Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Carrel’s pursuit of his humanitarian work in association with Pétain’s Vichy government would later provoke severe criticism from the Resistance forces backing de Gaulle. While suffering from wartime deprivation—refusing extra rations of food and fuel, which he could have procured—Carrel was observed one day at the German Embassy. He had arrived, in fact, to request help in feeding starving French children; but he happened to appear when a party was in full swing. Although the Carrels retreated as quickly as possible, rumors spread that the Germans had entertained them. “You know how Alexis felt about the Nazis when he was in New York,” Madame Carrel would later explain to Jim Newton. “He felt much more strongly, living in Occupied France. Why, many of our staff at the institute were members of the Resistance, and we protected them.” Accused of being a collaborator, the septuagenarian’s health declined.

  Saint-Exupéry was conflicted about the German occupation of France as well. With only ill-will for the anti-Jewish Vichy government, and not much kinder feelings for the egomaniacal de Gaulle, he sought perspective on the situation in New York City. “Did you see?” Anne remarked to Charles one morning, “Saint-Exupéry is here, but he is going back again!”

  “Yes,” Charles replied, “I see, with jealousy.” Taken aback, Anne asked why with jealousy. “Because,” he responded, “you seem to be so interested in him.”

  Anne quickly interjected that she had a purely literary interest in him, that she admired him—“and because I keep looking for someone to be left like that from my world, my world of writing.”

  Charles had long attempted to be his wife’s muse, but his methods usually failed. “He goes over the record,” Anne wrote in her diary, “—nine years, and only two books and wonders why it is. Has he not given me the right kind of environment?” As if shaming her was not enough, he further subjected her to a loyalty test. While Anne’s mother parceled Bundles for Britain and broadcast pro-Ally speeches on the radio, and Anne’s sister Constance, married to a Welshman, supported pro-British causes, Lindbergh kept pressing his wife to demonstrate whether she was more Morrow or Lindbergh.

  Then Anne had a breakthrough. She found a way of making a literary offering to Saint-Exupéry, all the while affirming her loyalty to her husband. An article gushed from her in a few days.

  It represented, she wrote her mother by way of preparing her for its publication, “all the winter’s mental strife—all the arguments—& counter arguments … building of a bridge between C.’s beliefs & my own & not least, my deep sense of the injustice to him & to his side.” But that was not its sole raison d’être. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel convinced of his integrity & the integrity of his stand,” she wrote. “… And I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel that there are things he has not—& probably could not present well. If I did not feel there were things I could present better than he. And that the presentation of these things might help both him & his cause.” In trying to be too many things to too many people, the article never congealed as either accurate history or sound philosophy. It remained a moving hodgepodge of an admittedly confused woman trying to make sense of contradictory feelings.

  “I think the clearest definition of the article is that it attempts to give a moral argument for Isolationism,” Anne wrote her mother on September 4, 1940, “—which I think no one has yet presented.” Upon reading Anne’s description, Betty Morrow—whose lifelong devotion to Smith College had just been capped by being named her alma mater’s Acting President—broke into tears.

  The five-thousand-word piece was hardly on paper before Lindbergh took a copy of it to her publisher, Alfred Harcourt. He read it on the spot, pronounced it “beautiful,” and said he was eager to publish it. In less than a month, the Lindberghs had copies of the forty-one-page, pocket-sized book in hand. Anne decided to tender all her income from the tract to the American Friends Service Committee to assist them in their war-relief efforts in Europe, especially France.

  The book’s central metaphor became its title—The Wave of the Future. As Anne explained at the text’s core, the war in Europe did not strike her as a struggle between the “Forces of Good” and the “Forces of Evil” so much as a conflict between the “Forces of the Past” fighting against the “Forces of the Future.” Far from siding with the new totalitarian regimes, she suggested that “somehow the leaders in Germany, Italy and Russia have discovered how to use new social and economic forces; very often they have used them badly,” she wrote, “but nevertheless, they have recognized and used them. They had sensed the changes and they have exploited them. They have felt the wave of the future and they have leapt upon it. The evils we deplore in these systems are not in themselves the future; they are scum on the wave of the future.”

  Anne condemned the tyrannies of Nazism and asserted that she could not “pledge my personal allegiance to those systems I disapprove of, or those barbarisms I oppose from the bottom of my heart, even if they are on the wave of the future.” But she did suggest “that it is futile to get into a hopeless ‘crusade’ to ‘save’ civilization,” for that task could not be accomplished by going to war. Instead, she thought America’s task was less in fostering a revolution in Europe than in fomenting a reformation at home, in protecting and preserving “our own family and nation.”

  “There is no fighting the wave of the future,” she wrote toward the end of her essay, “any more than as a child you could fight against the gigantic roller that loomed up ahead of you suddenly.” In conclusion, Anne could only offer vague platitudes expressing the need for America to reaffirm its basic beliefs. Constance Morrow Morgan suggested that her sister’s prewar book was an obvious illustration of her identity crisis, “torn as she was between being Anne Morrow and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh.”

