by Susan Hertog
But, she confided in her diary, her inability to write was more than a matter of finding time. She didn’t have the words. Her work before the war belonged to an era that no longer existed. Whitehead was right. The old world was dying and the new one had not yet begun.45
Charles, however, could not stop talking. On the sun-drenched afternoon of August 4, at a meeting in Chicago of Citizens to Keep-America-Out-of-War, Charles spoke to a crowd of forty thousand.46 His speech was reminiscent of Anne’s “Prayer for Peace.” “The world,” he said, “is not governed by principle or by Christian values; it is governed by power.”47
Hitler apparently agreed. His economic minister touted the wisdom of Lindbergh’s speech even as the Nazis were laughing at Charles’s naïveté. American shores were not invulnerable. After Europe would come the conquest of the United States.48
As the Luftwaffe continued its assault on England, Anne finished her “Confession of Faith.” Clothed in the religious and moral symbols of her childhood, her writing was a ritual form of self-absolution. The article would become her book The Wave of the Future.49 In forty-one pages, more a pamphlet than a book, Anne crystallized the thoughts in her diaries and articles, portraying the destruction of Western civilization as a divine and natural inevitability. Her desperation gave the book a tone of extreme urgency. Once more she apologized for being a woman, as if to placate a wrathful God. But she had to speak out and be heard.
How are we to get at the “truth,” she asks, and how are we to reevaluate the evil by the standard of Christian morality? Is it merely a question of good against evil? Is it a matter of launching a crusade? The demons who persecute, kill, and steal—do they not commit terrible sins? And what about the “democracies?” she asks, contemptuously placing the word in quotation marks. With fire and brimstone, Anne condemns them for their sins. “Democracies,” she writes, are guilty of “sins of omission” and self-delusion. They can afford to be smug because they were among the “have” nations. Germany cannot, and the “democracies” refuse either to support them or to give them aid. If “territorial and economic concessions” had been made, there would be no Nazism and no war. She does not excuse Nazi evil; she merely explains it. Their evil springs from the barren earth of neglect.
Here all her theories coalesce in an attempt to paraphrase what she understands as Whitehead’s theory of history. “The wave of the future is coming,” and there will be no stopping it. It is a wave of human energy pushing toward a divine good, a conception of humanity, trying to come to birth, that obscures its purpose with horror and evil. Perhaps, she muses, it is retribution for our materialism and lack of spirituality. It is a war “we have begotten,” and the evils we deplore are “the scum on the wave of the future.”
Using an argument of Hitler’s in Mein Kampf, she considers the evils of the French Revolution. Certainly we do not question its fundamental moral imperative. The old morality does not suffice; heroic enterprise is no longer respected. We have to let them go, and we have to let “democracy” die with them. It has failed economically and morally and has eroded the “hardiness of the race.”
We cannot “save” civilization. The German “spirit” will crush our armies. Our own moral and spiritual disintegration is a greater threat to our existence than the possibility of invasion from abroad.
There is no fighting the wave of the future … We, unhappily, are living in the hiatus between two dreams. One is dying and the other is not yet born. America must confront its sins and have an infinite faith in the future.50
Her amoral logic fractures like light through a prism. The book stands as a philosophic consummation of all she and Charles believed. Finally their vision had a form.
Harcourt Brace rushed it to print. The book, published on October 3, 1940, the day after the birth of her daughter, Anne Jr., was a recapitulation of her husband’s views. It sold fifty thousand copies within the first two months. The Italians and Germans called Anne “noble,” and the American public regarded her as nothing less than satanic or, worse, Satan’s “little wife.” Male reviewers dismissed her as the mouthpiece for her husband’s fascist views, and female journalists attacked her directly. The only exception was the gentle E. B. White, who criticized her logic but not her character.51 But it was Dorothy Ducas who came closest to the truth. In Who magazine, she pegged Anne as an incompetent dreamer who lacked the courage of her idealistic parents. “The young woman,” she writes, “[who] knows little of the rushing, pushing, world of reality,” lives in a house divided against itself, caught between those she loves.52
Later, Anne would call it her “bridge book,”53 her attempt to cross the divide between her father’s Wilsonian principles and her husband’s vision and practicality. Anne was convinced that her father would have agreed with its spirit if not its methods.54 Once again, Anne was deluding herself. Dwight Morrow would have loathed both her methods and her ideas. Cold practicality would have held no weight for him in the face of Hitler’s devastation of humanity. Man, believed Morrow, worked in partnership with God; there was no inevitability to “natural law.” The future of a country rested on its moral fiber and ethics, not on momentary events. Morrow’s loyalties to democratic principle and to the European democracies would have rendered his daughter’s theories absurd. A humanist to the core, Morrow would have seen the notion of racial superiority as abhorrent. A man of diplomacy, dedicated to a covenant of nations, Morrow would have considered war the last resort, but he would have understood its moral imperative in certain crises.
To stop the walls of her marriage from crumbling, Anne sanctioned Hitler’s charnel house. In the name of loyalty to her husband, Anne validated the vision of a madman.
27
Saint of the Midnight Wild
Anne at an America First rally in Philadelphia, May 1941.
