Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (62 page)

Are we in America really good, she asks? No, she writes. “Scum is everywhere; it is not just personified in devils across the ocean; it is in our midst.” Citing
Mein Kampf
, which refers to the infiltration of the Jews into German society, she writes, “Is it not possible that Nazism has come not only as a result of evils within Germany but also as a terrible antidote to other weaknesses in the Democracies themselves—as a fever is sometimes necessary to drive out a disease?”

The piece, she later told a friend, was a failure. Her message was too big for essays and articles; it was the stuff of novels and poetry. To herself, she admitted that it was a capitulation to Charles, tainted by her
bitterness toward the press. It did not represent purity of thought. In short, there
were
principles worth dying for.
³¹

On May 15, 1941, after Germany invaded the island of Crete in a spectacular air assault,
³²
Henry Ford offered Charles and American First lavish funds to support the committee’s cause: $250,000 for the first month.
³³
On May 23, Charles was to give the keynote address at America First’s meeting at Madison Square Garden,
³⁴
an event he knew was sufficiently important to receive wide coverage. He was to share the stage with Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party. Thomas, certainly neither pro-German nor a member of America First, was sympathetic to the isolationist cause and believed it crucial to educate as many as possible. He had addressed several America First rallies and accepted its funding and support for his radio broadcasts, tours, and books.

Anne and Charles drove to the Garden behind a fanfare of sirens. To Anne, the labyrinthine passages seemed a descent into Dante’s Hell. Suddenly out of the passageways and into lights, accompanied by Norman Thomas, they were before the roaring crowds. Twenty thousand people, filling the hall to its dimly lit corners, marked Lindbergh’s arrival with chants of “Lindbergh for President.” Overwhelmed by the emotion, the noise and the lights, Anne imagined the sound of gunshots in her ears, but, with relief, glimpsed a policeman through the glare, seated at the feet of Charles, standing on the podium.

John T. Flynn, head of the New York chapter, called the meeting to order with the solemnity of a preacher. In a booming voice, he denounced the communists, fascists, and Bundists who were attempting to infiltrate the organization. Frozen, Anne watched the crowd grow wild with disapproval, booing and hissing at the well-known leaders of these radical groups. Did this outbreak presage a future revolution, she wondered?

Charles’s presence seemed familiar yet strange. Once again, Anne became the child-wife who worshipped at her husband’s feet.

Beginning his speech with his usual plea for “an independent American destiny,” this time he dared to go a step further, portraying America as nothing less than a police state. Civil freedoms in America,
he said, were little better than those in Germany. Without mentioning Roosevelt’s name, he condemned the president as a self-serving dictator. “We in America were given just about as much chance to express our beliefs at the election last fall as the Germans would have been given if Hitler had run against Goering.”

At Anne’s request, Charles had included in the closing section a personal plea for commitment and a statement of his personal vision. But there was desperation in his words. His rhetoric had become so emotional that it lacked even the pretense of rational public policy.

Denounced from the pulpits of Presbyterian churches as an appeaser and a traitor,
³⁵
damned by the White House to public oblivion, and labeled by the press as the voice of Hitler,
³⁶
Charles was more desperate than ever to find the words that would set America free. Like a child who still believed in the magic of his will, he vowed to launch an attack on Roosevelt and the press, and, within the week, spoke again, this time to a crowd estimated at fifteen thousand.
³⁷
Though Anne had begged him not to mention Roosevelt’s name, Charles fiercely condemned him.

Anne resolved to make every sacrifice. No longer would she stay at home and indulge in fantasies of what might have been. She would squelch every doubt and follow him wherever he would go. She would throw herself headlong into Charles’s life and give up the utopian vision.

But Charles, aware of Anne’s sacrifices, tried again to set her free. The memory of his mother’s youth spent in the shadow of his father’s political views pained him. He told Anne to stay home and work, not only for the children but for herself. He wanted to protect her, even from himself.

On June 22, in the most ambitious attack in military history, Germany invaded the Soviet Union along its 1800–mile front from the Arctic to the Black Sea. More than three million troops, 600,000 vehicles, 750,000 horses, 3580 tanks, and 1830 planes were hurled against Russia’s borders.
³⁸
Charles calmly told the press that the invasion was “something that requires profound analysis.”
³⁹

As the Einsatzgruppen pushed on through Russian villages, murdering thousands of Jews as they did so, Charles spoke at another America First meeting in San Francisco.
⁴⁰
He said, “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than with the cruelty, the Godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.”

