More acquisitions from the last decade or so. Today, the Council Against Intolerance in America, America Answers Lindbergh! (1940; shelmark YD.2005.a.422), from the same dealer's catalogue as yesterday's Kingdom of Flying Men.  The Flying Man in question is the aviator Charles Lindbergh, famous for his 1927 non-stop flight across the Atlantic, and infamous for his flirtation with far-right and even fascist popular politics. Lindbergh provided the engine for Philip Roth's counter-historical novel, The Plot Against America, in which Lindbergh trumps Roosevelt to win the 1940 presidential election, with terrible antisemitic consequences.

In this pamphlet, which originally cost 10 cents, a range of leading figures from churchmen to journalists and politicians respond to Lindbergh's ant-intervention and antisemitic speech at Des Moines, Iowa on 11 September 1940 as leader of the America First Committee.  The mayor of New York's response, included on p. 9,  ran as follows

'Carbon Copy of a Nazi Paper

'Replying to your telegram concerning Colonel Lindbergh's injection of race and religious issue into American life, I can only repeat what I have already stated, that no American should read, at a public meeting at any time, from a carbon copy of a Nazi paper

- F.H. Laguardia'. 

 

Matthew Shaw