For months, Lindbergh had ignored such attacks. In this last speech, however, Lindbergh naively felt Ickes had been hoist with his own petard, placing both the Secretary and his president in a position Lindbergh could “attack with dignity and effectiveness.”
On July 16, 1941, Lindbergh wrote Roosevelt. His short letter called Ickes on his unfair behavior, specifically for criticizing him for accepting a decoration from the German Government in 1938. He asked the President to inform his cabinet member that he had received the decoration in the American Embassy in the presence of their own ambassador and that he was there at that ambassador’s request. Lindbergh offered his word that he had “no connection with any foreign government” and that he would willingly present himself and all his files for investigation to prove as much. Lindbergh felt he was owed an apology from him. Upon mailing the letter, he also released a copy to the press.
Lindbergh heard from neither the President nor his Interior Secretary. Instead, he received a nine-sentence note from FDR’s secretary Stephen Early, who dismissed the letter as an obvious publicity stunt, as demonstrated by the fact that the newspapers had received their copies a full day before the President. In his own reply to the press, Ickes chided Lindbergh for this breach of political etiquette and challenged him to reveal his true colors. “If Mr. Lindbergh feels like cringing when he is correctly referred to as a knight of the German Eagle,” Ickes wrote, “why doesn’t he send back the disgraceful decoration and be done with it? Americans remember that he had no hesitation about sending back to the President his commission in the United States Army Air Corps Reserve. In fact, Mr. Lindbergh returned his commission with suspicious alacrity and with a total lack of graciousness. But he still hangs on to the Nazi medal!”
Even Lindbergh’s supporters had to ask themselves some of the questions Ickes raised. General Wood gently suggested that Lindbergh publicly condemn totalitarianism in any form, thus silencing the whispering campaign that he was pro-Nazi. Billy Rose sent him a long telegram that same day, enumerating some of the Third Reich’s known atrocities to date. “IF YOU ARE WILLING TO CONDEMN HITLER AND HIS GANG AND THEIR UNSPEAKABLE BARBARITIES,” the theater impresario added, “I WILL ENGAGE MADISON SQUARE GARDEN AT MY EXPENSE AND GIVE YOU AN OPPORTUNITY TO AIR YOUR VIEWS. MY ONLY CONDITION IS THAT THE PUBLIC MELTING DOWN OR HAMMERING OUT OF SHAPE OF YOUR NAZI MEDAL BE MADE A FEATURE OF THE RALLY.” Lindbergh had “slipped badly,” Ickes noted in his diary. “He has now made it clear to the whole country that he still clings to this German decoration…. For the first time he has allowed himself to be put on the defensive and that is always a weak position for anyone.” The Great Debate was deteriorating into a more simplistic question, one which became the title of a pamphlet distributed by Birkhead’s Friends of Democracy: “Is Lindbergh a Nazi?”
THE LINDBERGHS could bear Long Island no longer. “[W]e are so sick of the atmosphere that surrounds New York & gets thicker all the time,” Anne wrote Kay Smith that summer, thinking of the “bitterness, suspicion, hate, pressure etc.” The Lindberghs’ unlisted telephone seldom stopped ringing—with requests and threats—keeping Charles and Anne from getting much work done there. They fled to Martha’s Vineyard, where they rented a small house at Seven Gates Farm in Vineyard Haven. It was smaller than they would have liked, so that children and secretaries would have to double up; but it sat in serene isolation, surrounded by wild hills, private beaches, trees and berry bushes, and endless vistas of rocks, distant islands, and the sea. It reminded Charles of Illiec. In a hillside hollow overlooking the water, he had two men erect a cabin-sized tent, in which he and Anne could bunk and she could write.
Lindbergh had long told himself that the moment American entry into the war seemed inevitable, he would drop a bombshell. He would publicly name “the groups that were most powerful and effective in pushing the United States toward involvement in the war.” Having agreed to speak at another America First meeting, in Des Moines, he realized his engagement there would provide that moment. He penciled draft after draft of his most provocative speech yet, one he bluntly titled “Who Are the War Agitators?”
In it, he pointed out that Americans had solidly opposed entering the war when it began, and that three groups had been “pressing this country toward war” ever since—the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews. Behind those groups, he added, were “a number of capitalists, anglophiles, and intellectuals, who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depend upon the domination of the British Empire.” He wrote that the first group was encouraging American participation so that it could accrue more power. The second group, he said, saw it as a way of lightening its military and financial load. But the core of his thesis rested on the third group, for whom he reserved his sharpest comments.
This portion of the speech threw Anne into “black gloom.” She did not disagree with anything he wrote. In fact, she found “what he says is as far as I can tell true and moderately stated,” without “bitterness or rancor.” Her desperation, she confided to her diary, came because “I hate to have him touch the Jews at all. For I dread the reaction on him.” She could already envision the next morning’s headlines—LINDBERGH ATTACKS JEWS—knowing that many people would read no further, “being only too eager to believe the worst of C.” The “ugly cry of anti-Semitism will be joyfully pounced upon and waved about [his] name,” she thought, as it was “so much simpler to brand someone with a bad label than to take the trouble to read what he says.” She tried to express as much to her husband, that the meaning of his words were not the same as the effect they would have, that the speech would be taken as “Jew-baiting.”
