'Lucky Lindy'

CHARLES LINDBERGH'S solo transatlantic flight in 1927 made him one of the few international folk heroes of this century. Nowhere was Lindbergh's popularity greater than in the United States, where he was welcomed upon his return with massive parades, previously unparalleled in size, and with numerous awards and decorations. For Americans in 1927, Lindbergh was a symbol of the nation's greatness, representing the ingenuity, daring, and stern moral fibre that Americans hoped typified the country. The kidnapping and subsequent murder of his infant son, five years after he flew "The Spirit of St. Louis" to Paris, certainly dispelled his "Lucky Lindy" image-the title of an enormously successful popular song in the late 20s. But it added yet another dimension to American's sense of him as a lone, proud hero.

Until the late 1930s. Lindbergh was a larger than life personality, a man who seemed to have transcended worldly concerns, and who spoke with legitimate moral authority. Precisely for this reason; Lindbergh's decline as a hero is also without parallel in American history. The cause of this change in the national attitude were Lindbergh's views on Nazi Germany, and on whether America should intervene in Europe after the outbreak of the Second World War. He believed the war in Europe was "fratricidal" in that neither side was entirely right or wrong, and he advocated that Western nations stand together as a wall against infiltration by those "of inferior blood" (as he wrote in 1940 in Readers Digest). There should be no confusion about whom he was referring to Lindbergh often spoke of the contrast between "European Germany and Asiatic Russia."

In 1936, after a visit to Germany, he wrote that he found developments there to be "encouraging...rather than depressing" and said that he saw Germany as a "stabilizing factor" in Europe. After September 1, 1939. Lindbergh became a leader in the fight to keep America out of the war a cause which rallied people from all ends of the political spectrum from the German American Bond to the Communist Party, but which never won the support or even succeeded mitigating the distrust, of a majority of the American people.

Wayne S. Cole's Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War 2 is his third book on this period. In America First: The Battle Against Intervention 1940-41. Cole detailed the history of the largest isolationist organization of that time, the America First Committee. Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations is a study of the career of one of Congress's most ardent isolationists. In Lindbergh, Cole documents the history of the aviator's involvement with anti-interventionists politics and presents a complete picture of Lindbergh's foreign policy views. The book is clearly written and makes use of a large number of previously unpublished resources. But Cole does little more than state the facts; Lindbergh is sorely lacking in substantive analysis of the validity of Lindbergh's views, and treats only the question of whether they aided or harmed the isolationist movement.

One of the few instances when Cole wavers from purely descriptive history is in his discussion of Lindbergh and the Jews. In September, 1941 at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh declared that the Roosevelt Administration, were seeking to push America into the War. He said that he understood that Jews were bitter about persecution in Germany, but warned, "instead of agitating for war, Jewish groups should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences." He had written in his diary two years earlier, after the Crystalnight pogrom. "They (the Germans) undoubtedly have a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably." Cole refrains from personally expressing his views on the Des Moines speech, and from placing a value judgment on Lindbergh's obvious anti-Semitism. Instead he charges that government officials, like Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, who attacked Lindbergh for his isolationism, used tactics, such as guilt by association, identical to those of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the early 1950's. Cole's comparison is extremely unsound. Lindbergh was not simply an objective surveyor of the international scene, and Cole's portrayal of him as a Lone Eagle victimized by a powerful administration intolerant of dissent, is patently invalid. Lindbergh was a Germanophile, extremely sympathetic to Nazi policies in Germany, and obviously a racist. He saw the Soviet Union as the paramount world danger and said frequently that he would rather ally himself with the Nazis than with the U.S.S.R., a nation of "godlessness, cruelty, and barbarism." It would be totally unreasonable to suggest that Lindbergh's views on these questions failed to color his perspective on foreign policy. To present the picture, as Cole does, by claiming that Lindbergh suffered from his detractors in the same way that internationalists suffered from McCarthyism is a clear historical distortion. It is apparent that most of those who McCarthy charged with disloyalty, for example, the leading China experts in the State Department, were in fact simply accurate reporters of unwelcome news, punished like harbingers of ill in medieval courts.

Lindbergh, on the other hand, always had an ax to grind, and made sure his analysis of, say, air force developments in Europe, conformed with his position that Germany could not of the war. Upon his return to the United States from Europe in 1938. Lindbergh told everyone who would be futile, that German air strength made war over the Sudeten crisis a non-viable proposition for England, France, and Russia. He endorsed the appeasement at Munich that ceded Czech territory to Germany, and paved the way for the occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year. Cole says that there was no reason to doubt Lindbergh's military assessment, even though almost all other historians-including military experts-who have treated this subject, feel that Germany could have been easily defeated in 1938 by a joint military force from those countries which reneged on their commitment to Czechoslovakia. It seems clear that Lindbergh distorted the military situation in Europe, whether deliberately or not, to prevent America from joining or encouraging a war against Hitler.

Cole's study is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Lindbergh and in the isolationist movement. But for a meaningful personal evaluation of Lindbergh, one is forced to look elsewhere.