Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  The isolationists’ glee over White’s letter was matched by an outpouring of interventionist fury. Fiorello La Guardia, New York City’s mayor, accused White of “doing a typical Laval,” referring to the pro-German foreign minister of Vichy France. In a letter he made public, La Guardia suggested to White that he “continue as Chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies with Words and the rest of us would join a Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies with Deeds.”

  The White Committee’s New York chapter promptly invited La Guardia to be its honorary chairman. “If anybody had been looking for the best possible way to kick Mr. White out,” J. P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont wrote to Roosevelt, “nothing could have been so perfect as to have the New York chapter applaud Mayor La Guardia’s insulting letter.”

  White took the hint. On January 1, 1941, he resigned as the committee’s national chairman. Six months before, his presence as its head had helped win wide national support for the idea of giving aid to the Allies, but his moderation now was considered passé. He complained to a friend that the committee was under the control of diehard interventionists, “and there is no way to oust them … I just can’t remain the head of an organization which is being used to ghost dance for war.”

  With White’s resignation, Lewis Douglas, a firebrand member of the Century Group, became the committee’s most influential figure. “Whatever is needed to insure the defeat of the Axis,” he wrote, “will be the policy of the Committee.” That, he made clear, included the possibility—even the probability—of war.

  Members of the Century Group, meanwhile, dissolved their organization in early 1941, believing that its effectiveness had been limited by its lack of a grassroots structure and broad-based financial support. Several of the group’s members immediately formed a new, more hawkish entity called Fight for Freedom. Among the organization’s founders were Herbert Agar and his Louisville Courier-Journal colleague Ulric Bell, who became the group’s executive director.

  Fight for Freedom, which advocated outright U.S. military intervention, was much more aggressive in its demands and inflammatory in its attacks on opponents than the Century Group had been. Its chairman—Henry Hobson, the Episcopal bishop of Cincinnati—introduced the group on April 19, 1941, by declaring that the United States was “in the immoral and craven position of asking others to make the supreme sacrifice for this victory which we recognize as essential to us. Once the U.S. accepts the fact that we are at war, we shall at last find peace within ourselves.” In an open letter to General Robert Wood a few months later, Hobson accused America First of becoming “the first fascist party in this nation’s history” and told Wood that it was “time for you to disband your organ of Nazi terror and hate.”

  When the chairman of a Connecticut chapter of America First challenged his Fight for Freedom counterpart to a public debate on foreign affairs, the FFF representative replied that “instead of spending money hiring a hall,” America First should hire “an airplane and a few parachutes and [send] Messrs. Lindbergh, Wheeler, Taft and some others … into Hitler’s Germany, which they are aiding so much by their present activities.… In our first fight for freedom, we got rid of Benedict Arnold. In this fight for freedom, let us get rid of all of the Benedict Arnolds.”

  A Who’s Who of the East Coast’s business, academic, and cultural elites, Fight for Freedom’s membership included Wendell Willkie, Grenville Clark, Lewis Douglas, members of the Rockefeller family, and the presidents of Harvard, Mount Holyoke, and Smith. Also in the group were the writers Maxwell Anderson, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dorothy Parker. The organization’s main watering hole was the exclusive Manhattan restaurant “21,” one of whose owners, Mac Kriendler, was on FFF’s national board.

  Kriendler made clear where his sympathies lay. Donors to the organization were assured of good tables at “21,” while known isolationists were barred from the restaurant. Hamilton Fish once managed to slip past the net but was spotted and confronted by Kriendler’s brother and co-owner, Jack, as he was leaving. “Mr. Fish, I’m afraid that I don’t like either you or your politics,” Jack Kriendler said. “I personally would appreciate your not coming in here again.”