(UPI/Corbis-Bettmann)
SAINT FOR OUR TIME1
Christopher, come back to earth again.
There is no age in history when men
So cried for you, Saint of a midnight wild,
Who stood beside a stream and heard a child…
But who today will take the risk or blame
For someone else? Everyone is the same,
Dreading his neighbor’s tongue or pen or deed
Imprisoned in fear we stand and do not heed.
The cry that you once heard across the stream
“There is no cry,” we say, “it is a dream.”
Christopher, the waters rise again,
As on the night, the waters rise; the rain
Bites like a whip across a prisoner’s back;
The lightning strikes like fighters in attack
And thunder, like a time-bomb, detonates
The starless sky no searchlight penetrates.
The child is crying on a further shore:
Christopher, come back to earth once more.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
SPRING 1941, LLOYD NECK, LONG ISLAND
All Anne could do was pray. The grief of war, she wrote to a friend, was intensified by the wounds of thousands.2 The world cried out for a saint who would carry the sins and pain of all men on his back.
But who were the new Saint Christophers, Anne asked? Winston Churchill? Adolf Hitler? Whoever they were, Anne was certain that Charles was meant to walk among them.
In the spring of 1941, Charles believed there was no turning back. Anne’s book had lent nobility to his cause. When he reread his father’s books, he saw history repeating itself; he was certain his father’s beliefs were true. One need not be pro-British to be a “true” American, nor was it one’s duty to stand by the president. It was the right of each citizen to challenge policy before or after it became law. Now, that right was again being violated by the machinations of warmongerers. Twenty years earlier, his father had believed that the Catholics formed an international conspiracy to bring America into a war with Europe. Charles believed it was now the Jews. The Jews, he wrote, were using the m
edia to spread propaganda. And Roosevelt, a liar and a demagogue, was their puppet.3 He had won election on a platform of peace, yet he was determined to lead the nation into war. Give England our destroyers? Protect them with American convoys? And now Lend-Lease? Whom was Roosevelt kidding? We were only a “step away” from sending our troops. Lindbergh would not be cowed into silence by Roosevelt’s lies.
In fact, Charles’s assessment of Roosevelt’s view of the war was correct. By 1941, Roosevelt saw U.S. involvement as inevitable. It was a matter of convincing the public. But in early February 1941, 85 percent of the public polled by Gallup did not want America to go to war.4 Knowing that time was running out, he had no choice but to move ahead.
Charles, too, sensed it was now or never. The time for aggressive attack had come. By the end of January, Charles joined the congressional debate. Representative Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, asked him to offer the committee his case against Lend-Lease.5 On January 23, 1941, Charles gave public testimony for the first time since the Hauptmann trial, in 1935, lending the proceedings an aura of theater.6 Long before the doors of the committee room in the new House Office Building were opened, lines of spectators waited outside. Those lucky enough to be admitted broke the silence with a defiant show of applause for the Colonel.
With the air of a “veteran” and the voice of authority, he instructed the photographers to take their pictures at once and not to set off any flashbulbs while he was testifying. He read his prepared statement in a firm voice, handed it to the official stenographer, and settled back in his chair to await the questions. Reporters noted that when he spoke, all the witnesses who had gone before and all who were to follow “dropped to the status of aging and colorless extras.” Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson and the others had been “eloquent but had sprung no surprises.” Ambassador Kennedy appeared disingenuous and confused. “Serious” and “smooth-cheeked,” with a touch of gray over his ears, Colonel Lindbergh responded with “infinite poise and infinite conviction,” telling his audience, “I want neither side to win.”7
The American press judged him “the perfect neutral,” and the Germans called him one of the few true Americans.8
From Saint-Gildas, Carrel informed him that the French agreed. The military and air attachés of the Vichy government were with him “one hundred per cent.” Thrilled with the news, Charles wrote in his diary: “I believe Dr. Carrel can be of great value to France at this time … to a reconstruction of France.” Charles considered him “one of the great men of France in these times. If only he is able to make the right contacts.”9
In the first week of March, feeling, once again, the need to “get away,” Anne and Charles made their second trip with Jim Newton to Florida.10 For Anne, it was a moment to regain perspective. She had begun to write her “feminist essay,” an analysis of married women and creativity. The problems confronting the ambitious woman weighed heavily on Anne’s mind. A married woman could not possibly write with the freedom and clarity of a man. Saint-Exupéry was the very essence of an artist, but he had the luxury of time and solitude, while she was pulled in different directions, always feeling rushed, guilty, and inadequate. She could not be the most important person in her children’s lives and still manage to write and spend time with Charles. Life itself was her art. If only she could be everything to everyone.
While the Lindberghs chopped their way through the keys, the Lend-Lease legislation was passed by Congress and signed by Roosevelt. This, said Roosevelt—as if to silence further dissent—“is the end of any attempt at appeasement in our land.”11 But Charles was prepared to counter Roosevelt’s every move. He wrote “A Letter to Americans,” which appeared in the March 1941 issue of Collier’s magazine.12
Although he set forth the same arguments he had presented before, he now put them in the context of personal experience. At the suggestion of Anne, who had assumed the responsibility of editing his speeches,13 he proclaimed himself the voice of reason and counseled France and England to cease the hopeless war. And he made one last request to the American people: before reaching a final decision, they should demand a full plan from those who preached the defense of democracy.
