“Who Are the War Agitators”

“Who Are the War Agitators?” is a speech by Charles Lindbergh, delivered at an America First Committee rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, and reproduced in the novel’s documentary materials. It sets out the logic of Lindbergh’s isolationism: intervention is presented not as a response to events abroad but as the consequence of pressure from supposedly self-interested groups at home and overseas. The address matters both as a political argument in its own right and as a key to the rhetoric surrounding Jewish vulnerability in the novel’s alternate America.

Documentary Setting and Political Argument

The speech opens by placing its argument within the two years since the European war began. Lindbergh says that efforts to involve the United States have grown, and presents the country as standing on the brink of conflict. From there, he identifies three principal groups he accuses of advancing intervention: the British, Jewish groups, and the Roosevelt administration. Other interests, including capitalists and intellectuals, appear as secondary forces in this account.

The structure gives the speech an air of ordered explanation: it names groups, assigns them motives, and promises to describe their methods. Lindbergh distinguishes these alleged leaders from ordinary people he portrays as misled or frightened. That distinction lets the address sound as though it is clarifying a hidden political process, even as it channels suspicion toward broad categories of people rather than establishing specific evidence of a coordinated effort.

The Jewish Question and the Speech’s Contradiction

Lindbergh acknowledges that Jews have suffered persecution in Germany and says that this history makes opposition to the Nazi regime understandable. But he then uses that acknowledgment to argue that Jewish groups in the United States should oppose American intervention. The speech thus recognizes the cause of Jewish fear while treating Jewish political responses to that danger as evidence of divided interests. Its disclaimer that it is not attacking Jewish or British people sits uneasily beside its portrayal of their leaders as un-American advocates of war.

The address applies a related accusation to the Roosevelt administration. It claims that the administration has used the war emergency to extend presidential power, increase public debt, and secure an unprecedented third term. In the speech’s framework, opposition to intervention becomes a defense of American self-government, while support for it is associated with manipulation and political self-interest. The argument therefore turns a debate over foreign policy into a broader test of national loyalty.

The Speech in the Novel’s Political Crisis

The novel places this document against the consequences of Lindbergh’s victory and the public unease surrounding his administration. The narrator’s family tries to reassure the children that a Republican, isolationist government containing anti-Semites is not thereby a Nazi government, and that constitutional limits still matter. At the same time, the family follows critical reporting in PM and listens to Walter Winchell’s attacks on Lindbergh and his administration. The speech’s division of political actors into war agitators and defenders of the country forms part of the rhetoric against which that reassurance is tested.

The political situation sharpens after the Iceland Understanding and the announcement of a White House state dinner for Joachim von Ribbentrop. Opposition appears in liberal reporting, rallies, and demonstrations; Franklin D. Roosevelt emerges from seclusion to urge Lindbergh to withdraw the invitation. Later, Walter Winchell makes the charge of fascism the center of his congressional campaign, drawing large crowds and facing hostility as he travels through New York and New England. The novel connects these public disputes to an escalating climate of anti-Semitism, but it does not establish the Des Moines speech as the direct cause of any particular attack.

Rhetoric, Mobilization, and Significance

As Winchell’s campaign and the unrest that follows bring political claims into the streets, Jewish residents of Newark prepare for the possibility of violence. The Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens seeks cooperation from city and state officials, while Longy Zwillman separately assigns Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit and train a volunteer corps called the Provisional Jewish Police. These parallel responses show how quickly arguments about national loyalty and political danger become questions of community safety. They also mark a contrast between formal appeals to public authority and preparations for protection if that authority proves insufficient.

The speech’s significance lies in the gap between its stated defense of peace and the suspicions its argument directs at groups already exposed to hostility. By presenting Jewish opposition to Nazi Germany as a reason to distrust Jewish political judgment, it turns a real threat to Jews into a basis for questioning their belonging in the United States. In the novel’s documentary form, the speech lets readers encounter that political logic directly; the surrounding narrative then shows how claims about loyalty and national security reverberate through elections, public protest, and local preparations for danger.