“I thought this was supposed to be a work of fiction,” a member of my book group wrote just before we met to discuss Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” Published in 2004, the book imagines that Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and, naturally, how that affected a Jewish family in Newark.

Lindbergh and the book, come to mind because on January 23, 1941, Lindbergh testified against the Roosevelt’s proposed Lend-Lease bill, which would have allowed the US to offer Britain (and its allies) massive amounts of weapons, food, and supplies needed for their fight against Nazi Germany. To mark this unfortunate anniversary, today’s #stampoftheday is a 10-cent stamp portraying the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane in which Lindbergh made the first successful solo trans-Atlantic flight in May 1927. Originally issued in June 1927, the stamp was reissued in May 1928, when the Post Office produced its first booklet of airmail stamps.

Although it has been more than a decade since his famous flight, Lindbergh was a major celebrity when he testified. As The New York Times noted in its lead story the next day, “Colonel Lindbergh’s appearance before the committee had all the atmosphere of a gala occasion. …Long long lines of prospective spectators were waiting to surge into the hall. The vast majority of them were admirers of the aviator and showed their admiration repeatedly by prolonged applause in defiance of the rules and of the not very stern admonitions,” made by the committee’s chairman.

Indeed, by the time he testified, Lindbergh not only was well-known for his opposition to American involvement in the war but also for his barely disguised anti-Semitic views. In a 1939 article in the Reader’s Digest, for example, he wrote that Americans “can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.”

In his January 1941 testimony, which lasted over four hours, Lindbergh argued that “the faults and the causes of the war are evenly divided in Europe.” Later, he added, “there is much I do not like that is happening in the world on both sides. Over a period of years, however, there is not as much difference in our philosophy as we have been led to believe.” Moreover, he claimed (falsely) that war might have been avoided had the United States not secretly promised to aid the British and French before they declared war after Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

He contended that Britain probably couldn’t successfully invade the continent, most of which was under German control, and Germany probably couldn’t conquer England. Given this, he said, “our encouragement of waging war” by providing aid to Britain, “won’t affect the outcome and will increase hatred against us.” And, he argued, that even if Germany defeated England, the US would still be safe. Given all this, he contended, “It would be better for us and for every nation that the war in Europe end without conclusive victory.” And he added, “a negotiated peace would be the best thing for the United States,” even if it left the Nazis in power.

Lindbergh, who had been sharply criticized for not returning a medal he had gotten from Hermann Goring in 1938 a few weeks before Kristallnacht, was asked if ever expressed opposition to Hitler. “Yes,” he replied, “but not publicly. I believe we should maintain neutrality publicly.” (In fact, in his 1939 Reader’s Digest article, he had written Hitler had “accomplished results (good in addition to bad) which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism.”)

The day after Lindbergh’s testimony, Germany Foreign Ministry officials said his candor was “courageous.” The British government did not make an official statement, but the British press sharply criticized him. The Daily Herald, for example, ran a photo of Lindbergh with the caption, “Lindbergh, pro-Nazi.” Roosevelt claimed that he hadn’t even bothered to read Lindbergh’s testimony. But testifying about a week later, Navy Secretary Henry Knox, (a Republican who had been his party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1936) said, “Colonel Lindbergh’s idea that it might be possible now to effect a stable negotiated peace between Great Britain and Germany is wild fantasy.”

A few months later (after the Lend-Lease bill had passed), Roosevelt attacked Lindbergh’s views as those of a “defeatist and appeaser” and compared him to the U.S. Representative who had led the “Copperhead” movement opposed to the American Civil War. Lindbergh responded by resigning his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps, writing that he saw “no honorable alternative” given that Roosevelt had publicly questioned his loyalty.

In September 1941, Lindbergh gave an infamous speech in which he said three groups were “pressing this country toward war; the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration.” He added that Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” Three months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Lindbergh tried to reenlist, but Roosevelt would not allow it. Lindbergh did, however, serve as a civilian consultant to companies that were making planes for the war effort.

Lindbergh never ran for president. But the idea wasn’t far-fetched. In a New York Times essay, Roth recalled that when he was reading historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s autobiography, “I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940. That’s all there was, that one sentence with…a fact about [Lindbergh] I’d not known.”

It made me think,” he continued, “‘What if they had?'” Three years later, he published “The Plot Against America.”

That question—”What if they had?” – haunts me.

“What if they had,” triumphed in 1940?

And “what if they had” triumphed in 2020?

And, of course, “what if they do” triumph at some point in the future, when, as in 1940 and 2020, the stakes are especially high?

But, for now, I’ll take solace in the fact that they didn’t triumph in 1940. And they didn’t win in 2020 either.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.