Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  On May 15, 1941, after Germany invaded the island of Crete in a spectacular air assault,32 Henry Ford offered Charles and American First lavish funds to support the committee’s cause: $250,000 for the first month.33 On May 23, Charles was to give the keynote address at America First’s meeting at Madison Square Garden,34 an event he knew was sufficiently important to receive wide coverage. He was to share the stage with Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party. Thomas, certainly neither pro-German nor a member of America First, was sympathetic to the isolationist cause and believed it crucial to educate as many as possible. He had addressed several America First rallies and accepted its funding and support for his radio broadcasts, tours, and books.

  Anne and Charles drove to the Garden behind a fanfare of sirens. To Anne, the labyrinthine passages seemed a descent into Dante’s Hell. Suddenly out of the passageways and into lights, accompanied by Norman Thomas, they were before the roaring crowds. Twenty thousand people, filling the hall to its dimly lit corners, marked Lindbergh’s arrival with chants of “Lindbergh for President.” Overwhelmed by the emotion, the noise and the lights, Anne imagined the sound of gunshots in her ears, but, with relief, glimpsed a policeman through the glare, seated at the feet of Charles, standing on the podium.

  John T. Flynn, head of the New York chapter, called the meeting to order with the solemnity of a preacher. In a booming voice, he denounced the communists, fascists, and Bundists who were attempting to infiltrate the organization. Frozen, Anne watched the crowd grow wild with disapproval, booing and hissing at the well-known leaders of these radical groups. Did this outbreak presage a future revolution, she wondered?

  Charles’s presence seemed familiar yet strange. Once again, Anne became the child-wife who worshipped at her husband’s feet.

  Beginning his speech with his usual plea for “an independent American destiny,” this time he dared to go a step further, portraying America as nothing less than a police state. Civil freedoms in America, he said, were little better than those in Germany. Without mentioning Roosevelt’s name, he condemned the president as a self-serving dictator. “We in America were given just about as much chance to express our beliefs at the election last fall as the Germans would have been given if Hitler had run against Goering.”

  At Anne’s request, Charles had included in the closing section a personal plea for commitment and a statement of his personal vision. But there was desperation in his words. His rhetoric had become so emotional that it lacked even the pretense of rational public policy.

  Denounced from the pulpits of Presbyterian churches as an appeaser and a traitor,35 damned by the White House to public oblivion, and labeled by the press as the voice of Hitler,36 Charles was more desperate than ever to find the words that would set America free. Like a child who still believed in the magic of his will, he vowed to launch an attack on Roosevelt and the press, and, within the week, spoke again, this time to a crowd estimated at fifteen thousand.37 Though Anne had begged him not to mention Roosevelt’s name, Charles fiercely condemned him.

  Anne resolved to make every sacrifice. No longer would she stay at home and indulge in fantasies of what might have been. She would squelch every doubt and follow him wherever he would go. She would throw herself headlong into Charles’s life and give up the utopian vision.

  But Charles, aware of Anne’s sacrifices, tried again to set her free. The memory of his mother’s youth spent in the shadow of his father’s political views pained him. He told Anne to stay home and work, not only for the children but for herself. He wanted to protect her, even from himself.

  On June 22, in the most ambitious attack in military history, Germany invaded the Soviet Union along its 1800–mile front from the Arctic to the Black Sea. More than three million troops, 600,000 vehicles, 750,000 horses, 3580 tanks, and 1830 planes were hurled against Russia’s borders.38 Charles calmly told the press that the invasion was “something that requires profound analysis.”39

  As the Einsatzgruppen pushed on through Russian villages, murdering thousands of Jews as they did so, Charles spoke at another America First meeting in San Francisco.40 He said, “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than with the cruelty, the Godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.”

  The heat from the press made it clear to Anne and Charles that they could no longer live in New York. In Lloyd Neck, they went into hiding, drawing shades and locking the doors. Margot Morrow encouraged them to seek asylum in Martha’s Vineyard near her family’s summer home. Desperate for escape, Anne searched for a home on the Vineyard and found a small farmhouse, part saltbox, situated on the north shore of the island, between Vineyard Haven and West Tisbury.41 A cross breeze came through the low-set doors and windows, and everywhere were views of the sea.