  Fight for Freedom followed the White Committee’s lead in organizing an extensive network of chapters throughout the country which circulated petitions, recruited local newspaper editors to support their cause, and sponsored rallies and letter-writing campaigns to Congress. The new group maintained close ties with the White House; its top leaders were in daily touch with Robert Sherwood, whose wife worked as a volunteer in Fight for Freedom’s headquarters, and other members of FDR’s staff. At the request of Ulric Bell, press secretary Steve Early authorized White House typists to compile mailing lists for the organization from names and addresses of interventionist letters sent to the president.

  Fight for Freedom also collaborated closely with an organization called Friends of Democracy, which proved to be even more militant than FFF. Organized by the Reverend Leon Birkhead, a Unitarian minister from Kansas City, Friends of Democracy hired freelance journalists and investigators to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups and antiwar organizations and observe and publicize their activities.

  Early in 1941, Birkhead’s organization published an expensively produced pamphlet about America First entitled “The Nazi Transmission Belt,” which dubbed the group “a Nazi front … by means of which the apostles of Nazism are spreading their antidemocratic ideas into millions of homes.” Tens of thousands of copies of the brochure, which received widespread publicity, were distributed by Fight for Freedom chapters across the country.

  Soon afterward, Birkhead sought contributions from FFF members for “a publicity campaign branding Charles Lindbergh as a Nazi.” The fruit of that campaign was another elaborate pamphlet, this one charging Lindbergh with being “a very real threat to our democratic way of life” and a future “American Hitler.” When Lindbergh addressed an overflow America First rally in New York in April 1941, more than a hundred members of Friends of Democracy distributed anti-Lindbergh handbills and picketed outside. Dozens of policemen, many on horseback, spent the evening breaking up scuffles between the interventionists and thousands of America First supporters milling about on nearby streets.

  In the country’s savage political climate, such scenes were becoming common. Street-corner rallies were staged by both sides in New York and other urban areas. They were supposed to enlighten passersby on the issues but often degenerated into verbal clashes and physical brawls. “A new hysterical note shrills in the oratory,” one journalist reported. “Organized hecklers at these meetings frequently precipitate fights. Partisans taunt each other as ‘Jews’ and ‘Nazis.’ ”

  In the early summer of 1941, a Fight for Freedom rally on the steps of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, dissolved into a nasty fight. A few blocks away, hordes of people leaving an America First rally at Carnegie Hall ran into crowds listening to an interventionist orator on a nearby street corner. Several people were injured in the melee that followed.

  As 1941 wore on, the growing intolerance took a particularly heavy toll on the operations of America First and other antiwar groups. In Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other major cities, America First was denied permission to hold rallies in public places such as parks and city auditoriums. In Brooklyn, the president of the Dodgers baseball team refused to allow the group to use Ebbets Field. In Oklahama City, the city council unanimously voted to revoke America First’s lease with the municipal auditorium for a rally at which Lindbergh was to speak. (It was held instead at a ballpark outside the city limits.)

  Opposition to Lindbergh had become so vocal and threats to his safety so frequent that policemen guarded him in every city where he made an appearance. They searched the rooms where he was to stay and posted guards along his travel routes and in the halls where he spoke. He kept his public exposure t
o a minimum, appearing only long enough to make his speeches and then quickly making an exit.

  In several cities, libraries banned books about him, streets named after him were renamed, and monuments and plaques removed. In New York, the Lafayette Hotel—once owned by Raymond Orteig, the rich businessman whose $25,000 prize spawned Lindbergh’s historic flight to Paris—took down from its restaurant wall a flag that Lindbergh had carried on his transatlantic journey. When a reporter asked Orteig’s son, who now owned the hotel, why it had disappeared, the son responded with a shrug. “Too many pros and cons,” he said. “When we hung it there in 1927, everyone was proud of him. But now he’s talking politics, and lately, when people notice the flag, they start getting into arguments. So it seemed best simply to remove it.”

