because Lindbergh had something that appealed so profoundly to America
that he has not lost it all yet, and he towers in influence above our
other isolationists, some of whom are plainly patriotic but deluded
citizens. Lindbergh, however, is, I am convinced, mainly responsible
for the long hesitation of this country to go to war to defend its
life. I do not intend to impugn Lindbergh’s sincerity, but surely there
is something wrong with a man who declares as he does that we should
not go to war, among other reasons, because we are not united, then
does his utmost to disunite us still further.
Mayor La Guardia, in his capacity as Director of Civilian Defense,
pleaded at a mass meeting in Philadelphia for all Americans not in
agreement with the Administration’s foreign policy not to do or
say anything that might give aid or comfort to a potential enemy.
Exactly twenty-four hours later, stepping on La Guardia’s heels,
Lindbergh addressed another mass meeting in Philadelphia and attacked
the President of the United States in terms so violent that they
were widely interpreted as calling for a revolution against the
Administration.
It was that famous speech which he was compelled to retract in part
since it alarmed so many even of his followers. Mrs. Kathleen Norris,
the novelist, a prominent member of the America First Committee, and
present on the platform with Lindbergh, told reporters that afternoon,
in answer to a question, that she could “swear that no member of the
committee is mixed up with any subversive activity.” “Subversive” means
“tending to overthrow, upset, or destroy,” which is precisely what
Lindbergh’s speeches attempt to do to the Administration of the United
States.
None of the isolationist crowd can compare with Lindbergh in
importance to the Fifth Column in America. From the point of view
of American national security and the future of this country he is
America’s Public Enemy Number One, because he was once so incomparably
America’s National Hero of Heroes, and some American people still hope
that now from their former idol, politically unbranded, apparently
disinterested, they can finally get the truth and the light. For
the most part, Americans do not realize what has happened to their
National Hero, although fortunately throughout the country there is a
deep-seated distrust of anyone who has taken up an attitude so palpably
favorable to the nation’s enemies.
Q. _What is the reason for the divorce between Lindbergh and the
American people who used to worship him unanimously? The crowds he
has at America First rallies may number thousands--mostly Nazis and
their sympathizers, I take it--but Lindbergh used to have 130,000,000
Americans cheering him._
A. Yes, what is it that has happened to Lindbergh to cause such a
radical change? In 1927 Coolidge called him “noble”; in 1941 Roosevelt
said he was “not wanted.” What a contrast! I have just finished reading
for the first time Lindbergh’s book called _We_, as he referred to
himself and his airplane, the _Spirit of St. Louis_, containing
the story of his life and flight. It moves one to sadness to look
back and remember the way that world of long ago reacted to the
twenty-five-year-old American’s feat. Many of us have forgotten that
the flight itself became secondary to the world’s intoxication over the
event.
Lindbergh received a more spectacular ovation, attended by more
persons, who were more excited, in France, Belgium, England, and the
United States than had ever been given any human being in the history
of the world by any of the multitudes which have welcomed conquerors
and kings.
Consider the terms used by President Coolidge in referring to
Lindbergh; “this sincere and genuine exemplar of fine and noble
virtues”; “illustrious citizen”; “this genial, modest American youth
with the naturalness, the simplicity and the poise of true greatness”;
“this wholesome, earnest, fearless, courageous product of America.” And
as if this were not enough, Coolidge read off a list of “some of his
qualities noted by the Army officers who examined him for promotion,
as shown by reports in the files of the Militia Bureau of the War
Department:
“‘Intelligent,’ ‘industrious,’ ‘energetic,’ ‘dependable,’ ‘purposeful,’
‘alert,’ ‘quick of reaction,’ ‘serious,’ ‘deliberate,’ ‘stable,’
‘efficient,’ ‘frank,’ ‘modest,’ ‘congenial,’ ‘a man of good moral
habits and regular in all his business transactions.’”
And then President Coolidge went on to say that “One of his officers
expressed his belief that the young man ‘would successfully complete
everything he undertakes.’ This reads like a prophecy.”
