The Des Moines speech, formally titled "Who Are the War Agitators?", was an isolationist and antisemitic speech that American aviator Charles Lindbergh delivered at a 1941 America First Committee rally held in Des Moines, Iowa. In the speech, Lindbergh argued that participation in World War II was not in the United States' interest, and he accused three groups of trying to push the country toward war: British people, who he said propagandized the United States; Jewish people, who Lindbergh accused of exercising outsized influence and of controlling the news media; and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who he said wanted to use a war to consolidate power. Called Lindbergh's "most controversial public speech",[1] his use of antisemitic tropes and his monolithic characterization of American Jews as war-agitating outsiders prompted a nationwide backlash against him and America First that the organization "never recovered from".[2]
After completing a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, American aviator Charles Lindbergh became an internationally famous and admired public figure.[3] An advocate for aviation, Lindbergh was interested in the military airpower of various European nations; he personally considered the United Kingdom deficient and Nazi Germany impressive in that regard.[4] In 1937, Lindbergh praised German aviation as being, in his words, "without parallel", and he thought Germany had a "sense of decency and value [...] far ahead of" those of America.[5] When the Embassy of the United States, Berlin hosted a dinner with Lindbergh and Hermann Göring (field marshal of the Nazi Luftwaffe) in attendance as guests of honor on October 8, 1938, Göring awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with the Star, which Lindbergh accepted.[6] In the summer of 1940, Lindbergh wrote in his diary that he believed American society was deteriorating, lamenting that Americans, according to him, "lack[ed] understanding of, or interest in, fundamental problems" and that there were, in his view, too many Jewish people in the United States, for "too many create chaos", Lindbergh believed.[7] People in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, including Roosevelt himself, privately concluded that Lindbergh was sympathetic to Nazism.[8]
Between 1939 and 1941, there was public disagreement in the United States about whether or not the country should enter the then ongoing Second World War.[9] Lindbergh strongly opposed American intervention in the war.[10] He believed the United States would lose in a European war with Germany,[11] and in June 1940 he prognosticated a German victory over the United Kingdom.[12] In 1941, Lindbergh became a member of the national committee for the America First Committee, an isolationist advocacy group that lobbied against American participation in World War II[13] and over the course of its existence increasingly adopted nativism and antisemitism.[14] Lindbergh gave speeches at thirteen rallies held by America First.[15] Lindbergh's speeches were broadcast over radio and excited audiences, who wrote to him with praises—such as for his rhetorical appeal to reason and calming voice—and according to historian David Goodman, he was "the most popular and charismatic orator" in the public debate about intervention.[16] Beginning in 1941, Lindbergh made several public criticisms of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration, accusing Roosevelt of ignoring the will of the American people, deceiving the public, and "advocat[ing] world domination".[17]
Development
By September 1941, Lindbergh thought the United States was on the brink of entering World War II, and he decided he wanted to give a speech identifying those who he believed were "responsible for pushing" the country to join the war.[18] Preparing for a scheduled address at an America First rally to be held in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh wrote several drafts of a speech he initially titled "Who Are the Interventionists?" before retitling it "Who Are the War Agitators?".[19]Anne Morrow Lindbergh, married to Charles Lindbergh, encouraged him to put more emotion into his public speaking in general, but he dissembled from practicing, disliking rehearsal because he thought, in his words, that he "seem[ed] to lose spirit and feeling in the second reading".[20] When Anne Lindbergh read Charles Lindbergh's "Who Are the War Agitators?", she was alarmed and warned him against delivering the speech as written, as she predicted the press would consider the speech and him antisemitic.[21] Lindbergh insisted that he intended no antisemitism and refused to revise the speech to alleviate Anne Lindbergh's concern, getting into what she called a "terrible row" with her.[22] In a conversation with Selden Rodman a few weeks before giving the speech, Charles Lindbergh said he believed Jewish people had "themselves to blame".[23]
Lindbergh delivered "Who Are the War Agitators?" at an America First rally held in the Des Moines Coliseum in Des Moines, Iowa[24] on September 11, 1941.[25] Eight thousand people were in attendance in person,[24] and it was radio broadcast to a national audience.[26] When Lindbergh got on stage with others from the America First Committee, members of the crowd variously applauded and booed.[27] After a few other speakers preceded him, Lindbergh spoke, and his remarks lasted 25 minutes. He began by saying that there was an "ever-increasing effort to force the United States into" World War II and that he would identify groups who he thought were "responsible for changing our national policy" to favor participation in the war.[28]
