Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
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Once Carter completed his research, Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, told White House reporters that if, at the next presidential press conference, they brought up the question of why Lindbergh, unlike so many other reserve officers, hadn’t yet been called into active military service, they might get an interesting answer.
On April 25, a reporter did ask the question, and Roosevelt’s ready response took the form of a history lesson. During the Civil War, he said, some men were deliberately barred from serving in the U.S. Army because of their defeatist attitudes. Prominent among them were the antiwar Copperheads, led by an Ohio senator named Clement Vallandigham, who made “violent speeches” against the Lincoln administration and declared that the North could never win a conflict with the South. Arrested and banished to the Confederacy, Vallandigham made his way to Canada, then returned to the North, where he continued agitating. Pressured to try him for treason, Lincoln decided not to do so.
When reporters asked Roosevelt if he was equating Lindbergh with Vallandigham, the president said yes. In that same context, he mentioned Revolutionary War appeasers who tried to persuade George Washington to quit at Valley Forge, arguing that the British could not be defeated. No journalist at the press conference apparently thought to mention that the analogy between Lindbergh and the earlier defeatists was faulty in at least one respect: in April 1941, the United States was not yet at war.
Roosevelt’s denunciation of Lindbergh made front-page headlines across the country, with many of the headlines and stories noting that the president had all but called Lindbergh a traitor. FDR’s statements unleashed a new flood of public attacks on the flier. In Charleston, West Virginia, a federal judge, while swearing in a grand jury, went off topic to condemn Lindbergh for criticizing Roosevelt’s foreign policy. “You say that we have freedom of speech in this country,” the judge declared, “but I’ll tell you that no man should be allowed to attack our government, especially in these days.” He added that “Lindbergh’s type destroys America.” In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in early June, a reader called Lindbergh “a maggot” and demanded that he be arrested on charges of treason and incitement of revolution.
Roosevelt’s anti-Lindbergh statement and the reaction to it received considerable criticism, even from a number of prominent interventionists. While Lindbergh’s foreign policy views were similar to those advocated by Nazi propaganda, he had never favored Nazism for Germany or any other country, including the United States. Indeed, he opposed the idea of any foreign government or party influencing America. As Life pointed out, “There is nothing on record or available as evidence to show that Lindbergh deliberately follows the Nazi Party line or has any contacts today with German leaders or agents. Perhaps Lindbergh appears pro-Nazi because practically everyone else is so anti-Nazi.”
According to a government report sent to FDR, “There has been rather unfavorable press reaction to the President’s verbal castigation of [Lindbergh].… It is argued that presidential indulgence in personalities diminishes national unity.” Wendell Willkie said he hoped that “the administration will discontinue these constant and bitter attacks.… Democracy should function through orderly and thoughtful discussion and not through adolescent name-calling. Nothing can contribute more to disunity than such attacks.” Speaking days later at an interventionist rally in New York, Willkie chided the audience for booing and catcalling when Lindbergh’s name was mentioned. “Let’s not boo any American citizen,” he said. “We come here tonight, men and women of all faiths and parties, not to slander our fellow citizens. We want all of them. Let’s save all our boos for Hitler.”
Lindbergh, for his part, was uncharacteristically shaken by the president’s attack. He had long been noted for what his wife called “his immobile, tolerant unconcern” regarding criticism, once telling a reporter that he only cared about “the future welfare of my country, my family, my friends, and my fellow citizens. In relation to these things, the names one is called makes very little difference.”
But this was not just a political attack, he thought: the president of the United States had directly questioned his loyalty and impugned his honor. “What luck it is to find myself opposing my country’s entrance into a war I don’t believe in, when I would so much rather be fighting for my country in a war I do believe in,” Lindbergh bitterly observed in his journal. “If only the United States could be on the right side of an intelligent war! There are wars worth fighting, but if we get into this one, we will bring disaster to the country.”
After brooding for several days about what to do, Lindbergh wrote a letter to Roosevelt resigning his commission. “I take this action with the utmost regret,” he told the president, “for my relationship with the Air Corps is one of the things which has meant most to me in my life. I place it second only to my right as a citizen to speak freely to my fellow countrymen, and to discuss with them the issues of war and peace which confront our nation in this crisis.”
In what the columnist Doris Fleeson called “this new and crackling chapter of the Roosevelt-Lindbergh feud,” Steve Early sharply criticized Lindbergh for releasing to the press his letter to FDR at the same time it was sent to the White House. It was a tactic, Early noted, that Lindbergh had used in 1934 when he dispatched a letter to Roosevelt criticizing his cancellation of airmail contracts. Then, in another dig at Lindbergh, Early wondered aloud whether he was also “returning his decoration by Mr. Hitler.” According to one newspaper account of Early’s comments, he “had just left the President, and none doubted that the Hitlerian wisecrack was of Rooseveltian authorship.”
