Part 30

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.

He found his sought-for refuge in England where he was given every consideration. The door of every home from Buckingham Palace down was open to him, but the British afforded him all the privacy he wanted. If it had been only privacy he sought, he could have led a restful secluded life in the country home of Harold Nicolson, his father-in-law’s biographer, and could have remained at peace until Hitler disturbed it. Lindbergh spent just enough time in England to convince him that England was soft, England couldn’t take it, England would lose if it ever went to war. It was bad luck that Lindbergh should have lived in England during a time when it _was_ soft, just as we are soft today. It was the England of pacifism, faith in the principle that if you want peace badly enough you can have it, just by refusing to fight. It was the England of the Oxford Union when the debating society boys voted not to fight “for King and Country.” It was the England which needed waking up, just as we need it today. It was an England that could get hard, if it had the time, just as we can get hard too, if we have the time.

But Lindbergh formed his opinion of England then, and from his public speeches he seems too stubborn to allow even the epic heroism of England today in battle to change his judgment. Nicolson, long-standing family friend of the Morrows, mailed Lindbergh a postcard every week during the Battle of Britain, when the people of England were persevering under a hurricane of bombs and were calling it their “finest hour.” Each postcard had the one sentence: “Do you still think we are soft?” Perhaps he still thinks so, long after the Germans have stopped thinking so. At any rate, he left England for a tour of the continent, and thereupon came the second turning point in the development of his political views.

When he left America he left it embittered by the tragedy of his child, and he left convinced that it would never have happened except in a corrupt, gang-ridden democracy. It was, indeed, one of the lowest periods in America’s public life, when kidnaping for ransom had become widespread for the first time in any modern civilized state, and the power of the gangs was a national humiliation. In a sense it was true that it was the fault of democracy, but the virtue of democracy is that slowly but almost always sooner or later we correct the faults and bring under control the license which ever threatens democratic liberty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not grown up when Lindbergh fled America.