Six minutes into the speech, Lindbergh named those he considered to be war agitators:[24] "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration", adding that he considered "capitalists, anglophiles, and intellectuals" and "[c]ommunistic groups" to also be agitators but of "lesser importance".[28] In the address, Lindbergh said Britain was propagandizing the United States to "get us into the war" because, he averred, it was impossible for Britain to win without American assistance; while it was "perfectly understandable that Great Britain wants the United States in the war on her side", according to Lindbergh "our interest is first in America".[29]
Lindbergh's accusations of Jewish war agitation comprised three paragraphs in the speech and formed what biographer A. Scott Berg called the "core of [Lindbergh's] thesis".[30] The speech deployed conspiratorial antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence permeating the United States.[31] Lindbergh said that American Jews had "large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government".[32] Accusations like those in Lindbergh's speech were recognizable in the United States at the time as antisemitic stereotypes codified by the hoax document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[33] In reality, only a minority of interventionist organizations' members were Jews, less than 3% of publishers of newspapers in the United States were Jewish, and there were few Jews in the foreign policy bureaucracy.[34] Many Jewish Americans, even if they hoped the United States went to war against Germany, deliberately avoided activism for war intervention out of fear of antisemitic backlash.[35] Lindbergh said he could "understand why Jewish people would desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany" and that "[n]o person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone" the Holocaust, but he insisted that entering World War II would endanger the country.[24] In saying that "the British and the Jewish races", in his words, "for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war", Lindbergh's antisemitic address characterized Jews as foreigners, outsiders, and infiltrators who were different from and dangerous to Americans.[36]
Lindbergh accused the Roosevelt presidency of wanting America to go to war as a bid for further power,[37] consolidating control by artificial "maintenance of a wartime emergency".[38] The United States Congress, Lindbergh said, was the "last stronghold of democracy and representative government in this country".[39] According to Lindbergh's speech, only by their combined effort had British people, Jewish people, and the Roosevelt administration brought the United States so close to war, and "[i]f any one of these groups" did not "agitat[e] for war", then he was sure the country would not enter World War II.[40]
Historian Susan Dunn wrote that when Lindbergh accused Jewish people of controlling the news media and government, booing from the audience "drowned out the cheers, forcing him again and again to stop" and "wait out the catcalls".[10] According to historian Lynne Olson, "applause clearly outweighed the jeering".[39]
Reception
The Evening Star (September 16, 1941) reporting on criticism of the Des Moines speech
Reaction
Historian David Goodman called the Des Moines speech Lindbergh's "most controversial public speech".[1] The public generally received the speech poorly.[41] Newspapers and politicians throughout the United States blasted Lindbergh's address as un-American.[38] Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic organizations and clergy denounced the speech for its bigotry; theologian Reinhold Niebuhr urged America First to "clean its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife",[42] and the American Jewish Year Book wrote that Lindbergh had platformed an "ugly, hate-breeding lie".[43] On September 16, 1941, the Davenport Times of Iowa reported that no other "public utterance by a figure of prominence in American life in a generation [...] brought forth such unanimous protest from the press, the church and political leaders".[44] Interventionists, noninterventionists, Democrats, Republicans, and Communists alike criticized Lindbergh, saying that the speech suggested he was antisemitic and sympathized with Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany.[45] Another isolationist organization, the Keep America Out of War Congress, had been collaborating with the America First Committee but ended that partnership after Lindbergh's Des Moines speech.[46] Public intellectual Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. heard Lindbergh's speech over the radio and in his memoir remembered finding it "all rather scary".[47]
