Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  A renegade state had no more right to aggression than a passive state had to neutrality. Reflecting the teachings of Leviticus, Morrow didn’t believe in the luxury of “isolation;” of standing by to watch another state starve and die. To cut off “entanglements” was to cut off the “liveliness, comfort, and happiness of millions of people.” Of course Morrow detested war and its devastation, but he believed it was often necessary to clear the path for human progress. The danger to America, he wrote, was measured not by military invasion but by its moral commitment to the international community. Growth required sacrifice and discipline. “Only then can we have the unity and courage to bring the world nearer to a dependable international guarantee of the territorial and political integrity of all nations, large and small.”2

  Now her mother was defending her father’s words against the views of Charles. Torn by the conflict, Anne wondered naïvely why there was a need for war at all. She hated any show of force; it was against her nature. But how could she desert Charles? And how could she live without him?3

  On August 22, Hitler told his generals that the “extermination” of Poland was about to begin. Although he had made a pact with the Soviet Union he vowed to crush Stalin. “Whether the world believes it doesn’t mean a damn to me … Be hard … Be without mercy. The citizens of Western Europe must quiver in horror.”4

  One week later, sitting at her desk in Lloyd Neck, Anne wrote in her diary that negotiations between Poland and Germany had stopped. War, she was certain, was inevitable. The waiting stirred her darkest memories. In her mind, her failure to protect her baby and her complicity with Charles and his pro-German views, were synonymous. She wrote in her diary, “The child is dead in Europe.”5

  Anne’s body pulsed to the sounds of war as she imagined guns booming in the distance. That night, unable to sleep, she sat by her window, watching the moon rise against the trees and the dim gold lights of the Connecticut shore. Suddenly, she found herself on her knees praying—praying as she had not done since Charlie died. It was as if she had been touched by God. She felt empty of anguish, clear and free. Like the birth of her babies, it was both a death and a resurrection.6

  But what and who had died? The next morning, as Anne sat on the steps of her seaside house, peeling unripe chestnuts with Jon, the realization came. The realities of war were harsh, and her husband’s stance was implacable. No matter how repelled she was by his antiseptic pragmatism, it was her duty as his wife and the mother of his children to submit to his views. Charles and the children were everything to her. They were her microcosm, her war job, small and meaningless in the scheme of things, but nonetheless an influence in a shattering world.7

  Her thoughts turned to her friends in Europe and the terible fate that lay ahead of them.8 She imagined the horror of human suffering and wanted to make it her own. And she saw something else—an America “shocked out of its senses” and turning against Charles.9

  Charles remained aloof, scanning the events with disciplined detachment. It was clear to him that Britain and France would not prevail against the Germans. Furthermore, he did not question the justifications for Germany’s transgressions. But he was concerned that the American press might push the United States into a war.10 Their influence made Charles wonder whether he could even think of living permanently in New York.

  As the Germans stormed Poland, Roosevelt declared a state of “limited national emergency,” which authorized him to accelerate conscription and call reservists to active duty. On the night of September 15, in a small broadcasting room in Washington, Charles spoke nationwide, with Anne by his side, urging Americans to stay out of war.11

  He set forth an isolationist doctrine, couched in the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, that drew on the xenophobia of the public. What good had the First World War done, he asked? It had cost over a hundred thousand men and millions of dollars, debts that we were still paying. Involvement in a European war was a fathomless pit that would put our country in debt for generations to come. And what did this war have to do with us? It was an internecine battle among “sister nations,” not a threat to the “white race.” The Versailles Treaty, which had reduced the size of Germany and demanded tens of billions of dollars in reparations, had proven that no one could legislate strength among nations. In 1936, when Hitler first came to power, the Allies might have persuaded Germany to disarm; now, they were paying for their errors. Anne found his speech visionary yet practical. It was Charles at his best.

  We must not let our sympathies cloud our vision, he said. “We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife,” cutting off the infections of European affairs. Besides the costs in men and dollars, he said, we would turn our country into a war machine in which democracy might not survive. Let us tend to our own problems and regenerate our institutions, turning away the alien voices in our midst that call for war. Now, in a public forum, Charles attacked the Jewish influence in the press:

  We must learn to look behind every article we read and every speech we hear. We must not only inquire about the writer and the speaker—about his personal interests and his nationality—but we must also ask who owns and who influences the newspapers, the motion pictures and the radio stations.12

  Ending with a plea for self-preservation and for a reliance on “logic” in our foreign policy, Charles, at Anne’s urging, called for the salvation of Western civilization. “The gift of civilized life must still be carried on. It is more important than the sympathies, the friendship, the desires of any single generation.”

  Charles would later pay a price for his isolationist, anti-British, and anti-Jewish address, but for the moment he basked in the favorable comments of his friends and in the admiration of the fine physical “types” who rallied to his cause. Buoyed by his apparent “victory,” he finished writing an article for the Reader’s Digest and began to compose another radio address.

