Antisemitism in the United States during the Lindbergh era

Antisemitism in the United States during the Lindbergh era is presented as a pressure that advances through both open hostility and the language of inclusion. In this alternate history, a government elected by a landslide insists that it is protecting national unity and drawing Jewish citizens into public life; at the same time, its programs single them out, disperse their communities, and leave them exposed to growing political intimidation. The gap between official assurances and lived consequences is central: exclusion need not announce itself as exclusion when it can be administered as opportunity, neutrality, or security.

Political normalization and the Iceland Understanding

Charles A. Lindbergh’s 1940 victory gives isolationism the appearance of national consensus. He receives 57 percent of the popular vote and carries forty-six states. The narrating family hears commentators explain the result through familiar ideas: the tradition of a two-term presidency, Lindbergh’s youth and aviation fame, and a public desire for normalcy after repeated crises. His promise to keep the country out of war becomes persuasive partly because it offers relief from uncertainty. But, in the family’s view, the promise also makes the political dangers facing Jews easier for the majority to set aside.

The president’s meeting with Adolf Hitler in Iceland, followed by an agreement guaranteeing peaceful relations between Germany and the United States, sharpens that danger. Lindbergh returns to Washington escorted by Navy patrol planes and presents neutrality as a settled national policy. The administration’s position does not, by itself, openly declare hostility toward American Jews. Its significance lies in the protection and legitimacy it affords to a political order that treats accommodation with a murderous fascist government as a reasonable route to peace. Herman Roth interprets the agreement as a betrayal of democratic allies and fears that a president who trusts Hitler will not defend Jews if persecution reaches the United States. That fear is not shared by everyone at the family’s table, but the novel gives it increasing weight as international events and domestic policy unfold.

Inclusion as administration

The Office of American Absorption describes its purpose as encouraging religious and national minorities to become more fully incorporated into society. In practice, the family sees its attention falling chiefly on Jews. Its Just Folks program takes Jewish boys aged twelve to eighteen from city schools and places them for eight weeks as farm laborers with families hundreds of miles from home. Sandy Roth joins the program for a summer apprenticeship on a Kentucky tobacco farm. The stated aim is cultural exchange and participation in traditional rural life; the family’s unease arises from the program’s selective reach and from the government’s power to define what fuller incorporation should mean.

The program also divides the family over the meaning of participation. Evelyn, working for Lionel Bengelsdorf, supports Sandy’s application. After he returns, she helps make him a recruiter who speaks to other boys and their families about the program’s benefits. Herman, by contrast, objects both to the implication that Jewish citizens need a special government program to become American and to the political use of Sandy’s public support. In their argument, assimilation is not simply a personal choice: the administration can present a policy as voluntary while attaching prestige, access, and pressure to compliance.

Homestead 42 extends that administrative logic from young people to whole households. A relocation offer to senior employees is framed by a participating insurance company as an opportunity, supported by government expense and the promise of a fresh start. Yet families are selected and assigned destinations through an extensive network of corporate and government planning. On Evelyn’s map, pins mark both the New Jersey families chosen to move and their assigned locations across the country. The map turns households into manageable entries in a national plan; its neatness contrasts with the disruption experienced by the people it represents.

A related measure, the Good Neighbor Project, brings non-Jewish families into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. Italian families move into flats vacated by Jewish households on Summit Avenue, with a government-funded rent discount intended to encourage the arrangement. Official language describes the goal as enriching everyone’s Americanness. At home, however, the policy is understood as weakening Jewish social ties and reducing the community’s electoral influence. The projected consequence is not merely that individual families leave, but that the balance of a neighborhood—and its capacity for collective political action—may be changed by planned dispersal and replacement.

Public hostility and competing accounts

The distinction between official inclusion and public antisemitism is especially clear in the German-American Bund’s return to Madison Square Garden. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, investigations and criminal charges had curtailed the organization. Under Lindbergh, government pressure on the Bund ceases, and the organization regains strength. At its 1942 rally, it presents itself as patriotic and anti-Communist, a change in emphasis that masks rather than removes its fascist affiliations. Its propaganda continues to conflate Judaism with Bolshevism and to attack Jews associated with support for intervention in the war.