The America First Committee received mail both praising and condemning Lindbergh for his speech.[48] 85% of the mail that America First received in the wake of the speech expressed solidarity with Lindbergh.[49] A portion of those pro-Lindbergh letters also expressed virulent bigotry against Jews, and the speech emboldened some antisemitic Americans.[50]Charles Coughlin, Merwin K. Hart, Herbert Hoover, and Alf Landon spoke in defense of Lindbergh, though their support, according to biographer Berg, "harmed more than they helped".[49] On September 24, 1941, the America First Committee issued an official statement denying charges of antisemitism and accusing interventionists of "inject[ing] the race issue into the discussion".[51] Numerous members and leaders of America First resigned in the aftermath of Lindbergh's speech,[52] and Dunn concluded that the organization "never recovered from the calamity of Lindbergh's stop in Des Moines".[2]
Depiction
Schlesinger's memoir, which mentioned that in 1940, some Republicans had wanted Lindbergh to run for president against Roosevelt, partly inspired novelist Philip Roth's 2004 The Plot Against America, an alternate history novel in which Lindbergh runs in and wins the 1940 United States presidential election.[53] As president, the character Lindbergh institutes antisemitic policies relocating American Jews, and his real-life Des Moines speech is reprinted in a postscript.[54] In the novel's plot, Roth moves the date of the Des Moines speech from 1941 to early 1940 (and thus before the 1940 Republican National Convention).[55] When narrating the speech, Roth describes Lindbergh's voice as "high-pitched, flat, midwestern, decidedly un-Rooseveltian".[56] Many book reviews of The Plot Against America interpreted its alternate history of the 1940s as a veiled metaphor for the presidency of George W. Bush, whom reviewers said had, like Roth's president Lindbergh, cast a pall of fear over the country, though Lindbergh's isolationism differed from George W. Bush's overseas adventurism.[57]Jewish studies professor Allan Arkush criticized The Plot Against America, as well as its HBO-produced miniseries adaptation of the same name, for implying that "an openly antisemitic candidate could have won the presidency in 1940", doubting the premise (though complimenting the execution) on the basis that in reality the Des Moines speech faced severe public backlash.[55]
Goodman, David (2017). "Lindbergh's Voice". In Damousi, Joy; Hamilton, Paula (eds.). A Cultural History of Sound, Memory, and the Senses. Routledge Studies in Cultural History. Routledge. pp.56–70. doi:10.4324/9781315445328. ISBN978-1-138-21177-3.
Greenwald, Lillian (1942). "Inter-group Relations". In Schneiderman, Harry; Fine, Morris T. (eds.). The American Jewish Yearbook, 5702. Vol.44. Jewish Publication Society of America. pp.151–165. JSTOR23602592.
Kalisch, Michael (Spring 2022). "Philip Roth's Radio Novels: Tuning in to I Married a Communist and The Plot Against America". Studies in American Fiction. 49 (1): 71–97. doi:10.1353/saf.2022.0003.
Specter, Matthew; Venkatasubramanian, Varsha (2023). "'America First': Nationalism, Nativism, and the Fascism Question, 1880–2020". In Rosenfeld, Gavriel D.; Ward, Janet (eds.). Fascism in America: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. pp.107–137. doi:10.1017/9781009337427.005. ISBN978-1-009-33741-0.
Valbousquet, Nina (January–April 2021). "'Un-American' Antisemitism?: The American Jewish Committee's Response to Global Antisemitism in the Interwar Period". American Jewish History. 105 (1–2): 77–102. doi:10.1353/ajh.2021.0004.
External links
Text and audio, hosted by the Spirit of St. Louis 2 Project
The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech, he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
Freedom of speech and expression
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Wendell Lewis Willkie was an American lawyer, corporate executive and the 1940 Republican nominee for president. Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican field's only interventionist: although the U.S. remained neutral prior to Pearl Harbor, he favored greater U.S. involvement in World War II to support Britain and other Allies. His Democratic opponent, incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, won the 1940 election with about 55% of the popular vote and took the electoral college vote by a wide margin.
The 1940 United States presidential election was the 39th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 5, 1940. Incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican businessman Wendell Willkie to be reelected for an unprecedented third term in office. Until 1988, this was the last time in which the incumbent's party won three consecutive presidential elections. It was also the fourth presidential election in which both major party candidates were registered in the same home state; the others have been in 1860, 1904, 1920, 1944, and 2016.
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator and military officer. On May 20–21, 1927, he made the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), flying alone for 33.5 hours. His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was designed and built to compete for the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first flight between the two cities. Although not the first transatlantic flight, it was the longest at the time by nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km) and the first solo transatlantic flight. It became known as one of the most consequential flights in history and ushered in a new era of air transportation between parts of the globe.
