Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  The need to find scapegoats for the misery and uncertainty of modern life helped contribute to a growth in racial and religious intolerance that in many cases exploded into hatred. Groups with names like the Black Legion, Crusaders for America, and the Knights of the White Camellia sprang up like mushrooms after a rain. In the late 1930s, Eric Sevareid, then a reporter for a Minneapolis newspaper, was assigned to report on the activities of another such group, called the Silver Shirts, whose founder, William Dudley Pelley, was supposedly intent on marching on Washington to take over the country and rid it of Jews. Sevareid’s investigation of the Silver Shirts was “an unbelievably weird experience,” he recalled, “like Alice going down the rabbit hole into the world of the Mad Hatter. I spent hair-raising evenings in the parlors of middle-class citizens who sang the praises of Adolf Hitler and longed for the day when Pelley would come to power as the Hitler of the U.S.… They were quite mad.”

  Another nativist group drawing considerable attention was the Vindicator Association, an anti-immigration movement fostered by Senator Robert Reynolds, who became chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee in 1941. A conservative Democrat from North Carolina, Reynolds was a passionate isolationist and Anglophobe, one of the few southerners in Congress holding those views. He had created the Vindicators, he said, to keep America out of war, stop all immigration for at least ten years, and “banish all isms but Americanism.” Young people were encouraged to join the association’s “border patrol” and catch “alien criminals,” receiving ten dollars a head for each one they nabbed.

  Reynolds’s bill to impose a ten-year ban on immigration was one of more than sixty anti-alien and anti-immigration measures under consideration by Congress in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Rep. Martin Dies, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, expressed the xenophobic attitude of many legislators when he thundered: “We must ignore the tears of sobbing sentimentalists and internationalists, and must permanently close, lock, and bar the gates of our country to new immigration waves and then throw the keys away.”

  Reynolds, for his part, bristled at any suggestion that his association was anti-Semitic. “We’re just anti-alien,” he told a reporter. “I want our own fine boys and lovely girls to have all the jobs in this wonderful country.”

  For all the attention paid to them, however, Reynolds’s extremist group and most others like it had relatively small memberships and limited influence. The same could not be said for the mass movement begun by a rabble-rousing Catholic priest named Charles Coughlin, a close ally of Henry Ford, whose weekly radio broadcasts at their peak were heard by upwards of forty million listeners. Coughlin, who broadcast from church facilities in a Detroit suburb, thought of himself as a champion of the workingman and regularly delivered anti-government, anti–Wall Street diatribes. Deeply anti-Semitic, he also denounced the “anti-Christian conspiracy” of Jews, Communists, FDR, and the British. During the 1940 presidential campaign, Coughlin made a number of savage attacks on the president, during which he also spoke approvingly of Hitler and Mussolini, praised Nazi persecution of the Jews, and charged that Jewish bankers had financed the Russian Revolution. “When we get through with the Jews in America,” he declared, “they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.”

  Much of Coughlin’s support came from urban, blue-collar Catholics; he was particularly popular with working-class Irish American communities in Boston, New York, Chicago, and other cities. But his followers also included people such as Philip Johnson, a Harvard student from an eminent Ohio family who in later years would emerge as one of America’s most celebrated and influential architects. Johnson became enamored with Nazism while traveling through Germany in the early 1930s. In 1939, he was sent to Berlin as a correspondent for Coughlin’s anti-Semitic newspaper, Social Justice.

  During the German invasion of Poland, Johnson visited the front with other foreign journalists at the invitation of Hitler’s government. The CBS correspondent William L. Shirer, who was along on the trip, was forced by German propaganda officials to share a hotel room with Johnson in the Polish city of Sopot. “None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis,” Shirer grumbled in his diary. “For the last hour in our room, he has been posing as anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my attitude.”

  Whatever Johnson was, he was, most assuredly, not anti-Nazi. In a letter home describing his tour of devastated Poland, he wrote: “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”‡

  Johnson’s dispatches from Germany were published in Social Justice, a weekly tabloid that was mailed to subscribers and sold on city streets by youthful members of Coughlin’s movement, who used their peddling as a way to pick fights with pedestrians who appeared to be Jewish. After denigrating such passersby and demanding they buy the publication, Coughlin’s bullyboys would often jump their targets and beat them up.

  Throughout the early 1940s, the assaults on Jews in New York, Boston, and other cities grew in number and intensity. Bands of Coughlin supporters, many brandishing brass knuckles, attacked Jews on the street and in parks, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, and vandalized synagogues and Jewish-owned stores. PM, a New York liberal daily, called the violence an “organized campaign of terrorism.”

  To its chagrin, America First found itself increasingly linked with Father Coughlin and his followers. Vendors of Social Justice often gathered on the sidewalk outside America First rallies to sell their papers and harass those passing by. In a memo to local chapters, Ruth Sarles called the Coughlinites and other such organizations “a menace.” She noted that they “wriggled like termites into various committee activities,” causing many people to equate their point of view with that of America First. Although Sarles and committee leaders denounced such commingling, the fact remained that many local chapters happily accepted Coughlin supporters and other extremists as members, with Coughlin himself urging his followers to join the anti-interventionist group.

