Prescient as Mitchell was, his grating style and outspokenness limited his ability to effect change. That fell to another Billy, Billy Moffett, a South Carolina–born naval officer who fought in the Battle of Manila Bay, then won a Medal of Honor at Veracruz in 1914. Moffett himself did not fly, yet was instrumental in founding the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in 1921, often conflicting with Mitchell in his desire to develop a separate naval air arm. Together, the two Billys brought American military aviation into the forefront of weapons design and war planning. Neither lived to see the application of American air power in World War II, Moffett dying in a blimp crash in 1933, Mitchell succumbing three years later to multiple illnesses. One of the high ironies of World War II occurred as the United States languished at its lowest point following the attack at Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the Philippines, when a single morale-lifting counterstrike changed the war’s momentum. Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s crews flew B-25 bombers from an aircraft carrier to Japan in broad daylight, dropped their lethal loads, and galvanized patriotic enthusiasm. The nickname of the B-25? The “Mitchell.”
The most famous aviator of the age, however, was not Billy Mitchell or Giulio Douhet, but a lanky engineering school dropout and the son of a Minnesota congressman, Charles Lindbergh. Enrolling in flying school just as Moffett was getting the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics off the ground, Lindbergh became a “barnstormer” who flew professionally (despite lacking a pilot’s license) across the American Midwest. During the interwar years, American influence in Europe grew robustly, with no greater symbol than Lindbergh’s successful solo transatlantic flight in 1927. Responding to a reward of $25,000 offered by hotel owner Raymond Orteig to the first man to complete a nonstop flight from New York to Paris, the former mail pilot left the dirt runway of Roosevelt Field on Long Island on May 20 with “four sandwiches, two canteens of water and 451 gallons of gas.”35 Just over thirty-three hours later, after a journey of 3,500 miles, he set down at Le Bourget Field to be mobbed by 100,000 people. For his courage and historic achievement, Lindbergh was the “new Christ,” a term only a few years earlier applied to Wilson. As a European writer observed:
Parisians craved to see him. They wanted to acclaim him, touch him, hoist him on their shoulders, worship him. They trampled the iron gates and barbed-wire fences of the airport; they trampled each other…. He was feted like no one else in previous history, not kings or queens, statesmen or churchmen…. [Now he was] a modern Icarus who, unlike his mythical forebear, had dispelled tragedy.36
Awarded the Legion of Honor in France, Lindbergh returned home to the acclaim of four million Americans lining the streets of New York before he embarked on a nationwide tour sponsored by the Guggenheim fund. In March 1929, just before leaving office, President Calvin Coolidge presented Lindbergh, a reserve military officer, with the Medal of Honor. Lindbergh remained in the reserves until 1941 when he resigned as a colonel in the Army Air Corps after President Franklin Roosevelt publicly questioned his loyalty to the United States because of his noninterventionist activities with the America First Committee.
Lindbergh represented the first true American international celebrity—the American that foreigners wanted to be. By the 1920s, there was already more to America, though, than a flash-in-the-pan celebrity aviator. Lindbergh seemed the quintessential American who ignored the odds and overcame the impossible. Increasingly Europeans identified with, and wanted to emulate, average Americans. Americanophilia was largely a factor of the growing American cultural influence through movies, which still celebrated rugged individualism, entrepreneurship, self-deprecation and humility, and above all, material accomplishment. Adolf Hitler’s untitled “second book” admitted as much. “The European today,” he wrote, “dreams of a standard of living, which he derives as much from Europe’s possibilities as from the real conditions of America.”37 In 1930, Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the first American to do so, and forced Europeans to acknowledge a distinctly American form of writing. Lewis, in books such as Babbitt, presented “crusading social criticism” with “cheerfulness and alacrity” as opposed to the “weightily serious” realism of the Europeans.38 Now, after only a decade since an American planted the U.S. flag at the North Pole and only a few years after the Americans opened the Panama Canal, at a time when American architecture and engineering had gained equal status with that of Europe, Lindbergh’s flight offered one more example of the growing reality of the influence of the United States across the spectrum.