  Even at home on Long Island, Lindbergh and his family were surrounded, as his wife put it, by “bitterness, suspicion, and hate.” In her journal, Anne Lindbergh wrote: “I am sick of this place. We no longer have any privacy here; people telephone all day long—they know where we are. They even come out without calling up beforehand and look for us through the house and garden. The beach is so crowded with (chilly to us) people that I no longer can bear to go down there. I feel trapped—on weekends I don’t want to walk for fear of meeting people.”

  In midsummer 1941, Charles and Anne Lindbergh moved again, this time to a small rented house on an isolated, windswept part of Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Massachusetts. The family’s move prompted an immediate avalanche of letters to the FBI warning of the potential dangers. Declaring that Martha’s Vineyard was “a perfect base for German invasion,” one letter writer demanded to know: “What is being done to guard this island? Who is watching this man who so loves the Germans and the New Order?” Another correspondent wrote: “Most of us would appreciate knowing that ‘enemy Americans’ are being controlled as well as German and Japanese suspects.… Martha’s Vineyard, being a place easily accessible from a boat off the coast, would of course be an ideal location for a person whose sympathies lay with Germany.”

  AS IT HAPPENED, THE FBI already had Lindbergh under close observation. Shortly before he and Anne moved to Martha’s Vineyard, he discovered from an America First acquaintance that the FBI had been tapping the Lindberghs’ phone for several months. The agents who passed on the information were “friendly” to Lindbergh, the acquaintance said, but were obliged to follow orders.

  According to William Sullivan, a top FBI official for more than thirty years, Roosevelt had asked J. Edgar Hoover in early 1941 to launch new investigations into the activities of prominent Lend-Lease opponents. The president “also had us look into the activities of others who opposed our entrance into World War II,” Sullivan wrote in his memoirs, “just as later administrations had the FBI look into those opposing the conflict in Vietnam.”

  While Robert Jackson and his successor as attorney general, Francis Biddle, looked the other way, the FBI placed taps on the phones of nearly one hundred individuals and organizations in 1941. Not all administration officials, however, went along with the operation. When Hoover asked James Fly, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to monitor all long-distance phone calls between the United States and Axis countries, Fly flatly refused, citing congressional and Supreme Court bans on wiretapping. Fly also strongly opposed administration efforts to introduce legislation that would legalize wiretapping in certain instances.

  The FCC chairman’s defiance angered Hoover as well as the president, who curtly dismissed his objections that tapping phones was a clear violation of privacy. “I do not think,” FDR wrote to Fly, “that any of us should be in a position of hampering legislation … by going too much into technicalities.” Hoover, for his part, accused Fly of hindering the FBI in its efforts to protect the country from subversion. He passed along such allegations to his close friend, the columnist Walter Winchell, who promptly printed them.

  IN THESE TUMULTUOUS pre–Pearl Harbor years, the FBI was not the only government entity whose investigations were raising troubling questions about the violation of civil liberties. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had embarked on similar probes. But instead of going after isolationist groups and native Fascist organizations, its main quarry were liberals, leftists, and the Roosevelt administration.

  HUAC had been set up in 1934 as a special committee to investigate pro-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups in the United States. After ending its operations a year later, it was revived by Congress in 1938 under the chairmanship of Rep. Martin Dies, a right-wing, anti–New Deal Democrat from Texas who, in addition to being addicted to publicity, was opposed to immigration, organized labor, intellectuals, and social change of almost any kind.

  Although the committee’s mandate was to investigate both Fascist and Communist activities in the United States, Dies focused instead on what he claimed was an extensive Communist presence in organized labor and the federal government. From his first hearings in 1938, the Texas congressman worked to portray the New Deal as part of a vast Communist conspiracy.

  That same year, Dies called for the resignation of Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and their “many radical associates” who “range in political insanity from Socialist to Communist.” His committee conducted a widely publicized investigation into the Federal Theatre Project, which funded nationwide theater and other live artistic performances during the Depression—a probe that ended in the Project’s cancellation. In 1940, Dies published a book called The Trojan Horse in America, which declared that Eleanor Roosevelt “has been one of the most valuable assets which the Trojan Horse organizations of the Communist Party possesses.”