Many in the press charged both Lindbergh and Roosevelt with unseemly, petulant behavior. “No evidence existed to justify the President’s comparison of Mr. Lindbergh with Senator Vallandigham,” The New York Times editorialized. “Nor is any American, from private to general officer, in service or on reserve, big enough to take the position that he will not serve his country because he has been, as he believes, unjustly reprimanded by his commander in chief or any other superior.” The incident, said Life, had “left a bad taste in America’s mouth. The President had delivered an unnecessary insult. The Lone Eagle had resigned in an unnecessary tantrum.”
UP TO THAT POINT, Lindbergh’s speeches had been relatively measured and objective, refraining, for the most part, from personal attacks. That changed, however, after the White House assault. His addresses became much more contentious, bitter, and demagogic, with frequent, strident criticisms of Roosevelt and other administration officials. Specifically, he charged the president with undermining democracy and representative government.
Democracy, Lindbergh told an America First rally in Minneapolis, “doesn’t exist today, even in our own country.” He denounced what he called “government by subterfuge” and charged that Roosevelt had denied Americans “freedom of information—the right of a free people to know where they are being led by their government.” At New York’s Madison Square Garden, he declared that during the 1940 presidential campaign, voters were given “just about as much chance” to express their views on foreign policy “as the Germans would have been given if Hitler had run against Goering.”
Charles Lindbergh addresses a jammed America First rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
When, in one speech, he urged “new policies and new leadership” for the country, his critics charged him with calling for the overthrow of the Roosevelt administration. Lindbergh vigorously denied the charge and, for the first and only time in his antiwar campaign, issued a statement clarifying what he had meant. In a telegram to the Baltimore Sun, which had requested the clarification, he said: “Neither I nor anyone else on the America First Committee advocate proceeding by anything but constitutional methods.” In a rather strained additional explanation, he insisted that his call for a change in leadership had actually been aimed at the interventionist movement—“the leadership of the opposition which we (the Nation) have been following in recent months.”
The wife of the journalist Raymond Clapper learned firsthand how brutal the debate had become when her husband began receiving hundreds of “filthy, profane” letters, threatening his life and those of his two children, for merely advocating in his syndicated column the dispatch of more aid to Britain. One day, Olive Clapper received a gift-wrapped package in the mail. She opened it to find a miniature black coffin with a paper skeleton inside, labeled “Your husband.”
Interventionist newspapers and magazines easily matched their isolationist counterparts—the Chicago Tribune, the Hearst press, and Scripps-Howard papers—in venomous assaults on their opponents. While the San Francisco Chronicle ran a cartoon showing Senator Gerald Nye waving an America First banner aboard a caboose labeled “Nazi,” Robert McCormick’s Tribune referred to Roosevelt and his men as “fat old men, senile hysterics … who devote their every energy to stirring up wars for other men to fight.” Time, meanwhile, called America First a collection of “Jew-haters, Roosevelt-haters, England-haters, Coughlinites, politicians, and demagogues.” In an editorial, the Chicago Daily News implied that the stands taken by America First had given aid and comfort to the enemy, which, the paper said, constituted treason.
Also taking part in the blame game was a man who would soon emerge as one of America’s most beloved authors of children’s books—the incomparable Dr. Seuss. Theodor Geisel—Dr. Seuss’s real name—was then working as an editorial cartoonist for PM, a left-leaning, interventionist New York daily newspaper. According to Ralph Ingersoll, PM’s editor and publisher, isolationists were “enemies of Democracy,” and thus his paper had “a special obligation—and privilege—to expose them.”
A Dartmouth graduate, Geisel had already published two children’s books—King’s Stilts and Horton Hatches the Egg—when he began work at PM in 1941. Employing the knife-sharp wit and whimsical surrealistic animals that became the trademarks of his books, Geisel’s cartoons skewered both Axis leaders and American isolationists. Next to Hitler, his favorite subject was Charles Lindbergh.
In one cartoon, Lindbergh is shown patting a Nazi dragon on the head. In another, a group of ostriches (the ostrich was Geisel’s symbol for isolationism) march down a street carrying a sign reading LINDBERGH FOR PRESIDENT IN 1944! while several sinister black-hooded figures, labeled “U.S. fascists,” follow with their own sign: YEAH, BUT WHY WAIT UNTIL 1944? In yet another, a smiling whale cavorts on a mountaintop, singing: “I’m saving my scalp / Living high on an Alp / Dear Lindy! He gave me the notion!”
America First was also a frequent target of Geisel’s satiric pen. One of his 1941 cartoons featured a mother, labeled “America First,” reading a book called Adolf the Wolf to her frightened children. The caption reads: “ … and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones.… But those were Foreign Children, and it really didn’t matter.”
Thanks to the withering criticism aimed at America First by Geisel and others, a sizable number of the organization’s more moderate members resigned, and in several chapters, there was a significant shift to the extreme right. Members of fringe groups like Father Coughlin’s National Union of Social Justice made up an increasingly large part of America First audiences, loudly booing any mention of Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, or Wendell Willkie and cheering speakers’ gibes at the British and “international bankers,” as well as assertions that Britain was losing the war.