Lindbergh’s accomplishment also forced Europeans to realize that America was a serious competitor, not just culturally, but technologically as well. Even though the French and British rapidly caught up with the United States, then surpassed American airplane designs during World War I, the first transatlantic solo flight seemed to underscore their second-class status in aviation, which had first become apparent with the Wright brothers. When the Wright brothers staged their first demonstration flights in France, distraught French aviators were embarrassed. “We are beaten—we just don’t exist,” said one. “We are like children compared to the Wrights,” mourned another.39
But the Lone Eagle’s flight marked another achievement for America by underscoring its rugged individualism and lack of dependence on government. After a brief fling with government-subsidized aircraft under Samuel Langley, whose $50,000 in aid from Uncle Sam did him little good in his competition with the unsubsidized Wrights, the United States embarked on what would become a long-standing policy of using the mails to encourage private builders and airlines to make their own choices. Cornelius Vanderbilt had repeatedly overcome hefty congressional subsidies to competitors in the 1840s and 1850s to provide superior service in packet steamers to California and across the Atlantic, driving the government-subsidized firms into oblivion. Now, in the 1920s, the U.S. Postal Service used the lucrative mail contracts to keep the infant American airlines in business.40 Unfortunately, no government assistance comes without a price. In the case of the American airlines, the Post Office dictated schedules and even engine designs for the planes. Ultimately, however, the flexibility of the system proved far more beneficial than direct government control or ownership, leaving the Americans when war arrived in 1941 with a dozen major aircraft manufacturers, each with different areas of expertise and experience.
Life Unworthy of Life
As the 1920s commenced and soldiers returned to civilian roles throughout Europe and America, unemployment surged. Noncombatant workers had taken many of the jobs, leaving returning soldiers without work. Production of farm goods—which met the wartime demands of armies—now became overproduction as fighters became farmers. With the subsequent fall in agricultural prices, farmers became bankrupt farmers. Recovering from wartime devastation and retooling from weapons manufacturing took time and money, and thousands of disaffected veterans, unemployed unionists, and displaced, homeless civilians fell in the gap. Many were impatient for postwar policies to provide relief; many looked to politicians who promised faster solutions.
In Italy, Benito Mussolini introduced a seemingly new political philosophy that many, mostly Europeans, found appealing in an ideology called “fascism,” for the Roman fasces or bundle of sticks. Mussolini essentially slapped a national label on widely accepted European socialism. All fascist movements were, at their core, socialist, and Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith and newspaper editor from Naples, perceived that a glaring weakness of Marxist doctrines was the absence of national unity that ethnically cohesive populations craved. He shrewdly glimpsed that in the wake of the Great War, while complaints about excess nationalism abounded, no one wanted to entirely abandon the premise of national identity. Then, to adapt socialism to the twentieth century, Mussolini wedded it to big business through corporatism, permitting companies to manufacture and distribute products, but only after government had answered the fundamental economic questions of what was to be made and who would receive it. Corporate leaders retained the
ir perks, companies made “profits,” but these were little more than crumbs dribbled out to party supporters. The only difference between “pure” socialism and fascism lay in the single layer of companies that carried out the wishes of the regime. The companies became closely aligned with the government, often in what would later be termed “public-private partnerships.” Others would call these alliances “crony capitalism,” but in any case the national government selected compliant corporations, regulated their industries, and insured their profitability through government loans, subsidies, and contracts.
Although scholars differ over a comprehensive definition of fascism, a usable description would be a system wherein the government controls the production and distribution of goods and services through regulation, financial support, and the management of public money to benefit the state and its citizens as a whole. Fascism is centered on a state, nation, or group of nations, with top-down control of the citizenry, determining laws and managing education, employment, health, and social welfare. Often fascism includes a certain racial or religious component, but not always.
Once economic, and to an extent, social control was ceded to the state without intermediary institutions, such as legitimate courts, bills of rights, or the church, anything became acceptable in the “public interest.” Particularly when it came to the newly unfolding field of public health, fascist states could easily meld nationalism into ethnic purification. After all, what was a German? Who was an Italian? Now the state decided. Ultimately, such definitions almost invariably involved calculations of who was of greater value to society, and from there, it was a short step to adopting eugenics in the name of improving public health. It also entailed a certain sterile judgment that appealed to statisticians, sociologists, and economists. (German economists and the statisticians at the German Institute of Business-Cycle Research, whose chief, Ernest Wagemann, advocated Keynesian-style reflation, were particularly attracted to Nazism.)41 Characteristic of these trends was Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life (1920) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, which calculated the cost of one “idiot” to GNP.42 Hoche went so far as to argue that some were “mentally dead,” including the “incurably stupid,” that is, people lacking imagination or self-consciousness.
