America First

America First is both a slogan for keeping the United States out of the European war and the name of a political movement that gathers support around Charles A. Lindbergh. The novel traces how a language of national independence and nonintervention becomes entangled with anti-Semitism: in the alternate-history narrative, Nazi leaders exploit the cause, while its domestic supporters help make Lindbergh’s rise possible.

The movement and its appeal

The America First Committee is founded in spring 1940 at Yale University Law School to oppose Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interventionist policies and promote American isolationism. In October, Lindbergh addresses three thousand people at Yale, advocating recognition of Europe’s new powers. The slogan’s promise is direct: the country should protect its own interests and stay out of a war overseas. But the novel places that promise alongside Lindbergh’s claims about Jewish influence, making the movement’s definition of American interest contested from the outset.

The movement draws audiences well beyond Yale. In spring and summer 1941, Lindbergh speaks to crowds of ten thousand in Chicago and New York, and to twenty-five thousand at a Madison Square Garden rally. Senator Burton K. Wheeler appears on the platform beside Anne Morrow Lindbergh; the audience greets Lindbergh with cries of support for his presidential prospects and gives his speech a four-minute ovation. He continues addressing large gatherings across the country. These scenes show America First not as a marginal phrase but as a mass political cause, carried by rallies, prominent allies, and Lindbergh’s national celebrity.

Henry Ford’s support places the movement within a broader coalition. After Ford joins the America First Committee’s executive committee, Lessing J. Rosenwald, the Jewish director of Sears, Roebuck and Company, resigns because of Ford’s anti-Semitic reputation. Ford also supports Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith, both described in the historical material as anti-Semitic figures. The committee’s isolationist program thus exists alongside alliances that give the slogan a meaning beyond opposition to foreign war.

Lindbergh’s speeches and the conflict over belonging

The tension becomes explicit at the committee’s September 11, 1941, rally in Des Moines. In his speech, “Who Are the War Agitators?,” Lindbergh argues that the country is being pushed toward war by a small minority and identifies the Jewish race among the groups he accuses of exerting powerful influence. The audience of eight thousand cheers when he makes this accusation. His appeal to national self-interest is therefore not presented as a neutral argument about military policy: it singles out American Jews as people whose interests supposedly conflict with those of the nation.

The speech is attacked the following day by both Democrats and Republicans. Senator Gerald P. Nye and other supporters defend Lindbergh and repeat the accusation against Jews. The dispute reveals how America First can work as both a call for nonintervention and a means of casting suspicion on fellow citizens. In the novel, the question of who belongs to the nation is not separate from the argument over whether it should enter the war.

That collision carries into the plot’s street-level violence. Walter Winchell, campaigning against Lindbergh’s political allies, calls the movement fascist and presents his own campaign as an effort to expose the danger. His denunciation provokes intense opposition; in Boston, a mob attacks him during a speech. After riots in Detroit, Jews in Newark prepare for the possibility of similar violence. Civic leaders organize a committee to coordinate with local and state authorities, while Longy Zwillman separately arranges a Provisional Jewish Police. These developments show the slogan’s political consequences within the story: debate about national allegiance unfolds amid threats against Jewish communities and preparations for their defense.

A cause shaped by Nazi influence

The novel’s historical afterword and its alternate-history plot give America First distinct but connected contexts. In the historical account, the committee is an American organization opposed to intervention in the European war. In the fictional account, the cause is also a vehicle through which Nazi leaders seek to influence American politics. After the Lindberghs visit their son in Germany, they are ordered to return to the United States and take up America First. Speeches are supplied for Lindbergh, denouncing the British, Roosevelt, and Jews while supporting neutrality. The account describes detailed instructions for his public appearances and says that Nazi leaders plot the campaign that carries him to victory over Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This fictional history makes the slogan’s political function more than a matter of stated policy. Lindbergh’s public advocacy of neutrality helps serve Germany’s wartime objectives, even as the cause presents itself as a defense of American independence. After his election, his administration establishes the Office of American Absorption. In the account attributed to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, this agency and programs such as Just Folks and Homestead 42 are presented as measures intended to satisfy Heinrich Himmler’s demands for the marginalization of American Jews while seeming comparatively limited. The purported gap between the language of national self-determination and the treatment of Jews exposes how easily the promise of protecting America can be made compatible with excluding some Americans.

The cause’s ending and significance

The historical movement ends after Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the United States declares war on Japan, Germany, and Italy. Lindbergh cancels an America First address scheduled for Boston on December 10, 1941, and the committee’s leadership terminates its activities and disbands. The change in circumstances ends the organized campaign described in the historical account, but it does not erase the political conflict the novel has built around it.

America First gives that conflict its most persuasive public language: a country should determine its own course rather than be drawn into another nation’s war. The novel sets that claim against Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic appeals, his political alliance with supporters such as Wheeler and Ford, and the Nazi intervention behind his fictional campaign. As the slogan moves from Yale speeches and packed rallies into presidential policy, its meaning shifts from nonintervention to a test of who may count as American. Its central irony is that a movement promising national independence can, in the novel’s alternate history, become an instrument of foreign influence and domestic exclusion.