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Then, like a bean patch under a hot sun, opposition sprouted up & down the country. Feeling blindly for something to fasten to, it clutched and climbed on the solid Chicago organization of General Wood. With sincere isolationists, frightened business and political opportunists, many a political weed twined up: Roosevelt-haters, Bundists, Fascists, Coughlinites. America First chapters sprang up overnight, started their own membership drives. Nickels, dimes, dollars rolled in. From Chicago, it looked breathtaking. The America Firsters in Chicago did not yet realize that their movement had grown out of hand.
White Knight. Isolationist Congressmen, after Lend-Lease went through over their protests, stormed out of the Capital to tour the country for the isolationist cause. Chief among them were Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who hates the President, dreams of riding into the White House on the crest of a post-war isolationist wave; Senator Gerald P. Nye, one of the most detested and distrusted men in the Senate; Representative Hamilton Fish, demagogic, erratic, unstable, who also dreams of being President some day.
The Three Furies of the isolationist press increased their howls. In Chicago, Robert ("Bertie") McCormick's Tribune bombarded the Midwest with isolationist propaganda, screamed: "The 80 per cent of our people who are Americans undefiled by foreign seductions must bring their influence to bear on Congress and the Executive." Cousins Joe Patterson (New York Daily News) and Eleanor Patterson (Washington Times-Herald) ground out their daily gripes at the risks involved in the Administration's policy of trying to stop Hitler.
In April Charles Lindbergh joined the crusade. He wrote his own speeches, said what he believed, submitted to no pre-speech censorship. He became America First's idol and white knight. Along with Mrs. Lindbergh, he became an intimate of Bob Wood and a frequent guest at the Woods' comfortable lakeside house. Often the General and the Colonel, plain men both, sat up talking until midnight, a late hour for Bob Wood, who habitually leaves parties at 9:30.
When Lindbergh made his Des Moines speech charging that the British, the Administration and Jews were pushing the U.S. towards war, America Firsters in Chicago did not immediately realize what havoc his words were to unleash. Neither did Lindbergh. He had believed that the President, warming up for his declaration on freedom of the seas, was about to make a speech which might mean war, and he was determined to get in one last word before it was too late to talk.
General Wood had made up his mind that when the U.S. was really in a shooting war, it was time to quit talking. As a patriotic citizen and an old soldier he felt that duty strongly. Whether he could shut up his Committee, or control the rank undergrowth, was something else.
There was no denying that, before Lindbergh spoke, anti-Semitism was one of the weeds that had already sprung up in America First's lush garden. But until Lindbergh publicly described the Jews as a danger to the U.S., anti-Semitism had not burst into full flower. General Wood and his associates were astonished at the country's reaction to Lindbergh's attack.