Isolationists Challenged to Denounce Lindbergh’s and Nye’s Anti-semitic Statements

“The American people are waiting, probably in vain, to see if any member of the America First group or any of the isolationist senators will condemn Charles A. Lindbergh for his anti-Semitic speech at Des Moines, or Senator Nye for his anti-Semitic statements before the so-called Subcommittee to Hold Hearings on the Motion Picture Industry and War,” the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies declared today.

“Unless and until the isolationist bloc of the Senate, the isolationist America First Committee, and the isolationist leaders of the country generally openly repudiate Senator Nye and Charles Lindbergh, the American people will proceed on the assumption that the isolationist movement in the United States copies the Hitler pattern of anti-Semitism as a means of destroying national unity,” the committee said.

ASKS INVESTIGATION INTO LINDBERGH’S ACTIVITIES

The Senate and House Military Affairs Committees were urged today by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to start an investigation into the activities of Mr. Lindbergh on the ground that he is “giving aid and comfort” to Nazi strategy. “When Mr. Lindbergh parroted the Nazi propaganda line in this country, as he did in his address last week at Des Moines, Iowa, he was giving aid and comfort to the Nazi war strategy of terror aimed at the United States,” the anti-Nazi League argued.

Secretary of the Navy Knox in Chicago yesterday scored Lindbergh. “When my attention was called to Lindbergh’s utterances in Des Moines my immediate reaction was that they were dictated by Herr Goebbels himself for this country,” Secretary Knox said. “Lindbergh’s address was very un-American.”

The Daily Mirror, a Hearst newspaper in New York, in an editorial today, demanded “an investigation to discover, condemn and crush the sources and the common motives behind the deliberate anti-Semitism spread by two speeches, first by Nye, second by Lindbergh.”

Arthur Brin, chairman of the Minnesota anti-Defamation League, in a letter to Gen. Robert Wood, head of the America First Committee, asked that the Committee repudiate Lindbergh’s anti-Jewish assertions. “Lindbergh’s statements reveal either such a gross ignorance as to discredit the responsibility of the America First Committee, or else his following of the Hitler line that ‘the very enormity of a lie contributes to its success,'” Mr. Brin said.