This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm Guy. Germanicus is here of 1940.

America First is the organization. It's a committee headed by my name Robert W. Wood,

who's head of Sears Roebuck out of Chicago. It has distinguished friends, one of them, Herbert Hoover, former president.

Teddy Roosevelt's son.

And most notably Charles Lindbergh, the lucky Lindy, the hero, the man who was, I guess you could put him together with, he's Musk, he's Glenn, he's something that we don't have anymore.

An amateur who reinvents technology and then becomes so virtuous and so aggrieved because of violence against his son that he seems untouchable.

And he travels to Europe for three years to escape the cameras who follow him around because

he's a celebrity, it's late 20s.

But he returns in 1939 because he has a message for Hap Arnold, the head of the Army Air Force,

which is that Germany's ready for war and Britain and France are not,

and it's coming. By late 40, Roosevelt has been re-elected for a third term, pretty much on the

message that we must prepare for war, and you don't change horses in midstream. Pretty much

that message.

Lindberg is preaching against him all the time in rallies in St. Louis and Minnesota and Chicago and New York.

Huge rallies, 10,000, 15,000 people outside. He's speaking on the radio routinely.

Mutual Broadcasting, NBC, CBS. He's a great copy. What he's saying is inarguable. It's not our fight. We went in the first war and we were lied to by the powers. As soon as we were gone,

they went back to scrabbling at each other for empires. There was no sense to it. Why did we lose 50,000 on the battlefield? For what?

It didn't save democracy. It wasn't a war to end war. Here's another war coming.

The Versailles Treaty was piracy. Saying things that are controversial at the time, but today

there's reason to believe it was an accurate assessment of

what happened in the First War. However, Franklin Roosevelt, a genius, understood that he was up against

a white knight in Lindbergh, and he used his office, his gift for dealing with the press. He also used the British

...