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July 13, 2005
by Gordon Francis Corbett
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born on 4 February 1902, the son of farmer, attorney, and future Member of the U. S. House of Representatives Charles August Lindbergh. Working on his family's farm let a World War I program give him enough credit to graduate from high school. He dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, underwent an Army training program, and flew the mails. His parents seem to have taught him no transcendent philosophy, although he absorbed some populist politics from his father. He was a brilliant self-disciplinarian who taught himself what he wanted to know. His aptitude for things mechanical let him function superbly as a mechanic, an engineer, and an aviator. To win the Raymond Orteig Prize, Lindbergh thought of flying to Paris in a single-engine monoplane. He persuaded some businessmen from St. Louis, Missouri, to pay the Ryan Aeronautical Company to create "The Spirit of St. Louis." He took off from New York at 0754 local time on 20 May 1927, and landed in Paris thirty-three hours, thirty minutes, and thirty seconds after flying 3,614 miles. Lindbergh's tumultuous reception in Paris was dwarfed by one even bigger and noisier when he returned to America on the U.S.S. Memphis. Later, on a good-will tour to Latin America, he flew to Mexico and met Ambassador Dwight Morrow's daughter, Anne. Charles and Anne married in 1929, and Anne gave birth to a son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. In 1932, the baby was abducted and murdered, probably by Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Hauptmann was later arrested, indicted, tried, and executed. Charles and Anne had four other children: three sons and one daughter. The Lindberghs were affectionate parents, but Charles was more than slightly strict. He prepared for his frequent absences by making check-lists of tasks for his children to complete while he was gone. (Lindbergh had invented the use of check-lists in aviation, and he brought the practice home.) Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born special. Her dad, Dwight Morrow, and her mom, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, came from America's intellectual and ruling class. Morrow became a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company. One of his friends was Thomas Lamont, whose son Corliss was later pilloried for being a Communist. Corliss tried several times, over several decades, to persuade Anne to marry him, but failed. Anne was a brilliant woman who earned literary prizes in college, and who, because Charles wanted her to try, later became a world-renowned writer. She was no political theorist, although in her book, "The Wave of the Future," she said of Hitler's, Mussolini's, and Stalin's regimes that they were not the wave of the future, but scum on the wave of the future. Most of what Charles learned of philosophy came from Anne and from Dr. Alexis Carrel, whom he helped to invent the organ-perfusion pump, an ancestor of the heart-lung machine. Carrel believed passionately in mysticism, and his brilliance and sincerity convinced Lindbergh. In 1944, Carrel died of natural causes in France. The French Resistance believed that he had been pro-Nazi because he had collaborated with the Germans; but Carrel's "collaboration" was politically unimportant medical work. Carrel was apolitical. During the "'thirties," Lindbergh flew to many parts of the world, often to learn how Juan Trippe's Pan American Airways could open new routes. Anne flew with him and wrote about their travels. Dr. Carrel and he worked jointly on their organ-perfusion pump. Harry Guggenheim befriended Lindbergh and helped him with various projects. These events formed a pattern. Juan Trippe borrowed money from Establishment banks. The Rockefellers funded Carrel's and Lindbergh's invention of the organ-perfusion pump. Guggenheim was an Establishmentarian. And, topping all this, Lindbergh had married one of Dwight Morrow's daughters. In other words, after his flight to Paris, Charles Augustus Lindbergh became attached to the American Establishment. That fact may help to explain why Franklin Roosevelt reacted so angrily when Lindbergh began frustrating his effort to push us into World War II. Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. After publicly declaring us neutral, President Roosevelt and his aides began working openly, to persuade Americans to aid Britain, and covertly, to enter the war on Britain's side. The president began by arguing that a German conquest of Britain would endanger the United States strategically and economically, and that therefore, we should render the British all aid "short of war." At a news conference held on 17 December 1940, President Roosevelt pushed aiding Britain. "What I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of practically everybody in this room, I think--get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign. Well, let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor's house catches on fire and I have a length of garden hose...." We would lend Britain weapons, and after winning, they would return the "survivors" and pay for the rest. Baloney. Before and during World War I, we lent the British money that they never repaid. After winning their second war with Germany, a Britain newly ravaged might not have been able to pay for Roosevelt's "garden hose." We would probably not have wanted back our war-weary airplanes, tanks, and other weapons. And, unlike Roosevelt's voluntarily hose-lending home-owner, the American people would have participated perforce through the payment of taxes. Anti-interventionist spokesmen such as Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-Montana) and Colonel Lindbergh cited these faults and more. Regardless, Congress passed the "Lend-Lease Act," bringing us closer to war. The Roosevelt Administration could so persuade Congress because they had a powerful tool: an argument that those who have should share with those who have not. Applied domestically, this "argument from need" had spawned the New Deal; applied to foreign policy, it let the president urge intervention with seeming integrity and benevolence. Take President Roosevelt's "Fireside Chat" of 26 May1940, made while Hitler was tearing up western Europe. He delivered it in the relaxed style that let his mellifluous voice persuade most listeners. This "Chat" has five parts. The first requests contributions to the Red Cross for refugee relief; the second attacks Americans opposing intervention; the third recounts what he has done to build up our Armed Forces and to increase the capacity of our weapons factories; the fourth once again attacks anti-interventionists, this time as disloyal; and, the fifth asks his audience for their support. Here is the first part's second paragraph:
Remove the request for contributions, and we have a description of the refugees' plight and an implicit plea for their rescue. Colonel Lindbergh did not like Naziism, but he did not want us to fight a second European war only twenty-one years after losing 116, 516 men in the first. Polls showed that four-fifths of America agreed. Two weeks after the German attack, Lindbergh made his first radio address for neutrality. Author Wayne S. Cole, in his book, "Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II," said that before Pearl Harbor, he would do a lot more.
R. Douglas Stuart, retired General Robert E. Wood, and five other men founded "The Committee to Defend America First." The Committee favored expanding our armed forces, improving our defense industries, and keeping our newly produced weapons here. President Roosevelt urged Kansan editor William Allen White to form a committee of his own. White formed "The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies" to back the president's positions. America First accepted Charles Lindbergh's application for membership on 10 April 1941. Afterwards, before Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh gave enormous stadium crowds and radio audiences thirteen speeches to advocate staying neutral, making weapons, and building up our armed forces. Roosevelt scorned most of the America Firsters as misguided; but, maybe because Lindbergh was their most prominent and persuasive speaker, the president believed falsely that he was a Nazi. His campaign against America First and Lindbergh reflected that view, and his spokesmen said as much in many articles and speeches. On 11 September 1941, at a stadium in Des Moines, Iowa, Charles Lindbergh denounced the interventionist groups. He named "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration," and "a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that the future of mankind depends on the domination of the British Empire. Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago [when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941], and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country." Then, he said,
In his third paragraph on Britain's geographic, economic, financial, and military history in World War I and in World War II to-date, Lindbergh said, "If it were not for her hope that she can make us responsible for the war financially, as well as militarily, I believe England would have negotiated a peace in Europe many months ago, and be better off for doing so." Then, he continued,
Then, Lindbergh began analyzing the second group, "the Jewish."
