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Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939-1942 (Paperback)

~ (Author), Bruce Ramsey (Introduction) "In autumn 2002, when George W. Bush asked Congress for permission to wage war against Irag, there ensued a national debate..." (more)
Key Phrases: executive principle, fifty destroyers, mosquito fleet, United States, Great Britain, New York (more...)
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Product Description

In 1939 much of the world was at war. In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed America eventually would be forced to join the conflict. F.D.R. launched a campaign to rally citizens and Congress to the cause.

But not everyone agreed with the president's beliefs or methods. Roosevelt's situation was, in many respects, similar to problems faced by recent American presidents, including the Bush administration.

Garet Garrett, editorial writer for the SATURDAY EVENING POST was one of the most outspoken and articulate voices for the "America First" movement that opposed the war.

DEFEND AMERICA FIRST is a collection of Garrett's Saturday Evening Post editorials questioning FDR's decision to move the nation toward war. The editorials were selected and arranged by Seattle Times columnist Bruce Ramsey. In his introduction Ramsey points out that Garrett wasn't unwilling to fight Hitler. He was unwilling to pick a fight, especially when the country wasn't ready. Garrett's belief that FDR's actions were unconstitutional helped to fuel his vehement editorials opposing Roosevelt's foreign policy.



About the Author

Bruce Ramsey is an editorial writer for the Seattle Times.

He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 285 pages
  • Publisher: Caxton Press (March 6, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0870044338
  • ISBN-13: 978-0870044335
  • Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #383,387 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #95 in  Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Political Doctrines > Nationalism

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Garet Garrett
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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In autumn 2002, when George W. Bush asked Congress for permission to wage war against Irag, there ensued a national debate. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
executive principle, fifty destroyers, mosquito fleet
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United States, Great Britain, New York, New Deal, White House, British Empire, President Roosevelt, Lend-Lease Law, Soviet Russia, President Wilson, Western Hemisphere, Winston Churchill, Democratic Party, America First Committee, Pearl Harbor, Holy Alliance, Military Affairs, Supreme Court, Burma Road, Monroe Doctrine, Communist Party, Declaration of Independence, Declaration of the Atlantic, Saturday Evening Post, William Allen White
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A sixty year old treasure of truth uncovered, January 27, 2004
By J. Adams "History buff" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
This book is probably more relevant today than when its initial version was published over sixty years ago in a series of editorials in "The Saturday Evening Post" by Garet Garrett. If you think the current debate about whether President Bush "lied" about going to war with Iraq is interesting, you need to read this book. When FDR was running for his unprecedented third term, he won on a platform of keeping the USA out of the wars ravaging the rest of the world.
In October, just a couple weeks before the 1940 presidential election, FDR said "The United States is at peace and will remain at peace. We will not participate in foreign wars. There is no secret plan or agreement that would or could involve the nation in any war." FDR was elected on that platform, with polls showing the vast majority of Americans declining to get sucked into another war to rescue the Europeans from the marauding criminals like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, or Japan. Of course history has shown that to be an enormous lie. This book shows how FDR cleverly inched us into the war, first with "Lend Lease" then armed convoys, then the oil embargo of Japan, which forced Japan's hand and made Pearl Harbor inevitable.
Unlike the shrill accusations against Bush today, Garrett only points to established facts, and not second guessing about whether there may have been intelligence failures. And he did this while events were unfolding in a world that most of us have forgotten ever existed. The loans to the Europeans to keep them from starving to death after WW I were repudiated and American generosity was turned against us by Europeans who thought we were just greedy to want our loans repaid. When Hitler was at their throats because the UK and France and others refused to bear the cost of defending themselves, it was America's "obligation" to save them again. One can see that there were many alternatives to expending American blood and treasure and forcing the US into war, not the least of which was to let Hitler and Stalin, the greatest criminals in world history, fight themselves until they both were eliminated from the world stage. Given the ingratitude the Europeans have repeatedly shown for our sacrifice, it is an interesting scenario to contemplate.
The editorials also cover much history regarding Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations, the "America First" groups, the American Communist Party as a puppet of Stalin, and much more. The book shows the extraordinary, behind the scenes coordination of the administration and "outside" groups to march the country to a war it did not want, and thought it was voting against when it reelected FDR.
This book is a great source of many good quotes, and shows why Congress has never declared an official war since then.
One facinating sidelight is a speech given by then Attny General Robert Jackson, soon to become Supreme Court Justice, and he of the famous quote that the "Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact" advocating legislating from the bench and using judicial powers to act more like dictators than jurists. He might well be called the grandfather of the liberal judicial activists who permeate the bench today.
Of course FDR may well have been right, and leading Americans into a war they said they did not want, in spite of themselves, may be one of the reasons that democracy survived the onslaught of the totalitarian criminals who ruled Germany and the Soviet Union, but if so, FDR must also then be called the greatest liar in the history the United States, too.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Contemporary History of the U.S. Path Toward WWII, August 20, 2005
Defend America First is the perfect title of this collection of articles written by Garet Garrett. But the subtitle--The AntiWar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939-1942--can be misleading. Mr. Garrett was not an antiwar pacifist in any sense. He criticized President Roosevelt (FDR) for not spending enough to build not only the best navy in the world but two--one for each coast; and he even supported conscription.

