Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  By the time they arrived, Lindbergh had once again grabbed the morning headlines. By noon, hundreds of telegrams and letters—most from strangers—were arriving in Lloyd Neck. The vast majority of them were favorable—calling Lindbergh brave and patriotic. One likened his speech to the Sermon on the Mount. General Arnold wrote that Secretary Woodring thought “it was very well worded and very well delivered” (as did Arnold himself). Anne shared the general response with her mother-in-law, saying how heartening it was to receive support “from all kinds and types of people—grateful mothers & fathers, school professors and teachers, businessmen, and also farmers, ranchers, small shop keepers … as though C’s speech has answered a real need, a clear call in the confusion.”

  Philippics followed. Hardest-hitting was Dorothy Thompson, who only months earlier had praised Lindbergh for following the courageous path of his father. In her syndicated column she dismissed this speech as the rantings of a “somber cretin,” a man “without human feeling,” a “pro-Nazi recipient of a German medal.” Furthermore, she got the bee in her bonnet that Lindbergh “has a notion to be the American Fuehrer.” She admitted that she had no proof of her theory; but she would attack him in three more columns that year, six in 1940, and four in 1941—all aimed at getting readers to see him as more than just “America’s number one problem child.” She believed he was a Nazi.

  Less than one month after his first speech—on October 13, 1939—Lindbergh addressed the nation a second time. “Neutrality and War,” as he titled the speech, was less philosophical and more pragmatic in its content, with a specific program. American policy, he said, should not be directed toward Europe so much as America, and the United States should “draw a sharp line between neutrality and war.” That meant refusing credit to belligerent nations or their agents. Like his father before him, Lindbergh believed that once American money was invested in a warring country’s economy, “many interests will feel that it is more important for that country to win than for our own to avoid the war. It is unfortunate but true that there are interests in America who would rather lose American lives than their own dollars.”

  “This talk is going to create more criticism than the last one,” Lindbergh predicted the day of its delivery. “It is more detailed and more controversial. However, I think it is desirable to get people thinking about fundamental problems and to speak clearly on this present issue of ‘neutrality.’ The criticism which arises is of very secondary importance.” By the following Monday, letters were arriving at radio stations by the sackload. Nearly ninety percent of the mail seemed to be in Lindbergh’s favor, though he was levelheaded enough to know “the people who like what you say are more likely to write than those who don’t—at least that is true in the intelligent classes.” He would never be able to get through them all, but Lindbergh saved what would grow into a collection of tens of thousands of letters, many of them never opened.

  Days later, threatening letters began to arrive at the Lindberghs’ house. “It is a fine state of affairs in a country which feels it is civilized,” Lindbergh complained to his journal; “people dislike what you do, so they threaten to kill your children.” Lindbergh considered his options, but laying down his pen was never one of them. “I feel I must do this,” he wrote of his new political role, “even if we have to put an armed guard in the house.”

  “I have taken the stand that this country should not enter the war,” Lindbergh wrote Madame Carrel after his second speech, feeling that any rational Frenchman would disagree with his position; “and that peace in the near future is the only way of preserving the quality, the prestige, and the influence of our western civilization.”

  As a result of Lindbergh’s conviction, the Carrels and the Lindberghs did not stop communicating with each other, but their letters and time together decreased. Even though the doors of the Rockefeller Institute had closed to him, Carrel would have liked to continue working in America. But one evening, talking to Lindbergh and Jim Newton, he said, “It’s becoming more and more difficult for me to sit in New York and know that my country is sliding into hunger and disease. I feel I must go back. There must be more that I can do in France than here.” He thought he might even prove to be a “lifeline” for France, a link in getting whatever aid from America might be necessary.

  Meantime, Lindbergh became the nation’s symbol of neutrality. His stand, Anne wrote Madame Carrel, “has been gravely misunderstood, misquoted, and as usual smeared with false accusations and motives.” She “felt very badly about this,” finding it difficult “to be arbitrarily labelled and shelved on a side so opposite to all one’s friends and feelings.” She was not surprised to find him as unconcerned as ever about public opinion. “Personally, I rather enjoy the situation,” Lindbergh admitted to his mother in November 1939, “for I feel that the goal ahead is well worth the effort necessary to atain [sic] it.”

  Toward that end, Lindbergh met government figures of every stripe in Washington, aligning himself with no political party or organization. He spent one afternoon with a half-dozen Democratic senators who advocated language in the pending neutrality legislation that would minimize the chances of American involvement in the war. He spent another day with ex-President Herbert Hoover, William Castle, and Carl W. Ackerman, the influential Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism—all Republicans who supported Lindbergh’s position wholeheartedly. Lindbergh knew his growing antipathy toward Roosevelt would lead most people to assume that he and the President were of opposite parties; but the labels meant nothing to him. “As far as I am concerned personally,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal, “I have but little fear of being classed as a Republican for long. I have too little interest in either politics or popularity. One of the dearest of rights to me is being able to say what I think and act as I wish. I intend to do this, and I know it will cause trouble. As soon as it does, the politicians will disown me quickly enough … I have no intention of bending my ideas or my ideals to conform to the platform of either party. One must make certain compromises in life—that is a part of living together with other men—but compromise is justified only when the goal to be gained is of greater importance than what is lost in compromising.”

