ABSTRACT
Charles Lindbergh’s speeches of course also divided Americans; amidst increasingly frequent charges that he was an appeaser at best and a Nazi sympathizer at worst, his speeches provoked intense hostility as well as admiration. Lindbergh was by 1939 a national public and political figure who would rapidly become an effective radio broadcaster. Lindbergh’s technical persona and emotional coolness resonated with many Americans at a time when emotional control was increasingly valued; historian of emotions Peter Stearns indeed identifies a ‘new aversion to emotional intensity’ from the 1920s. Lindbergh’s interventionist opponents lamented to themselves their lack of a headline speaker with this kind of crowd-pulling and persuasive capacity. Lindbergh’s opposition of rationality to emotion resonated broadly within the isolationist movement. The isolationists constantly claimed to be rational, free from the pro-British emotion and war hysteria they feared were engulfing the rest of the populace.