Lindbergh said the point was not what the effect would be on him but “whether or not what he said is true and whether it will help to keep us out of war.” Feeling that the perception was as important as the reality, Anne anxiously rewrote several paragraphs, making them less accusatory and more understanding. She hoped, for example, that he might say: “I call you people before me tonight to witness that I am not anti-Semitic nor have I attacked the Jews.” But he would not. He departed for Des Moines, leaving his wife with “a sinking of heart.” Instead of snuffing the inflammatory reaction she foresaw, she feared his words would prove to be “a match lit near a pile of excelsior.”
For the first time Lindbergh felt that he was “fighting a losing battle,” that Roosevelt had cleverly rigged the American psyche “so that just a small incident could draw us into a declaration of war.” The week before he was to deliver his fiery speech, the nation moved another step in that direction, when the U. S. destroyer Greer was attacked near Iceland on September fourth. Roosevelt did not address the nation on the subject until the evening of the eleventh, the very moment before Lindbergh was to speak, thus delaying the start of the America First rally. The President’s speech was piped into the Des Moines Coliseum, filled with eight thousand Iowans. They all listened to Roosevelt declare that he had ordered the U. S. Navy to “shoot on sight” any German or Italian ships in the American Defense Zone, which he said stretched from Iceland to the west coast of Africa. Less than a minute after the President had finished, Lindbergh and his colleagues walked onstage, to loud applause mixed with boos.
Although the loudspeakers did not function properly for the first few minutes, the other speakers warmed the crowd up enough so that by the time Lindbergh reached the microphone, the audience was ready to listen—even the hecklers. Six minutes into his speech, when he reached the point at which he named the three war-agitating groups, most of the crowd stood and cheered. For the rest of his speech, the Iowans drowned out the opposition that occasionally erupted.
In the end, Lindbergh had reduced his comments about the Jews to three paragraphs. They were the only public comments he ever made during the Great Debate in which he mentioned them. Although he felt he was showing his sympathy for a long-persecuted tribe, each additional sentence would be used to burn the brand of anti-Semite deeper into his public persona.
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“It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany,” Lindbergh said. “The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”
Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this, and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.
Ironically, it was in his third paragraph about the Jews, in what he intended to be his most compassionate words on the subject, that Lindbergh incurred the most wrath:
I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people [he said]. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.
Lindbergh had bent over backward to be kind about the Jews; but in suggesting the American Jews were “other” people and that their interests were “not American,” he implied exclusion, thus undermining the very foundation of the United States.
Because he spent all the next day in seclusion on the train home, it was not until his arrival in New York on Saturday morning that Lindbergh learned how despised he had become. Most of the nation’s newspapers carried vituperative denunciations of his speech.
“He is attacked on all sides,” Anne noted in her diary, “Administration, pressure groups, and Jews, as now openly a Nazi, following a Nazi doctrine.” Thinking about the national response, Anne wondered why nobody minded his naming the British or the Administration as pro-war, but “to name ‘Jew’ is un-American—even if it is done without hate or bitterness or even criticism.” She asked her diary why.
By the time Charles arrived home, she could answer her own question, recognizing that the implied segregation was “setting the ground for anti-Semitism.” Her husband never saw that. When she told him that she would rather see the country at war than “shaken by violent anti-Semitism,” he rigidly held that those were not the options. For him the choice was “whether or not you are going to let your country go into a completely disastrous war for lack of courage to name the groups leading that country to war—at the risk of being called ‘anti-Semitic’ simply by naming them.” Happy to be reunited, Anne and Charles pitched a pup tent in the hills west of the house and slept together under the stars in the cool, clear night.
He awoke the next morning to a Niagara of invective. Few men in American history had ever been so reviled. One columnist stated that the Lone Eagle had plummeted from “Public Hero No. 1” to “Public Enemy No. 1.” Anne noted that he had become nothing less than “the symbol of anti-Semitism in this country & looked to as the leader of it.” Presidential Secretary Stephen Early commented only that Lindbergh’s words sounded like those pouring out of Berlin. He left prominent Republicans to issue harsher denunciations, and they did. Wendell Willkie called the Des Moines speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”; New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, on his way to becoming the party’s new standard-bearer, called it “an inexcusable abuse of the right of freedom of speech.” Jewish groups demanded retractions, as did Catholics and Protestants; Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called upon America First to “divorce itself from the stand taken by Lindbergh and clean its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country.” Time wrote, “The America First Committee had touched the pitch of anti-Semitism and its fingers were tarred.” Liberty went even farther, calling Lindbergh “the most dangerous man in America.” Before him, they observed, “leaders of anti-Semitism were shoddy little crooks and fanatics sending scurrilous circulars through the mails…. But now all that is changed … He, the famous one, he who was once illustrious, has stood up in public and given brazen tongue to what obscure malcontents have only whispered behind the back.” Rabbi Irving F. Reichart of Temple Emanu-El of San Francisco commented that “Hitler himself could not have delivered a more diabolical speech.”