American and English Progressives found these elements of fascism appealing, and were drawn to their own variants of selective breeding, eugenics, race purification, or other such programs to ensure that only the “right” people (that is, those like them) survived. Keynes was at the forefront of the English eugenics movement, along with H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Huxleys, and Havelock Ellis. British Socialist economist Sidney Webb insisted the “wrong” people were out-breeding the “right” ones, a trend putting Britain at risk of “national deterioration” or of falling into the hands of the “Irish and the Jews.”43 H. G. Wells would regulate the right of an individual to bring a child into the world based on what he called “a certain minimum of personal efficiency,” namely whether the parents were worthy, based on “a certain minimum of physical development,” and free of disease.44 For society to attain Wells’s perfection, “swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people” would have to go: the “sterilisation of failures [sic]” was the only hope for improvement of “human stock.”45
In America, similar ideas were embraced by the likes of Margaret Sanger, Charles B. Davenport, and Madison Grant, whose book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) propounded a Nordic approach to history, in which Aryan races were the most evolved, and embraced eugenics wholeheartedly. A “rigid system of selection,” Grant argued, would eliminate the “weak or unfit.” (Hitler wrote Grant, saying, “The book is my Bible.”) Woodrow Wilson himself had written of “progressive races” versus “stagnant nationalities,” Progressive code words for racial superiority. While governor of New Jersey, his Board of Examiners of the Feebleminded had established criteria for the state to decide when “procreation was inadvisable” for those living in poverty, for criminals, or for mental defectives. Herbert Croly, a leading intellectual, lobbied for enforcing celibacy on lunatics and criminals; one of Teddy Roosevelt’s advisers, Charles Van Hise, took it even further, declaring, “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot.”46
One of the leading American race-suicide theorists, sociologist E. A. Ross, having already authored a book called Social Control (1901), in 1914 described immigrants as “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality…ox-like men [who] are the descendants of those who always stayed behind.”47 Sentiments such as these lay behind the sterilization laws for “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists” passed by thirty states, Canada, and many countries in Europe from 1907 to 1937. This was not far from the Nazi racial program against Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, nor from the Third Reich’s program of sterilization of all undesirables: both invested doctors and medical science with a new and powerful authority as experts who could give the final word on mental capacities and inherited, unchangeable characteristics.48
American Progressives copied the Europeans and the British by implementing racial control through economics and public health. Margaret Sanger and others specifically targeted Negroes and mental defectives for extinction through their programs. Other early American Progressives, including Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as labor leader Samuel Gompers, had first invoked racial quotas to combat what they viewed as unfair competition in the labor market in the late 1800s. As Ross explained when advocating the minimum wage, “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.”49 A minimum wage was also advocated by many in the American Economic Association who thought they could exclude an “unemployable class,” in the words of Sidney Webb, from the workforce using a higher wage, thereby putting them on the path to extinction. “Of all the ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Webb contended, “the most ruinous…is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.”50 The subject of inferior breeding also loomed large in the writings of many Progressives, including Princeton economist Royal Meeker, who favored a minimum wage that would lock out undesirable workers. “Better the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”51 John R. Commons, the dean of American labor economists, likewise feared immigrants’ competition: “competition has no respect for the superior races,” he intoned, and the race with the “lowest necessities” displaces the others. Ironically, Commons identified Jews as the source of unfair low-wage competition (the “Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race”).52
American Progressives called for the limitation of the reproduction of “undesirables” as an effort to protect the public health. Edward Larson’s extensive 1996 study of Progressive eugenics in the South revealed how pervasive the sentiment was even in the medical community for controlling what were viewed as undesirable populations. One Alabama doctor at the turn of the century advised his colleagues, “People who have [dysgenic] hereditary traits ought not to be allowed to get married, and men who persist in [degenerate behavior] ought to be confined in reformatory institutions, or have their testicles removed….”53 Another Georgia pediatrician recommended, “Sterilize all individuals who are not physically, mentally or emotionally capable of reproducing normal offspring.”54 These views were not confined to rural areas or the “backward” South. Chicago surgeon A. J. Ochsner advised that sterilization “could reasonably be suggested for chronic inebriates, imbeciles, perverts and paupers.”55 North Dakota and Nebraska established central registries for mental defectives and would not allow them to get marriage certificates unless one of the partners was sterilized.
California had one of the most advanced sterilization programs, performing procedures on 2,500 patients in state institutions by 1920, and ultimately more than 20,000 by the 1930
s. Originally passed in 1909, the first sterilization law focused on the mentally retarded and convicted sex offenders. A second law, passed in 1913, repealed the first and broadened the range of people to be considered for sterilization, including anyone “afflicted with hereditary insanity or incurable chronic mania or dementia,” as well as those included in the 1909 categories.56 The state’s general superintendent of the Commission on Lunacy, F. W. Hatch, sought to expand the program even more, calling for the sterilization of “confirmed criminals, habitual drunkards, and drug habituates, epileptics, sexual and moral perverts.”57
Hatch was supported by such academic leaders as Stanford’s president David Starr Jordan and philanthropist E. S. Gosney, who founded the Human Betterment Foundation, a California organization which distributed information about compulsory sterilization “for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship.”58 Hatch also had the backing of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections, which noted that for the benefit of society, children of the insane were better off “not to be born.”59 In the Deep South, only one top mental health official publicly opposed eugenics, while the proceedings of the southern states’ medical associations revealed a deep commitment to hereditary causes of criminal behavior, epilepsy, and mental disease. Thomas Haines, of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, stated that “the way to prevent much of the crime, immorality and degeneracy of the community today is to prevent this class of persons from propagating (emphasis in original).”60
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