Lindbergh’s 1940 presidential campaign

Lindbergh’s 1940 presidential campaign converts the aviator’s celebrity into a national political force, presenting the election as a stark choice between his promise to keep the United States out of war and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its transcontinental tour makes the campaign a spectacle of personal flight and direct address, while the novel follows the consequences of the political divisions it helps sharpen—from opposition campaigns to Jewish communities’ preparations for violence.

An improvised campaign opening

On the Saturday before Labor Day in 1940, Lindbergh failed to appear at the Detroit parade where he had been expected to launch his campaign. Instead, he arrived without announcement at the Long Island airfield from which his transatlantic flight had begun thirteen years earlier. The Spirit of St. Louis had been brought there secretly beneath a tarp. By the time he took off the next morning, however, reporters from wire services, radio stations, and newspapers were waiting to watch him fly west, toward California.

The route and its political meaning depended on a distinction between Lindbergh the commercial aviation consultant and Lindbergh the celebrated pilot. His earlier work had helped commercial aviation grow, but the campaign presented the public with the remembered figure of the unknown airmail pilot who had crossed the Atlantic alone: the youthful, adored Lone Eagle. That image displaced other versions of him, including the man decorated by the Nazis in Berlin and the speaker who had blamed influential Jews for trying to draw the country into war. The campaign drew power from this selective return to a heroic public identity.

Lindbergh’s arrival in Los Angeles did not set a new coast-to-coast flight record. The crowd that greeted him there, made up largely of tens of thousands of aircraft workers, nevertheless responded with overwhelming enthusiasm. Democrats called the flight a publicity stunt arranged by Lindbergh’s staff. The narrator reports instead that Lindbergh decided to fly to California only hours before departure, contrary to the expectations of the Republican professionals assigned to guide the political novice. The campaign’s unconventionality was therefore both an image and a working method: the candidate’s own decisions could outrun the machinery meant to manage him.

Flight, message, and political contrast

At the California appearance, Lindbergh spoke briefly in a flat, high-pitched Midwestern voice, wearing the flight clothes associated with his Atlantic crossing. He framed his candidacy as a defense of American democracy through nonparticipation in another world war, reducing the contest to a choice between Lindbergh and war. The brevity of the speech mattered. Rather than offer a detailed program in the scene, he made personal authority and a single urgent proposition carry the argument.

Over the next month and a half, Lindbergh spent a day in each of the forty-eight states. He moved between cities, towns, and villages, landing on highways where no airstrip was near and using pastures to reach remote farming communities. Local and regional stations carried remarks from his landings; several times a week, he broadcast nationally from a state capital where he stayed overnight. His recurring message held that war in Europe could no longer be prevented, but American involvement still could be. He accused Roosevelt of misleading the country and again defined the vote as a choice between Lindbergh and war.

The method made the campaign feel immediate and personal, but Roosevelt’s response emphasized the governing responsibilities Lindbergh’s performance could leave out. Democrats likened the tour to the stunts of Lindbergh’s early barnstorming days. Roosevelt, meanwhile, turned questions about the campaign back to the international crisis: the danger of a German invasion of Britain, a proposed peacetime draft, and the protection of American aid to Britain. Rather than tour the country, he planned to remain in the White House and address those issues with the authority of the presidency. The contrast was not simply between two candidates’ styles; it placed the spectacle of a pilot’s mobility against the institutional weight of a president confronting war.

Opposition and the campaign’s later echoes

The novel extends this contrast into a wider contest over patriotism and political belonging. The Roth family’s visit to Washington shows how national symbols could offer reassurance amid fear of Lindbergh. After a wrong turn brought them to the United States Capitol, the narrator understands American history as something the family is counting on to protect them. At the Lincoln Memorial, the monument’s grandeur intensifies that sense of a shared national inheritance. For the family, attachment to the country is not the same as support for its president; the campaign’s rhetoric makes that distinction newly difficult to sustain.

The political struggle becomes more explicit in 1942, when Walter Winchell, recently deprived of his radio microphone and newspaper column, launches a separate congressional campaign. Speaking from a soapbox at Broadway and 42nd Street, he argues that the threat is fascism, not merely a dispute over war policy. Thousands gather to hear him. His campaign then carries that confrontation through industrial towns and into Boston, where hostility toward him as a Jewish speaker turns into a mob attack. The episode gives physical form to a danger that Lindbergh’s campaign had helped normalize without making every later act of violence identical to the 1940 election campaign itself.

After violence in Detroit, Jewish residents of Newark prepare for the possibility that unrest will reach their own streets. Rabbi Prinz and other civic leaders establish the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens and seek contingency plans from city and state officials. Separately, Longy Zwillman assigns Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit local youths into a provisional volunteer police force. These parallel responses—formal civic coordination and neighborhood self-defense—show how the campaign’s political divisions have outlasted electioneering and entered the practical question of who can keep a community safe.

Consequences for national belonging

The danger is registered within the Roth home as well as in public streets. Their neighbor, Mr. Cucuzza, offers a pistol for the family’s protection. Herman rejects the implication that his citizenship and lifelong conduct should leave him dependent on a weapon, insisting on his faith in the country even as he condemns the political order that has made such an offer necessary. When news arrives that Winchell has been killed at a rally in Louisville, Herman falls silent and the household listens together. The campaign’s long aftermath has made political violence a domestic fact, not an abstraction confined to speeches or newspapers.

The later constitutional crisis gives the campaign a further consequence without undoing the damage already shown. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s broadcast defies the acting president, calls for Congress to act under the succession law, and urges a special election. Her words are repeated through the morning; at noon she announces that she is returning to the White House. The restoration of constitutional procedures does not make Lindbergh’s campaign harmless in retrospect. Instead, the novel places its promise of peace beside the fear and emergency that follow, showing how a campaign built around a simple electoral choice can deepen divisions over who belongs, what patriotism requires, and which institutions will defend the country’s citizens.