NEWS from one hundred years ago: AMERICA FIRST

The Free Lance editorialises today about the landslide victory just won by Warren Harding, leader of the Republican Party, in the presidential election in the United States. The editorial says that this outcome is dismaying. The new president is so strongly isolationist that he calls for a foreign policy based on the principle of ‘America First.’ The United States, says the editorial, will ‘be a quitter so far as her post-war responsibilities ... are concerned.’ France and Britain by themselves ‘cannot possibly undertake the duty of acting the part of policemen to the whole of Europe, to say nothing of a large party of Asia — of the world, in fact.’ American foreign policy will become ‘a self-contained self-centred policy of “Number One”.’
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Free Lance, 10 November 1920