Lindbergh's nomination at the 1940 Republican National Convention

Lindbergh's nomination at the 1940 Republican National Convention turned a deadlocked party contest into a presidential candidacy with consequences far beyond the convention hall. Remembered through Philip Roth’s childhood perspective, the event arrives first as a late-night radio broadcast, then as an eruption of alarm across a Democratic Jewish neighborhood. The nomination joined Lindbergh’s immense popular appeal to a political movement that had already made his hostility toward Jews part of its public argument.

Deadlock and an unexpected arrival

On Thursday, June 27, the Roth family listened to live convention coverage from Philadelphia: Philip and his brother Sandy Roth were in bed, while their parents and cousin Alvin Roth stayed by the radio. After six ballots, the delegates had chosen no candidate. The contest remained divided among other Republican contenders, and Lindbergh’s name had not yet been spoken by a delegate. He was not expected to attend, being at a Midwestern factory engineering meeting where he had advised on the design of a new fighter plane.

The broadcast crossed the neighborhood through open windows on the first muggy evening of summer. Radios in the Roth home, the flat below, and neighboring houses carried the proceedings along a block of roughly thirty two-and-a-half-family houses and a small apartment building between Keer and Chancellor. The narrator emphasizes the contrast: not a single Republican lived on that block, where Jewish residents had voted Democratic while Franklin D. Roosevelt led the ticket. A distant party convention thus became an intimate household event, heard collectively by people who had reason to fear what Lindbergh’s candidacy meant for them.

The nomination

The children had fallen asleep before the convention reached its twentieth ballot. At 3:18 A.M., Lindbergh arrived on the convention floor in flying attire, having landed his own plane at the Philadelphia airport only minutes earlier. The delegates rose and cheered his name for half an hour. The scene appeared spontaneous, but Senator Gerald P. Nye quickly placed Lindbergh’s name in nomination, and Congressmen Thorkelson and Mundt seconded it. At precisely four o’clock on Friday, June 28, the Republican Party chose Lindbergh by acclamation.

The acclaim concealed the stakes of the choice. Lindbergh had recently used national broadcasts to accuse Jews of wielding disproportionate influence in American public life and to portray them as a danger to the country. His statements were denounced by liberal journalists, Roosevelt’s press secretary, Jewish organizations, and critics within his own party. He had resigned his reserve commission rather than serve under Franklin D. Roosevelt, yet the America First Committee continued to support him as its most popular advocate of neutrality. The convention elevated a candidate whose isolationist appeal and anti-Jewish politics had already been publicly fused.

A neighborhood’s alarm

The nomination awakened the block. A man’s shouted refusal was heard from house to house; within seconds, Philip and Sandy were back at the radio with their parents and Alvin. Their mother, roused from sleep, sat in her robe with her fingers over her mouth. Their father sat beside her, while Alvin paced the room. The family’s response was not eased by the fact that Lindbergh did not repeat his accusations in his acceptance speech: his silence did not undo what he had said before, or the political meaning of his selection.

As dawn approached, families came into the street in pajamas and bathrobes, gathering in slippers. The anger and fear crossed the boundary between private homes and public life: the convention’s decision had been made hundreds of miles away, but its consequences seemed immediate to residents who understood themselves to be among its targets. The scene makes the nomination more than a change in party leadership; it is the moment when a national political choice becomes a local and familial threat.

Political consequence

Lindbergh accepted the Republican nomination with a pledge to keep the United States out of the European war. His candidacy subsequently brought him to the presidency; he was sworn into office on January 20, 1941. The Roth family later tried to reassure the children that a Republican, isolationist administration containing anti-Semites was not therefore Nazi rule, and that the president and Congress remained bound by the Constitution. That effort to distinguish prejudice from dictatorship registers the uncertainty opened by the convention: the nomination did not itself settle what the administration would become, but it made the question impossible for the Roth family to treat as distant politics.