Her tale will probably upend what we thought we knew about America and offers history’s traditional consolation of nothing new under the sun. The past, indeed, turns out to be not only similar in many ways, but sometimes much worse and more disquieting ... It’s a ripping yarn ('a genealogy of national conversations,' says Churchwell), which puts Trump and Trumpism in a category that is perhaps less sinister than we might have feared and more intelligible than we might have imagined ... Behold, America is an enthralling book, almost a primer for the ferocious dialectic of U.S. politics, inspired by the events of 2015/16. It will no doubt take an influential place on a teeming shelf of Trump-lit. Much of its force derives from the echoes of the present it finds in the thunderous caverns of the past, blurred by the distortions of history. Passionate, well-researched and comprehensive, it is both a document of our times and a thrilling survey of a half-forgotten and neglected dimension of the American story—a tale full of sound and fury currently being narrated by an idiot.
This is a timely book. It’s also a provocative one ... Churchwell has a tendency to corral the unruliness of her material by overstating her case. Still, she’s an elegant writer, and when 'America First' and 'the American dream' come head-to-head in her book during the run-up to World War II, the unexpected (and alarming) historical coincidences begin to resonate like demented wind chimes ... Churchwell strenuously resists any implication 'that the American dream was invented as a fig leaf to protect white privilege, to obscure the racist foundations of the capitalist system in institutional slavery.' But the phrase didn’t have to be 'invented' for that purpose in order to serve as such. Her entire book argues against categorical defenses like hers. Behold, America illuminates how much history takes place in the gap between what people say and what they do.
Ms. Churchwell delivers more than an exercise in literary archaeology. In crisp prose driven by impressive research in period newspapers, speeches and correspondence, she shows Americans wrestling over the very meaning of their nation ... [Churchwell's] enlightening account is a valuable contribution to the never-ending debate over fundamental American values and a provocative reminder that troubling impulses may lurk beneath seemingly anodyne sloganeering and inspiring rhetoric.
Her study of the changing meanings of the 'American Dream' and 'America First' has the aura of too much time spent in the searchable databases of old newspapers now temptingly available to us, and too little listening to the voices of real people, whether on the campaign trail or anywhere else. Nonetheless, despite a sea of quotations...it’s clear where Churchwell’s political passion is, and her detailed genealogy of 'America First' becomes, indirectly, something of a history of twentieth-century American racism.
Ms. Churchwell...provides an informative, and often surprising, history of these two tropes (and others) that dominate political discourse in the era of Donald Trump. Behold, America is at its best when Ms. Churchwell excavates the origins of our iconic phrases ... Ms. Churchwell moves, rather abruptly, from World War II to 2016. She is eager to get Donald Trump in her crosshairs. Her present-oriented ideological agenda is clear throughout Behold, America ... These days, Sarah Churchwell concludes, 'America has inherited a story that diminishes it.'
As she weaves the twin strands of her history, shuttling between the American dream and 'America first,' Ms. Churchwell sometimes relies on tenuous connections to (and between) her yarns. Books described as 'American dream novels' (The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men) turn out not to mention the phrase at all. A juicy tale of Fred Trump, the president’s father, being arrested along with five 'avowed Klansmen' at riots in Queens in 1927 has only a tangential connection to the America-first narrative. Yet this book is timely and instructive. Mr Trump’s critics can be mildly reassured that banging on about 'America first' has plenty of precedent; yet they will also be disturbed by the nastiness of some of that history.
Churchwell has cast a wide net in her research, drawing into account not only politicians and pundits, but also journalists, novelists, ministers, and ordinary Americans. The result, appropriately enough, is a bit messy. Readers hoping for a tidy etymology will doubtless find themselves frustrated at times. But that messiness illustrates the ways in which these phrases have always been, as the historian Daniel Rodgers memorably put it, 'contested truths' ... Behold, America is the author’s effort to offer this context and to map out [the] multifarious meanings [of the phrases 'the American Dream' and 'America First']. Moving back in time from the early 21st century to the early 20th, Churchwell shows that these expressions were originally used in ways that are significantly different from our current understanding of them.
Sarah Churchwell’s book serves as a reminder that the version of American values espoused by Fred Trump’s son Donald and the hate-filled racism of last year’s 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville are not aberrant blips. Rather, racism, nativism and the quasi-fascistic call of 'America first' are part of the warp and woof of the modern American experience ... Despite her tour of America’s dark undergrowth, Churchwell’s book is not unremittingly depressing, because she also charts the early 20th-century meanings of 'the American dream,' and in the process recovers a pervasive social democratic sensibility. At bottom then, Behold, America, like so much of the best historical enquiry, is rooted in an acute sensitivity to language ... But the book is much more than a study of these catchphrases, and she deftly relates them to wider social, political and cultural developments.
It’s an impressive trawl of data, but what she does with that research worries me ... Patterns...always seem obvious when looking backwards, like footprints in the snow. Behold, America is a connect-the-dots history, or, to use another metaphor, the past viewed through the wrong end of a telescope ... the past should not be shoehorned into a convenient narrative. Had Churchwell stuck to the task of analyzing the past in its context, as historians are supposed to do, she might have produced a classic text on the American dream or America first.
Churchwell, a scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his era, reveals the nationalism and nativism that flourished during the first decades of the 20th century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and American fascist parties during the 1920s and 1930s is particularly chilling. Readers will discover that nativists and social democrats have dueled against one another through long stretches of the 20th century. Many will learn that Trump-era 'America First' concepts have deep roots ... Highly relevant to current U.S. politics, this is a great read for those seeking a scholarly examination of the origin and evolution of common and oft-cited American ideals.
Churchwell shows persuasively that, initially, ['the American dream'] signified opposing the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, since business moguls rarely cared about the well-being of society as a whole ... Churchwell demonstrates a lively intellect ... The only weakness of this book, which provides much food for thought, stems from generalizations about the way 'most Americans' define the two key concepts. That knowledge is, of course, ultimately unknowable.
In clear and graceful prose, Churchwell shows that the triumph of these later ideas was far from inevitable; her book is a reminder that 'we do not have to accept others’ narrow understanding of our meanings.'
