Franklin Roosevelt’s battle with the famous aviator and anti-interventionist Charles Lindbergh is often presented as a morality play showing Roosevelt to be the long-sighted hero in the war on fascism. Since then, Democrats have lobbed charges of fascism against Republicans, the latest being Donald Trump.

So, one wonders at the timing of two books this year. On September 24, came the latest of thirty books by history professor H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War, which followed the June 4, release of Awakening the Spirit of America: FDR’s War of Words with Charles Lindbergh — and the Battle to Save Democracy by former director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Paul M. Sparrow.
But what Lindbergh got wrong was the American people: they had few “regrets” about interventionism and becoming a superpower.
Brands’s use of the antagonists’ speeches, correspondence, and journals to weave a storyline, some say, offers an unfiltered objective account.
But the technique deceives. Brands remains the FDR fanboy he was in his earlier book, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008), where he wondered, “What traumas or epiphanies had transformed a Hudson Valley patrician into a champion of the common people of America?”
And where he also marveled at how the “signature line of his first inaugural address — that the only thing America had to fear was fear itself — spoken in his confident tenor, had “flashed across the radio waves to every neighborhood, village, and hamlet in the country” and “soothed the worst of the fears and allowed the president and Congress to pull the financial system back from the brink.”
In America First, Brands briefly describes Lindbergh’s upbringing as the son of an anti-interventionist (World War I) Minnesota Congressman, his technical precocity, his solitariness, the first world-famous solo transatlantic flight in 1927, and the kidnapping and m...