  It was hardly surprising, then, that as the debate over the war intensified in late 1940 and early 1941, the interventionist critics of America First would feel no compunction in condemning the organization as “a Nazi transmission belt” and the “first fascist party in this nation’s history.”

  * Interventionists in Chicago had similar problems. Adlai Stevenson, a well-known lawyer there, was told by his law partners that his chairmanship of the White Committee’s Chicago chapter had antagonized many of the firm’s clients and that he would have to choose between the firm and his interventionist activities. Stevenson solved the problem by taking a government position in Washington.

  † One of the substitutes was Jesse Owens, the black track and field superstar who won four gold medals in Berlin, including one for the 400-meter relay.

  ‡ In later years, Johnson would repent of his notorious past. “I have no excuse [for] such unbelievable stupidity,” he said. “I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “THE BUBONIC PLAGUE AMONG WRITERS”

  From the day she returned to the United States from Europe in the spring of 1939, Anne Lindbergh was determined to stay out of the spotlight: she wanted no involvement in the furor over the war. But the vitriolic criticism of her husband prompted her to rethink her position.

  By the fall of 1940, it was open season on Charles Lindbergh. According to Christian Century, the flagship magazine of U.S. Protestantism, “the attack launched against Lindbergh has gone far beyond the ordinary canons of debate. 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.”

  Lindbergh, dispassionate as always, revealed little or no emotion himself when he criticized the Roosevelt administration and his other interventionist opponents. As one newspaper noted, “he never ‘gets
personal,’ is never abusive, indulges in no innuendoes or sly intimations, is severely factual and logical.” Neither he nor Anne, who had grown up in a sheltered world where civility ruled, was able to understand why his critics could not keep their arguments on a similarly high plane.

  In August 1940, Lindbergh showed Anne a couple of “very angry” telegrams from old friends. One read, “You have let America down”; the other, “You stand for all the atrocities of Hitler.” Anne was stunned by their nastiness. “They had a right to criticize—but to throw mud, to leave issues and simply hurl names!” she wrote in her diary. “It shocks me, for they supposedly are the intelligent, the moderate, the tolerant.”

  When she reread her diary almost forty years later, Anne was appalled by her youthful, naïve “innocence of politics and the violence of my indignation.” At the time, however, she felt compelled, “because of … my desperate feeling of the injustice [done] to C.,” to explain and defend her husband and his position on the war, even though she still was unsure of her own feelings about it.

  Although Anne had adopted Charles’s views, she did not wholeheartedly believe in isolationism. Nor did she think much of others in the isolationist camp: “The arguments of the isolationists are so often narrow, materialistic, short-sighted, and wholly selfish—I am repelled by them.”

  She became even more conflicted after reading letters, shown to her by Con and Aubrey Morgan, from friends of the Morgans in Britain who were facing the Luftwaffe onslaught. “They are thrilling letters,” Anne admitted, “infused with a kind of fire of sacrifice, gallantry, beauty of spirit, sureness of purpose, and courage heedless of danger, death, or discouragement. It is, as they say, truly Elizabethan.” Later, she wrote: “When you hear this side, you feel the British are right to resist to the end, that there is no hope of dealing with the Germans.”

  In late August 1940, Anne sat down to compose what she called “a moral argument for isolationism,” trying to reconcile “the terrible struggle that goes on eternally between [one’s] heart, which is in Europe, and [one’s] mind, which is trying to be American and determine what is the best course for this country.” The result was an odd, muddled little book she called The Wave of the Future. The book’s subtitle was A Confession of Faith, but Con Morgan thought a more apt subtitle would be A Confession of Doubt, to underscore the identity crisis its author was obviously experiencing, “torn as she was between being Anne Morrow and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh.”

  When one reads The Wave of the Future, it becomes clear that Anne had not resolved her doubts or cleared up her confusion in regard to the issues she wrote about. Her ideas are half-baked, her writing cloudy, imprecise, poetic, somewhat mystical, and illogical. Teasing out what she was trying to say is virtually impossible. According to Life, even her husband did “not fully understand” the book.

  Its main point seemed to be that totalitarian ideologies like Fascism and Communism had been highly successful in using modern technological and scientific advances to instill energy, dynamism, and a sense of self-sacrifice and pride in the people under their control. Those ideologies were riding a revolutionary “wave of the future,” a concept Anne did not really explain, except to say, “I keep feeling that it could be directed, it could be a force for good in the world, if only it could be looked at, acknowledged, turned in the right direction.” She added that it “was not done right in Germany or Russia, but maybe could be done right” in America.

  Anne labeled Nazism and other totalitarian beliefs “scum on the wave of the future.” At the same time, she was severely critical of what she saw as the sins of the world’s democracies—“blindness, selfishness, irresponsibility, smugness, lethargy, and resistance to change—sins which we ‘Democracies,’ all of us, are guilty of.” To many if not most readers of her book, she seemed to be equating the inadequacies of free nations with the wanton aggression and brutal persecutions carried out by Germany and other dictatorships.

