jan 1, 1940 - AFC founded

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AFC: A committee organized by isolationists in 1940 to oppose the entrance of the United States into World War II. The membership of the committee included senators, journalists, and publishers and such prominent national figures as the aviator Charles Lindbergh. (p. 740)


What Time magazine would later call America’s “thousand-step road to war” had already begun. In 1939, after a bitter battle in Congress, Roosevelt won a change in the neutrality laws to allow the Allies to buy arms as well as nonmilitary goods on a cash-and-carry basis. Interventionists, led by journalist William Allen White and his Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, became increasingly vocal in 1940 as the war in Europe escalated. In response, isolationists formed the America First Committee (AFC), whose 800,000 members included journalists and publishers, as well as U.S. senators such as Gerald Nye and such prominent national figures as Lindbergh. Urging the nation to stay out of the war, the AFC held rallies across the United States, and its posters, brochures, and broadsides warning against American involvement in Europe suffused many parts of the country, especially the Midwest. The aviator Lindbergh’s speeches opposing U.S. involvement accused “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration” of leading the nation into an unpopular war, also identifying “capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals” as prominent among the “war agitators.”

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