How a presidential campaign that wasn't-- from an earlier time--seems relevant today
And what all of this has meant to Jews then and now
So here we are, almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century with America’s fifty-ninth presidential election just around the corner.
One of the two major candidates rose to his position of political power as a celebrity and is running a campaign based in large part on fear of people who are not white Christians.
Meanwhile, one of the richest men in the world who made his fortune by manufacturing and selling a new kind of automobile has invested heavily in the support of this candidate and seems poised to become a part of the administration if his candidate wins.
In the background, America is experiencing a major increase in anti-Semitism in response to a war elsewhere in the world that began with the targeting of Jews for elimination.
But this is not about Donald Trump or Elon Musk or the anti-Semitism stemming from the war in Gaza.
It is not about what is going on in America and the world in 2024.
It is about America and the world in the early 1940s
It is about Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and World War II.
Oddly, the situations in both 2024 and the 1940s have strong connections to Iowa. More about that later.
The story of America in the 1940s had its roots much earlier in the twentieth century – specifically in America’s entry into World War I in 1916 and in Lindbergh’s 33-hour, non-stop, solo flight across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris, in 1927, an achievement many thought to be impossible.
America’s entry into World War I did bring that war to a conclusion within two years. But the cost was substantial. More than 100,000 American men died in that war, either in combat or from disease. The national debt ballooned by more than $25 billion, the equivalent of more than $500 trillion today. And then, the end of the war was messy. Many of the problems in Europe that caused the war were not resolved. In effect, they simply were placed in storage to set the stage 20 years later for World War II.
Little wonder that by the time Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, marking the official beginning of World War II, a majority of Americans were opposed to the U.S. having anything to do with another war in Europe.
Lindbergh, whose popularity was unsurpassed in America with the possible exception of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became the de facto leader of the anti-war movement in America the month after the war began.
He wanted America to enter no war unless its domain in the Western Hemisphere was attacked. More specifically, only an attack on the area framed by Alaska and Hawaii on the west, Labrador and Bermuda on the east, Canada on the north, and South America on the south should draw America into the war.
In 1940, with the question of whether America would enter the war still on the table, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term, and Lindbergh is reported to have been in discussions with Republican Party leaders to become the opposition nominee.
He also began stoking the fires of anti-Semitism in America even while Jews had come under attack in Germany and were facing a crisis that soon would evolve as the Holocaust.
Before it ended, 6 million Jews, one-third of the world’s Jewish population, would be exterminated by Hitler and his generals – the same generals who Trump wants to emulate as top military appointees within his administration if he wins the presidency again.
The Jews in America were one of the major forces pushing the country toward war, Lindbergh said repeatedly. The greatest danger the Jews posed to America, he said, was their “large ownership and interest in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” The unstated implication was that Jews involved in these endeavors would profit from war.
The Jews, he said, “wish to involve us in war” for “reasons which are not American.” He also warned against the “infiltration of inferior blood” within what he considered America’s native bloodline, the Western Europeans.
In many ways, Lindbergh used his base of celebrity to promote his isolationist policies through a campaign based on hatred of a minority group within America. (Full disclosure: the Jews were only one of three alleged pro-war agitators targeted by Lindbergh; the other two were the British, already under attack by Hitler, and Roosevelt, who had consistently stated that America would not participate, but would be ready, just in case.)
In any case, four score and four years later, a presidential candidate who rose to power through celebrity would use the same approach in running for office. This time, the hatred would be built on the foundation of halting and reversing immigration, not on promoting isolationism.
A Lindbergh candidacy in 1940 did not happen. It stalled very early in the discussion stages. But some have speculated in recent years that it might have been an election Lindbergh could have won.
In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, the author, Philip Roth, spins an alternative history in which Lindbergh does get the Republican nomination in 1940, based in large part on his anti-Semitism, and defeats Roosevelt on the strength of his campaign slogan, “Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War.”
Overall, there was no louder voice than Lindbergh’s in America speaking against entering World War II. But there were other notable voices of anti-Semitism.
Henry Ford likely was America’s first billionaire, although he was, in effect, in a race for that title against John D. Rockefeller, and some believe Rockefeller got there a few years earlier.
Ford had achieved his enormous wealth by creating and using the assembly line as a way to significantly reduce manufacturing costs for automobiles, thus creating a car that could be sold at prices most Americans could afford.
Unfortunately, Ford, like Lindbergh, a supporter of Hitler, used a portion of his enormous fortune to create and disseminate vitriolic anti-Semitic literature nationwide at levels never previously seen.
He was, in effect, Lindbergh’s echo chamber for the propagation of anti-Semitism. Had Lindbergh run and won, Ford almost certainly would have held high office in his administration.
About Iowa’s role in all of this
Donald Trump got his start in Presidential politics in Iowa through the nation’s earliest Republican presidential primary elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024. He finished a surprisingly close second in 2016 and won in 2020 and 2024.
And Des Moines is where Charles Lindbergh chose to make his strongest anti-war speech on September 11, 1941. In the speech, he detailed his political beliefs and used fear to promote anti-Semitism as a major tool for building support for his beliefs.
Ultimately, the 1940 election ended with Roosevelt easily winning a third term over the Republican nominee, Indiana businessman and utility executive Wendell Wilkie.
Three months after Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Lindbergh’s stay-out-of-the-war campaign collapsed almost immediately.
Anti-Semitism, of course, would fall from the limelight for a decade or so during and after the war but would live to fight another day.
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Good column, Arnie, as usual. Many parallels between Ford and Lindbergh's time and now, with our multi-billionaires financing the blond fascist. My dad's from Iowa. He voted for Nixon and had all his proper Iowa Republican propensities. Even he would ask, "How could such a worthy state push that disgusting felon through the primaries again?"
Thanks, Cheryl.