  When Senator William E. Borah, Republican from Idaho, suggested that Lindbergh would make a good candidate for President, Lindbergh explained that he enjoyed too much “the ability to do and say what I wish to ever be a successful candidate for President. I prefer intellectual and personal freedom to the honors and accomplishments of political office—even that of President.”

  On November 4, 1939, FDR signed the Neutrality Act. It allowed sale of arms to belligerents as long as they paid cash and transported them in non-American ships. While this appeared to represent a policy of impartiality, Lindbergh saw it as an American effort to aid Britain and France. Except for his article “What Substitute for War?”—in the March 1940 issue of The Atlantic Monthly—he would not address the public for a half-year.

  His silence coincided with a lull in the fighting abroad—what people called “the phony war.” When he was not brooding about foreign affairs, Lindbergh attended to his own domestic agenda, starting with the “ceaseless problem for us” of where to live—“how best to fit our unique set of circumstances to this changing world.” He wondered where Jon and Land could lead normal lives, where Anne could write, where they could be away from the “deadly life of a modern city, and yet not isolate ourselves from those contacts and associations that made up civilized life.” Complicating matters was the increase in terrifying letters arriving at his door—calling him a Nazi, threatening to kidnap his two sons. When the Lindberghs’ lease in Lloyd Harbor expired, they moved back to Next Day Hill.

  On January 21, 1940, Charles and Anne stole away for a vacation on the “Florida West Coast Special.” They were ticketed to Tampa, but they hopped off the train in Haines City, centerstate, in order to evade the press. Only their host, Jim Newton, was there to meet them and to drive them
through Fort Myers on the Gulf coast and just beyond to Punta Massa. There they boarded a one-horse ferry to Sanibel Island, drove its length, and crossed a small bridge to Captiva, where a shell road led to the Newton family’s cottage set in a grove of palms and pines. The three-bedroom house sat on a strip of land so narrow that the Gulf was visible from the front door and the bay from the back.

  The next ten days were magical. Unusually cold weather descended upon this tropical haven, but that did not keep the Lindberghs away from the water. Newton borrowed a thirty-foot cabin cruiser; and along with him and an Audubon Society game warden named Charlie Green, Anne and Charles sailed down the coast into the Everglades, along the Shark River, and among the Keys. For the better part of a week, they explored exotic bayous and mangrove swamps, completely unnoticed except for the eyes of hundreds of pelicans, egrets, buzzards, ducks, and ibises.

  Charles was rejuvenated, Anne transported. “Wilderness,” he blurted to Jim Newton one day. “People need it and miss it. It’s frightening to think that in a few years our children and their children may not be able to experience it. It feeds the soul.” Then he startled Jim Newton by claiming to have contributed to its gradual disappearance. While Lindbergh had hoped aviation might “unify the world,” he could not help seeing the trouble it was creating, enabling man to penetrate remote places, perhaps to trespass where he did not belong. At night in Florida, he rowed his wife out onto the still waters, and they soaked in the “beauty and quiet … and isolation” of their surroundings. Anne realized the importance of responding to her husband, whenever he pulled her into adventure: “I should always go when C. calls,” she wrote during this romantic interlude, “—break through my crust of inertia or fear—because life lies behind it.” By the time the Lindberghs returned to New Jersey, Anne was pregnant.

  The thought of a fourth child forced Anne to confront feelings she had been avoiding for years. “Isn’t it possible for a woman to be a woman and yet produce something tangible beside children—something that stands up in a man’s world?” Anne had written a cousin during her last pregnancy. Even entering the new decade, such thoughts were bold. Now reaching her thirties, she heard a psychological clock ticking—one which made her feel “it’s time I did ‘get down to’ something, ‘too old’ to be ‘promising.’” She was struggling with feminism.

  More than ever, Anne yearned to write—“not because I feel I have anything to give … not because being an artist comes first (it doesn’t) not because it matters to anyone else what I say.” She simply felt that the thread of her life “will not be strong without that strand.” All the imagery of Captiva and its environs had renewed her; and for the rest of her life, she would find herself drawn to that region, in search of metaphors. But unlike her feminist heroines—Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Rebecca West—Anne wanted to define new roles for women without sacrificing the traditional ones, those of wife and mother.

  She had already become a magnet for similarly striving women all over the country, many of whom poured their hearts out to her. Although few of these women were her intellectual or social equals, Anne found comfort in their letters. They filled an emotional void her husband never could. For decades, she engaged in lengthy correspondences with many of these needy women. “Perhaps my job right now,” she wrote one such suppliant, “is not to write books but to have my baby, keep a peaceful home and try to give my husband the kind of atmosphere, and thought and encouragement, and balance that will help him to deal with some of the problems he feels so disturbed about in the world today.”

