PROGRAM

Roosevelt House is pleased to present bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands on his new book, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War. In this gripping chronicle, Brands sheds light on a crucial tipping point in American history—and depicts the making of a legendary president. The author will be in conversation with Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House Harold Holzer.

Insightful, immersive, and topical, America First narrates the fierce debate over America’s role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Roosevelt, who leaned toward intervention, and his isolationist opponent, aviator Charles Lindbergh. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 launched a momentous period of decision-making for the United States: with fascism rampant abroad, should America take responsibility for its defeat?

In the years following Lindbergh’s famed 1927 flight across the Atlantic, he had emerged as a vocal critic of American involvement overseas—rallying Americans against foreign war as the leading spokesman for the America First Committee. While Hitler advanced across Europe, President Roosevelt struggled to turn the tide of public opinion. With great effort and political acumen, FDR readied the country for war—and pushed the nation onto the world stage, where it has stayed ever since.

“Brands’ conclusion about foreign policy puts the debate [over isolationism] in a broader context, relevant to Americans today,” according to Booklist. And, according to previous Roosevelt House guest Charles Kupchan, author of Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World, Brands’ book “provides critical historical insight into the heated debate currently building between internationalists and today’s America First isolationists.”

H.W. Brands is the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written more than a dozen biographies and histories, including The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America; Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics; Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution; The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War; and Reagan: The Life, which he appeared at Roosevelt House to discuss in 2015. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Rooseveltand The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.

Harold Holzer has served since 2015 as the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. A prolific author with more than 50 books to his credit, he won the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Prize for his Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. His most recent book is Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.