  But the press was already murmuring in disgust. As Britain declared its resolve to conquer Germany, in the Times of London Beverly Baxter, a member of Parliament, a novelist, and a journalist, condemned Charles for turning against the nation that had given him security.13 At the same time Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, railed at Lindbergh’s slander of the press; if the motives of the press were to be examined, she suggested, so should his. She portrayed Lindbergh as an anti-British instrument of fascist Germany.14

  Betty Morrow, meanwhile, was polishing her own speaking skills. Smith College had asked her to serve as acting president, and on September 26 she accepted the post in Northampton. As she spoke with poise and simplicity to the large audience of teachers and students, Anne felt her mother looked young again. She thought her mother had finally found her mission—the higher education of women.15

  On September 27, three weeks after the declaration of war, Poland surrendered to Hitler. More than 140,000 Polish troops laid down their guns. Two-thousand Polish soldiers and ten thousand civilians had died. Hitler signed a treaty with Stalin and declared his desire for peace, even as he told his military commanders he would “attack in the West as soon as possible.”16 He issued his “strength of Germanhood” decree, calling for the “elimination” of all alien populations, and began to deport Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews to the concentration camps set up in Poland. He told his generals that France was next.17

  Anne, as she struggled with her book on family reminiscences, worked daily on a short piece confirming Charles’s vision of the European war. If this was not at the direct urging of Charles, it was certainly to his great pleasure. After reading her work-in-progress, he praised her lyrical expression of feeling. Anne’s writing, he wrote in his journal, combines philosophy with delicacy unparalleled.”18

  A week later, on the eve of a congressional debate on the Neutrality Bill, Charles gave his second radio address.19 This time he argued, with greater subtlety, to convince the public of its moral obligation to avoid war. Yes, he said, we must defend America if it is attacked, and,
yes, we must defend the countries of the Western hemisphere whose physical integrity is vital to ours. But we must make no promises we are unable to keep, and we must not embroil ourselves in an international struggle that has no moral or physical imperative. This war is not about ideology; it is about power. It is not about democracy; it is about political borders. We are bound to Europe by race, not politics, he said, implying his belief in Aryan superiority. This war is a quarrel among equals, an incestuous battle among the white races of Europe, beyond the purview of American interest. The laws of evolution, not manmade justice, were the measure of war.

  If the white race is ever seriously threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French and German, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.

  The first war taught us that political strength could not be legislated and that war was costly. If America were to enter the present war, it would become like “Shylock,” demanding retribution for its wartime loans. He offered his listeners a moderate course: the “unrestricted sale of purely defensive armaments” and a refusal of credit to the belligerent nations.

  While the subsequent outrage in England and France was predictable, the response in Congress was beyond anyone’s expectations. The New York Times reported:

  Senate debate on the Neutrality Bill today quickly turned into a free-for-all discussion of Colonel Lindbergh’s radio speech last night, in the course of which three Administration leaders charged him with inconsistency and, in one case, with substantive approval of the “brutal conquest of democratic countries.”20

  Senator Key Pittman, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, stopped just short of calling Charles a fascist; others, such as Senator Alben Barkley, pointed to the absurdity of distinguishing between “defensive” and “offensive” ammunition. Are planes right, but gunpowder and gasoline wrong? The consensus was that the famous aviator had gone beyond the bounds of his limited expertise.

  Even Charles’s friends began to denounce him. In an article in the British Spectator, Harold Nicolson tried to explain the source of Charles’s opinions. He said Colonel Lindbergh, after his historic flight to France, had allowed his ideas to become not merely inflexible, but rigid; his self-confidence to become arrogance, and his convictions to harden into granite. “He began to loathe democracy,” Nicolson said.21

  Nicolson’s article knocked Anne’s breath away. She was shocked that he didn’t deal with the issues. He had chosen instead to dissect his motives, as if Charles were a laboratory specimen. Under the pretense of analyzing his views, he made a cheap shot at someone he once considered his friend.22

  An audience in London, echoing Nicolson, raucously sang a ditty: “Then there’s Colonel Lindbergh/Who made a pretty speech/He’s somewhere in America/We’re glad he’s out of reach.”23 Henry Breckenridge, even the Guggenheims, turned their backs on their once beloved friends. Aubrey Morgan, Con’s husband, now assistant chief of the Bureau of British Information Services, refused to see them.

