The Wave of the Future

The Wave of the Future is Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s third book, an anti-interventionist tract that became an immediate bestseller and a flashpoint in the debate over the United States’ role in the war in Europe. Its title suggests historical momentum; in the novel’s alternate political history, that confidence sits uneasily beside the state’s growing power to direct citizens’ lives and suppress dissent.

Publication and Argument

Published in October 1940, the book is described as a brief anti-interventionist tract and carries the subtitle “A Confession of Faith.” The evidence identifies its position, but does not detail its arguments beyond that opposition to intervention. Its appearance coincides with the growth of organized isolationism: the America First Committee, founded at Yale University Law School to oppose Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interventionist policies, was pressing for American isolation, while Charles A. Lindbergh addressed three thousand people at Yale and urged recognition of “the new powers in Europe.” The title’s language of a coming future gives political disagreement the shape of historical inevitability. In the surrounding narrative, that promise of direction and certainty is echoed by Charles A. Lindbergh’s repeated appeal to “An independent destiny for America,” which he used in a State of the Union address and repeated at the close of a June 22 address. His stated aim joined keeping the country out of foreign wars with preventing foreign wars from reaching it; his peacetime draft proposal, however, required eighteen-year-olds to undergo twenty-four months of military training and remain on call in the reserves for eight years. The language of an independent future therefore accompanies an expansive military obligation, not simply withdrawal from public affairs.

Reception and Political Conflict

The book immediately became a top nonfiction bestseller and aroused enormous controversy. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes denounced it as “the Bible of every American Nazi,” turning its reception into a measure of the sharp conflict over isolationism and sympathy toward Europe’s new political powers. The denunciation was not an abstract literary judgment: it placed Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book within an argument that also surrounded Charles A. Lindbergh’s public speeches and his political alignment with the America First movement. That conflict intensified in 1941. Charles A. Lindbergh addressed crowds of ten thousand at America First Committee rallies in Chicago and New York; Ickes called him “the No. 1 United States Nazi fellow traveler.” At a May rally in Madison Square Garden, where he spoke alongside Senator Burton K. Wheeler, the audience greeted Lindbergh with cries of “Our next president!” and gave his speech a four-minute ovation. These episodes do not establish that the book caused the movement’s growth, but they show the political atmosphere in which its anti-interventionist position circulated and became controversial.

Retrospective Resonance

The novel’s later events sharpen the difference between language that presents a political course as the future and the consequences of government action. The official description of Just Folks calls it a volunteer work program introducing city youth to traditional heartland life, while the program removes Jewish boys from their homes and sends them to work as field hands and day laborers. In 1942, a relocation offer to a senior employee similarly wraps government-directed movement in the language of opportunity and strengthening the country. Such programs make “the future” more than a question of foreign policy: it also concerns who is expected to adapt, move, or be incorporated, and on whose terms. By October 1942, the country’s political crisis has moved far beyond debate over intervention. Martial law is imposed nationwide after Charles A. Lindbergh’s disappearance; Lionel Bengelsdorf is arrested on suspicion of participating in a supposed Jewish conspiracy; and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, after escaping from detention at Walter Reed Army Hospital, broadcasts a demand that detainees’ rights be restored and constitutional procedures followed. The title’s certainty thus acquires an unsettling double edge. What presents itself as a confident forecast of political change is set against a narrative in which the future remains vulnerable to coercion, reversals, and resistance.