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

by Lynne Olson

  For all the recrimination heaped on Lindbergh, there were a few people who spoke up in his defense. One was a nineteen-year-old Cornell University student named Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a passionate pro-Lindbergh column in the school newspaper attacking “the mud-slingers” for stirring up hate against “a loyal and sincere patriot.” Vonnegut, whose 1945 experiences as an American prisoner of war in the firebombed German city of Dresden would lead him to write his iconic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, was in 1941 a committed isolationist who believed America should stay as far away from war as possible. “The United States is a democracy, that’s what they say we’ll be fighting for,” he wrote. “What a prize monument to that ideal—a cry to smother Lindy.… Lindy, you’re a rat. We read that somewhere, so it must be so. They say you should be deported. In that event, leave room in the boat for us.”

  Others, while not defending Lindbergh’s comments, charged those who attacked him with hypocrisy. Even as he disparaged Lindbergh’s remarks, Norman Thomas declared that the aviator “was not as anti-Semitic as some who seize the opportunity to criticize him.” In an editorial, Christian Century noted sardonically that “one hundred clubs and hotel foyers rang with a denouncement of Lindbergh on the morning after his Des Moines speech—clubs and hotels barring their doors to Jews.”

  Dr. Gregory Mason, chairman of the America First chapter in the affluent Connecticut towns of Greenwich and Stamford, made the same point in a letter to his White Committee counterpart in southern Connecticut. According to Mason, a number of the White Committee and Fight for Freedom’s most prominent members in the area belonged to “exclusive social clubs from which Jews are strictly barred. Pick at random any local newspaper report of the attendance at a Bundles for Britain party or a rummage sale for the RAF, and you’ll find a very high percentage of names of wealthy snobs who would shun a Jew socially as they would shun a leper.”

  Yet while there was much truth in Mason’s allegations, they did not alter the fact that Lindbergh’s remarks in Des Moines were unmistakably anti-Semitic and that they did incalculable harm to the cause of isolationism. They diverted attention from the main issue of America’s involvement in the war and, as Anne Lindbergh feared, encouraged the country’s anti-Semites to become even more outspoken.

  America First had always had a problem with anti-Semitism, but in the days and weeks following the Des Moines speech, the problem became a full-blown crisis. Thousands of letters, many of them flagrantly anti-Semitic, flooded the group’s headquarters. One correspondent wrote: “We need thousands of fearless men and women to rid this country of the JEWS, who have already taken it over.”

  America First’s weak reaction to the Lindbergh speech and its failure to condemn anti-Semitism left no doubt that, by the fall of 1941, the organization had strayed far from the path that its idealistic young founders at Yale had envisioned for it just the year before.

  WHILE LINDBERGH SEEMED IMPERVIOUS, at least outwardly, to the allegations of anti-Semitism, the specter of the Des Moines speech would haunt his wife and children for decades. “Isn’t it strange,” Anne wrote to a friend at the time, “there is no hate in him, no hate at all, and yet he rouses it and spreads it.” Years later, she told an interviewer: “I cannot blame people for misinterpreting [what he said]. I can understand why the Jews dislike him.”

  Reeve Lindbergh, the only child of Charles and Anne’s to write and speak publicly about her family, struggled to come to grips with her father’s explosive words for much of her adult life. She first learned of the speech while attending Radcliffe in the early 1960s, after the parents of several friends acted oddly toward her, and the roommate of a boy she was dating told him that he wouldn’t mind meeting Reeve but he would never shake hands with her father.

  When she expressed puzzlement at such antagonism, her closest friend at college advised her to read Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech. She was devastated when she did. “I can still feel the sick dizziness that I felt then,” she wrote years later, “bending over the page, reading his words.” As a child, Reeve had read Anne Frank’s diary and knew the horrific dimensions of the Holocaust. She understood the implications that her father’s remarks would have for “so many people.”

  Stunned and bewildered, she kept thinking that this was not the father she knew—a man who had never made an anti-Semitic comment in her presence, who never told a racial joke or uttered an ethnic slur like those she had heard in the homes of her friends, who taught his children that such words were “repellent and unspeakable.”

  Reeve’s confusion swiftly turned to shame and fury. She wrestled with the question of what her father had intended to say—and, in doing so, grappled with the issue of what constitutes anti-Semitism. “Did he really believe that he was simply, dispassionately ‘stating the facts,’ as he later persistently claimed, without understanding that the very framework of the statement reverberated with anti-Semitic resonance? And if he really believed [it], was that in itself not a form, however innocent he might think it, of anti-Semitism? Was there, in fact, such a thing as innocent, unconscious anti-Semitism? … [D]id the Holocaust forever criminalize an attitude that was previously acceptable and widespread among the non-Jewish population of this country and others? … Or was I simply playing with semantics and denying the obvious?”

  She concluded that her father was doing what he always did: “identifying a situation as he saw it … and then clarifying it, in his logical way, and then proceeding with his argument in an orderly fashion.… He talked to the American people about isolationism, about the pros and cons of war, about persecution of Jews in Germany, the way he talked to his children about Independence and Responsibility, or the Seven Signs of Frostbite or Punk Design. What was he thinking? How could he have been so insensitive?”

