The New Neo

We had a discussion on this blog recently about Charles Lindbergh and whether he ever actually supported the Nazis in the buildup to World War II, rather than just being an isolationist.

First, an interesting bit of background from Wiki:

Lindbergh’s father, a U.S. congressman from 1907 to 1917, was one of the few congressmen to oppose the entry of the U.S. into World War I.

I’m going to assume that his father had some influence on the formation of Lindbergh’s viewpoint about entering foreign wars

After the tragic kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh’s first child in in 1932, Lindbergh and his wife moved to Europe to try to recover. They visited Germany during the 1930s:

In July 1936, shortly before the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, American journalist William L. Shirer recorded in his diary: “The Lindberghs are here [in Berlin], and the Nazis, led by Göring, are making a great play for them.”

This 1936 visit was the first of several that Lindbergh made at the request of the U.S. military establishment between 1936 and 1938, with the goal of evaluating German aviation.

Lindbergh was aware of Kristallnacht when it happened:

“I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans”, he wrote. “It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult ‘Jewish problem’, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” Lindbergh had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938–39. He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews, it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer, who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted. On the advice of his close friend Alexis Carrel, he cancelled the trip. ….

So it seems he continued to be German-friendly, and although he disapproved of the Nazis’ violence against Jews his main problem with it seemed to have been that it was disorderly and beneath his high opinion of Germans. The Jews themselves were undoubtedly a problem, however.

More:

In 1938, the U.S. Air Attaché in Berlin invited Lindbergh to inspect the rising power of Nazi Germany’s Air Force. Impressed by German technology and the apparently large number of aircraft at their disposal and influenced by the staggering number of deaths from World War I, he opposed U.S. entry into the impending European conflict. In September 1938, he stated to the French cabinet that the Luftwaffe possessed 8,000 aircraft and could produce 1,500 per month. Although this was seven times the actual number determined by the Deuxième Bureau, it influenced France into trying to avoid conflict with Nazi Germany through the Munich Agreement. At the urging of U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Lindbergh wrote a secret memo to the British warning that a military response by Britain and France to Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement would be disastrous; he claimed that France was militarily weak and Britain over-reliant on its navy. He urgently recommended that they strengthen their air power to force Hitler to redirect his aggression against “Asiatic Communism”.

Following Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Lindbergh opposed sending aid to countries under threat … He equated assistance with war profiteering: “To those who argue that we could make a profit and build up our own industry by selling munitions abroad, I reply that we in America have not yet reached a point where we wish to capitalize on the destruction and death of war”.

He reminds me somewhat of our current isolationists, and they even use the phrase that was used back then: “America First.”

In late 1940, Lindbergh became the spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, soon speaking to overflow crowds at Madison Square Garden and Chicago’s Soldier Field, with millions listening by radio. He argued emphatically that America had no business attacking Germany. Lindbergh justified this stance in writings that were only published posthumously:

I was deeply concerned that the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.

He seems to have been so focused on the evil of the Soviets that he was blind to the evils of the Nazis. Was he merely naive? I think that was part of it, but still another part was his affinity for German culture and what he saw as German “order and intelligence.” Nor was he keen on Jews. But I think he was more a German sympathizer than an actual Nazi sympathizer, although he shared their emphasis on race.

One of Lindbergh’s worst acts was a speech he gave in September of 1941 (emphasis mine):

… for an America First rally at the Des Moines Coliseum that accused three groups of “pressing this country toward war; the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration”. He said that the British were propagandizing America because they could not defeat Nazi Germany without American aid and that the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to use a war to consolidate power. The three paragraphs Lindbergh devoted to accusing American Jews of war agitation formed what biographer A. Scott Berg called “the core of his thesis”. In the speech, Lindbergh said that Jewish Americans had outsized control over government and news media (even though Jews did not compose even 3% of newspaper publishers and were only a minority of foreign policy bureaucrats), employing recognizably antisemitic tropes. The speech received a strong public backlash as newspapers, politicians, and clergy throughout the country criticized America First and Lindbergh for his remarks’ antisemitism.

Sound familiar? It certainly does to me.

Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.”

Lindbergh also believed that Communism would destroy the West’s “racial strength.” However, after the war he was shocked by what was revealed to have occurred at Nazi concentration camps: “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?”

Once the US entered the war, Lindbergh did work for the Allied war effort. But he retained his admiration for Germany, later visiting often, having several long-term affairs with women there, and fathering children with those women.

There’s a great deal more about Lindbergh, but this is already so long that I’ll just end with this, which expands on the topic of his father’s influence:

Lindbergh was the son of a Progressive Republican congressman from Minnesota. His father, Charles August Lindbergh possessed Populist agrarian views prevalent in the Midwest and adamantly opposed the so-called “Money Trust,” an alleged de facto monopoly of powerful New York bankers, led by J.P. Morgan. The farmers the senior Lindbergh represented were wary of more cosmopolitan Americans, especially bankers from the east coast. They assumed bankers were to blame for the travails of Midwestern farmers and incorrectly assumed they were primarily Jewish. Many of Lindbergh Sr.’s constituents were xenophobic and often antisemitic. These were not uncommon themes throughout the country at the time.

Unfortunately, very similar attitudes have become more common again in our time.