Heaven protect the American people if Lindbergh succeeds in his present
undertaking, because he has undertaken now to keep America from meeting
her peril before it becomes overwhelming. He wants us to wait until the
only allies left in the world for us are stricken down and we stand
by ourselves to face a combination of powers stronger than we and
unappeasably resolved to destroy us.
He has undertaken this task apparently as a sort of crusade. We are
assured that his father before him, Charles Lindbergh, Congressman
from Minnesota, also possessed the Lindbergh sincerity as he declaimed
throughout the last war against American participation. We recognize
sincerity, persistence, and courage as admirable qualities when linked
with a just cause, but the possession of them only makes the matter
worse when they are associated with a disastrous and cynical policy.
You ask “cynical”? Yes, Hitler, for example is a sincere cynic, and
so is Lindbergh. His policy shamelessly declares we should withdraw
aid from Britain, coolly watch her fall, and then as quickly as
possible trade with Hitler and make what we can out of the defeat
of civilization. Lindbergh genuinely sees nothing to be ashamed of
in advocating such a policy, and that makes him deserve the title
“sincere.” It is nevertheless as cynical as any Nazi could invent. We
could stomach that if the cynicism were realistic. It is not. This
would-be smart policy has no more chance to succeed than the would-be
Machiavellian policy of Mussolini, who has given the world its least
appetizing sight of the war: the avowed brute too feeble to be brutal.
Lindbergh’s personality is important to us all, since he has assumed
office as a member of what they would call in England “the disloyal
opposition,” and so it is not too minor a point to note that of all
the qualities he was ever credited with, the quality of generosity is
lacking. Witness his experience with France and England. To France
and the French people he owed the beginning of the ovation which was
to make his fame and fortune, and he acknowledged his debt this way
in _We_: “The whole-hearted welcome to me--an American--touched me
beyond any point that words can express. I left France with a debt of
gratitude which, though I cannot repay it, I shall always remember.”
That was the old Lindbergh, or rather the young one, still unspoiled.
Thirteen years later, when France stood more in need of a friend than
ever in her long and troubled history; when a mere gesture of American
solidarity with her cause might have put heart in her bewildered troops
and kept the enemy at bay; when the word of a Lindbergh could have been
effective in the awakening of American public opinion to our obligation
not to let France fall, for our own sake as well as for hers; Lindbergh
spoke. He spoke against America’s giving France any aid whatever.
It was May 20, 1940 and the Germans stood on the Somme. Lindbergh’s
broadcast summarized everything he has had to say since: “Years ago we
decided to stay out of foreign wars. We based our military policy on
that decision. We must not waver now that the crisis is at hand. There
is no longer time for us to enter this war successfully.”
I was with the French at that time and can testify that Lindbergh’s
words struck France like a blow between the eyes. The famous Lafayette
Escadrille announced that it had deprived Lindbergh of his honorary
membership. Lindbergh’s response to England was identical. He took
his child to England after he had suffered his great family tragedy
in America, and in England he received everything he desired: quiet
hospitality and all the privacy he has said he wanted. But when
England stood with her back to the wall, and once again the American
attitude to the war became decisive; and once again the voice of a
Lindbergh could have worked powerfully to shake our people into the
tardy realization that this time would be the last time and that if
we did not awaken now we might never be given the chance again; when
our people needed to realize that the fate of America was inextricably
bound up with the fate of Britain, and that if Britain fell our hopes
would all become forlorn; then Lindbergh spoke.
Now, he declared, we should cease to aid Britain in any manner, because
Britain was beaten, Germany had won, and we had better make the best
terms we could with the conqueror. With the total lack of shame
which characterizes Hitler’s and Lindbergh’s political philosophy he
declaimed in the same speech of June 16, 1940 that, “Fortunately, the
wide wall of the Atlantic stands between us and the shooting that is
going on.” It is, of course, the strong wall of the British Navy that
stands between us and the shooting that is going on, but Lindbergh has
never admitted that the British Navy plays any role in keeping the
Germans from crossing the Atlantic; his implication is that the water
of the Atlantic constitutes the sole hindrance to German passage.