  When Reeve asked her mother about the infamous speech, Anne said that Lindbergh had refused to believe her when she warned him he would be labeled an anti-Semite if he gave it. Reeve was astonished: in her experience, her father had always listened to her mother. That was not the case when he was younger, Anne replied. He had grown up listening only to himself and relying on his own judgment: his survival as a pilot had depended on following his own instincts. “If he had listened to others,” Anne told her daughter, “he never would have gotten to Paris.”

  AS LINDBERGH’S CRITICS RUSHED to heap opprobrium on him in the aftermath of the Des Moines speech, there was one prominent exception—his mother-in-law.

  Elizabeth Morrow’s silence had nothing to do with a lessening of commitment on her part to the interventionist cause; in fact, the opposite was true. Now a diehard believer that America must go to war to save Britain and the rest of the world from Germany, she was honorary chairwoman of the women’s division of Fight for Freedom, the most extreme of the interventionist organizations.

  On November 21, 1941, Mrs. Morrow made a nationwide radio broadcast explaining the rationale for her pro-war views: “I consider the consequences of a German victory so disastrous for us that I think this country should, if necessary, enter an all-out war to prevent that victory.” But toward the end of her broadcast, she abruptly shifted her focus to an issue that obviously was causing her intense worry—the mudslinging and increasingly vicious name-calling that was tearing apart not only her own family but the country as a whole.

  In an appeal to her interventionist allies, Mrs. Morrow said she hoped “desperately that we can all be not only good fighters but fair fighters. There are honest, conscientious and honorable citizens who hold that involvement in the European war will not help our national defense and will not preserve the American way of life so precious to us all. We must respect the sincerity of their opinions while differing with them.”

  With considerable emotion in her voice, she went on: “ ‘War Monger’ is an unpleasant name, but ‘Unpatriotic’ and ‘Un-American’ are equally disagreeable adjectives. When it comes to motives, let us leave the role of omniscience to God.”

  CHAPTER 25

&n
bsp; “HE WAS NOT GOING TO LEAD THE COUNTRY INTO WAR”

  By the fall of 1941, a new superhero had captured the imagination of young comic book readers across the country. The debut issue of Captain America, whose cover showed its red-white-and-blue-clad protagonist knocking Adolf Hitler silly with a right to the jaw, sold nearly one million copies. Dedicated to saving the United States from Nazis and other threats, Captain America quickly took his place in the superhero pantheon.

  Years later, Joe Simon, a cocreator of Captain America, readily admitted that he and his colleague Jack Kirby were making a political statement with their new comic book character: both believed that the United States must enter the war to end Nazi Germany’s reign of terror. “The opponents to the war were all quite organized,” Simon said. “We wanted to have our say too.”

  The popular new comic book was hardly alone in its strong interventionist bent. By that time, many newspaper comic strips had also sent their main characters into action against the Axis. In Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, the villains invading Dogpatch were obvious caricatures of German leaders. Joe Palooka, which once had portrayed Britons as effete monocle-wearing appeasers, now showed them in heroic Nazi-fighting mode.

  Newspaper readers who glanced at more than the comics found reminders of the war on virtually every page. According to a government analysis of the press, most U.S. newspapers now backed Roosevelt’s interventionist policy, with an increasing number endorsing immediate American participation in the conflict. More than three hundred papers had done so, including the New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Atlanta Constitution, and Louisville Courier-Journal.

  Many of the bestselling books in 1941 also had war-related themes. William Shirer’s Berlin Diary was high on the nonfiction list, as were a collection of Winston Churchill’s speeches and This Is London, a compilation of Edward R. Murrow’s London broadcasts. In fiction, Mrs. Miniver, a collection of stories on which the wildly popular film was based, and James Hilton’s Random Harvest were atop the list.

  There was no question that war had left a distinct imprint on the national consciousness. A Vogue fashion layout featured models posing in front of a London-bound plane loaded with Bundles for Britain parcels. The Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company began featuring V for Victory lipsticks. In Newark, San Francisco, and other major cities, practice blackouts were staged, with volunteer wardens bustling around their neighborhoods demanding that people turn out their lights. In New York City, more than 62,000 residents volunteered as wardens in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s new civil defense program.

  Congressmen returning from their summer recess reported that many of their constituents had shifted their views toward war, with some isolationist districts becoming “middle of the road, and middle of the roaders now interventionists.” At its annual convention, the American Legion, once fervently isolationist, called for a repeal of the neutrality law and for a plan “to carry the war to the enemy.”

  A Life reporter traveled to Neosho, Missouri, a small town on the edge of the Ozarks, to sample opinion there. After interviewing several dozen Neosho residents, he came to the conclusion that the majority of townspeople, although Republican and “conservative about almost everything,” had decided that their country must enter the war.