  In the wake of Anne’s retreat to Martha’s Vineyard, rumors of marital difficulties proliferated.42 The press decided that Anne had broken with Charles in favor of her parents’ beliefs. But Anne, remaining solidly by Charles’s side, still believed he had integrity.

  As Roosevelt and Churchill met in the mid-Atlantic to formulate U.S.–British strategy, Anne slipped quietly into the rhythms of the sea. She enjoyed the time alone with her children and her walks along the beach. Except for the trees and the mild movements of the changing tides, the island’s climate and ambiance reminded Anne of Illiec.

  Meanwhile, like a man with nothing to lose, Charles walked into the eye of the storm, encountering hostility wherever he went. His physical safety was constantly threatened; police officers watched his every move. They accompanied him on motorcycles and fine-combed every room in which he was to stay, checking the phones and x-raying the furniture. They assigned a detective to every door of his meeting halls and guarded the rooms beneath the speaker’s stand. Nonetheless, Charles insisted that the crowds adored him.43

  Roger Butterfield commented in Life magazine,

  Without [Lindbergh] the isolationist movement would be split into ineffective fragments. The magic of his legendary name, the appeal of his personality, the sincerity with which he comes before the microphone, have persuaded millions of Americans who were only half-persuaded before that there is no reason for the U.S. to fight or fear Hitler … The semi-hysterical response of the crowds is nothing less than “Fuehrer-worship.”44

  But Anne could tell that something had changed. Thwarted at every turn, Charles no longer masked his anger. The text of a speech he planned to give in Washington disturbed her. For the first time, he dared to give the enemy a name—“the British, the Jews, and the [Roosevelt] Administration.”45 She tried to dissuade him, but he would not bend. In an effort to protect him from Nazi epithets, Anne edited his speech, hoping that she would bring out his “true self.”46

  The public, of course, would believe what it heard and saw. Forced to appear outside Washington, for fear of retaliation by the government, Charles spoke on September 11 in Des Moines, surrounded by armed police and ferocious reporters. Even the crowd, numbered at only 7500, was unusually restless and unfriendly. When Charles rose to speak, a package thrown from the balcony onto the podium knocked down a vase on the table in front of him. He remained unperturbed.

  Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences…. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races I admire. But I am saying that the leader of both the British and the Jewish races for reasons which are as understandable from their perspective as they are inadvisable from ours, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.47

  Charles had made an irreversible leap from the abstraction of evolution theories to the “otherness,” implying that the Jews we
re not Americans but had only self-serving allegiances. There was a hierarchy of human worth, even in America, and the civil rights of all citizens were not guaranteed. No longer were Jews merely cogs in the great wheel of history. They were dangerous to the survival of the body politic—an alien race deserving of public condemnation.

  Defiantly, the crowd cheered Roosevelt’s name eleven times during the course of his address, but Charles saw only their adulation. “Before long,” he wrote in his diary, “we began to win over the crowd.”

  What he had won over was the admiration of Nazis, whose foot-high swastikas were displayed in storefronts as far away as Los Angeles. His speech in Des Moines was the final step in his public disgrace. Denunciation swept across the country, from Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. It came from Democrats and from Republicans, from government leaders and from grassroots Americans all charging him with anti-Semitism and Nazism. They called on America First, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “to clear its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country.”48

  Several members of America First, however, supported Lindbergh, admiring his courage on “the Jewish Problem.” On September 18, Lindbergh met with the committee, debating its public response for eight hours. The committee’s statement, released on September 24, denied that Lindbergh and his fellow members were anti-Semitic. It blamed the interventionists for raising the issue of race, and it invited Jews to join the ranks.

  Norman Thomas commented that “silence” would have been better. Privately, he castigated Lindbergh for singling out the Jews. In a letter to Flynn, however, Thomas went further, telling the organization that “many besides Jews have been at fault.”