  Few books in the history of publishing have encountered a reception like the one that greeted Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith. It immediately became the number-one nonfiction bestseller across the country—fifty thousand copies in its first two months alone—and received prominent reviews everywhere. The book had many admirers, including the growing numbers of Americans who opposed intervention into the European war. DeWitt Wallace of Reader’s Digest condensed the book for his readers and called it “the article of the year.” Even English-born poet W. H. Auden pronounced it a “beautiful book.” He reminded her that “everything one writes goes out helpless into the world to be turned to evil as well as good, that every work of art is powerless against misuse.”

  Such was the case with The Wave of the Future, which overnight became the book people loved to hate. Surpassed in modern literary history perhaps only by Mein Kampf, it was one of the most despised books of its day. Anne’s hopeful message, innocently intended to bind the opposing sides with its universal images, only wedged them farther apart. It was promptly quoted and persistently misquoted. Ironically, it resulted in rallying greater support for the side she had meant to oppose by offering a weak stalking horse. Store owners as well as book buyers boycotted it, sending copies back to the publisher. One dealer wrote Alfred Harcourt that he thought both Lindberghs “should be put behind barbed wires!” Half a century later, The Wave of the Future remained a book nobody remembered with affection—not even the author, who later recanted much of its contents, which she ascribed to her naïveté.

  Dorothy Thompson lashed out at Anne Lindbergh in the pages of Look, accusing her (as most readers did) of calling Communism, Fascism, and Nazism the “wave of the future,” accosting her for saying there was no way of fighting it. In her syndicated columns, Thompson repeatedly misrepresented Anne Lindbergh’s metaphor and distorted the record even further by suggesting that the Lindberghs supported several “American Fascists” just because they had endorsed the writings of the Lindberghs. (These rabble-rousers included William Dudley Pelley, who had organized the openly anti-Semitic “Silver Shirt” brigades, and the more intellectual Lawrence Dennis, who contended that Fascism was America’s best hope agai
nst the rising tide of Communism.) FDR’s outspoken Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, went farther than that, publicly calling Lindbergh a Nazi and calling The Wave of the future “the Bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist and Appeaser.”

  Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for a third term on a non-interventionist platform. Days before the 1940 election, he assured voters that American boys would not be sent into any foreign wars. Two months later, after his landslide election over Wendell Willkie—for whom Lindbergh voted—he spoke in a Fireside Chat of making America “the great arsenal of democracy.” At his inauguration, three weeks later, he invoked Anne Lindbergh’s book, chiseling her metaphor into the public consciousness. “There are men who believe that … tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide,” he proclaimed. “But we Americans know that this is not true.”

  The increasing attacks made Anne recoil, not only from further political statements but from publishing at all. “I find I am hurt, not by the reviews exactly,” Anne wrote in her diary, “but by the growing rift I see between myself and those people I thought I belonged to. The artists, the writers, the intellectuals, the sensitive, the idealistic—I feel exiled from them. I have become exiled for good, accidentally, really. My marriage has stretched me out of my world, changed me so it is no longer possible to change back.” Anne’s few intimates—her family and a scattering of friends—all recognized the new isolation she had created for herself by aligning herself so publicly with her now controversial husband. “You know, Anne,” her former suitor Corliss Lamont wrote her, “some of your old friends hesitate even to suggest meeting with you, for fear it might embarrass you in some way; though no doubt you may feel that you might embarrass them.” When Charles encouraged Anne to call on Saint-Exupéry during his visit to New York in January 1941, she refused for that very reason. She was distressed from not seeing him; but, alas, she wrote in her diary, “I am now the bubonic plague among writers and C. is the anti-Christ!”

  Although politics strained many of Anne’s relationships, her family never abandoned her. When newspaperman William Allen White suggested conflict between Lindbergh and his mother-in-law, Betty Morrow fired a handwritten letter off to him in Emporia, Kansas, insisting “Colonel Lindbergh and I differ about what our country’s attitude towards the war should be, but each honors the sincerity of the other’s opinions and there is no misunderstanding between us.” Anne’s sister Constance and her husband, Aubrey, said that they and the Lindberghs had all “agreed to disagree.”

  A few months later Anne would write an article, “Reaffirmation,” for The Atlantic Monthly, in which she tried to clarify the thesis of The Wave of the Future. Even though she reasserted her definition that the evils of Fascism were but the “scum on the surface of the wave,” and that she opposed the way in which the dictator-governed nations met the wave, there was no erasing what had been stamped into the public consciousness.

  In the midst of this debate, Anne was presented with yet another reason to withdraw from the public. At two o’clock in the morning of October 2, 1940—within days of her book’s publication—she awoke at Lloyd Manor with labor pains. Charles rushed her to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, where she gave birth a few hours later. Both Charles and Anne had hoped for a girl; and getting their wish, the father insisted on naming the child after her mother. To avoid confusion, the newborn—Anne Spencer Lindbergh—would be called Ansy. With reporters already staking out the Lindbergh house, and so much unpopular undertow from The Wave of the Future, Lindbergh thought it best for Anne to cloister herself in the hospital with their daughter for more than two weeks.

  He visited the healthy mother and daughter almost every evening; but he spent his days working to keep America out of the war. His wife’s “confession of faith”—to both the anti-intervention effort and to him—refortified him for his mission. Charles reread his father’s book Why Is Your Country at War?