To underscore his point that Britain should negotiate with Germany, Lindbergh told one rally that the British were in danger of starvation and that their cities were being “devastated by bombing.” The cavernous hall promptly erupted in riotous applause. At another rally at which he spoke, several members of the audience chanted “Hang Roosevelt!” and “Impeach the president!” Like other America First leaders, Lindbergh denounced such outpourings of hate, but his scolding had little or no effect. According to the historian Geoffrey Perret, “Lindbergh became, against his will, the darling of the worst elements of isolationism.”
DURING THIS TIME, THE interventionist movement was also roiled by a rancorous struggle between moderation and radicalism. It, too, ended with the moderates’ defeat, as well as the abrupt resignation of their leader, William Allen White, as head of the committee he had founded in the spring of 1940.
For months, White had been at odds with the more extreme interventionists in his organization, many of whom were also members of the Century Group. Although he had fought hard for all-out aid to Britain, the seventy-two-year-old editor remained steadfast in his belief that America must stay out of the war. “What right has an old man to tell youth to go out and lose its life?” White wrote to Robert Sherwood. “Always I have been restrained by an old man’s fear and doubt when it comes to lifting my voice for war. Of such seeds, unhappiness grows and tragedy comes to fruit.”
But with Britain edging closer to the brink of disaster, a growing number of people in White’s committee lost patience with such personal doubts and scruples. The Century Group was even more outspoken in its disdain for White’s desire for moderation and civility. In a letter to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, White complained that the “radical” Century Group “has given me more headaches and has kept me awake at night longer than any other part of my job.”
By late 1940, the interventionist split had become a chasm, as seen in a nasty dispute between White and a majority of members in the group’s New York chapter over what role the organization should take in the 1940 congressional elections. Most people in the chapter believed the White Committee should support candidates who backed aid to Britain and work to defeat those who did not. White, on the other hand, argued for nonpartisanship. A staunch Republican, he knew that most isolationist members of Congress were members of his own party, and he was determined not to do anything that would hurt their chances for victory.
The issue came to a head when the New York militants formed a group to oppose the election of Hamilton Fish, the archisolationist Republican congressman from their state. The anti-Fish organization used the office of the committee’s New York chapter as its headquarters, leading outsiders to conclude that the committee was behind the effort to stop Fish.
Dashing off a letter to the congressman, White disavowed any connection with the campaign against him, adding: “However you and I may disagree about some issues of the campaign, I hope as Republicans we are united in our support of the Republican ticket from top to bottom in every district and every state.” He made clear to Fish, an old friend of his, that he could use the letter in any way he wished. Fish immediately made the letter public—and won reelection. Stunned by White’s public support for this diehard opponent of his committee’s cause, many in his group angrily questioned where their leader’s loyalties lay: to his fellow Republicans or to the survival of Britain and the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This fracas was soon followed by a controversy over the committee’s future direction. Against White’s better judgment, the group’s executive board issued a statement in December 1940 urging Roosevelt to step up war mobilization and to assume responsibility for maintaining “the lifeline between Great Britain and the United States,” which “under no circumstances” must be cut. In effect, the board was calling for the use of U.S. naval escorts for British merchant shipping if all other measures failed. White, who opposed convoying, worried that the committee was “getting out too far in front” of public opinion and the president. From his home in Kansas, he informed other committee leaders of his deep concern
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A few days later, White learned that the publisher Roy Howard was planning to run an article in his Scripps-Howard newspapers attacking him and his group as advocates of war. Worn out from his work on the committee, exasperated by those he called “radical warmongers,” and worried about his wife’s poor health, White had had enough. He notified Howard that the premise for his story was completely false: “The only reason in God’s world I am in this organization is to keep this country out of war.… The story is floating around that I and our outfit are in favor of sending convoys [which is] a silly thing, for convoys, unless you shoot, are confetti, and it’s not time to shoot now—or ever.” White added this parting shot: “If I was making a motto for the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, it would be ‘The Yanks Are Not Coming.’ ” He gave Howard permission to print the letter.
Its publication stunned White’s colleagues on the executive board, as well as the group’s rank and file. Their leader had, in effect, committed them to a policy that many were adamantly against: opposition to U.S. participation in the war, regardless of Britain’s fate. “The misunderstanding over your Howard interview is having national repercussions, and unless we can agree quickly on a statement, our movement is threatened with disaster,” the committee’s executive director, Clark Eichelberger, told White in an urgent telegram.
But there was no misunderstanding, and isolationist leaders quickly moved to capitalize on this obvious deep split in the interventionist movement. “Mr. White has rendered a great service to this country by clarifying his position and the position of his committee,” Charles Lindbergh said. “It seems to me advisable to accept his statement at its face value and to welcome him to the camp of the ‘isolationists.’ ”