The heat from the press made it clear to Anne and Charles that they could no longer live in New York. In Lloyd Neck, they went into hiding, drawing shades and locking the doors. Margot Morrow encouraged them to seek asylum in Martha’s Vineyard near her family’s summer home. Desperate for escape, Anne searched for a home on the Vineyard and found a small farmhouse, part saltbox, situated on the north shore of the island, between Vineyard Haven and West Tisbury.
⁴¹
A cross breeze came through the low-set doors and windows, and everywhere were views of the sea.

In the wake of Anne’s retreat to Martha’s Vineyard, rumors of marital difficulties proliferated.
⁴²
The press decided that Anne had broken with Charles in favor of her parents’ beliefs. But Anne, remaining solidly by Charles’s side, still believed he had integrity.

As Roosevelt and Churchill met in the mid-Atlantic to formulate U.S.–British strategy, Anne slipped quietly into the rhythms of the sea. She enjoyed the time alone with her children and her walks along the beach. Except for the trees and the mild movements of the changing tides, the island’s climate and ambiance reminded Anne of Illiec.

Meanwhile, like a man with nothing to lose, Charles walked into the eye of the storm, encountering hostility wherever he went. His physical safety was constantly threatened; police officers watched his every move. They accompanied him on motorcycles and fine-combed every room in which he was to stay, checking the phones and x-raying the furniture. They assigned a detective to every door of his meeting halls and guarded the rooms beneath the speaker’s stand. Nonetheless, Charles insisted that the crowds adored him.
⁴³

Roger Butterfield commented in
Life
magazine,

But Anne could tell that something had changed. Thwarted at every turn, Charles no longer masked his anger. The text of a speech he planned to give in Washington disturbed her. For the first time, he dared to give the enemy a name—“the British, the Jews, and the [Roosevelt] Administration.”
⁴⁵
She tried to dissuade him, but he would not bend. In an effort to protect him from Nazi epithets, Anne edited his speech, hoping that she would bring out his “true self.”
⁴⁶

The public, of course, would believe what it heard and saw. Forced to appear outside Washington, for fear of retaliation by the government, Charles spoke on September 11 in Des Moines, surrounded by armed police and ferocious reporters. Even the crowd, numbered at only 7500, was unusually restless and unfriendly. When Charles rose to speak, a package thrown from the balcony onto the podium knocked down a vase on the table in front of him. He remained unperturbed.

Charles had made an irreversible leap from the abstraction of evolution theories to the “otherness,” implying that the Jews were not Americans but had only self-serving allegiances. There was a hierarchy of human worth, even in America, and the civil rights of all citizens were not guaranteed. No longer were Jews merely cogs in the great wheel of history. They were dangerous to the survival of the body politic—an alien race deserving of public condemnation.

Defiantly, the crowd cheered Roosevelt’s name eleven times during the course of his address, but Charles saw only their adulation. “Before long,” he wrote in his diary, “we began to win over the crowd.”

What he had won over was the admiration of Nazis, whose foot-high swastikas were displayed in storefronts as far away as Los Angeles. His speech in Des Moines was the final step in his public disgrace. Denunciation swept across the country, from Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. It came from Democrats and from Republicans, from government leaders and from grassroots Americans all charging him with anti-Semitism and Nazism. They called on America First, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “to clear its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country.”
⁴⁸

Several members of America First, however, supported Lindbergh, admiring his courage on “the Jewish Problem.” On September 18, Lindbergh met with the committee, debating its public response for eight hours. The committee’s statement, released on September 24, denied that Lindbergh and his fellow members were anti-Semitic. It blamed the interventionists for raising the issue of race, and it invited Jews to join the ranks.

Norman Thomas commented that “silence” would have been better. Privately, he castigated Lindbergh for singling out the Jews. In a letter to Flynn, however, Thomas went further, telling the organization that “many besides Jews have been at fault.”

On October 3, at a rally in Fort Wayne, Lindbergh claimed that his motives and statements had been “falsely ascribed.” He did not “speak out of hate for any individuals or any people.” Nonetheless, John Flynn believed the damage had been done. At at time when Roosevelt accelerated
efforts to repeal the Neutrality Act, Lindbergh, “acting alone,” had discredited the anti-interventionist movement.

Even Anne could no longer abide his words. Charles’s homecoming—indeed, the very idea of their marriage—was now a terrible burden. His bitterness had eclipsed his idealism, and Anne could no longer deny the meaning of his words. No matter what his intentions, his condemnation of the Jews was the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Reich. “I would prefer to see this country at war,” she wrote.
⁴⁹

Perhaps the invasion of Kiev, portending the massacre of its 34,000 Jews, was at last too much. Perhaps, finally, she realized she could no longer defend his words to herself, to her family, or to her friends. She wrote to Mina Curtiss that some Puritan moral sense was taking hold of her.