The rally’s changed appearance is itself revealing. Nazi flags, uniforms, salutes, and prominent images of Hitler, familiar from the earlier 1939 gathering, are absent. Yet the Bund retains its hostility to Jewish participation in national life and its aspiration to a Gentile-ruled United States. The slogan “KEEP AMERICA OUT OF THE JEWISH WAR” compresses the organization’s political maneuver into a blunt accusation: Jews are cast as a suspect group whose concerns about war do not belong to the national interest. The novel sets this rhetoric beside the administration’s polished language of incorporation, showing how a softer official vocabulary can coexist with, and help normalize, more explicit prejudice.

Herman’s confrontation with Lionel Bengelsdorf dramatizes the dispute over what counts as evidence of antisemitism. Herman points to Hitler’s record, the danger to European Jews, and Lindbergh’s trust in the Iceland Understanding. Bengelsdorf answers that Lindbergh came to office in a fair election, supports individual enterprise, and has shown no signs of dictatorship or government-sponsored anti-Semitism. He argues that the Office of American Absorption offers Jews entry into national life rather than denying their rights as the Nuremberg Laws did. His defense depends on a distinction between formal civic inclusion and persecution by law. Herman remains unconvinced: programs that mark Jewish communities for special treatment and movement can be alarming even when their organizers describe them as benevolent. The scene makes the conflict more than a disagreement about the president’s private beliefs; it concerns whether the effects of policy can be separated from its reassuring stated intentions.

War, emergency power, and the culmination of suspicion

As Germany advances against the Soviet Union, Herman follows the campaigns with particular alarm. He fears the defeat of the Soviet Union would strengthen the German war machine and place millions of Russian Jews under an occupying army intent on carrying out Hitler’s anti-Jewish program. The stakes in his warnings are both international and familial: the danger to European Jews includes relatives connected to the family’s history. His concern also exposes the asymmetry of Lindbergh’s neutrality. A policy that promises protection from foreign war can leave those threatened by fascist conquest without American assistance.

The domestic crisis of October 1942 brings the novel’s pattern of suspicion into government action. After Lindbergh disappears, Burton K. Wheeler declares martial law and tells Congress that the president has been kidnapped. When Lionel Bengelsdorf is arrested, the accusation against him describes him as one of the ringleaders of a Jewish conspiracy against America. Other public figures are arrested as well, and troops enter New York City while authorities restrict protest and take control of media facilities. In this emergency, the language of a hidden Jewish plot gives state power a pretext for treating dissenters as enemies.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh escapes from Walter Reed Army Hospital and broadcasts a demand that the National Guard disband, the armed forces leave the cities, detainees regain their rights, and government-sequestered media return to normal operation. She also calls for Wheeler’s removal and a special presidential election. Her address invokes constitutional procedure against emergency rule, and the subsequent political reversal ends the immediate crisis. The book does not present this outcome as proof that the preceding measures were harmless: the episode shows how quickly official accusations can turn prejudice into arrests, restrictions, and military deployment, and how much depends on people within the political system resisting those actions.

Narrative and historical significance

The novel’s account of antisemitism is built from a sequence of changes in scale. It begins with electoral explanations and the promise of normalcy, moves through programs that classify boys and families, and reaches public mobilization and emergency accusations. Across these stages, the central tension remains: American belonging is proclaimed as universal while Jewish people are repeatedly identified as a population requiring special management, dispersal, or suspicion. Herman’s warnings, Sandy’s participation in Just Folks, the relocation maps, the Bund rally, and the October arrests provide different tests of what the government’s assurances mean in practice.

The postscript explicitly identifies the book as fiction and describes its documentation as a guide to where historical fact ends and historical imagining begins. That distinction matters to this subject: the imagined Lindbergh administration is not presented as a record of actual government events, but as a counterfactual construction that follows the consequences of political choices. Within that construction, antisemitism is not confined to individual prejudice or conspicuous slurs. It also operates through policies that distribute people, narratives that label Jewish concerns disloyal, and institutions that can turn conspiracy claims into coercive action.