  On October 3, at a rally in Fort Wayne, Lindbergh claimed that his motives and statements had been “falsely ascribed.” He did not “speak out of hate for any individuals or any people.” Nonetheless, John Flynn believed the damage had been done. At at time when Roosevelt accelerated efforts to repeal the Neutrality Act, Lindbergh, “acting alone,” had discredited the anti-interventionist movement.

  Even Anne could no longer abide his words. Charles’s homecoming—indeed, the very idea of their marriage—was now a terrible burden. His bitterness had eclipsed his idealism, and Anne could no longer deny the meaning of his words. No matter what his intentions, his condemnation of the Jews was the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Reich. “I would prefer to see this country at war,” she wrote.49

  Perhaps the invasion of Kiev, portending the massacre of its 34,000 Jews, was at last too much. Perhaps, finally, she realized she could no longer defend his words to herself, to her family, or to her friends. She wrote to Mina Curtiss that some Puritan moral sense was taking hold of her.

  28

  Pilgrim

  Anne on a trip through the Florida Everglades with Charles and their friend Jim Newton, 1941.

  (Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

  PILGRIM1

  This is a road

  One walks alone;

  Narrow the track

  And overgrown.

  Dark is the way

  And hard to find,

  When the last village

  Drops behind.

  Never a footfall

  Light to show

  Fellow traveler—

  Yet I know

  Someone before

  Has trudged his load

  In the same footsteps—

  This is a road.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  DECEMBER 1941, MARTHA’S VINEYARD

  Gathered in the darkness, the Japanese planes flew toward the island of Oahu. As light drenched the morning sky on December 7, 1941, waves of Japanese bombs pummeled Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, caught by surprise on a Sunday morning, was at anchor, off-guard and half-manned. Forewarned but unprepared, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel marshaled his sleeping men for counterattack, but within hours, 2334 American men were dead and 1347 lay wounded.2

  At their home on Martha’s Vineyard, Anne and Charles along with millions of Americans across the country, sat riveted by their radios as Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan. It was a date, said Roosevelt, “which will live in infamy.”3

  Charles knew better. “I am not surprised that the Japs attacked,” he wrote in his diary. “We have been prodding them into war for weeks. They have simply beaten us to the gun.”4

  The next day hysteria took hold. Prewar ambivalence turned to fervor as thousands of men stormed naval recruitment centers.5 In Germany, Adolf Hitler, fearing insurrection, went on a bloody rampage. He issued the Night and Fog Decree, enveloping enemies of the Reich in the folds of a winter night.

  Anne hid beneath the bed covers, too weak to lift her head from the pillow. She was pregnant with her fifth child, but this malaise went beyond her pregnancy.6

  She wrote to her friend Sue Vaillant that she would never publish anything under her name again and that Charles’s reputation was ruined for good.

  Charles would hear nothing of it. The war was on, and there was work to be done. Although he didn’t trust Roosevelt, it was his duty to serve the president in his role as commander in chief.7 Within days of Roosevelt’s declaration, Charles offered his services to the War Department.8 Secretary Stimson replied quickly: there was no way he would be permitted to serve, in any capacity. His loyalty, implied the letter, could not be trusted. Unless he retracted all his statements, his wartime activities would be shadowed by public doubt and fear. And for the most part, the press agreed. The best Charles could do, wrote the New York newspaper PM, was to retire.9 The Nation magazine wrote that a commission to Charles Lindbergh would be “beyond the limits of safety.”10

  Outraged but adamant, Charles refused to give in to the War Department’s demands. A statement of retraction was out of the question. He still believed the war was wrong, but serving his country was a matter of honor. If he couldn’t serve in the military, he would support the war through private industry. The problem was, the government was everywhere. No matter where he looked or to whom he spoke, it all came back to the decision by Roosevelt. While the War Department camouflaged its stance with amiable public statements, Charles was barred from company after company—first Curtiss-Wright, then United Airlines, then Pan Am. Discouraged, Charles called on his friend Henry Ford.11

  Ford had instructed the men at his fledgling aircraft division at the plant in Dearborn to begin experimenting with high-altitude bombers. He was pleased with Charles’s offer of help; the expertise would be more than welcome. This time, Roosevelt heartily agreed. Charles Lindbergh was suited to work with Henry Ford.