Henry Agard Wallace was an American politician, journalist, farmer, and businessman who served as the 33rd vice president of the United States, from 1941 to 1945, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He served as the 11th U.S. secretary of agriculture and the 10th U.S. secretary of commerce. He was the nominee of the new Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election.
Charles Edward Coughlin, commonly known as Father Coughlin, was a Canadian-American Catholic priest based in the United States near Detroit. He was the founding priest of the National Shrine of the Little Flower. Dubbed "The Radio Priest" and considered a leading demagogue, he was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience. During the 1930s, when the U.S. population was about 120 million, an estimated 30 million listeners tuned to his weekly broadcasts.
Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh was an American writer and aviator. She was the wife of decorated pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh, with whom she made many exploratory flights.
The America First Committee (AFC) was an American isolationist pressure group against the United States' entry into World War II. Launched in September 1940, it surpassed 800,000 members in 450 chapters at its peak. The AFC principally supported isolationism for its own sake, and its varied coalition included Republicans, Democrats, farmers, industrialists, communists, anti-communists, students, and journalists – however, it was controversial for the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist views of some of its most prominent speakers, leaders, and members. The AFC was dissolved on December 11, 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war.
Gerald Prentice Nye was an American politician who represented North Dakota in the United States Senate from 1925 to 1945. Nye rose to national fame in the 1930s as chair of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, which studied the causes of United States' involvement in World War I and became known as the Nye Committee. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was a prominent opponent of United States involvement in World War II.
Samuel Irving Rosenman was an American lawyer, judge, Democratic Party activist, and presidential speechwriter. He coined the term "New Deal", and helped articulate liberal policies during the heyday of the New Deal coalition. He was the first person to hold the position of White House Counsel.
William Dudley Pelley was an American fascist activist, journalist, writer and occultist, noted for his support of German dictator Adolf Hitler during the Great Depression and World War II.
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the novel follows his coming of age, as well as American politics.
Burton Kendall Wheeler was an attorney and an American politician of the Democratic Party in Montana, which he represented as a United States senator from 1923 until 1947.
The Babel Proclamation was issued by Iowa's Governor William L. Harding on May 23, 1918. It forbade the speaking of any language besides English in public. The proclamation was controversial, supported by many established English-speaking Iowans and notably opposed by citizens who spoke languages other than English. Harding repealed it on December 4, 1918. The Babel Proclamation marked the peak of a wave of anti-German sentiment in Iowa during World War I.
Charles August Lindbergh was a United States Congressman from Minnesota's 6th congressional district from 1907 to 1917. He opposed American entry into World War I as well as the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. Lindbergh is best known as the father of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The Jewish question was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century Europe that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other "national questions", dealt with the civil, legal, national, and political status of Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
The "Day of Infamy" speech, sometimes referred to as the Infamy speech, was a speech delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, to a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941. The previous day, the Empire of Japan attacked United States military bases at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, and declared war on the United States and the British Empire. The speech is known for its famed first line, which opened with Roosevelt saying, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy..."
Different opinions exist among historians regarding the extent of antisemitism in American history and how American antisemitism contrasted with its European counterpart. In contrast to the horrors of European history, John Higham states that in the United States "no decisive event, no deep crisis, no powerful social movement, no great individual is associated primarily with, or significant chiefly because of anti-Semitism." Accordingly, David A. Gerber concludes that antisemitism "has been a distinctly minor feature of the nation's historical development." Historian Britt Tevis argue that, "Handlin and Higham’s ideas remain influential, and many American Jewish historians continue to present antisemitism as largely insignificant, momentary, primarily social."
The following events occurred in September 1941:
The foreign policy of the United States was controlled personally by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first and second and third and fourth terms as the president of the United States from 1933 to 1945. He depended heavily on Henry Morgenthau Jr., Sumner Welles, and Harry Hopkins. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Cordell Hull handled routine matters. Roosevelt was an internationalist, while powerful members of Congress favored more isolationist solutions in order to keep the U.S. out of European wars. There was considerable tension before the Attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The attack converted the isolationists or made them irrelevant. The US began aid to the Soviet Union after Germany invaded it in June 1941. After the US declared war in December 1941, key decisions were made at the highest level by Roosevelt, Britain's Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, along with their top aides. After 1938 Washington's policy was to help China in its war against Japan, including cutting off money and oil to Japan. While isolationism was powerful regarding Europe, American public and elite opinion strongly opposed Japan.
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