  “I would hate to see our boys sent over there to fight, and I’ve got one nineteen years old,” said C. W. Crawford, a flour miller, “but if England can’t win without it, we’ve got to send them … we’ve got to chip in and do it.” Glen Woods, a grocer and the Neosho mayor, remarked: “I can’t see how we can help getting in it actively, and I can’t see how we could live with ourselves if we don’t.” Glenn Wolfender, editor of the town’s weekly paper, told the Life reporter that he and other Neosho residents had become interventionists out of a moral conviction that America must put an end to Hitler. “When you got [such a conviction], you can’t get anything stronger in this world,” Wolfender added. “Maybe it’s something you city people could use, and I don’t intend no offense, you understand.”

  A poll taken in the fall of 1941 showed that 75 percent of those identifying themselves as Republicans now supported FDR’s foreign policy. Fewer than 20 percent of the American people would admit to being an isolationist, and 72 percent regarded “defeating Nazism” as “the biggest job facing their country.” The pollster Elmo Roper reported: “The willingness to use our armed forces has increased even more than our nominal tendency toward intervention.… Now you have big majorities for using all branches of the armed forces—if necessary.” From Chicago, Graham Hutton, a British propaganda official, wrote: “The Isolationists are fighting a vocal and stubborn but hopeless rear-guard action.”

  By virtually all standards, then, it seemed that Americans were prepared for war. And yet they were still afraid to take the leap into full-fledged hostilities. According to polls, 75 to 80 percent of the public continued to oppose an immediate declaration of war against Germany.

  News from the war fronts, meanwhile, grew steadily bleaker. Having swept across much of Russia, the Germans were now threatening Moscow and laying siege to Leningrad. Fearful that the Soviets might soon collapse and that Germany would once again turn its full fury against Britain, Winston Churchill was desperate for unequivocal American involvement.

  As the historian Geoffrey Perret noted, a strange scenario was playing itself out in Washington and the rest of America that fall: “grown men jostling and nudging, daring and egging one another on, talking tough yet trembling on the brink.” It was “an unhappy sight,” Perret added, “—people adrift for the lack of sure purpose on which to attach their will.”

  And then came the strange case of the Greer.

  ON SEPTEMBER 4, THE American destroyer Greer was steaming toward Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, when it received word from a British patrol plane that a German submarine had been spotted about ten miles ahead. Just two weeks before, the U.S. Navy had authorized its Atlantic-based ships to begin escorting all friendly merchant shipping, including cargoes bound for Britain and Russia, as far as Iceland. There, the British navy would take over as protector. U.S. naval vessels were also given authority to destroy any German submarines or surface raiders that threatened the merchant convoys.

  Because the Greer was not escorting merchant shipping when it was notified of the submarine, it was not permitted to open fire. Its only option was to trail the U-boat and report its location to the British, which it did for more than three hours. At one point, the British patrol plane dropped several depth charges, but to no evident effect.

  Finally, the German submarine commander had had enough. Apparently believing that the depth charges had come from the Greer, he fired two torpedoes at the U.S. ship. The Greer evaded them and, having been attacked, dropped its own depth charges in response. In the confrontation, neither vessel suffered damage or casualties.

  A week later, FDR used the episode as the rationale for broadening the rules of engagement to allow U.S. Navy ships to shoot on sight any Axis vessels they encountered, regardless of whether they posed threats to merchant shipping. In a September 11 radio broadcast, the president charged that the German submarine had “fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her.” (True enough, but the president did not mention the incident’s other details: the British depth charges dropped on the U-boat and the Greer’s three-hour surveillance preceding the attack.)

  Describing the assault on the Greer as “piracy,” Roosevelt, using some of his toughest language yet, blasted German submarines and surface ships as “rattlesnakes of the Atlantic” that posed a “menace to the free pathways of the high seas” and “a challenge to our sovereignty.” He insisted that his “shoot on sight” order was not meant as an act of war but as a defensive measure taken in waters vital to American security: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.… The time for active d
efense is now.” In his broadcast, the president also slipped in an announcement of his earlier decision to provide U.S. naval escorts for all merchant shipping as far as Iceland.

  Over the next month, American destroyers operating under battle conditions shepherded fourteen convoys, numbering 675 ships, across the stormy North Atlantic. The U.S. Navy had thus become the country’s first armed service to go to war, albeit one that was still undeclared.

  Most junior naval officers and crew did not share the isolationism and Anglophobia of their high-ranking superiors. When the fifty overage destroyers were handed to the Royal Navy the year before, British seamen, to their delight, found that their American counterparts had stocked the ships with luxuries unheard of in their service, including cigarettes, blankets, sheets, steaks, and bacon. American naval officers were “forthright in saying how much they wished they could bring the ships over themselves and join us in the fight against the Hun,” said British vice admiral Sir Guy Sayer.

  In late September 1941, the first British convoy officially escorted by American ships was handed off to the Royal Navy south of Iceland. The convoy’s commodore, British rear admiral E. Manners, and the escort group leader, Captain Morton Deyo of the U.S. Navy, exchanged messages of mutual gratitude and good wishes as they bade each other farewell. “Please accept my best congratulations,” Manners signaled, “… for looking after us so very well, and my grateful thanks for all your kindly advice and help. Wish you success, with best of luck and good hunting.” Deyo signaled back: “This being our first escort job, your message is doubly appreciated. As in the last war I know our people afloat will see eye to eye.… I hope we shall meet again.”