  Carrel could not understand the public uproar. He asked Jim Newton to send him a copy of Charles’s speech. He wrote, “We are wondering about the cause of this immense feeling of surprise and hatred growing against him.”24

  Charles wondered whether, given the public hostility, he could remain on the East Coast. Perhaps “a real and permanent” home could be found only in the West. Echoing his father’s views, Charles said he wanted to find a place grounded on “sound agricultural principles,” where human values were not distorted by urban life.25

  But in truth, he was being pushed. Betty Morrow simply had had enough. For the first time she spoke out against Charles, denouncing his call for a munitions embargo.26 She announced that she was joining William Allen White’s Nonpartisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Law, passed by Congress and signed by Roosevelt in 1935. White, the editor of the Emporia Gazette, in Kansas, was known as a philosopher, a liberal Republican, and a patriot. The committee attracted broad bipartisan support, from Henry L. Stimson, Thomas Lamont, and Helen Hayes, to the labor leader David Dubinsky and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. They threw their support to Roosevelt in his effort to arm the British. Father Charles E. Coughlin, an anti-Semitic isolationist with German contacts, denounced the committee as a “dangerous fifth column.”27 She was bitter, but she was resigned. The only thing she could do was pray.28

  Two weeks later, Charles’s Reader’s Digest article appeared. Laced with poetic and philosophical musings, which showed the artful touch of Anne, it presented the airplane as an instrument of a divine and natural struggle among racially disparate nations. Aviation, wrote Charles, was “a tool specially shaped for Western hands … one of those priceless possessions which permit the white race to live at all in a pressing sea of yellow, black, and brown.” While the airplane, he said, could lead to worldwide conflagration, it was also an instrument for preserving racial purity. In his most vicious racial attack yet, he wrote:

  Unless we act quickly to counteract it … the White Race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain … It is time to turn from our quarrel and to build our White ramparts … We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only as long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.29

  His article was both a plea for peace and a justification for racism and war. Lindbergh, said Heywood Broun of The New Republic, had developed a new political stance, “Pacifist Imperialism.” “I honestly believe that our greatest danger lies in heeding the jingoes who come forward camouflaged as doves.”30 The Roosevelt administration was angry. Secretary of the Interior Ickes noted that even Roosevelt was beginning to take seriously Charles’s reputation as a fascist.

  Three days later, Congress repealed the Neutrality Law. “Cash and Carry” purchases were now permitted; U.S. manufacturers could sell arms to belligerents if the material was shipped under the flag of a foreign nation. The next day, Hitler set his date for the attack on France. Within three weeks, wearing the yellow star became compulsory for Jews in Poland.31

  Anne worked relentlessly on her plea for peace, to be published in the Christmas issue of Reader’s Digest. Defying her deepest instincts, she immersed herself in Charles’s political world.32 “I make myself someone else and I am calm and collected!”33

  Assuming her usual apologetic stance, Anne began her article:

  I am speaking as a woman, a weak woman, if you will—emotional, impulsive, illogical, conservative, dreaming, impractical, impulsive, pacific, inadventurous, any of the feminine vices you care to pin on me. I write knowing that all those vices cannot help but be used to undermine anything I say.34

  Speaking for a “long-range attitude toward peace,” using the metaphors of motherhood and domesticity, Anne reiterated Charles’s theories one by one: (1) the military constraints of the Versailles Treaty created an embittered Germany; (2) violence and aggression are facts of human life; (3) war is justified and inevitable among nations of disparate power; (4) the need to prevent the destruction of Western civilization as we know it; (5) the need to effect an early peace.

  Hitler isn’t evil, she wrote, or at least no more evil than the rest of us. He is the “embittered spirit of a strong and humiliated people.” Russia, not Germany, is the real threat. Its weak and spiritless “hordes,” mindlessly tied to a false vision of equality that breeds decadence and mediocrity, will destroy not only Germany but all the people of Europe. Let the natural process of war among nations smother the weak. Why destroy everything we value in Western civilization for a democratic principle that has proven itself flawed?

  If Hitlerism is a spirit and you cannot kill or incarcerate a spirit, how can you deal with it? It can only … be exorcised. To exorcise this spirit you must offer Germany and the world not war but peace.35

  Truly, Anne had written like �
��someone else.” For the sake of loyalty to Charles, she had elevated Hitler to an unconquerable “spirit,” reduced democracy to an infirm ideal, and renounced America’s responsibility to its allies. There was only one thing harder to bear than the truth, and that was the thought of separation from Charles.

  26

  Images

  Bronze head of Anne Lindbergh by Charles Despiau.

  (Museum of Modern Art)

  You have made an image of me.

  Every image is a sin.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH,

  QUOTING STILLER IN CORRESPONDENCE1

  JANUARY 1940, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  Images of Anne—Charles couldn’t get enough of them. As criticism of his pro-German stance intensified, he wanted to etch her onto the walls of his mind, as a sign of constancy in this pit-grave of politics. The task, however, was proving impossible. First Despiau and now Simon Elwes—painter of dukes, princesses, and kings—was summoned by Charles to perform the task. But no matter how many times the jovial painter put his brush to the cloth, the image turned out wrong. Elwes could not capture Anne’s depth of character, Charles wrote in his diary. He would have to settle for mediocrity.