Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (58 page)

We must not let our sympathies cloud our vision, he said. “We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife,” cutting off the infections of European affairs. Besides the costs in men and dollars, he said, we would turn our country into a war machine in which democracy might not survive. Let us tend to our own problems and regenerate our institutions, turning away the alien voices in our midst that call for war. Now, in a public forum, Charles attacked the Jewish influence in the press:

Ending with a plea for self-preservation and for a reliance on “logic” in our foreign policy, Charles, at Anne’s urging, called for the salvation of Western civilization. “The gift of civilized life must still be carried on. It is more important than the sympathies, the friendship, the desires of any single generation.”

Charles would later pay a price for his isolationist, anti-British, and anti-Jewish address, but for the moment he basked in the favorable comments of his friends and in the admiration of the fine physical
“types” who rallied to his cause. Buoyed by his apparent “victory,” he finished writing an article for the
Reader’s Digest
and began to compose another radio address.

But the press was already murmuring in disgust. As Britain declared its resolve to conquer Germany, in the
Times
of London Beverly Baxter, a member of Parliament, a novelist, and a journalist, condemned Charles for turning against the nation that had given him security.
¹³
At the same time Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the
New York Herald Tribune
, railed at Lindbergh’s slander of the press; if the motives of the press were to be examined, she suggested, so should his. She portrayed Lindbergh as an anti-British instrument of fascist Germany.
¹⁴

Betty Morrow, meanwhile, was polishing her own speaking skills. Smith College had asked her to serve as acting president, and on September 26 she accepted the post in Northampton. As she spoke with poise and simplicity to the large audience of teachers and students, Anne felt her mother looked young again. She thought her mother had finally found her mission—the higher education of women.
¹⁵

On September 27, three weeks after the declaration of war, Poland surrendered to Hitler. More than 140,000 Polish troops laid down their guns. Two-thousand Polish soldiers and ten thousand civilians had died. Hitler signed a treaty with Stalin and declared his desire for peace, even as he told his military commanders he would “attack in the West as soon as possible.”
¹⁶
He issued his “strength of Germanhood” decree, calling for the “elimination” of all alien populations, and began to deport Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews to the concentration camps set up in Poland. He told his generals that France was next.
¹⁷

Anne, as she struggled with her book on family reminiscences, worked daily on a short piece confirming Charles’s vision of the European war. If this was not at the direct urging of Charles, it was certainly to his great pleasure. After reading her work-in-progress, he praised her lyrical expression of feeling. Anne’s writing, he wrote in his journal, combines philosophy with delicacy unparalleled.”
¹⁸

A week later, on the eve of a congressional debate on the Neutrality Bill, Charles gave his second radio address.
¹⁹
This time he argued, with
greater subtlety, to convince the public of its moral obligation to avoid war. Yes, he said, we must defend America if it is attacked, and, yes, we must defend the countries of the Western hemisphere whose physical integrity is vital to ours. But we must make no promises we are unable to keep, and we must not embroil ourselves in an international struggle that has no moral or physical imperative. This war is not about ideology; it is about power. It is not about democracy; it is about political borders. We are bound to Europe by race, not politics, he said, implying his belief in Aryan superiority. This war is a quarrel among equals, an incestuous battle among the white races of Europe, beyond the purview of American interest. The laws of evolution, not manmade justice, were the measure of war.

The first war taught us that political strength could not be legislated and that war was costly. If America were to enter the present war, it would become like “Shylock,” demanding retribution for its wartime loans. He offered his listeners a moderate course: the “unrestricted sale of purely defensive armaments” and a refusal of credit to the belligerent nations.

While the subsequent outrage in England and France was predictable, the response in Congress was beyond anyone’s expectations. The
New York Times
reported:

Senator Key Pittman, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, stopped just short of calling Charles a fascist; others, such
as Senator Alben Barkley, pointed to the absurdity of distinguishing between “defensive” and “offensive” ammunition. Are planes right, but gunpowder and gasoline wrong? The consensus was that the famous aviator had gone beyond the bounds of his limited expertise.