  Although the president took a dim view of Dies’s smears of his wife and associates, he nonetheless tried to appease the congressman, whose red-baiting and anti-immigration activities had won a great deal of support on Capitol Hill and, according to polls, among a majority of Americans as well. In an attempt to keep Dies quiet, FDR agreed in early 1939 to supply him with confidential details from tax returns of witnesses called before the committee and to order the FBI to investigate several organizations on Dies’s hit list.

  But Roosevelt’s efforts at conciliation failed to stifle Dies. In 1939, he began publishing the names of alleged Communists and fellow travelers in the administration—more than five hundred in all—with no evidence to back up the charges. According to the historian Robert Griffith, “Martin Dies named more names in one single year than [Senator Joseph] McCarthy did in a lifetime.” Griffith, who has written extensively about McCarthy’s investigation of purported Communists in the early 1950s, noted: “The Dies Committee pioneered the whole spectrum of slogans, techniques, and political mythologies that would be later called ‘McCarthyism.’ ”

  Liberals, many of whom had applauded earlier efforts to quiet those who attacked the president and opposed his foreign policy, now found themselves under assault. Background checks were ordered for applicants for federal government positions, and the Justice Department created a list of subversive organizations, membership in any of which was grounds for dismissal from federal employment.

  A number of state and city governments followed suit. In New York, the legislature ordered the firing of more than sixty professors from Brooklyn, Hunter, and City Colleges after they had been denounced as Communists. Several secondary schools in New York were also purged of suspected Communist teachers.

  Perhaps the most striking example of obeisance to the repressive temper of the times was the American Civil Liberties Union’s decision in 1940 to bar from its staff and leadership any person belonging to a “political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country.” As a result of its new dictum, the ACLU, which had long opposed the idea of guilt by association, sought the resignation of a member of its board of directors who was a Communist. When the member refused to resign, she was expelled from the organization.

  CHAPTER 21

  “DER FÜHRER THAN
KS YOU FOR YOUR LOYALTY”

  By the middle of 1941, a onetime poet named George Sylvester Viereck had become one of the most closely watched men in America. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Viereck was now Nazi Germany’s chief publicist in the United States. For years he had advised the German Foreign Ministry on the state of American public opinion and the mood on Capitol Hill regarding the Reich. In the course of his work, he had cultivated a number of isolationist members of Congress, including Rep. Hamilton Fish and Senator Ernest Lundeen, a Republican from Minnesota. In late 1939, with German money, Viereck organized an anti-British group called the Make Europe Pay Its War Debts Committee. Lundeen was named its chairman.

  For more than a year, Viereck, who worked closely with the German chargé d’affaires, Hans Thomsen, had been under heavy surveillance by British intelligence and the FBI, both of which were also keeping a watchful eye on the America First Committee and Capitol Hill isolationists. Joining in that effort were Fight for Freedom and other interventionist groups, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization organized to fight anti-Semitism and other bigotry and discrimination.

  Through American intermediaries, British Security Coordination had established close ties with several interventionist organizations, giving them information its agents had uncovered and in some cases reportedly helping to subsidize them. According to the BSC official history, the British allied themselves with Fight for Freedom, whose offices were in the same Rockefeller Center building as BSC’s, to disrupt America First rallies and discredit their speakers. When Senator Gerald Nye spoke at one such gathering in Boston in September 1941, Fight for Freedom members booed and heckled him and passed out thousands of handbills attacking him as an appeaser and Nazi-lover. They also placed anti-Nye ads in Boston newspapers. When Hamilton Fish appeared at an America First rally in Milwaukee, a Fight for Freedom member approached him as he was giving his speech and handed him a card on which was written, “Der Führer thanks you for your loyalty.” Tipped off beforehand, newspaper photographers were on hand to capture pictures of the flustered congressman, which were then featured in papers throughout the country.