Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (61 page)

A
nne at an America First rally in Philadelphia, May 1941
.

(UPI/Corbis-Bettmann)

A
ll Anne could do was pray. The grief of war, she wrote to a friend, was intensified by the wounds of thousands.
²
The world cried out for a saint who would carry the sins and pain of all men on his back.

But who were the new Saint Christophers, Anne asked? Winston Churchill? Adolf Hitler? Whoever they were, Anne was certain that Charles was meant to walk among them.

In the spring of 1941, Charles believed there was no turning back. Anne’s book had lent nobility to his cause. When he reread his father’s books, he saw history repeating itself; he was certain his father’s beliefs were true. One need not be pro-British to be a “true” American, nor was it one’s duty to stand by the president. It was the right of each citizen to challenge policy before or after it became law. Now, that right was again being violated by the machinations of warmongerers. Twenty years earlier, his father had believed that the Catholics formed an international conspiracy to bring America into a war with Europe. Charles believed it was now the Jews. The Jews, he wrote, were using the media to spread propaganda. And Roosevelt, a liar and a demagogue, was their puppet.
³
He had won election on a platform of peace, yet he was determined to lead the nation into war. Give England our destroyers? Protect them with American convoys? And now Lend-Lease? Whom was Roosevelt kidding? We were only a “step away” from sending our troops. Lindbergh would not be cowed into silence by Roosevelt’s lies.

In fact, Charles’s assessment of Roosevelt’s view of the war was correct. By 1941, Roosevelt saw U.S. involvement as inevitable. It was a matter of convincing the public. But in early February 1941, 85 percent of the public polled by Gallup did not want America to go to war.
⁴
Knowing that time was running out, he had no choice but to move ahead.

Charles, too, sensed it was now or never. The time for aggressive attack had come. By the end of January, Charles joined the congressional debate. Representative Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, asked him to offer the committee his case against Lend-Lease.
⁵
On January 23, 1941, Charles gave public testimony for the first time since the Hauptmann trial, in 1935, lending the proceedings an aura of theater.
⁶
Long before the doors of the committee room in the new House Office Building were opened, lines of spectators waited outside. Those lucky enough to be admitted broke the silence with a defiant show of applause for the Colonel.

With the air of a “veteran” and the voice of authority, he instructed the photographers to take their pictures at once and not to set off any flashbulbs while he was testifying. He read his prepared statement in a firm voice, handed it to the official stenographer, and settled back in his chair to await the questions. Reporters noted that when he spoke, all the witnesses who had gone before and all who were to follow “dropped to the status of aging and colorless extras.” Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson and the others had been “eloquent but had sprung no surprises.” Ambassador Kennedy appeared disingenuous and confused. “Serious” and “smooth-cheeked,” with a touch of gray over his ears, Colonel Lindbergh responded with “infinite poise and infinite conviction,” telling his audience, “I want neither side to win.”
⁷

The American press judged him “the perfect neutral,” and the Germans called him one of the few true Americans.
⁸

From Saint-Gildas, Carrel informed him that the French agreed. The military and air attachés of the Vichy government were with him “one hundred per cent.” Thrilled with the news, Charles wrote in his diary: “I believe Dr. Carrel can be of great value to France at this time … to a reconstruction of France.” Charles considered him “one of the great men of France in these times. If only he is able to make the right contacts.”
⁹

In the first week of March, feeling, once again, the need to “get away,” Anne and Charles made their second trip with Jim Newton to Florida.
¹⁰
For Anne, it was a moment to regain perspective. She had begun to write her “feminist essay,” an analysis of married women and creativity. The problems confronting the ambitious woman weighed heavily on Anne’s mind. A married woman could not possibly write with the freedom and clarity of a man. Saint-Exupéry was the very essence of an artist, but he had the luxury of time and solitude, while she was pulled in different directions, always feeling rushed, guilty, and inadequate. She could not be the most important person in her children’s lives and still manage to write and spend time with Charles. Life itself was her art. If only she could be everything to everyone.

While the Lindberghs chopped their way through the keys, the Lend-Lease legislation was passed by Congress and signed by Roosevelt.
This, said Roosevelt—as if to silence further dissent—“is the end of any attempt at appeasement in our land.”
¹¹
But Charles was prepared to counter Roosevelt’s every move. He wrote “A Letter to Americans,” which appeared in the March 1941 issue
of Collier’s
magazine.
¹²

Although he set forth the same arguments he had presented before, he now put them in the context of personal experience. At the suggestion of Anne, who had assumed the responsibility of editing his speeches,
¹³
he proclaimed himself the voice of reason and counseled France and England to cease the hopeless war. And he made one last request to the American people: before reaching a final decision, they should demand a full plan from those who preached the defense of democracy.

