America First isolationism

America First isolationism is the non-interventionist position advanced by the America First Committee and Charles A. Lindbergh in the years before the United States entered the war. In the novel, it moves from an organized campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interventionist policies to a mass political cause, while Lindbergh’s public appeals reveal how the language of national self-interest can be turned against American Jews.

Organization and Early Advocacy

The America First Committee was founded in spring 1940 at Yale University Law School to oppose Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interventionist policies and promote American isolationism. In October, Lindbergh addressed a meeting of three thousand at Yale, urging the country to recognize the new powers in Europe. His formulation presented accommodation to the changing balance of power as a reason to avoid intervention.

The cause also gained a public platform through Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book The Wave of the Future, a short anti-interventionist tract subtitled A Confession of Faith. It became a nonfiction bestseller despite condemnation by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, who called it the Bible of every American Nazi. The controversy places anti-interventionism within a dispute over whether arguments for peace and accommodation could be separated from sympathy for authoritarian powers.

Mass Appeal and Political Performance

In May, Lindbergh spoke at an America First rally at Madison Square Garden, with Senator Burton K. Wheeler seated beside Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the platform. The audience numbered twenty-five thousand; cries identifying Lindbergh as a prospective president greeted his appearance, and his speech received a four-minute ovation. The scene makes the movement’s appeal visible as more than a policy argument: it had the scale, enthusiasm, and electoral expectations of a national political force.

Lindbergh continued speaking against American intervention to large audiences across the country through spring and summer. The repeated rallies gave the position a recognizable public voice and joined the claim of national independence to Lindbergh’s personal authority. His audiences’ response suggests that non-intervention had become a source of political allegiance, not simply a judgment about foreign policy.

The Des Moines Speech and Its Fallout

On September 11, Lindbergh delivered his speech Who Are the War Agitators? at an America First rally in Des Moines before eight thousand people. He accused Jewish Americans of being among the powerful and effective forces pushing the United States toward war for reasons he characterized as un-American. He qualified the accusation by acknowledging that they were pursuing what they believed to be their interests, then insisted that the country must protect its own. The address thus cast a minority’s political concerns as a threat to national interests while presenting exclusionary suspicion as a defense of the nation.

The speech drew attacks from both Democrats and Republicans the next day. Senator Gerald P. Nye, a Republican from North Dakota and a staunch America Firster, defended Lindbergh and reiterated the accusation, as did other supporters. That response shows how the controversy did not end with the condemnation of one speech: supporters carried its charge forward, exposing the movement’s political division between its appeal against intervention and its use of antisemitic rhetoric.

Wartime Contrast

The evidence places Lindbergh’s later work in a changed political setting. In 1942, after Franklin D. Roosevelt refused his request to return to the Air Corps and attempts to find work in aviation failed, Lindbergh became a government-approved consultant to Ford’s bomber development program at Willow Run, outside Detroit. The narrative does not state that he abandoned his earlier views; instead, the contrast is between his recent public campaign against intervention and his subsequent participation in a government-approved defense project. This shift in circumstance underscores the gap between America First isolationism as a political appeal and the demands of wartime production.