Lindbergh’s 1940 Madison Square Garden rally brought the campaign’s case for staying out of the European war to a national audience, with Lionel Bengelsdorf’s defense of Charles A. Lindbergh making the event especially contentious for American Jews. The rally presented nonintervention as a broad civic interest, but Bengelsdorf’s appearance also offered Lindbergh’s supporters a prominent Jewish endorsement. In Philip Roth’s account, the speech unsettles listeners well beyond the Garden: its claims reach into a family living room, where disagreement, fear, and the need to explain what is happening become inseparable.

Background and Campaign Strategy

Three days after Bengelsdorf appeared at Newark Airport to greet Lindbergh and publicly support his candidacy, he took part in the rally marking the end of Lindbergh’s nationwide flying tour. The election was only two weeks away. Lindbergh appeared to be gaining support in the traditionally Democratic South, while close contests were anticipated in conservative Midwestern states; national polling nevertheless placed Franklin D. Roosevelt comfortably ahead in both the popular and electoral vote.

The Republican campaign was troubled by Lindbergh’s insistence on determining his strategy himself. Party leaders organized the Garden event to break the monotony of his extended barnstorming and to surround him with an atmosphere reminiscent of the party’s lively nominating convention. The rally was broadcast nationally on the second Monday evening in October, making its carefully arranged sequence of speakers available to listeners far beyond New York City.

Fifteen speakers were presented as prominent Americans from different walks of life. A farm leader warned of war’s consequences for an agricultural sector still affected by the First World War and the Depression; a labor leader emphasized the prospect of workers’ lives being regimented by government agencies. A manufacturer addressed the long-term dangers of wartime industrial expansion and taxation. A Protestant clergyman and a Catholic priest argued, from their respective religious positions, that war would damage young men and corrode the spiritual and moral life of a peace-loving country. Bengelsdorf, identified as a New Jersey rabbi, followed these voices and received an especially warm welcome from the full Garden audience.

Bengelsdorf’s Address

Bengelsdorf sought to recast Lindbergh’s visits to Germany in the 1930s. Rather than treating them as evidence of sympathy for or support of Adolf Hitler, he described Lindbergh as having traveled there as a secret adviser to the United States government. He credited Lindbergh with helping strengthen American military preparedness, sharing knowledge with the military, and advancing aviation and air defenses. The claim directly contested the accusations made by Lindbergh’s critics and presented the candidate’s relationship with Germany as service to the United States.

The rabbi then argued that the conflict belonged to Europe, not America. He recalled the American deaths, wounds, disease, and lasting disability caused by the previous war and warned that another war could impose an even greater cost. His appeal made the possible deaths of American sons the central measure of the case against intervention, and he challenged Roosevelt to answer what kind of country would remain after such losses.

Bengelsdorf did not deny the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. He acknowledged the distress it caused him and other Jews and spoke of German Jewish scholars who had lost long-held academic positions and were being persecuted. Yet he argued that American entry into the war would not relieve their suffering and might make their situation worse. He joined this argument to his own identity as both a Jew and an American citizen, asking listeners to consider the deaths of Jewish as well as Protestant and Catholic sons on a European battlefield. The address thus acknowledged Nazi persecution while using the prospect of American casualties to defend nonintervention.

Reception in the Roth Household

In the Roth home, the broadcast was heard against a background of mounting concern about Bengelsdorf’s political conduct. Some members of his congregation had already called for his resignation or removal by the temple’s trustees; others, though disturbed by his endorsement of Lindbergh, defended his right to speak freely. The rally drew attention from Jewish listeners who might otherwise have avoided a Lindbergh event, and its broadcast made the rabbi’s defense impossible for the family to treat as distant political news.

Alvin interpreted Bengelsdorf’s place on the stage as a political maneuver: in his view, the campaign was using a rabbi not to persuade Jews but to reassure non-Jewish voters that they could support Lindbergh. Herman was also angry, but urged the boys to hear the speaker out, partly to keep the event from seeming as frightening to them as it did to the adults. Philip had recently fallen out of bed; although he denied remembering a dream about Lindbergh, he knew that Sandy’s Lindbergh drawings, kept beneath the bed, were already troubling him. His stamp collection and his attachment to a Lindbergh stamp made the unease intimate: he could not simply remove the image from his own collection even as his brother’s drawings haunted him.

The family remained still through much of the speech. Bess, usually the one to quiet the others, left the room when Bengelsdorf’s accent became intolerable to her. Sandy, absorbed in the scene, sketched the family listening to the radio; Alvin’s silence expressed his loathing, while Herman was too stirred to speak. When Lindbergh finally came onto the stage, the audience’s excitement was so overwhelming that Herman abruptly switched off the radio. Bess returned with tears in her eyes and offered Alvin tea, an ordinary gesture that could not restore the household’s earlier ease. Herman’s anger then broke out in questions about why Bengelsdorf had made the speech and whether Jewish voters could be expected to support a candidate he regarded as anti-Semitic.

Political Meaning and Aftermath

Alvin supplied his own explanation: Bengelsdorf, he believed, had been brought before the non-Jewish audience to give it permission to vote for Lindbergh, and thereby to help secure Roosevelt’s defeat. This was Alvin’s interpretation, not a confirmed account of the campaign’s intentions, but it captures the speech’s perceived political function within the family. Bengelsdorf’s identity could be used as part of the campaign’s argument even by listeners who rejected his conclusions. Herman’s attempt to be fair to the speaker did not resolve the conflict; instead, the family heard the same address as a defense of peace, a partisan intervention, and a warning about the vulnerability of Jewish Americans.

The rally’s force therefore lay not only in what Bengelsdorf said but in the public setting that gave his words reach and authority. The other speakers framed nonintervention through agriculture, labor, industry, and religious life; Bengelsdorf joined those arguments to a defense of Lindbergh’s German record and a Jewish account of the costs of war. At home, the broadcast made those political claims part of everyday family experience. The event’s competing appeals—to national security, peace, religious conscience, and Jewish safety—remain unresolved in the scene, while the contrast between the Garden’s applause and the Roth household’s silence shows how sharply divided the country’s response has become.