Lindbergh's landslide victory in the 1940 U.S. presidential election

Charles A. Lindbergh’s landslide victory in the 1940 U.S. presidential election transformed the novel’s political crisis from a campaign argument into a governing reality. Lindbergh won 57 percent of the popular vote and carried 46 states, defeating Franklin D. Roosevelt in a result that the press soon recast as inevitable. His appeal rested on a powerful promise: Americans could avoid war, recover normalcy, and trust a celebrated aviator to lead them into the future without abandoning the values of the past. The victory made that promise the basis of national policy, while its consequences steadily narrowed the security and belonging of American Jews.

The result and its reception

The election was not close. Lindbergh lost only New York, Roosevelt’s home state, and Maryland, where he fell short by just 2,000 votes. In Maryland, federal workers voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt; he also retained nearly half of the Democrats’ old Southern constituency, a degree of loyalty he could not sustain elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line.

The morning after the election, disbelief prevailed, particularly among pollsters. By the following day, radio commentators and newspaper columnists were presenting the result as though it had been ordained. Their retrospective explanations turned a contingent political choice into a story of national character: voters, they argued, had declined to break the two-term tradition established by George Washington, which no earlier president had dared to challenge. That account made Lindbergh’s victory seem less like a rejection of Roosevelt’s policies than a restoration of an older American norm.

The appeal of normalcy

The explanations for Lindbergh’s success emphasized the contrast between the candidates as much as their political programs. In the aftermath of the Depression, his relative youth and graceful athleticism were set against Roosevelt’s physical impairments from polio. Lindbergh’s record-breaking long-distance flights gave him an apparently unmatched authority to guide the country into an aeronautical future; his straitlaced, old-fashioned manner reassured voters that technological change need not unsettle traditional values.

Above all, Lindbergh came to represent normalcy enlarged into a heroic national promise: a decent-looking, honest-seeming man with an ordinary voice, yet renowned for courage, command, and the ability to shape history. His capacity to transcend personal tragedy strengthened that image. The narrator’s account shows how the promise of peace could make the election feel straightforward to voters exhausted by repeated crises: if Lindbergh said there would be no war, many believed that war could be kept away. The victory thus rested not only on Lindbergh’s celebrity but on the desire to treat his personal assurance as a guarantee about the country’s future.

From electoral mandate to government policy

The new administration’s direction became clearer after the inauguration. Lindbergh traveled to Iceland to meet Adolf Hitler and, after two days of talks described as cordial, signed an understanding intended to guarantee peaceful relations between Germany and the United States. Demonstrations against the Iceland Understanding took place in a dozen American cities. Democratic congressmen who had survived the Republican landslide condemned Lindbergh for treating a murderous fascist ruler as an equal and for meeting him on an island whose democratic monarchy had already been conquered by the Nazis. The victory had enabled a foreign policy that its opponents regarded as tacit accommodation of that conquest.

The administration’s domestic programs likewise gave political meaning to the election’s appeal to national unity and normalcy. The Office of American Absorption presented Just Folks as a voluntary work program introducing city youth to traditional rural life. In practice, it sent Jewish boys away from their urban homes to work as farm laborers: Sandy Roth left for a Kentucky tobacco farm in the summer of 1941. The program’s public language of incorporation into the larger society sat uneasily beside its concentrated attention to Jewish communities and families’ objections to what the new office implied about their status as citizens.

Homestead 42 extended this administrative approach to families and neighborhoods. A May 1942 letter from Metropolitan Life described relocation as an opportunity, financed by the government, for selected employees to move and strengthen their Americanness. In a related initiative, the Good Neighbor Project, Italian families were assigned housing in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods with rent discounts funded by the Department of the Interior. The narrator records the difference between this benevolent official vocabulary and the coercive arrangements on the ground: residents heard that the programs would weaken Jewish social solidarity and electoral influence, while government maps and coordinated assignments made families legible as units to be redistributed.

A victory whose consequences exceed the campaign

The election’s political aftermath culminates in a national emergency in October 1942. After Lindbergh disappears, Acting President Wheeler announces that martial law has been imposed throughout the continental United States and its territories and possessions, with borders sealed, airports and seaports closed, and military and police forces charged with maintaining order. The FBI then arrests Lionel Bengelsdorf and a broad range of political, civic, and labor figures, alleging a Jewish conspiratorial plot. These events are not part of the election itself; they show how far the political order established by Lindbergh’s victory has moved from its language of reassuring normalcy.

The crisis also exposes the instability of that order. The First Lady escapes confinement at Walter Reed Army Hospital and broadcasts a demand that the National Guard disband, detainees be released, occupied news organizations resume normal activity, and Congress proceed under the Presidential Succession Act of 1886. Her appeal invokes constitutional rights against an acting administration that has used emergency measures to suppress opposition. In the novel’s larger political arc, Lindbergh’s electoral mandate is therefore both a decisive transfer of power and the beginning of a period in which the promise of peace coexists with coercive government, forced assimilation, and threatened civil liberties.