Des Moines appears as the setting of Charles Lindbergh’s September 11, 1941, address to an America First Committee rally. The book identifies the city through the speech preserved in its documentary material: a political venue where Lindbergh argued that pressure to bring the United States into the European conflict came from foreign interests and a minority within the country.

The Rally and Its Setting

The documentary section identifies the address as the “Who Are the War Agitators?” speech, delivered at an America First Committee rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941. The evidence gives no street-level description of the city or the rally site; Des Moines matters here as the named location of a public political event.

The Speech’s Argument

In the reproduced address, Lindbergh frames the war debate as a campaign to draw the United States into a conflict that began in Europe two years earlier. He attributes that pressure to foreign interests and a small minority of Americans, and warns that the country stands on the verge of war. The setting thus anchors an argument for resisting intervention in a specific public rally rather than presenting it only as an abstract policy position.

Documentary and Narrative Significance

Des Moines enters the book through documentary evidence rather than through a developed scene in the family’s daily life. The printed speech allows readers to encounter Lindbergh’s political case in his own public forum, while the surrounding narrative depicts a country in which his government’s policies are increasingly scrutinized and Jewish families fear what those policies may mean. The contrast makes the rally’s argument part of the book’s broader record of how isolationism and domestic political pressure are presented and contested.