Unlucky Lindy

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.

The punch line

Those who bemoan divisiveness on Capitol Hill should have been in town in 1940 when Congress debated a military draft weeks after the Nazis marched through Paris.  When “Rep. Martin Sweeney of Ohio delivered a scathing attack on the Roosevelt administration for allegedly using conscription as a way to get the United States into the war, Rep. Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who was next to Sweeney, loudly muttered that he refused to ‘sit by a traitor,’” writes historian Lynne Olson. “Sweeney swung at Vincent, who responded with a sharp right to the jaw that sent Sweeney staggering.  It was, said the House doorkeeper, the best punch thrown by a member of Congress in 50 years.” Both men were Democrats. –Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Good reading

Lynne Olson.  Those angry days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s fight over World War II, 1939-1941. Random House. 2013.

Butterfingers

John O’Hara.  BUtterfield 8.  New York: The Modern Library.  2003 [1935].

After his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, became a hit, ex-newspaperman John O’Hara followed up with another slice of life –a young woman at odd ends early in the Great Depression.

“The 1920s in America had been a feverish time,” writes the historian Lynne Olson, “noted for government corruption and graft, a spectacular boom in the stock market, organized crime on an unprecedented scale, a widespread rebellion against convention, the loss of idealism, and an emphasis on enjoying oneself.”  That era would have suited O’Hara’s anti-heroine, Gloria Wandrous, but she was born too late.  She came of age not in the Twenties but in their grim dénouement. 

 

A youth in the early Thirties could imagine only two routes of escape – getting married and getting sauced.  Gloria is ready to throw over her down-to-earth impoverished sortof-fiancé, Eddie Brunner, for an embittered married man, Weston Liggett, who is loaded in equal parts with cash, Scotch and soda.  When she is not seducing, she is drinking, and so is he.  “I can’t think of anyone I like that has strong character and high purposes,” she tells Eddie.  “The Giants beat Brooklyn, if you’re interested.”  She thinks that she wants financial stability, but in reality she just wants escape from the future and the past.  The Depression she can’t handle.

Gloria is twin to Helen Serebryakov, the object of all male desires in Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play, Uncle Vanya.  Like Helen, she makes a fetish of listlessness.  “In the midst of all this ghastly boredom,” Helen says in a soliloquy, “where there are no real people, but just dim, gray shapes drifting round, where you hear nothing but vulgar trivialities, where no one does anything but eat, drink and sleep – he appears from time to time, so different from the others, so handsome, charming and fascinating, like a bright moon rising from the darkness.  To fall under the spell of such a man, to forget everything….” That’s Gloria’s position, too.  But Helen is bored with wealth – and Gloria, with the lack of it.  Her pursuit of the Mammon Money will cost her her life, but she thinks this a bargain.  -- Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Good reading

Anton Chekhov.  Five plays.  Oxford University Press.  2008.

Lynne Olson.  Those angry days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s fight over World War II, 1939-1941.  New York: Random House.  2013.