On 11 September 1941, Charles Lindbergh appeared before a cheering crowd of 8,000 supporters in the city of Des Moines in Iowa. Beyond the hall, hundreds of thousands of eager radio listeners waited at home to hear his words.
With America bitterly split over what, if any, role it should take in the conflagration enveloping Europe, Mr Lindbergh – who had become an international celebrity 14 years earlier by undertaking the first non-stop Transatlantic flight – was one of the best-known, and most controversial, leaders of the non-interventionist movement.
The former aviator, who had been publicly dubbed “the No.1 United States Nazi fellow traveller” by a member of the Roosevelt administration was becoming a celebrity.
The Des Moines speech was one of many he had delivered in the months since he’d become the national spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee five months earlier. 10,000 people had turned out to hear him in Chicago, while more than double that number has packed Madison Square Garden where a four-minute ovation and cries of “our next president” had greeted him.
President Roosevelt himself had refused to disown the attacks on Mr Lindbergh by members of his administration and had labelled his views those of a “defeatist and appeaser”. Mr Lindbergh had responded by resigning his army commission.
By the time he sat down in Iowa, Mr Lindbergh’s detractors were even more appalled by the flying ace’s pronouncements.
The drive to entangle America in Europe’s war, Mr Lindbergh declared, was being driven by the Roosevelt administration, the British and the Jews.
While being careful to express a measure of sympathy for the plight of German Jews, Mr Lindbergh nonetheless went on to fire off a series of antisemitic salvos and issue a thinly veiled threat. “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Mr Lindbergh argued. “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realise this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.” The “greatest danger” Jews posed to America, he continued, “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government”.
Mr Lindbergh’s words sparked immediate outrage. “The voice is the voice of Lindbergh, but the words are the words of Hitler,” suggested the San Francisco Chronicle. In the New York Herald Tribune, columnist Dorothy Thompson declared: “I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.” In Austin, the state legislature passed a motion saying Mr Lindbergh was no longer welcome in Texas; one member of the House of Representatives shouted “Lindbergh ought to be shipped back to Germany to live with his own people” just before the resolution was voted upon.
Mr Lindbergh had long made sly, albeit often coded, attacks against Jews. His sympathy for the Nazis was also barely disguised. Visiting the Berlin Olympics in 1936, for instance, he described Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man” who had “done much for the German people”. Two years later, the Nazis repaid the compliment when Hermann Göring presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, a gold medallion with four small swastikas given to foreigners in honour of their services to the Third Reich. Mr Lindbergh refused to return the medal when, less than a month later, the Nazis unleashed the Kristallnacht pogrom.
When war broke out in September 1939, Mr Lindbergh penned an article for Readers Digest in which he bemoaned the conflict, while advocating that the Germans turn their guns on the Soviet Union. Alongside his trenchant anti-communism, the article also made clear Mr Lindbergh’s white supremacist views (albeit an attitude not uncommon in America at this time). “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again,” he wrote. “Our civilisation depends on a united strength among ourselves … on a Western Wall or race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.”
In his diary, Mr Lindbergh was even less discreet about his views and his obsession with Jews’ alleged power shone through. “There are too many Jews in places like New York already,” he wrote. “A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.”
Mr Lindbergh’s election as president in 1940 is, of course, the conceit underlying Philip Roth’s alternative history novel “The Plot Against America”. Unaltered in content, the Des Moines speech is moved back a year by Mr Roth and comes on the eve of Mr Lindbergh’s supposed surprise nomination by the Republican party as its presidential candidate. As he wrote in the New York Times when the novel was published, Mr Roth did not believe that a President Lindbergh would necessarily have openly persecuted Jews. “What matters in my book isn't what he does,” he wrote, “but what American Jews suspect, rightly or wrongly, that he might be capable of doing given his public utterances, most specifically his vilification of the Jews” in the Des Moines speech.
Although Mr Roth believed it was not far-fetched to believe that – running on a slogan of “vote for Lindbergh or vote for war” – the celebrity aviator might have succeeded in depriving Mr Roosevelt of a third term, in reality this scenario was unlikely. An August 1939 poll, for instance, showed that less than 10 percent of American wanted Mr Lindbergh to run for the presidency and, of these, barely three-quarters believed he would actually do a good job in the White House.
Indeed, widespread doubts about his views help explain why the America First Committee had initially sought to keep its distance from Mr Lindbergh.
Founded in the spring of 1940 by a group of students at Yale University – among whom included the future president Gerald Ford; Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law of John F Kennedy, who founded the Peace Corps and was the Democrats’ candidate for the vice-presidency in 1972; and Potter Stewart, who later served for more than two decades on the Supreme Court – the committee’s non-interventionist stance attracted the backing of powerful business figures such as Robert Wood, the chair of Sears Roebuck, as well as the conservative newspaper proprietor Colonel Robert McCormick.
As historian Susan Dunn has suggested, the committee sought to “brand itself as a mainstream organisation”, and forced out controversial figures, such as the antisemitic motor manufacturer Henry Ford, from its ruling executive. At its peak, the committee, which spawned hundreds of local branches, had the support of 800,000 members. That its membership skewed heavily towards the Midwest reflected the region’s isolationist tradition, which had mostly, but not exclusively, found a home in the Republican party.
However wrong-headed, isolationism was not inherently right-wing and certainly didn’t automatically indicate sympathy towards the Nazis. Mr Lindbergh’s non-interventionist message, Jean Edward Smith suggests in his biography of FDR, “tapped into a vast reservoir of antiwar sentiment” which encompassed “Midwestern progressives, old-line socialists and Communists, Christian pacifists, cryptofascists such as Father Coughlin, and the German-American Bund”.
Nonetheless, by picking Mr Lindbergh as its leading mouthpiece, the isolationist movement eventually made a devil’s pact that threatened not just to tarnish its cause but to unleash some highly unpleasant demons into the national discourse.
To their credit, some Republicans instinctively understood the danger Mr Lindbergh posed. Wendell Wilkie, the internationalist conservative the party actually chose as its presidential candidate in 1940, described the Des Moines speech as “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”.
Mr Wilkie’s moral courage in confronting a popular figure within his party contrasts sharply with the appeasement and silence with which Republican leaders today greet the demagoguery and racism of Donald Trump. Mr Trump himself sees no trouble in embracing the America First label, with all its seamy historical baggage, and, when running for the presidency in 2016, brazenly rejected requests by the ADL not to use the term.
Joe Biden’s warning last month that, with their embrace of political violence and rejection of democracy, sections of the American right were slipping into “semi-fascism” attracted huge controversy and criticism.
But as the US writer Jonathan Katz suggested in response the president’s warning shouldn’t be ignored. “The danger is not that American fascism will necessarily or even probably turn out like Italian Fascism — or German, Syrian, Argentinian, or any other. We are not going to live a shot-for-shot remake of the Holocaust or the Second World War”,” he argued.
Instead, Mr Katz wrote, “the danger would be in the triumph of an exclusionary, violent, anti-democratic cult of personality, which by definition will not be dislodged through elections, politics, or civil debate.”