  To the sound of the innocent laughter of her children at play, Anne began a gradual recovery. She sat in the island sunshine of early spring, trying to reconstruct her life. With her name synonymous with the “passive acceptance of totalitarianism,” she feared not only public condemnation, but the loss of her family’s and friends’ good will. She still imagined she could have prevented the kidnapping and dammed the torrents of the war. If only she could achieve a state of grace, Anne thought she would be free of guilt and self-condemnation.12

  In her despair, Anne turned again to the work of Saint-Exupéry for comfort. His new novel, Flight to Arras, a stream-of-consciousness narrative in the voice of a flier on a wartime mission, seemed to Anne “an act of forgiveness.” He moved beyond the conventional notions of good and evil and beyond the confines of human “sin” to embrace the perversity of human nature. As if echoing Anne’s deepest thoughts, he wrote, “I sat there longing for night, like a Christian abandoned by grace … alone and safely isolated in my beloved solitude. So that I might discover why I ought to die.”13

  Once more, his words seemed intended only for her. Anne no longer felt “exiled.” Unlike the words of her husband, these were right and good and pure. Unlike the punitive voice of Calvinism during her childhood, they held the promise of forgiveness and grace.

  In the sp
ring of 1942, Anne was a pilgrim in search of God. She was willing to accept the dark uncertainties of life if only she could reclaim her faith.14 But Anne’s “darkness” mirrored the devastation of Europe. As she wrote, nearly a million German soldiers lay dead or wounded on the frigid white battlefields of western Russia. Hitler, confirming his right to rule, demanded that churchbells be taken down and collected. They would be melted to build airplane engines.15

  Charles at last began to realize that German victory was far from certain, and he was worried. After all, to him “a Russian-dominated Europe would be far worse than German rule.” He wondered how America could possibly win a war when the character of its people was in constant decline. If only we could do away with the “cheapness and immobility” of the motion picture industry, he wrote, America might stand a chance. While his patriotism condemned him to serve in a war he despised, he refused to profit from death and destruction. He would accept a salary of no more than $10,000 a year, he wrote—no matter what job he decided to take. It was the sum he would have received as a commissioned officer.16

  Like Anne, he felt imprisoned by “fate.” There is nothing worse than a caged animal, he wrote. The glaze in its eyes betrayed the death of its spirit. He, too, felt “hungry” and “deadened,” but he hid his anguish to protect Anne.17

  Anne believed that Charles was taking the war in stride. Nothing seemed to stop him. He was as tenacious and vibrant as ever.18 Perhaps Charles’s vitality came from his reconciliation with his past. It was as if, he later wrote, he sat on a hilltop and threw a beam of light on the road he had traveled. Not wishing for salvation, he hoped, at least, for self-understanding. He began to realize that the visions of his father and grandfather, which had pursued him during those long months before the war, were the source of his values, motives, and politics. He wanted to reclaim them and to make them his own. Using the story of his 1927 transatlantic flight, Charles wrote a narrative that overlaid bare fact with metaphysical experience and stream-of-consciousness interpretation. It eventually took him seventeen years to write the book; in it, he defined his heroism as a response to the lives and views of his father and grandfather, and to his lonely, discordant, and vagabond childhood. He re-created his young self as a sensitive, frightened, and flawed child, whose desire to rise above personalities and ideologies drove him to seek the objective standards by which he could measure his life. While technology gave him a mechanism of control, flying gave him an almost “mystical” means of transcendence. The personal account of his public victory, The Spirit of St. Louis, is as technical and precise a book as it is a lyrical and poetic expression. It reveals his broad knowledge and his literary skill.19 Although the story is dominated by masculine mythologies, thus minimizing the powerful influence of his mother—the prime sustaining force of his early years—it is an honest glimpse into the workings of his mind.20