One Sol Schwartz of Brooklyn, who introduced himself in a letter to Lindbergh as a Jewish anti-interventionist, said the Des Moines speech had become “a tragic event in my life.” He explained that his gentile friends now regarded him differently, that to the man in the street, Lindbergh had suggested that all Jews were “INTERNATIONAL BANKERS, WARMONGERS, BOLSHEVIKS … whether he lives on Riverside Drive or in the slums of the east side.” Norman Thomas asserted that the speech “did great harm.” He told his friends that Lindbergh was no anti-Semite but that this speech was “by no means the whole truth or free from error.” By way of instruction, he wrote Lindbergh, “There are lots of forces, for instance, impersonal economic forces, which make for war beside the groups which you mention.”
He also censured him for exaggerating “the solidarity of the Jews in this matter and their power,” a common misconception.
In fact, statistics revealed less Jewish domination of the media than Lindbergh supposed. A study in 1941 by a Notre Dame philosophy professor pointed out that Jews controlled only about three percent of the American press. The government departments most responsible for foreign policy were largely in the hands of non-Jews; and only one Cabinet member was Jewish. In radio NBC’s twenty-six member advisory council contained but two Jews; the president of CBS was Jewish, but the majority of its board of directors was non-Jewish; Mutual was a co-operative organization, the Chicago Tribune chief among its stockholders. And though most of the American motion-picture studios were owned by Jews, most were virtually paranoid about keeping pro-Jewish sentiment off the screen.
To anyone who asked, Lindbergh’s longtime friend Harry Guggenheim insisted that “Slim has never had the slightest anti-Semitic feeling.” But during the years surrounding the America First movement, their friendship undeniably eroded. Walter Winchell gleefully announced that Lindbergh’s “halo has become his noose.” And the President continued to say nothing, allowing the rest of the populace to kick his rival now that he was down. Although eighty-five percent of the mail pouring into the offices of America First backed Lindbergh, thousands of letters excoriated him. Lindbergh read only occasional samples, but he instructed the secretaries of the local chapters not to destroy any of it—“no matter how unfavorable or blasphemous it may be”—explaining, “I am holding all mail as a matter of record, and I want the bad as well as the good.” Ultimately, these tens of thousands of letters went to Yale University, which began housing his archives shortly after he had delivered his America First address on its campus.
Lindbergh’s few public defenders tended to be names that harmed more than they helped—Alf Landon, Father Coughlin, Merwin K. Hart, and Herbert Hoover. While maintaining that his “remarks at Des Moines were true, and moderately stated,” Lindbergh intended to suggest that the most practical solution to the crisis was for him to resign from the America First Committee. He left for Chicago, where General Wood had called an emergency meeting to discuss the possibility of adjourning the committee altogether.
At breakfast the next morning, Lindbergh told Wood he did not feel it was time to adjourn, and that while he was “not willing to repudiate or modify any portion” of his statement, he wou
ld announce that his Des Moines speech expressed his opinion and not necessarily that of America First.
Lindbergh absented himself from the lunch meeting, so that the committee members could freely discuss the Des Moines speech and how to repair its damage. Several hours later, Bob Stuart called Lindbergh and asked him to join them. The committee had decided to issue a statement asserting that neither Lindbergh nor America First was anti-Semitic and that the interventionists, “by twisting and distorting what Colonel Lindbergh said at Des Moines, have tried to label that address as anti-Semitic.” America First was remaining in business, its doors open to “all patriotic Americans, whatever their race, color or creed.” While continuing the policy of not imposing restrictions on America First speakers, General Wood suggested to Lindbergh that he make no reference to Des Moines at his next speaking engagement.
On October 3, 1941, at Fort Wayne, he took Wood’s advice and spoke of the many violations of the Administration against the “will of the people.” Before concluding, however, he did interject a few personal remarks, the closest he ever came to pleading for sympathy. “In making these addresses,” he reminded his audience of eight thousand in the Gospel Temple, and millions more listening on their radios, “I have no motive in mind other than the welfare of my country and my civilization. This is not a life that I enjoy. Speaking is not my vocation, and political life is not my ambition. For the past several years, I have given up my normal life and interests … because I believe my country is in mortal danger, and because I could not stand by and see her going to destruction without putting everything I had against that trend.” After the speech, Lindbergh was feeling “written out” on the subject of isolationism. He explained to General Wood that it seemed advisable to him for the committee to “avoiding building up any one man to a position of too great importance in the organization.”
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