This incomprehension sometimes reaches a degree which is puzzling to
an observer convinced that “at any rate Lindbergh is sincere.” Some
obviously honest Americans argue that we can successfully hold aloof,
but can any American really believe as Lindbergh said in his speech
at the opening of the war, September 16, 1939: “These wars in Europe
are not wars in which civilization is defending herself against some
Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against
our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to
defend the white race against foreign invasion. This is simply one more
of those age-old struggles within our family of nations.”
If Lindbergh believes this, he has failed utterly to understand what
Hitlerism is, or if he understands it, then he must approve of it; and
we surmised some months later with the publication of Anne Lindbergh’s
_The Wave of the Future_, that he was indeed a convert. Surely it is
not the color of Hitler’s skin and of his Nazi warriors that make
the difference, nor their geographic home. Lindbergh implies that if
they were yellow-skinned and came from Tibet, he would understand and
perhaps not oppose our fighting them, but being white and living in
Central Europe they cannot, he implies, be enemies of civilization.
This and other examples of Lindbergh’s apparent naïveté, or as Raymond
Clapper put it once, his childishness, are not the result of an obtuse
mind, but the consequence of his having constantly to hide one element,
the most important element in his political attitude, and that is his
secret approval of the totalitarian idea and of the German Nazis’ right
to conquer.
This is too unpopular an idea to admit publicly now, and the
concealment of it leads to the most glaring discrepancies in his
arguments. Only a person who approved of Hitler could deny that he is
waging a war against civilization. Only Lindbergh can tell how far he
approves of Hitler’s right to conquer. We can observe that in other
countries, as France, men who talked before the defeat as Lindbergh
does now, were elevated to power in Hitler’s puppet government.
I was in England when Lindbergh delivered the first of his broadcasts
calling it “just another war,” and putting both belligerents on the
same level. The British were hurt. They felt that a man whom they had
considered a friend had let them down. They did not know that he had
never been a friend, but beneath a serene, impenetrable demeanor had
harbored an antipathy for England which has contributed to making him
“the way he is.”
This antipathy he has more than once documented, as in the _Collier’s_
article when he wrote the astounding sentence: “We in America should
not be discussing whether we will enter _the war that England
declared in Europe_.” Let those who set such store by the quality of
sincerity ask themselves if anyone on earth, including a German, could
_sincerely_ define the present war as one “that England declared in
Europe.”
Q. _But you still have not explained why Lindbergh is the way he is.
You have only defined what he is._
A. Very well, but this is merely a personal interpretation of what
built his character and formed his motives. I believe in the importance
of emotional causes for most of men’s attitudes, and so I should
like to mention these causes first. The young Lindbergh, as one can
discover from _We_, seems really to have been possessed of the virtues
catalogued by President Coolidge. He became the Lindbergh of today
only after his flight. First came the initial impact of the hysterical
reaction of the world to his accomplishment. It is bound to have
affected him, and it did, despite the fact that he appeared to the
public as still the simple, modest, somewhat shy boy who carried with
him on his flight an introduction to the American Ambassador to Paris.
It took the public a long time to learn otherwise, because from the
moment of his landing in Paris until only a comparatively short time
ago, Lindbergh was protected by the press of America in a way that
could happen only in this youthful country of hero-worshipers. When
America has a hero, he remains a hero of purest ray serene, and no flaw
may be found in him, and if any are privately discovered by newspaper
reporters, or others, they are carefully hidden. This is our standard
behavior toward heroes, but in the case of America’s hero of heroes the
inhibitions voluntarily imposed by the press upon itself were Spartan.