  She and Charles moved into another house in Lloyd Neck, one more substantial than their first—a three-story wooden farmhouse dating back to 1714, full of charm and history. It overlooked a tidal inlet and Cold Spring Harbor. Anne suffered through the early spring there, as her morning sickness coincided with the disheartening news of Germany’s conquering Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium. The Nazis now approached Paris.

  Alone in bed, Anne did “a lot of mental writing and a soaking up of old trains of thought.” She found that she could not bring herself to blame Europe’s current ills entirely on Hitler, as though he were some “accidental scourge unconnected to other world events—alone responsible for all,” that if he were wiped out, all would be well. “Nazism,” Anne wrote in her diary in April 1940, “seems to me scum which happens to be on the wave of the future. I agree with people’s condemnation of Nazi methods but I do not think they are the wave. They happen to be riding on it.”

  With pressure mounting for America to enter the war, Lindbergh felt impelled to address the nation again. He wrote a speech called “The Air Defense of America” on May fifteenth, which he arranged to deliver from the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Washington studios on the nineteenth, a Sunday, at 9:30 in the evening. His simple message required only twelve minutes of airtime. “We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of America,” he said, “but because American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe.” He called on his nation to prepare itself for war, suggesting that the best offense was a proper defense. Without naming the faction, Lindbergh told his audience, “The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge.” A month later, Lindbergh spoke again, calling on the nation to resist the propaganda spurring America into battle.

  With his mail running 20 to 1 in his favor, Anne felt that her husband was giving voice to the silent majority of the nation. “[H]e speaks for inarticulate America,” commented one of Anne’s friends. Increasingly, Lindbergh found himself speaking for intolerant America as well.

  Lindbergh had no supporter more ardent than Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a large following on the radio and through a national weekly tabloid called “Social Justice,” which he published in Royal Oak, Michigan. With a definitely anti-Semitic agenda, he appropriated Lindbergh’s likeness to help sell his own message, putting him on the front of his national weekly, quoting him in his suggestion as to who were the unnamed “war-breeding clique.” The more Lindbergh attracted such bigots, the more people judged him by his followers.

  On Monday, May 27, 1940, their wedding anniversary, Anne and Charles drove along Huntington Bay and found the spot where they had rowed out to their honeymoon boat eleven years earlier. It was a clear night, with dogwood and chestnut flowers in full bloom. Later they drove to the beach at Lloyd Neck, where they had summered the preceding year. Charles left for a walk alone down the beach, while Anne sat on a raft. Even in this peaceful moment, she could not help feeling depressed, thinking of all the people she cared about in England and France. And then she caught sight of her husband’s figure in the distance, an approaching silhouette, and she instinctively felt hope. “And I think, yes—that is what keeps one going in times like these,” she wrote in her diary, “the thought, the realization that there are a few men in the world, here and there—one has met them—who are on top of fate. And I do not mean just that they always win, but they are not downed by their circumstances in spite of everything.”

  When Charles reached his pregnant wife after his walk, Anne told him of her thoughts, of her belief that there were strong people in Europe, survivors who “will not be embittered, will get something from it, make something of it—if they are not killed.” Even though Anne and Charles had never discussed the depth of her unrequited romance the preceding year, he saw his wife’s pain. After a quiet moment, he tried to comfort her by saying, “I hope Saint-Exupéry survives.”

  Anne had followed Saint-Exupéry through the press—his return to France, his testing planes and training pilots. A Dorothy Thompson column the first week of June 1940 praised his flying missions ag
ainst the Germans and moved Anne to tears. “Nobody has the right to write a word today who does not participate to the fullest in the agony of his fellow human beings,” Saint-Exupéry told Miss Thompson. “If I did not resist with my life, I should be unable to write…. The Christian idea has got to be served; that the word is made Flesh. One must write with one’s body.” Saint-Exupéry, a reserve officer, was demobilized from his flying group just weeks after France’s hasty capitulation to the Germans, which placed the government in the hands of elderly Marshal Henri Pétain in Vichy. Anne and Charles could not help thinking of their second home, as they often listened to a recording of Mignon, the opera that had been composed on Illiec. Their neighbors in France, the Carrels, were in their prayers.

  Instead of resisting himself, or even hiding out on Saint-Gildas, the sixty-seven-year-old Alexis Carrel thought it in the best interests of his countrymen if he cooperated with the new Vichy government as much as necessary to help secure the authority, personnel, and equipment he would need to address the problems of “war medicine”—wound infection, hemorrhage, shock, gas burns, and poisoning that would soon plague his nation. As the “phony war” of the winter turned real, Carrel spent most of his time studying “the conditions which have brought about the degeneration of modern men”—moral, intellectual, anatomical, and racial. “The problem of remaking society is extremely complex on account of the multiplicity of the factor of deterioration,” he wrote a medical colleague. “In France, the main trouble is moral corruption.” When Carrel approached Pétain with his vision of an “Institute of Man,” Jim Newton would later recall, “Pétain offered to subsidize it. Carrel accepted and went to work, despite the obstructions placed in his way by the medical profession.”