America first!

by Bill Kauffman

Bill Kauffman has been described by the Washington Post as having the "pleasantly wicked touch of H. L. Mencken." In America First!: Its History, Culture, and Politics, he examines the nineteenth-century underpinnings and the political eruptions of twentieth-century American nationalism, which promises to be the fault line along which policies of the next century will emerge. Kauffman recounts a fascinating story of nativist American culture, beginning with the populism of Hannibal Hamlin Garland and Amos R. E. Pinchot, which was distinguished by its opposition to militarism, big government, and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and by its promotion of the common man. Even after the rise of the New Deal, which broadly expanded the power of government, and the growth of the American Empire, the populist song continues to be sung by many in this country: they decry, even at the risk of being called xenophobes, isolationists, and crackpots, what they see as reckless immigratio