With simple elegance, Lord Halifax, the English ambassador to the United States, replied. The plan, he said, was a single word: “Victory.”
¹⁴

In fact, Charles’s assessment of Allied military power was wrong. While America was not at the peak of its production—as it would be within six months—she and the Allies had enough power to keep the Germans at bay. At the time he wrote his article, Germany had approximately 3500 combat airplanes, the United States and Russia combined had 8000, and England had 3100. Within six months, the German force would decline to 2500, and the Allied forces, including the United States, would have 11,000 front-line combat planes.
¹⁵

Contrary to Charles’s assessment of Greenland as an unimportant military base, the U.S. acquired full defense rights for its operation.
¹⁶
Charles wrote in his diary that the moon rose “huge and blood red.”
¹⁷

Within the week, Charles joined the America First Committee, an event that made national news. Committee leaders convinced him that he was the only one with mass appeal that rivaled the President’s. On April 17, Charles spoke to a crowd of 10,000 gathered under the committee’s auspices in Chicago.
¹⁸

America First had been conceived in the spring of 1940 after the fall of France. R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., a student at the Yale University Law School and the son of a vice president of the Quaker Oats Company, organized students and faculty on the Yale campus. They launched a petition
that led to a nationwide anti-interventionist organization. Stuart’s intent was to oppose the policies of the Roosevelt administration and preserve the Neutrality Act of 1939. On September 4, Stuart, as national director, assisted by General Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, set forth the group’s principles. The United States must build an impregnable military defense to protect itself against invasion. It must preserve democracy by keeping out of a European war and concentrating on its defense and the maintainance of its neutrality. To achieve these ends, the committee issued a resolution: “To bring together all Americans, regardless of possible differences on other matters, who see eye to eye on these principles. (This does not include Nazis, Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interest of any other nation above those of our own country).”
¹⁹

While the organization attracted support across the political and social spectrum, its official stance reflected the interests of its main contributors—businessmen, manufacturers, agricultural-based enterprises—that is, industries dependent on consumer rather than military goods. Despite its conservative cast, however, America First contributed to several pacifist and socialist groups.

But the tide of public opinion was turning against the isolationists. President Roosevelt had managed to do the impossible. His personal approval rate was at 72 percent, and 59 percent of the public polled supported Lend-Lease. While 83 percent of the people did not want to go to war, the same number of people believed that we would. In fact, 68 percent believed it our moral duty.
²⁰

America was talking back, but Charles Lindbergh refused to listen. All he could hear was the roar of the crowds who flocked by the thousands to see him. They were the true mirror of America, he wrote. They were the pure and hearty Americans who were worth his voice and worth his life.

Harold Ickes, speaking this time at a benefit for the Jewish National Workers Alliance of America, dubbed Charles the “Number 1 Nazi Fellow Traveler,” and described Anne’s book,
Wave of the Future
, as “the bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist, and appeaser.”
²¹

At a rally on April 23 at the Manhattan Center, 35,000 people flooded the flag-draped hall. Amidst the flying colors, in his high-pitched, schoolmarm tone, Charles spoke for twenty-five minutes, to the intermittent applause of a thunderous crowd. Charles believed that “the crowd seemed one hundred percent with us,”
²²
but a hundred policemen watched the hall anyway.
²³
The press called it “the largest gathering of pro-Nazis and pro-Fascists since the Bund rallies in Madison Square Garden.”
²⁴
And while the German press called Charles “a real American of Swedish descent,”
²⁵
Roosevelt called him a defeatist and an appeaser.
²⁶

Comparing him to Clement L. Vallandigham, the Civil War Copperhead who was banished by the North, Roosevelt questioned his integrity as an army officer.
²⁷
Hurt and humiliated, Charles Lindbergh renounced his army commission.
²⁸
“A point of honor” was at stake, he told his friend Truman Smith.
²⁹

To Anne, however, Charles remained “Sir Galahad.” Yet she sensed that something was wrong. While the crowds hung on his every word, the caliber of the audience was not what it had been. Even the hall was shabby and garish. There was something “second-rate” to it all, she wrote. But she resolved to respond to the outspoken critics. Her article “Reaffirmation”
³⁰
appeared in the June issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
and was billed as an explanation
of The Wave of the Future
. In truth, she confided to a friend, it was a form of self-exorcism. Even as she tried to dig herself out, though, she was sucked further into the quicksand.