bankrupt. So payment for  U.S. armaments would be switched from “cash and carry” to “lend lease,” a riff on retail merchants’ buy-now, pay-later promotions. Two days later, America First staged a rally that filled Orchestra Hall and left 2,000 unable to get in. John T. Flynn, “a noted economist and writer,” got the crowd on its feet when he denounced a “plot” by officials in Washington and Britain as well as White’s committee to get the U.S. into World War II. Flynn several years later wrote “The Truth About Pearl Harbor,” claiming FDR knew the Japanese were planning the attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii, but didn’t alert its defenders because the Japanese aggression would serve his purpose of getting America into World  War II. Col. McCormick so admired Flynn’s lengthy report that he printed all of it in one edition of the Tribune, beginning on the front page. McCormick, a conservative to the core, was joined by Robert Hutchins, the University of Chicago’s liberal president, in supporting the America First movement. Other backers included, Norman Thomas, the Socialist party’s perennial presidential candidate, and retired Brig. Gen. Robert Wood, who headed the Chicago chapter of America First. Wood was the chairman of Sears Roebuck and Co., a veritable temple of capitalism. Henry Ford, an antisemitic automobile mogul, was an America Firster, as was Lessing Rosenwald, the son of Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist who led Sears for many years. But Lessing Rosenwald resigned when Ford joined as the America First Committee struggled against accusations of antisemitism and support from Nazis. America First’s efforts to keep America out of the war in Europe didn’t appeal to American Jews who saw German Jews being persecuted. But those attacks resonated with antisemites eager to join the anti-war movement. Charles Lindbergh tells an overflow crowd of 20,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, that the alternative to a negotiated peace in Europe is “either a Hitler victory or a prostrate Europe, and possibly a prostrate America as well.” He spoke June 20, 1941, under the auspices of the America First Committee. (Frank Filan/AP) Charles Lindbergh’s appointment as the committee’s spokesman was PR disaster for America First. The first aviator to fly over the Atlantic Ocean was a global hero. The Nazis in Germany gave Lindbergh a medal in 1938, and he was widely seen as an antisemite and suspected of harboring pro-Nazi sympathies In September 1941, he spoke at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, and said the three main agitators for war were “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” “No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved,” he said. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Three months later, the issue was mooted. People attend an America First Committee rally in May 1941 at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. (Chicago Herald-American) “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United  States and the Japanese Empire,“  FDR said the following day.  A day later, the isolationist Tribune changed its tune with an editorial headline, “Japan’s Perfidy Unites the American People.” Two days after that, the America First Committee closed up shop. The America First movement was effectively dead. It has been resurrected by politicians only occasionally in the years since, most recently when former President Trump made it his war cry. Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at [email protected] and [email protected]. 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