Europe is the overseas theater of war against which Charles A. Lindbergh defines the United States’ choices in his 1941 America First Committee rally speech. Rather than serving only as a place where fighting began, it becomes the measure of a threatened shift from neutrality and independence toward entanglement.

Europe as the theater of war

Lindbergh dates the beginning of the latest European war to September 1939. By the time he speaks in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, he describes the conflict as approaching its third winter and the United States as standing on the verge of entering it. Europe thus marks both the origin of the crisis he addresses and the foreign arena into which he warns his audience the country may be drawn.

The argument for distance

The speech presents American opposition to involvement as established at the war’s outset. Lindbergh points to the country’s defensive position and tradition of independence from Europe, and argues that participation in the previous European war had left its problems unresolved and its debts to America unpaid. He also cites national polls showing that, after England and France declared war on Germany in 1939, fewer than ten percent of Americans favored a similar course for the United States. In this account, Europe is linked not only to active conflict but also to the prospect of repeating an earlier, unsatisfactory intervention.

Europe in Lindbergh’s political framing

Lindbergh uses the war in Europe to pose a question about responsibility: how the United States moved, in his description, from neutrality and independence toward involvement in European affairs. He claims that groups favoring intervention sought to prepare the country for foreign war under the guise of defense, involve it gradually, and create incidents that would force it into combat. These are the speaker’s allegations, presented as part of his case for keeping the United States apart from the European conflict. Europe consequently functions in the speech as both a real wartime setting and a political symbol of entanglement, against which Lindbergh asserts the idea of an independent American destiny.