When we look back today at the "good war" and "the greatest generation," we are blinded to what was going on in America before Pearl Harbor and before the shocking discoveries of the concentration camps. There was another war going on right here in America--a war against our Constitution and against the very economic system that made this country so great and which was being challenged by European socialism. We have never yet fully recovered from those lost battles and most citizens today are completely unaware.

Garrett was not only a very capable writer, but also a rational-thinking economist and patriotic historian. He understood the principals of our founders and their fear of the tendency toward centralization of political power. When fighting to make the world safe for "democracy," Garrett would have us ask first, what kind of democracy? `Totalitarian Democracy' and `Elective Despotism' are a couple of the thought-provoking terms I picked up from reading these articles. Garrett also scrutinizes terms and phrases used by the Roosevelt administration (such as "methods short of war") to lure the American people into an undeclared war against the consent of the governed while simultaneously provoking our enemies abroad.

This collection of articles is invaluable because of the fact that they were public and contemporary documents rather than the revisionist retrospections we have been taught ever since. How ironic that the greatest immorality of the attack on Pearl Harbor is always considered to be the fact that the attack occurred before a declaration of war. Garrett had been writing for well over a year that our president, with the complicity of an inept congress, had in fact been waging an undeclared war against Germany and Japan even though at the time we were woefully unprepared for it and that we elected our leaders based on promises to keep us out of it. Nevertheless, once the war was inevitably upon us, long before Pearl Harbor, Garrett was 100% behind the effort for victory and knew that Americans, of all the peoples of the world, would be well up to the task.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Would that Garet Garrett were alive in this hour, April 22, 2004
By Ross E. Nelson (Casselton, North Dakota United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This collection of essays by the unjustly forgotten Garrett perfectly complements his other, longer essays in "The People's Pottage." His broadsides on Franklin Roosevelt's policies and his laments for a republican (little "r") America turning imperialistic will make you see American history between the two great wars in a new light.

He also challenges conventional wisdom: for example, he maintains that essentially America aggressed against Japan and Germany first, and explains why. You may not find his facts and thesis so easy to overthrow as you might think. This man was an editorial writer for the Saturday Evening Post (which editorials make up most of this book under review) for years and didn't let the idiocies and tyrannies of his day pass unnoticed.

As a neutralist ("isolationist" being nothing more than an unfounded slur) Garrett has much to say to us today. Given our endless wars and interventions which have made the world less safe, not more, and our 700 military bases flung across the globe, we could do much worse than sit down and consider what this great writer said.

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