Lindbergh then spent two paragraphs to say that the Roosevelt Administration had used the war to give the president a third term and to build his power. He also alleged that Mr. Roosevelt had attached his future to the success of Great Britain. When Lindbergh made this speech, Hitler was still using his concentration camps mostly to quell dissidents. SS guards subjected Social Democrats, trade unionists, and Jews to hard labor, beatings, and terror, so that, later, freed, they would tell tales so fearsome that they would paralyze their fellow opponents. It was to these atrocities, and to crimes like Kristallnacht, that Lindbergh referred with the words, "the persecutions [Jews] suffered in Germany..." Lindbergh could not have known that Hitler had begun exterminating Jews wholesale shortly after his armed forces invaded Soviet-held Poland and the Soviet Union proper on 22 June 1941. The Nazis were keeping these crimes very secret. Nobody outside the German and Soviet governments, and possibly the British and American governments, knew about them. In 1942, in Germany, and in the rest of his empire, Hitler built his death camps and began prosecuting the rest of the "Final Solution." Let us return to Lindbergh's Des Moines speech. Although it was very interesting, and discussed many facts and truths not treated here, it contained important errors. Here are a few. If, in 1939, Britain could have declared war on the Weimar Republic or the Kaiser's German Empire, making peace might have been smart; but the Munich Pact's aftermath had shown that trusting Adolf Hitler was stupid. Jewish ownership of our communications industries was nowhere near so large as Lindbergh thought. Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg reports on Page 429:
The influence that Lindbergh thought was Jewish almost certainly emanated from the American Establishment. If he had cited statistics showing the Council on Foreign Relations' influence in the "media," he would very likely have hit the right target. Concerning the British and the Jewish leaders, Lindbergh said that he was speaking only about "war agitators" who "wish to involve us in the war" "for reasons that are not American." These remarks discussed the British and Jewish agitators, but denounced their "reasons," because, supposedly, they were "not American." In other words, these agitators were asking us to rescue foreign groups for reasons alien to our interests. [My emphasis.] Careless listeners might have thought that Lindbergh was denouncing the British and the Jewish war agitators as "not American." This would have been true of the British agitators, who, because they were British, were not American. What about the Jewish war agitators' reasons? Could an American Jewish leader's urgings of intervention be American because he was American? Lindbergh does not clarify. Worse, Lindbergh's statement that Jewish war agitators' reasons were "not American" could have led the sloppy listener to think that he was denouncing Jews as "not American." Hitler had abolished German Jews' German citizenship; a carelessly listening American could have "heard" that Lindbergh wanted to abrogate American Jews' American citizenship. This possibility let Roosevelt's partisans hint falsely that Lindbergh hated Jews. Lindbergh's comments reflect some compassion for the Jews, but they recommend only that Jews oppose our entering the war. The rest of the speech advocates defense. Therefore, Lindbergh handed President Roosevelt and his spokesmen a solid gold comeback: because only offensive action could rescue Hitler's victims, Lindbergh's advice was morally wrong. You see, naming the interventionist groups constituted a philosophical error and a major forensic gaffe. Take the philosophical error. Lindbergh had said that although "...these war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people...", they had "...marshalled the power of their propaganda, their money, their patronage" "[a]gainst the determination of the American people to stay out of war." In other words, because the interventionists were few, their using their power was wrong; and, implicitly, because the anti-interventionists were many, their reluctance was right. This stems from "majoritarianism": the precept that popularity legitimates ethical positions. It is false. In ethics, no majority's size can affect an idea's merit. Even if ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of the American people had opposed intervention, their position could have been ethically wrong. The forensic gaffe was that in naming the agitators, Lindbergh denounced advocates of victims. Hitler's armies had sliced through Poland, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, Greece, and France, and his thugs ruled those nations. Although the English Channel and the Royal Air Force had prevented Hitler's invading Britain, German bombs had destroyed much British property and had impoverished, maimed, and killed many Britons. Moreover, German forces were racing across the Soviet Union. Charles Lindbergh recommended frustrating these victims' spokesmen. Lindbergh did not see that journalist's rules cannot sustain an advocate. As a journalist, Lindbergh could have recounted the history preceding Hitler's attack on Poland. He could have related the arguments given for and against intervention; he could have listed every one of the interventionist groups that he named in his Des Moines speech; and, as he did, he could have described what the most influential were doing to move America into the war. He could have done all of that, because, as a journalist, he would have urged no political action. Unhappily, a debate case has tighter requirements, especially if it has a strong ethical or political component. The battle over intervention had both. Both men's cases stemmed from collectively owned rights. President Roosevelt's argued that keeping Britain free would protect us, and that we have a moral duty to rescue Hitler's victims. Lindbergh's argued that strengthening our Armed Forces would keep us safe, and that we have no moral duty to rescue foreign peoples. These positions let Americans choose between helping President Roosevelt to aid and to rescue foreigners, and helping Lindbergh to "save their own skins" by withholding aid from Hitler's victims and moving away from the war. The result was confusion. A clear majority favored aiding Britain, but eighty per cent wanted not to fight. Never, before Hitler declared war on us, did a majority of Americans favor declaring war on the Axis. If Lindbergh had argued from individual's rights, the proportions might have been different. Here is what he could have said on that fateful evening of 11 September 1941.