In newspaper parlance a sacred cow is an individual who for reasons of
policy must be protected from criticism. Every newspaper has its sacred
cows. Lindbergh became the Supreme Sacred Cow of all the newspapers
in America. Long after it became apparent to the working newspapermen
who came in contact with him that he had succumbed to the adulation
poured upon him and had completely lost that original modesty which
had endeared him to the American public, perhaps above all his other
qualities, and that he had, in fact, become impatiently egotistic,
and convinced that he “knew it all,” he still was represented as the
unassuming young man who aspired only to be left alone. He complained
that the press would not let him alone, gave him no privacy, harassed
him. Publicity, he declared, he hated worse than anything in the world.
Newspapermen nevertheless observed that he and Greta Garbo appeared to
have the same technique, and that he managed always to behave himself
in such a way as to receive the greatest amount of public attention.
The normal cycle of publicity received by a celebrity of the type of
Lindbergh was summed up by Sinclair Lewis. He and I were standing
at the bar in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin a few days after Lindbergh
landed in Paris, and the world had gone mad over him. It seemed as
though never had such adulation been poured upon the head of any young
man, and those who were not joining in the almost universal blaze of
hysterical feeling were curiously examining the blaze, wondering what
made the world go crazy.
Surely there had been more heroic exploits, even in the realm of
aviation. The flight of Bleriot over the Channel in the primitive
machine at his disposal in 1909 has been estimated a more important
feat; while the flight of John Alcock and A. W. Brown from Newfoundland
to Ireland, June 14, 1919, although almost forgotten in the din of
Lindbergh’s ovation, was not only the first transoceanic flight, but
considering that it was made eight years before Lindbergh’s with a
machine correspondingly less modern, should rank as a greater feat. All
these things were subjects of discussion, but Sinclair Lewis settled
the matter by saying: “It doesn’t matter. Lindbergh is the best-known
man in the world today, but ten years from now he will go into a hotel
in Detroit and sign the register, ‘Charles A. Lindbergh,’ and the room
clerk will say ‘Lindbergh? Yes, Mr. Lindbergh, Room 502. Boy! Show Mr.
Lindbergh his room,’ and the clerk won’t know him from Adam’s off ox.
That’s the way it is with fame. He has come by his with incredible
speed; it will go the same way.”
But it did not. Lindbergh saw to that by behaving so eccentrically at
times that even his mother-in-law, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, has been heard
to complain of it. I was in London at the time of the birth of his baby
there. Lindbergh for reasons of his own withheld formal announcement of
the birth until long after it had taken place and the fact was known to
so many persons that eventually the newspapers, although with British
reticence, carried the report and queried Lindbergh to his great
annoyance.
“I said to Charles,” Mrs. Morrow exclaimed to a friend, “if you want to
avoid being bothered by the press, why don’t you simply announce the
birth of your child? After all he’s normal and born within wedlock.”
Douglas Corrigan confirmed the judgment of Lindbergh’s mother-in-law.
“Wrong-way Corrigan,” who flew to Ireland in the alleged belief that he
was flying to California, was a devoted disciple of Lindbergh. I met
Corrigan in Dublin shortly after he landed, and I remember two things
he told me which shed some light on Lindbergh’s character. I was
almost the first newspaperman to see Corrigan, and in our introductory
conversation the little Irish flyer, whose flight in many ways was more
remarkable than Lindbergh’s, said: “I’m not going to do like Lindbergh
and be hounded to death by newspapermen. He refuses to see them and
won’t say anything for quotation and makes himself so mysterious that
they never have stopped going after him. If he had only opened up to
them from the very first and never refused to see them, very soon
they would have let him alone. That’s what I’m going to do--tell you
anything you want to know, and go on seeing anybody who wants to see
me, and pretty soon you will all get tired of it.”
Corrigan did just that and it all worked out exactly as he had
planned. He was soon left in peace and never suffered from Lindbergh’s
complaint. If Lindbergh had behaved as Corrigan did, there never would
have grown up between American newspapermen and himself the secret feud
that required all his prestige as national hero to keep under cover.
You may say that Corrigan’s flight could not be compared to Lindbergh’s
in its sensational appeal as the first solo flight across the ocean.