With simple elegance, Lord Halifax, the English ambassador to the United States, replied. The plan, he said, was a single word: “Victory.”14
In fact, Charles’s assessment of Allied military power was wrong. While America was not at the peak of its production—as it would be within six months—she and the Allies had enough power to keep the Germans at bay. At the time he wrote his article, Germany had approximately 3500 combat airplanes, the United States and Russia combined had 8000, and England had 3100. Within six months, the German force would decline to 2500, and the Allied forces, including the United States, would have 11,000 front-line combat planes.15
Contrary to Charles’s assessment of Greenland as an unimportant military base, the U.S. acquired full defense rights for its operation.16 Charles wrote in his diary that the moon rose “huge and blood red.”17
Within the week, Charles joined the America First Committee, an event that made national news. Committee leaders convinced him that he was the only one with mass appeal that rivaled the President’s. On April 17, Charles spoke to a crowd of 10,000 gathered under the committee’s auspices in Chicago.18
America First had been conceived in the spring of 1940 after the fall of France. R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., a student at the Yale University Law School and the son of a vice president of the Quaker Oats Company, organized students and faculty on the Yale campus. They launched a petition that led to a nationwide anti-interventionist organization. Stuart’s intent was to oppose the policies of the Roosevelt administration and preserve the Neutrality Act of 1939. On September 4, Stuart, as national director, assisted by General Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, set forth the group’s principles. The United States must build an impregnable military defense to protect itself against invasion. It must preserve democracy by keeping out of a European war and concentrating on its defense and the maintainance of its neutrality. To achieve these ends, the committee issued a resolution: “To bring together all Americans, regardless of possible differences on other matters, who see eye to eye on these principles. (This does not include Nazis, Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interest of any other nation above those of our own country).”19
While the organization attracted support across the political and social spectrum, its official stance reflected the interests of its main contributors—businessmen, manufacturers, agricultural-based enterprises—that is, industries dependent on consumer rather than military goods. Despite its conservative cast, however, America First contributed to several pacifist and socialist groups.
But the tide of public opinion was turning against the isolationists. President Roosevelt had managed to do the impossible. His personal approval rate was at 72 percent, and 59 percent of the public polled supported Lend-Lease. While 83 percent of the people did not want to go to war, the same number of people believed that we would. In fact, 68 percent believed it our moral duty.20
America was talking back, but Charles Lindbergh refused to listen. All he could hear was the roar of the crowds who flocked by the thousands to see him. They were the true mirror of America, he wrote. They were the pure and hearty Americans who were worth his voice and worth his life.
Harold Ickes, speaking this time at a benefit for the Jewish National Workers Alliance of America, dubbed Charles the “Number 1 Nazi Fellow Traveler,” and described Anne’s book, Wave of the Future, as “the bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist, and appeaser.”21
At a rally on April 23 at the Manhattan Center, 35,000 people flooded the flag-draped hall. Amidst the flying colors, in his high-pitched, schoolmarm tone, Charles spoke for twenty-five minutes, to the intermittent applause of a thunderous crowd. Charles believed that “the crowd seemed one hundred percent with us,”22 but a hundred policemen wat
ched the hall anyway.23 The press called it “the largest gathering of pro-Nazis and pro-Fascists since the Bund rallies in Madison Square Garden.”24 And while the German press called Charles “a real American of Swedish descent,”25 Roosevelt called him a defeatist and an appeaser.26
Comparing him to Clement L. Vallandigham, the Civil War Copperhead who was banished by the North, Roosevelt questioned his integrity as an army officer.27 Hurt and humiliated, Charles Lindbergh renounced his army commission.28 “A point of honor” was at stake, he told his friend Truman Smith.29
To Anne, however, Charles remained “Sir Galahad.” Yet she sensed that something was wrong. While the crowds hung on his every word, the caliber of the audience was not what it had been. Even the hall was shabby and garish. There was something “second-rate” to it all, she wrote. But she resolved to respond to the outspoken critics. Her article “Reaffirmation”30 appeared in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly and was billed as an explanation of The Wave of the Future. In truth, she confided to a friend, it was a form of self-exorcism. Even as she tried to dig herself out, though, she was sucked further into the quicksand.
Are we in America really good, she asks? No, she writes. “Scum is everywhere; it is not just personified in devils across the ocean; it is in our midst.” Citing Mein Kampf, which refers to the infiltration of the Jews into German society, she writes, “Is it not possible that Nazism has come not only as a result of evils within Germany but also as a terrible antidote to other weaknesses in the Democracies themselves—as a fever is sometimes necessary to drive out a disease?”
The piece, she later told a friend, was a failure. Her message was too big for essays and articles; it was the stuff of novels and poetry. To herself, she admitted that it was a capitulation to Charles, tainted by her bitterness toward the press. It did not represent purity of thought. In short, there were principles worth dying for.31