American interventionism

American interventionism is the contested question of whether the United States should move beyond neutrality and become involved in war abroad. In the novel, its most sustained formulation appears in Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech, delivered at an America First Committee rally on September 11, 1941. Lindbergh presents intervention not as a single declaration but as a sequence of choices that has brought the country to the edge of conflict. The speech makes that sequence a defense of his policy and a warning about its opponents; the surrounding narrative, however, places the argument in a society where claims about war, loyalty, and national security carry immediate consequences for American Jews.

The Argument Against Intervention

Lindbergh begins by claiming that the United States stands on the verge of war because foreign interests and a small domestic minority have pressured it away from neutrality and independence. He casts the debate as a contest over information: opponents of intervention, in his account, clarify the facts, while interventionists hide them or confuse the public. His appeal to an open political record and to the judgment of ordinary Americans presents nonintervention as both a reasoned position and the expression of the popular will.

The speech invokes the country’s defensive position, its tradition of independence from Europe, and the unresolved consequences of its previous European war. It also cites public opinion as evidence: according to Lindbergh, national polls showed that in 1939 fewer than ten percent of Americans favored following Britain and France into war against Germany. This figure supports his claim that the movement toward involvement has not followed an initial popular mandate. Instead, he argues, the public’s opposition has been overcome gradually, without a direct request for a declaration of war.

Lindbergh names Britain, Jewish Americans, and the Roosevelt administration as the three principal groups pressing for intervention. He places capitalists, Anglophiles, intellectuals, and, more recently, Communist groups behind them as secondary forces. This account is not a neutral inventory of political positions: its selection of Jewish Americans as a major war-promoting group makes the argument depend on an antisemitic generalization. Lindbergh acknowledges that Jews have reason to oppose Nazi persecution, but then argues that their supposed pro-war policy endangers both the country and Jews themselves. He further alleges that Jewish influence in film, the press, radio, and government creates a danger to the United States. The speech thus folds a debate about foreign policy into a conspiracy claim about Jewish power.

The Steps Toward War

Lindbergh describes the movement toward intervention as a planned progression. He claims that advocates of war first prepared the country for foreign conflict under the language of defense, then involved it incrementally, and finally intended to create incidents that would compel direct participation. His examples include cultural and political pressure: he says that theater productions glorified war, newsreels lost objectivity, newspapers faced commercial penalties for carrying antiwar articles, and people who opposed intervention were smeared or lost their jobs. These claims make the struggle over intervention a struggle over what the public can hear and say, not just over military policy.

His concrete account centers on the expansion of the arms program. Lindbergh contrasts an initial call in 1939 for 5,000 aircraft with a later demand for 50,000, arguing that planes were sent abroad even as the American air corps needed modern equipment. He presents this buildup as preparation for a European war rather than adequate defense at home. The sequence he gives then moves from selling arms to Europe, to lending arms, to patrolling the ocean on Britain’s behalf, and finally to occupying a European island in the war zone. Each measure is described as a step short of war; together, he argues, they leave the country involved in nearly every respect except actual combat.

That step-by-step account gives interventionism its central dramatic shape in the speech: an apparently limited measure becomes the precedent for a larger one, while the language of defense promises that each choice will keep war away. Lindbergh claims that the first two stages of the interventionists’ plan have succeeded and that only the creation of sufficient incidents remains. His forecast depends on treating successive policies as parts of a coordinated design. The speech does not simply oppose a particular military action; it warns that a series of decisions can alter national policy before the public has knowingly approved the destination.

Political Conflict and Public Resistance

The novel sets Lindbergh’s abstract warning against the visible contest over who gets to define the danger. In the spring of 1942, President Lindbergh and his wife host Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at a White House state dinner celebrating the Iceland Understanding. The invitation prompts criticism in the liberal press and demonstrations across the country. Franklin D. Roosevelt, emerging from seclusion at Hyde Park, urges Lindbergh to rescind it, while Vice President Burton K. Wheeler accuses Roosevelt of playing politics with foreign affairs. The dispute exposes two opposing uses of national security language: one treats accommodation with Nazi Germany as compatible with keeping the country out of war; the other presents the dinner as an affront to freedom and to people living under Nazi rule.

Walter Winchell’s campaign turns that disagreement into street politics. Starting at Broadway and 42nd Street, Winchell addresses crowds in New York City and carries his campaign through the northeastern industrial cities. In South Boston, a gathering of hecklers escalates into a mob attack; the episode makes explicit the danger that political agitation can release against a public figure targeted as Jewish. After violence in Detroit, Jewish residents of Newark prepare for the possibility that disorder may reach their own neighborhood. Rabbi Joachim Prinz and other prominent local figures establish the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens and seek contingency plans from city and state officials. Separately, Longy Zwillman has Bullet Apfelbaum recruit local young men into the Provisional Jewish Police. These efforts show communal defense developing alongside appeals to official authority, as residents question whether public institutions will protect them.

The narrative also places interventionism beside measures presented as national incorporation or preparedness. The Office of American Absorption sponsors Just Folks, sending Sandy Roth to spend eight weeks working for a Kentucky tobacco farmer, while the program’s declared aim is to incorporate minorities into the larger society. Later, a letter to Herman Roth describes Homestead 42 as a government-funded relocation opportunity for selected employees, borrowing the language of the Homestead Act to present uprooting as opportunity. These policies are not identical to military intervention, but their place in the story sharpens the stakes of Lindbergh’s promise of national independence: federal programs can reach into the lives of Jewish families even while the administration represents its broader course as a defense of American autonomy.

The Speech in the Novel’s Wider Crisis

The contrast between the speech’s defense of popular consent and the novel’s events becomes especially stark as political conflict escalates. After Winchell is killed at a rally in Louisville, a radio bulletin reports that his body will be brought to Pennsylvania Station and that his funeral will take place at Temple Emanu-El, with public mourning expected on Fifth Avenue. The report interrupts a domestic conversation. Later, after Lindbergh disappears, Acting President Wheeler announces martial law across the continental United States and its territories and possessions, seals the borders with Canada and Mexico, and invokes federal and local security forces. These events do not settle the speech’s historical argument on its own terms; they place its language of emergency and national protection in a narrative where political crisis can produce restrictions and coercive state action.

Lindbergh’s Des Moines address therefore serves both as a policy statement and as an example of how nonintervention can be argued. It insists that gradual involvement threatens an independent national destiny, but its explanation of who drives that involvement assigns collective blame to Jewish Americans and treats suspicion as political evidence. The surrounding story repeatedly tests the difference between opposing foreign war and confronting domestic persecution. By placing the appeal to neutrality beside protests, antisemitic violence, community organizing, and emergency rule, the novel shows that the argument over intervention is also an argument over whose safety and whose account of the nation will count.