Yes, but in another way the obscure little Irishman’s flight was the
more audacious of the two. Lindbergh had a plane specially constructed,
the finest money could buy. He had lavish financial backing, friends
to help him at every turn. Corrigan had nothing but his own ambition,
courage, and ability. His plane, a nine-year-old Curtis Robin, was the
most wretched-looking jalopy.
As I looked over it at the Dublin airdrome I really marveled that
anyone should have been rash enough even to go in the air with it, much
less try to fly the Atlantic. He built it, or rebuilt it, practically
as a boy would build a scooter out of a soapbox and a pair of old
roller skates. It looked it. The nose of the engine hood was a mass of
patches soldered by Corrigan himself into a crazy-quilt design. The
door behind which Corrigan crouched for twenty-eight hours was fastened
together with a piece of baling wire. The reserve gasoline tanks
put together by Corrigan, left him so little room that he had to sit
hunched forward with his knees cramped, and not enough window space to
see the ground when landing. It had cost Corrigan $325, saved nickel by
nickel.
The inspiration for all of Corrigan’s sacrifice was his hero worship of
Lindbergh. As a young mechanic Corrigan had helped build the _Spirit
of St. Louis_ in the Ryan Airlines plant in San Diego, California, and
from that time on he had lived for but one ambition, to emulate his
hero. The older flyer had millions of admirers but none could have been
more fervent than the little mechanic who once wrote, “It was often
necessary to work till midnight on the _Spirit of St. Louis_ and then
come back at eight the next morning, but everyone was glad to do that
as they all seemed to be inspired by the fellow that the plane was
being built for--Lindbergh.”
When Corrigan landed in Dublin, it was an event sufficiently
sensational, and the “wrong-way” aspect of it so eccentric, that the
world gave its attention and hundreds of cables and radiograms poured
into the American Legation where the Minister, John Cudahy, had given
Corrigan quarters. Every hour scores of congratulations were reaching
Corrigan but he was visibly unhappy. I asked him what was the matter.
“No cable from Lindbergh,” Corrigan replied. “That was the thing I
wanted most of all. Maybe it will come later.” It never did come.
Lindbergh never found time nor inclination to send the single word
which would have meant more to Corrigan than all the other applause and
rewards he won. I have related this to friends of Lindbergh and their
answer was, “Typical.”
After the first uproar over Lindbergh’s greatest flight had subsided
somewhat, he made his good-will flights. His marriage to the gifted
Anne Morrow, daughter of the brilliant Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow,
linked him now with America’s greatest financial house, and put the
Swedish immigrant’s son definitely in the category of those who have
a stake to protect against social disturbance, and the consequences
of war. The fact that the marriage was a love match, and that his wife
had every quality of a distinguished person and was a poet in her own
right, helped establish Lindbergh even more firmly in the affections of
the American public. The American feeling toward him had mellowed from
hysterical hero worship to what seemed to be a love which would endure.
Then came the heart-breaking tragedy of the kidnaping and murder of his
child. All fathers, all mothers, throughout the world suffered with
the Lindberghs. Years later during the Spanish Civil War, when I was
imprisoned by orders of the Gestapo in San Sebastian, with me was a
Spanish workman who that night was taken from the cell and shot, and
I remember how just before the door opened and he was summoned by his
executioners, he was discussing the Lindbergh kidnaping.
The world-wide outpouring of sympathy with the Lindberghs during
that woeful period of their lives was surpassed only by the intense,
personal, national compassion of America for them in their pain. Now
Lindbergh had become no longer just the national hero, but one for
whom the nation felt the intimacy of suffering shared. He responded by
leaving the country with his family to quit the scene of their sorrow,
to find a sanctuary to heal their wounds, to escape public attention,
and to find a safety for his children he felt he could not find in the
United States.
This was the turning point of his relationship with his country. His
country was ready to forgive because it felt it could understand his
need for a refuge, but for Lindbergh his residence abroad was a true
renunciation of democratic America, and this I believe to be the key to
his subsequent political activity and his present defiance of the vast
majority of his fellow citizens.