Even Charles’s friends began to denounce him. In an article in the
British Spectator
, Harold Nicolson tried to explain the source of Charles’s opinions. He said Colonel Lindbergh, after his historic flight to France, had allowed his ideas to become not merely inflexible, but rigid; his self-confidence to become arrogance, and his convictions to harden into granite. “He began to loathe democracy,” Nicolson said.
²¹

Nicolson’s article knocked Anne’s breath away. She was shocked that he didn’t deal with the issues. He had chosen instead to dissect his motives, as if Charles were a laboratory specimen. Under the pretense of analyzing his views, he made a cheap shot at someone he once considered his friend.
²²

An audience in London, echoing Nicolson, raucously sang a ditty: “Then there’s Colonel Lindbergh/Who made a pretty speech/He’s somewhere in America/We’re glad he’s out of reach.”
²³
Henry Breckenridge, even the Guggenheims, turned their backs on their once beloved friends. Aubrey Morgan, Con’s husband, now assistant chief of the Bureau of British Information Services, refused to see them.

Carrel could not understand the public uproar. He asked Jim Newton to send him a copy of Charles’s speech. He wrote, “We are wondering about the cause of this immense feeling of surprise and hatred growing against him.”
²⁴

Charles wondered whether, given the public hostility, he could remain on the East Coast. Perhaps “a real and permanent” home could be found only in the West. Echoing his father’s views, Charles said he wanted to find a place grounded on “sound agricultural principles,” where human values were not distorted by urban life.
²⁵

But in truth, he was being pushed. Betty Morrow simply had had enough. For the first time she spoke out against Charles, denouncing his call for a munitions embargo.
²⁶
She announced that she was joining William Allen White’s Nonpartisan Committee for Peace Through
Revision of the Neutrality Law, passed by Congress and signed by Roosevelt in 1935. White, the editor of the
Emporia Gazette
, in Kansas, was known as a philosopher, a liberal Republican, and a patriot. The committee attracted broad bipartisan support, from Henry L. Stimson, Thomas Lamont, and Helen Hayes, to the labor leader David Dubinsky and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. They threw their support to Roosevelt in his effort to arm the British. Father Charles E. Coughlin, an anti-Semitic isolationist with German contacts, denounced the committee as a “dangerous fifth column.”
²⁷
She was bitter, but she was resigned. The only thing she could do was pray.
²⁸

Two weeks later, Charles’s
Reader’s Digest
article appeared. Laced with poetic and philosophical musings, which showed the artful touch of Anne, it presented the airplane as an instrument of a divine and natural struggle among racially disparate nations. Aviation, wrote Charles, was “a tool specially shaped for Western hands … one of those priceless possessions which permit the white race to live at all in a pressing sea of yellow, black, and brown.” While the airplane, he said, could lead to worldwide conflagration, it was also an instrument for preserving racial purity. In his most vicious racial attack yet, he wrote:

His article was both a plea for peace and a justification for racism and war. Lindbergh, said Heywood Broun of
The New Republic
, had developed a new political stance, “Pacifist Imperialism.” “I honestly believe that our greatest danger lies in heeding the jingoes who come forward camouflaged as doves.”
³⁰
The Roosevelt administration was angry. Secretary of the Interior Ickes noted that even Roosevelt was beginning to take seriously Charles’s reputation as a fascist.

Three days later, Congress repealed the Neutrality Law. “Cash and Carry” purchases were now permitted; U.S. manufacturers could sell arms to belligerents if the material was shipped under the flag of a foreign nation. The next day, Hitler set his date for the attack on France. Within three weeks, wearing the yellow star became compulsory for Jews in Poland.
³¹

Anne worked relentlessly on her plea for peace, to be published in the Christmas issue
of Reader’s Digest
. Defying her deepest instincts, she immersed herself in Charles’s political world.
³²
“I
make
myself someone else and I am calm and collected!”
³³

Assuming her usual apologetic stance, Anne began her article:

Speaking for a “long-range attitude toward peace,” using the metaphors of motherhood and domesticity, Anne reiterated Charles’s theories one by one: (1) the military constraints of the Versailles Treaty created an embittered Germany; (2) violence and aggression are facts of human life; (3) war is justified and inevitable among nations of disparate power; (4) the need to prevent the destruction of Western civilization as we know it; (5) the need to effect an early peace.

Hitler isn’t evil, she wrote, or at least no more evil than the rest of us. He is the “embittered spirit of a strong and humiliated people.” Russia, not Germany, is the real threat. Its weak and spiritless “hordes,” mindlessly tied to a false vision of equality that breeds decadence and mediocrity, will destroy not only Germany but all the people of Europe. Let the natural process of war among nations smother the weak. Why destroy everything we value in Western civilization for a democratic principle that has proven itself flawed?

Truly, Anne had written like “someone else.” For the sake of loyalty to Charles, she had elevated Hitler to an unconquerable “spirit,” reduced democracy to an infirm ideal, and renounced America’s responsibility to its allies. There was only one thing harder to bear than the truth, and that was the thought of separation from Charles.