Lynne Olson. Those angry days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and
America’s fight over World War II, 1939-1941. New York: Random House. 2013.
In 1937, when fascists were fighting in China and
Spain, Franklin Roosevelt proposed in a talk to quarantine global belligerents
(never mind how). He promptly ran into a
media maelstrom. “This time, Mr. President, Americans will not be stampeded
into going 3,000 miles across water to save [the civilized],” said the Boston Herald. FDR was rueful. “It’s a terrible thing to look over your
shoulder when you are trying to lead – and to find no one there.”
So Roosevelt did an about-face. He would not lead the public; the public
would lead him. And the public, in the late Thirties, opposed
the quarantine called war. “…When German
tanks rolled into Austria on March 12, 1938,” wrote historian Susan Dunn, “the
president of the United States – trying to rally his New Deal supporters as he
struggled with an economy in recession and prepared for a midterm election –
said and did nothing.”
After all, he could do next to nothing to muzzle
eloquent isolationists like Burton Wheeler, a Democrat Senator from Montana. Wheeler famously compared Roosevelt’s bill
for arming the British to the Agricultural Adjustment Act that reduced farm
supply in order to raise the prices received by farmers: “The lend-lease-give
program is the New Deal’s triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every
fourth American boy.”
But FDR’s greatest
antagonist was the lanky Midwesterner who became a hero by flying solo across
the Atlantic in 1927. Roosevelt and Charles
Lindbergh had been squaring off ever since 1933, when the aviator warned the
new President that the Army air corps lacked the experience needed to deliver
the mail. Many crashes later, FDR
conceded the point and returned the air mail to the private sector.
Lindbergh knew less about foreign policy than aviation,
although he didn’t seem to realize it, and he devoted himself throughout the late
Thirties and early Forties to opposing American attempts to arm Britain against
Nazi Germany. As Lindbergh, recipient of
a Nazi medal, saw it, Germany was a more natural ally of the US than the Soviet
Union was.
Des
Moines debacle
He managed to tear down the isolationist movement as
rapidly as he had built it up when in a 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, he
blamed the drift toward war partly on American Jews, who allegedly controlled
the media. In reality, only 3% of US newspaper publishers were Jews. And
the most famous of them, Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times, hesitated to editorialize for intervention,
fearing that his ethnicity might make his argument suspect among Americans in
an age when anti-Semitism was common. Such
facts did not interest Lindbergh, whose hostility toward Jews is evident from
his diary. “A few Jews add strength and
character to a country,” he wrote in 1939, “but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.”
In Des Moines, he succeeded in linking
isolationism to racism, and the America First movement went into decline among
the educated who had created it.
Isolationism died of heart failure on December 7, and Lindbergh flew 50 or
so sorties in the Pacific War.
Lindburgh’s stubborn speeches wrecked his
family. His wife, Anne Morrow, warned
him that his bluntness would backfire, but he ignored her. The two drifted apart. In 2003, years after
Lindbergh and his wife had died, it came to light that he had fathered seven
illegitimate children by three mistresses.
Olson’s books on World War II include The Murrow boys: Pioneers in the front lines
of broadcast journalism, co-authored with Stanley Cloud, and Troublesome young men: The rebels who
brought Churchill to power and helped save England. Her limpid, structured prose is a pleasure to
read.
--Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com
Good
reading
Susan Dunn. 1940:
FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler – the election amid the storm. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2013.
