Political slogans rarely last. “America First” has had several lives. It has served a Democratic president urging neutrality, a Republican senator opposing the League of Nations, a mass movement against entry into the Second World War, an insurgent candidate in the 1990s and a Republican president elected twice. Each used the same words for different ends, and the phrase’s history has become part of the argument about it.
1915: A Neutral’s Motto
With war raging in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson told an Associated Press luncheon in New York in April 1915 that the nation’s whole duty “for the present” was summed up in the motto “America first.” He meant readiness, not withdrawal. Americans, he said, should think of America before Europe so that the country would be fit to be Europe’s friend when the fighting ended. Two years later the United States entered the war.
1920: Harding and the League
After the war the phrase crossed to the other party and to a new argument. Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, opposing American membership in the League of Nations as Wilson had negotiated it, told a New York audience in January 1920 that Americans should “think of America first.” As the Republican nominee he made the phrase a campaign theme alongside his promise of a return to “normalcy,” and he won in a landslide. In Harding’s usage the phrase meant independence of action and caution about permanent foreign commitments, not a withdrawal from diplomacy: his administration convened the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922 on limiting naval arms.
1940: The Committee and Its Shadow
The phrase acquired its most troubling associations on the eve of the Second World War. Organized in 1940 by Yale law students and chaired by Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck, the America First Committee became the most prominent organization opposing American entry into the war. It grew to more than 450 chapters and an estimated 800,000 or more members, and its speakers included senators from both parties. Its supporters argued that a well-defended America could not be successfully attacked and that another European war would cost American lives and liberties.
Its best-known speaker was the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. At an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, Lindbergh named the British, American Jews and the Roosevelt administration as the groups pressing the country toward war. The speech drew on antisemitic claims about Jewish influence and was condemned in the press and by political leaders across the spectrum. Three months later, days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the committee voted to dissolve.
The 1990s: A Revival
Half a century later, the commentator Patrick J. Buchanan revived the phrase in his challenges for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He joined opposition to free-trade agreements and high levels of immigration with skepticism of foreign intervention after the Cold War. Buchanan won the 1996 New Hampshire primary but never the nomination. Critics, including William F. Buckley Jr., faulted some of his earlier statements as antisemitic, a charge Buchanan rejected.
2016: A Governing Theme
Donald J. Trump accepted the label in a March 2016 interview, saying he was not an isolationist, and made it the central theme of his first major foreign-policy address that April. The Anti-Defamation League urged him to drop the phrase because of its history. Instead, his 2017 inaugural address declared: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.” In office he applied the phrase to trade, immigration, burden-sharing among allies and skepticism of open-ended military commitments. At Davos in 2018 he offered his own gloss to an international audience.
“As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like the leaders of other countries should put their country first also. But America first does not mean America alone.”
Two Readings
Supporters read America First as a plain statement of what every government owes its citizens: trade agreements, immigration policy and foreign commitments should be judged by whether they serve Americans. They note that Wilson and Harding used the phrase before the committee existed, that it has no necessary connection to the prejudice voiced in 1941, and that the policies pursued under it have included alliance commitments, the Abraham Accords and pressure on allies to share the cost of defense.
Critics hear an echo of 1940–41 and argue that the phrase signals a retreat from the alliances and open trade that helped the United States win the Cold War. Others accept the principle that policy should serve Americans but argue that alliances and trade are themselves among the nation’s interests, so that the real question is how, not whether, to put America first.
What the Record Shows
History does not settle the argument, but it clarifies it. The same words have stood for neutrality, national independence, noninterventionism, economic nationalism and a governing program, depending on who used them and when. The policies carried out under the phrase since 2017 can be judged on their merits, and our America First Archive sets out the primary documents and the principal disagreements side by side.