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor quashed the debate. As did many anti-interventionists, Lindbergh believed that President Roosevelt had deliberately provoked their raid so that we could go to war against Hitler. During the war, Lindbergh wangled permission to visit the Pacific Theatre, where he taught our flyers how to extend their airplanes' range. He flew over fifty combat missions and shot down one Japanese aircraft. He did all this in mufti, because the president forbade his flying in uniform. Immediately after the war, he visited Europe. He inspected the V-2 factory at Nordhausen, Germany, viewed victims' bodies in the adjacent concentration camp, and saw the horribly thin survivors. He realized that Hitler was a lot worse than he had thought before the war. Subsequently, Lindbergh underwent a political conversion. He appeared at the United Nations with Philip Jessup, our ambassador of the time, during the debate on the Berlin Airlift. He voted for one-world liberals Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. Perhaps the reasons are these.
Combined, these factors may have led him to conclude that,
There are several lessons here. If "nature abhors a vacuum," it despises ignorance. Lindbergh's philosophic ignorance, coupled with his sincerity and brilliance, enabled Dr. Carrel and Anne to teach him mystical and political concepts very different from those he had learned from his father. Another concerns his premise of collectively owned rights. Like President Roosevelt, and like most other Americans of his time, Charles Lindbergh believed that groups, such as nations, could own rights. Many learned people, such as Henry M. Wriston, wrote books advocating freedom from that basis. Very few persisted. Wriston, for instance, eventually joined the Establishment. Belief in collectively owned rights eventually produces a denial of individually owned rights, which are all that exist. Therefore, just as ordinary Americans' belief in collectively owned rights has led them to desire more and more government, so Charles A. Lindbergh came to want big government at home and "One World" abroad. Lindbergh remained essentially aloof from the public, although he did resume his aviation career, acting as a consultant to those who sought his services. Aviators continued admiring him as the pioneer he truly was. In his few post-war speeches, he said little about national defense per se. From his earliest days on his family's farm, Charles Augustus Lindbergh had loved animals and had favored "balance." This combination may have steered him toward an early kind of environmentalism. In our cities, our ships, and even our airplanes, he saw a danger to the balance between nature and man that only government could defeat. To further these views, he gave speeches and worked hard in Alaska and the Philippines. He died of cancer on the island of Maui, Hawaii, on 26 August 1974. If, before Paris, Charles Lindbergh had studied Constitutional political theory, the theory of logical argument, and how they apply to specific issues, he might have realized that government's sole legitimate purpose is protecting individual's rights. So guided, he might have argued that, when our nation has not been attacked, defending Americans' individual's rights did not necessitate defending those of foreigners. That argument might have turned the majority favoring "short-of-war" aid to Britain into a majority opposing it. He could not thereby have prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he could have demonstrated that he was not pro-Nazi, shredded the interventionists' arguments, and given America First an ethically sound foundation. Post-war Americans would have regarded him as a champion of individual's rights and national independence. Then, he might once again have raised his famous voice to oppose our acting as the world's policeman. Sources: Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II, by Wayne S. Cole. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1974. Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1998. "Des Moines Speech," from the Public Broadcasting System web-site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/lindbergh/filmmore/reference/primary/desmoinesspeech.html "[A]ddress delivered at an America First Committee meeting in New York City on April 23, 1941." from the Public Broadcasting System web-site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/lindbergh/filmmore/reference/primary/firstcommittee.html "ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT DELIVERED BY RADIO FROM THE WHITE HOUSE." May 26, 1940, 9:30 PM, E. S. T. http://www.mhrcc.org/fdr/chat15.html "America's Wars"--statistics on war casualties by the Department of Veterans' Affairs' Office of Public Affairs.
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