  GRASS-ROOTS anti-intervention movements sprouted across the country. Even though veterans groups found their membership divided on the issue, most—like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion—strongly supported Lindbergh’s position of building up America’s defenses. When legionnaire Bennett Champ Clark, Democratic senator from Missouri, invited Lindbergh to address an antiwar rally in Chicago, he agreed, for the first time, to address the issue at a public gathering. Although fronted by veterans, the assembly was backed by a local organization called Citizens Keep America Out of War Committee, led by a Chicago builder named Avery Brundage, who also headed the American Olympic Association.

  On August 3, 1940, Lindbergh flew to Chicago on one of TWA’s new Boeing “stratoliners.” He was met by the chauffeur of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who showed his support of Lindbergh’s cause by offering extensive publicity for the rally in his newspaper. The next day Lindbergh drove to Soldier Field, where a respectable half-capacity crowd of forty thousand people gathered. Under a broiling sun, Lindbergh spoke for twenty minutes. “I do not offer my opinion as an expert,” he insisted, “but rather as a citizen who is alarmed at the position our country has reached in this era of experts.” And unpopular though some of his opinions might prove, he proclaimed, “I prefer to say what I believe, or not to speak at all. I would far rather have your respect for the sincerity of what I say, than attempt to win your applause by confining my discussion to popular concepts.”

  As the first rumblings of the Battle of Britain were being felt, he asked his audience to consider “a Europe dominated by Germany,” insisting that no matter who won the war, Western civilization would depend on a strong America and that cooperation with a victorious Germany need not be impossible. To keep America out of the war, Lindbergh urged “an impregnable system of defense.” The crowd, eager to applaud at every opportunity, threw Lindbergh slightly off his rhythm; but in the end, he found it “much easier to speak to an audience than to microphones alone.” While a houseguest of the McCormicks, Lindbergh met other like-minded citizens, who urged him to continue speaking out.

  Choosing public arenas over guarded radio studios made him a bigger public target; and it became open season on Lindbergh. The “attack launched against Lindbergh has gone far beyond the ordinary canons of debate,” observed The Christian Century not three weeks after his Chicago address. “It has pulsed with venom. If this man who was once the nation’s shining hero had been proved another Benedict Arnold he could not have been subjected to more defamation and calumny.” Indeed, Ralph Ingersoll, publisher of PM, filled the front page of his new daily tabloid with a signed editorial censuring Lindbergh. Illustrated with only a photograph of a grinning Lindbergh sharing a jolly moment with Hermann Goering, Ingersoll declared, “Lindbergh is a political novice. His speech was post-graduate work. Obviously, he was helped in writing it. Who are the people who did his thinking and helped in his writing? Who are his gang?” Ingersoll concluded by denouncing “Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh as the spokesman of the fascist fifth column in America.” Walter Winchell called “The Lone Eagle” the “Lone Ostrich.” Lindbergh’s FBI file, quiet since the Hauptmann trial, was reactivated, as the agency gathered information that might bear upon “his nationalistic sympathies.” The most treasonous behavior investigators could uncover were sketchy reports of Lindbergh’s smiling on the streets of Berlin in 1936 or of Lindbergh’s associating with the likes of Merwin K. Hart, the head of the New York State Economic Council and an alleged promoter of an American Fascist movement who was assumed to have ties with more reactionary fringe groups.

  Publicly, FDR let others in the White House speak for him. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and speechwriter Robert Sherwood delivered a radio address in which he attacked Lindbergh and Henry Ford, another anti-interventionist long considered anti-Semitic. Ford was partially excused because he was a genius; Lindbergh, on the other hand, was accused of having a “poisoned mind,” of being a traitor—an “unwittin
g [purveyor] of Nazi propaganda.” The Lindberghs were receiving so many obscene letters—generally unsigned—that the Post Office took the precaution of inspecting their mail.

  At the same time, Lindbergh was not blind to his legions of supporters. “The sheer number of the unsolicited letters and telegrams is little short of astounding,” observed Paul Palmer, a Reader’s Digest editor who wrote an article that August on America’s apparent shift in attitude toward its living legend. He stated that more mail followed a Lindbergh radio address than that of any other person in America, including FDR, thus making this reluctant orator “one of the great radio voices of all time.” Even Robert Sherwood called Lindbergh an “extremely eloquent crusader for the cause of isolationism…. undoubtedly Roosevelt’s most formidable competitor on the radio.” What Palmer found most striking was “the amazing fact that over 94% of these thousands of letters and telegrams express ardent approval of the Colonel’s anti-war position.”

  In covering America’s reaction to the new public Lindbergh for Scribner’s Commentator, C. B. Allen found many people asking why Lindbergh had chosen to step up to the microphones and wondering who was getting him to do it. “From the beginning,” Allen assured his readers, “it has been his own idea. No diplomat or former diplomat has been ‘advising’ him. He has not sought and even repels those who would be his special advocates or advisers. No word painter or ghost writer has been helping him prepare his speeches; they are as wholly and typically Lindbergh as his amazing flying career.”