Charles Lindbergh Lights the Way

Charles Lindbergh was a global icon, an American patriot, and a man of unimpeachable courage. For that reason, Lindbergh was demonized, slandered, and posthumously cancelled.

Lindbergh opposed U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts whenever the vital interests of the American people were not at stake. Today, as the Trump administration prepares to restart its war of aggression against Iran—and to do so under the influence and for the benefit of Israel—the America First movement must defend the reputation and revive the example of Lindbergh.

The daring aviator—who piloted, in 1927, the first solo transatlantic flight—garnered unparalleled fame worldwide and was named Man of the Year by Time magazine. Five years later, Lindbergh’s 20-month-old infant son was kidnapped and murdered—the “Crime of the Century,” as it became known.

A more respected and sympathetic public figure could hardly have been imagined. No wonder, then, that Lindbergh was perceived to be so dangerous after the outbreak of the Second World War. In a series of speeches and articles, he opposed American intervention, castigated the warmongers, and made himself a target of the political establishment.

“When history is written,” Lindbergh declared in one such speech, “the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the interventionists who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared.”

In January 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his annual address to Congress, painted Lindbergh and his America First Committee as soft-headed preachers of appeasement who “would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.”

Roosevelt didn’t refer to Lindbergh by name in that speech, but everyone knew who he had in mind. And three months later, Roosevelt confirmed their suspicions during a press conference, categorizing Lindbergh himself among the appeasers and defeatists of American history. Other political leaders maligned him as pro-Nazi, antisemitic, and un-American.

Though Lindbergh supported the war effort after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor—even flying on combat missions in the Pacific and shooting down a Japanese fighter—his reputation never fully recovered.

In 2004, the author Philip Roth published The Plot Against America, an alternative history in which Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, allies with Nazi Germany, and unleashes an epidemic of antisemitism in America. The novel was adapted into an HBO miniseries in 2020 that received critical acclaim.

By villainizing Lindbergh, political and media elites have also weaponized him. The playbook is straightforward: Whenever an antiwar conservative gets out of line, just call him a modern-day Lindbergh, whose very name has become synonymous with Hitler fan.

Pat Buchanan, cofounder of this magazine, was routinely smeared using the technique. After Tucker Carlson gravitated from neoconservatism to Buchanan-style populism, he got the same treatment. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, critics presented him as the second coming of Lindbergh. Indeed, the Plot Against America miniseries functioned as an implicit critique of Trump and the nation that elected him.

Courageous right-wingers have understood that opposing the anti-Lindbergh narrative is necessary to defend today’s America First movement. “What they tried to do is discredit the term America First, and they did it by tying it to Charles Lindbergh,” observed Carlson last year on a podcast. “Lindbergh was the greatest hero in the first half of the 20th century in the United States. A true hero and a pioneer in aviation.”

Buchanan too refused to back down. “Good for you in bringing up Colonel Lindbergh’s name,” he said during a radio interview in 2008. “Because his reputation has been blackened because of a single speech he gave and a couple of paragraphs in it.”

The speech to which Buchanan referred was Lindbergh’s September 1941 address in Des Moines. In it, Lindbergh poses this question, “Who is responsible for changing our national policy from one of neutrality and independence to one of entanglement in European affairs?” And he offers this answer: “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.”

You can see why the speech remains controversial, exhibit A for those who wish to prove that Lindbergh was a virulent antisemite. And yet, nobody has sought to cancel Lindbergh over supposed Anglophobia, though he also slammed “the British” for supporting America’s war party.

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

In these and other passages—which mirror writings from his personal diary—Lindbergh sympathized with foreign nations and internal ethnic groups whose parochial interests dictated support for the U.S. entering the war. Lindbergh’s argument was that America’s interests dictated staying out of it, and that Americans of whatever ethnic background should prioritize those interests above all. One can reject Lindbergh’s assessment on that score without ascribing the motivation of Jew-hatred.

What increasingly cannot be denied is that America today is at war on behalf of a foreign nation. Israel and its American loyalists—a group, by the way, that includes (non-Jewish) Christian Zionists and arguably Trump himself—have inflated the Iranian threat, inserted poison pills into peace negotiations, downplayed the difficulty of toppling the Islamic Republic, smeared antiwar voices as antisemites, and agitated relentlessly for a war that was intended to defang Israel’s chief adversary but instead has accelerated America’s relative decline.

These are the times that try men’s souls. Freedom-loving American patriots must jealously guard our nation’s hard-won independence. To that end, we should demand that U.S. foreign policy serve Americans’ interests. Decades ago, Charles Lindbergh fought this good fight at great personal risk. Today, his example can, and should, inspire us to do the same. America First!