  Instead of “climbing down into the maelstrom of war” and trying to combat what was in fact a revolution in Europe, Anne wrote, America must focus on reforming itself, on building a new society that would harness this amorphous “wave of the future” for the good of the country and the world. “There is no fighting the wave of the future, any more than as a child you could fight against the gigantic roller that loomed up ahead of you suddenly,” she warned. “You learned then it was hopeless to stand against it or, even worse, to run away. All you could do was to dive into it or leap with it. Otherwise, it would surely overwhelm you.”

  From the moment she began writing The Wave of the Future, Anne had forebodings about the negative reaction she was sure it would receive. “It will be considered anti-British and ‘tainted’ with German propaganda (though I don’t defend—and am outspoken in my dislike of the horrors in Germany—also of my admiration for the English),” she wrote. In reality, neither the dislike nor the admiration she mentions comes through clearly in the book.

  Anne was also aware that her lack of credentials as an expert in the subjects she was writing about would draw fire from her critics. Among them was a friend to whom she showed the manuscript before publication. He “gave me back all my own doubts and fears on it and myself,” she glumly noted. He called it “presumptuous—that I had no right to write it without more knowledge of history, economics, foreign affairs, etc. That it would be torn limb from limb. That it would be called—with some justification—‘Fifth column.’ That it would do C. no good and me, harm.”

  Her friend was right. Anne’s book was published in October 1940 at the height of the Blitz, when the supposedly lethargic British, by her lights, were demonstrating the same pride, resolution, and self-sacrifice that she had attributed to Germany and other totalitarian states. Despite its ill-starred timing, The Wave of the Future swiftly became the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller in the country—fifty thousand copies were sold in the first two months—but most of the reaction, from critics and readers alike, was intensely unfavorable. One bookseller wrote Alfred Harcourt, Anne’s publisher, that both Lindberghs “should be put behind barbed wire!”

  Yet at least one reviewer—E. B. White, the noted essayist and children’s book writer—was able to look beyond Anne’s murky prose and hazy analysis to offer a balanced, judicious assessment of its author. “I couldn’t make out what it is she believes in, and I did not think it a clear book or a good one,” White wrote in The New Yorker. But he added that although he thought she was wrongheaded in her conclusions, “I do not believe that Mrs. Lindbergh is any more fascist-minded than I am, or that she wants a different sort of world, or that she is a defeatist; but I think instead she is a poetical and liberal and talented person troubled in her mind (as anybody is today) and trying to write her way into the clear.”

  Few other comments about the book were as perceptive or broad-minded. Dorothy Thompson accused Anne of calling Communism, Fascism, and Nazism “the wave of the future” and implied that the book would be used as a handbook by Charles Lindbergh to create a Fascist movement in the United States. Echoing that view, Harold Ickes labeled The Wave of the Future “the Bible of every American Nazi, fascist, Bundist and Appeaser.” Half a decade later, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his autobiography, would refer to Anne’s book as a “poisonous little bestseller” that saw totalitarianism as a “new and perhaps even ultimately good, conception of humanity trying to come to birth.”

  Anne was appalled by what she considered the critics’ flagrant misquotation and misinterpretation of her work. “I never said Totalitarianism was the wave of the future,” she wrote in her diary. “In fact, I said emphatically that it was not—and that I hoped we in America could be, in our way.” In an article in The Atlantic Monthly, she attempted to set the record straight, reiterating that she regarded Fascism, Communism, and Nazism as “scum on the surface of the wave” of the future, not the wave itself. “To me, the wave of the future is … a movement of adjustment to a highly scientific, mechanized and material era of
civilization … and it seems to me inevitable. I feel we must face this wave [but] do not say we must meet it in the same way as the dictator-governed nations. I oppose that way from the depths of my conviction.”

  Many years later, Anne would reveal how deeply she regretted writing the book. “It was a mistake,” she said in a television interview. “It didn’t help anybody … I didn’t have the right to write it. I didn’t know enough.” At the time, she was shattered by the overwhelmingly negative reaction and furious at herself for not having had the literary skill to clearly explain her ideas to her readers. Not only had she failed in her mission to offer a persuasive defense of isolationism, she herself was now regarded by many as a leading proponent of Fascism. “Will I have to bear this lie through life?” she wondered in despair.

  She was particularly upset by her estrangement from those she considered kindred spirits, notably writers; having created her own niche in that community, she now felt exiled from it. “My marriage,” she observed sadly, “has stretched me out of my world, changed me so it is no longer possible to change back.”

  When a friend called to ask the Lindberghs to dinner with the novelist Robert Nathan and his wife, Anne asked her hostess if she was sure the Nathans wanted to see them. She was thrilled when the woman said yes. “Perhaps I am wrong,” Anne thought, “perhaps people do not feel so bitterly, perhaps the two worlds can meet. Perhaps I myself have been raising a glass wall where one didn’t exist.” The next day, however, her friend called back to say that the Nathans did in fact “feel bitterly.” A dispirited Anne commented in her diary: “After all, it is just as I thought.”

  French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.