Lindbergh, Nazis, and America First
Lindbergh, Nazis, and America First
Sorting out some historical details
On this date in 1940, thousands packed into Woolsey Hall at Yale University to hear Charles A. Lindbergh warn against American intervention in World War II. Nearly two months into German bombing of London and other British cities, the famous pilot insisted that
our involvement in this war would be a disaster both for our own country and for Europe. I say that it would be a disaster for America because it would confuse and aggravate our internal problems, which are critical enough without war. I say that it would be a disaster for Europe because I am convinced that the relationships of European countries cannot be solved through American interference in their affairs. I say that it would be a disaster for all of us because from a purely material standpoint, if from no other, we are not in a position to enter this war successfully.
Lindbergh had been invited to Yale by students R. Douglas Stuart Jr. and Kingman Brewster Jr., who had founded the America First Committee a month before. As the debate over intervention continued, Lindbergh would make thirteen more speeches for America First.
I mention all this because a Trump-Vance rally held this past Sunday at MSG, an event that the New York Times described as offering “a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA movement,” has prompted all sorts of semi-valid historical allusions to Lindbergh and America First by outraged commentators.
Like Alon Pinkas of Haaretz, for example, I do worry that the rally “[provided] a glimpse into an America under a second Donald Trump term,” one reflecting “a racist, white supremacist, angry, misogynistic, xenophobic, undemocratic, and quasi-fascist United States.” Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden made many think back to a 1939 rally in the same arena, at which the pro-Nazi German American Bund gathered more than 20,000 “Heil Hitler”-ing people to support Germany. Finally, Pinkas is also correct that Lindbergh spoke to an America First rally two years later at MSG.
(Well, he’s half-correct; Lindbergh spoke to two such rallies in that building, one in April 1941 and the other in October of that year, weeks after his infamously anti-Semitic speech at an America First event in Des Moines, Iowa.)
But he’s also tossing together some historical details that should be parsed out more carefully. So let this Lindbergh biographer point out a few facts that both complicate and confirm the 2024 to 1939/1941 comparison.
1. Neither Lindbergh nor America First had anything to do with the Bund rally in February 1939. America First hadn’t been founded yet, and Lindbergh was still living in France at that point. He returned to the U.S. in April, but didn’t make his first public statements against intervention until WWII started that September.
2. America First was ideologically diverse, with a membership that included Christian pacifists, democratic socialists, and well-meaning liberals and conservatives. (Its leadership took pains to distance America First from far-right wing groups like the Bund.) As I pointed out here last February, “before Pearl Harbor, Americans opposed intervention in World War II for all sorts of reasons that had nothing to do with religious or racial bigotry or sympathy for fascist dictatorships.”
3. In most of his America First speeches — including the one at Yale in 1940 and those at Madison Square Garden in 1941 — Lindbergh primarily argued against interventionism on grounds other than white supremacy or sympathy for Nazism: the catastrophe of World War I, which left many Americans suspicious of British manipulation and pro-democracy crusades alike; a centuries-old version of isolationism that emphasized American security behind its two oceans; and a badly flawed strategic analysis that overemphasized German strength (particularly that of the overstretched Luftwaffe) and badly underestimated the United States’ potential to wage war around the world.
“I have been forced to the conclusion,” Lindbergh told the MSG audience in April 1941, “that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.” Yet the U.S. “is better situated from a military standpoint than any other nation in the world. Even in our present condition of unpreparedness, no foreign power is in a position to invade us today. If we concentrate on our own defenses, and build the strength that this nation should maintain, no foreign army will ever attempt to land on American shores.”
I haven’t read it yet, but based on reviews, I suspect that you’ll find historian H. W. Brands emphasizing this set of arguments in his new book about the debate between Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But uglier impulses were always implicit in Lindbergh’s case against intervention, and sometimes explicit. And they haven’t disappeared from the American political imagination.
First, it’s certainly fair to wonder just how much admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime Charles Lindbergh shared with Bund leader Fritz Kuhn. Seven months after she was removed from the MSG rally by Bund members, Dorothy Thompson warned readers of her syndicated column that Lindbergh’s “inclination toward Fascism is well known to his friends.” One of them, British diplomat Harold Nicolson, had told his diary a year earlier that Lindbergh “believes in the Nazi theology, all tied up with his hatred of degeneracy and his hatred of democracy as represented by the free Press and the American public.” Indeed, only the violent spectacle of Kristallnacht — three weeks after the world’s most famous American accepted a medal from Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering — kept the Lindberghs from moving to Berlin in late 1938.
At the very least, Charles Lindbergh held a racialized worldview that shaped his analysis of geopolitics. In his first anti-intervention appeal, a national radio broadcast delivered two weeks after Germany invaded Poland, Lindbergh called the new world war “simply one of those age-old quarrels within our own family of nations” (emphasis mine). When he amplified his arguments later that fall for Reader’s Digest, Lindbergh decried “a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization.” The way to arrest “that racial decline which follows physical and spiritual mediocrity” was for England, France, Germany, and the United States “to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again” into a “Western wall of race and arms.”
As I pointed out in my Lindbergh biography, his first America First speech mostly “emphasized themes of national security.” Yet “racialized concerns of civilizational decline had not disappeared,” so long as you understand what he meant by the “internal problems” that American intervention in WWII could “confuse and aggravate.”
A week after that speech, Lindbergh voted against a third term for FDR, then attended a dinner party at which he and his friends took to “discussing the Jewish problem and how it could be handled in this country with intelligence and moderation.”1 Or so he recorded the night in his private diary, in a passage he left out when publishing his Wartime Journals years later. Likewise, Lindbergh deleted his suggestion that evening that a first step to fixing American politics “must be to disenfranchise the Negro.”
“What of our ten million negroes?”, Lindbergh had asked his diary just before leaving France, in March 1939. “What of our industrial immigration? On what stock are we to build? Are we building hatred against an older European country because it is facing problems which we ourselves must sometime face?… One thing is certain—if democracy is to continue on this earth it will not be by the blood of its soldiers but only by great changes in its present practices. No system based on the equality of the strong and the weak… can long endure. Democracy can succeed only as long as it embraces a relatively small number of comparatively equal people—and they must in addition be a superior people. Democracy never has and never can encompass the whole of mankind.”
So let’s get the historical details right. But the larger point remains: when speakers at a Trump rally equate Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage” and proclaim that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” when Trump himself calls next Tuesday “liberation day” from a supposed scourge of Latin American and African immigrants that he routinely reviles as criminals with “bad genes,” then it’s clear that some of the most troubling facets of Lindbergh’s case for America First haven’t yet been confined to the ash heap of history.
What did he mean by “the Jewish problem”? Sailing back to the U.S. with some Jewish refugees in April 1939, Lindbergh imagined “the United States taking these Jews in addition to those we already have. There are too many in places like New York already. A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many. This present immigration will have its reaction. The worst of it is that the good Jews will be carried with it.”