[3] The AFC principally supported isolationism for its own sake, and its varied coalition included Republicans, Democrats, farmers, industrialists, communists, anti-communists, students, and journalists – however, it was controversial for the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist views of some of its most prominent speakers, leaders, and members.

The group fervently opposed measures for the British advanced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt such as the destroyers-for-bases deal and the Lend-Lease bill, but failed in its efforts to block them.

The AFC was founded by Yale Law School student R. Douglas Stuart Jr., a Princeton graduate who was heir to the Quaker Oats Company fortune, and headed by Robert E. Wood, a retired U.S. Army general who was chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Its highest-profile early member was Henry Ford, the automotive pioneer and notorious anti-Semite, who resigned in controversy.

Historian Susan Dunn has concluded that, "Though most of its members were probably patriotic, well-meaning, and honest in their efforts, the AFC would never be able to purge itself of the taint of anti-Semitism.

"[6] American isolationism of the late 1930s had many adherents, and as historian Susan Dunn has written, "isolationists and anti-interventionists came in all stripes and colors—ideological, economic, ethnic, geographical.

There were a potpourri of affiliations and beliefs: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, socialists, communists, anti-communists, radicals, pacifists, and simple F.D.R.-haters.

during the early Great Depression as part of the New Deal programs combating the bad economic conditions for a while before President Roosevelt discharged him in 1934.

[6] America First chose retired Brigadier General Robert E. Wood, the 61-year-old chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co., to preside over the committee.

[19] At its peak, America First claimed 800,000–850,000 members in 450 chapters, making the AFC one of the largest anti-war organizations in the history of the United States.

[21] There were almost no AFC chapters in the American South, where traditions of involvement in the military and ancestral ties to the United Kingdom (Great Britain) were both strong.

[24] Following his resignation as ambassador to the Court of St. James's in late 1940, the increasingly isolationist, anti-British, and defeatist Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was offered the chance to head the America First Committee.

[25] Members of the national committee included: advertising executive Chester Bowles, diplomat William Richards Castle Jr., journalist John T. Flynn, writer and socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, military officer and politician Hanford MacNider, novelist Kathleen Norris, New Deal administrator George Peek, and World War I flying ace and later aviation executive Eddie Rickenbacker.

On January 11, 1941, the day after Roosevelt's Lend-Lease bill was submitted to the United States Congress, Wood promised AFC opposition "with all the vigor it can exert.

"[32] America First staunchly opposed the convoying of ships involving the U.S. Navy, believing that any exchange of fire with German forces would likely pull the United States into the war.

[1] The America First Committee was not a pacifist organization, however, and it based its beliefs around the aim that the United States would embody preparedness with a modern, mechanized army and a navy that would be strong in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

[36] The world-famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh was admired in Germany and was allowed to see the buildup of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, in 1937.

He was impressed by its strength and secretly reported his findings to the General Staff of the United States Army, warning them that the U.S. had fallen behind and that it must urgently build up its aviation.

[39] Voicing his belief that people of Northern and Western European descent were the safeguards of civilization against Asia (which included the Soviet Union),[40] his speech argued that instead of fighting, all of Europe and the United States should "defend the white race against foreign invasion".

"[4] Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie criticized the speech as "the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.

[19] During the period after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, most American Communists were opposed to the United States entering World War II, and they tried to infiltrate or take over America First.

[47][verification needed] After June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, they reversed positions and denounced the AFC as a Nazi front, a group infiltrated by German agents.

The aviator and orator Laura Ingalls' pro-Nazi rhetoric and straight-armed Nazi salutes on her America First speaking tour worried the group's leadership, but they allowed her to continue because of praise from local chapters where she had spoken.

[49][50] When Ingalls was arrested in December 1941 and put on trial for being an unregistered Nazi agent, the prosecution revealed that her handler, German diplomat Ulrich Freiherr von Gienanth, had encouraged her to participate in AFC activities.

[51] Historian Alexander DeConde wrote, "Most of the America First supporters were middlewestern Republicans who distrusted the President for various reasons, but it was not a purely sectional organization or partisan political movement.

[52] After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, AFC canceled a rally with Lindbergh at Boston Garden "in view of recent critical developments,"[53] and the organization's leaders announced their support of the war effort.

On December 11, the committee leaders met and voted for dissolution,[55][56] the same day upon which Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy declared war on the United States.

Similarly, many of the leaders of local chapters volunteered for service in the U.S. armed forces; a few continued to involve themselves in anti-war actions.