Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of 1940s Nazi Sympathizers

Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of 1940s Nazi Sympathizers

Charles Lindbergh may have been known as a legendary pilot, but he had another, more sinister position in American History: as a Nazi sympathizer and spokesperson for the America First Committee. (2:00)

Charles Lindbergh's Real Nazi Ties Are At the Heart of David Simon's The Plot Against America

The new HBO series based on Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel takes place in an alternative history America, but the roots of the story are very real.

BY GABRIELLE BRUNEY

MAR 16, 2020

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a31482451/charles-lindbergh-nazi-ties-explained-the-plot-against-america-true-story/

HBO’s The Plot Against America, a miniseries from The Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns, adapts Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, telling the story of an alternative history United States in which Nazi-sympathizing aviator Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, fueling violent anti-Semitism that upends the lives of American Jews. Though the story is a clear departure from the facts of American history during World War II, much of it is based on real life. The family at the heart of the series, the Levins, are based upon Roth’s own family and childhood in Newark, New Jersey. And though Lindbergh never became president, he remains infamous as one of America’s most prominent Nazi sympathizers. Here’s what you need to know.

Who was Charles Lindbergh?

Lindbergh was born in 1902, to the son of future Minnesota congressman Charles August Lindbergh. As a young man, he became interested in aviation, and trained with the US Army Air Service before becoming an air mail pilot.

In 1919, French-American hotel owner Raymond Orteig announced that he would award $25,000 to the first pilot to make a nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Eight years later, the 25-year-old Lindbergh claimed the prize, flying for 33-and-a-half hours from Long Island, New York, to Paris. British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown had become the first pilots to cross the Atlantic in a non-stop flight in 1919, when they flew from Newfoundland to Ireland, but Lindbergh was the first solo pilot to accomplish the feat.

When he landed in Paris, more than 100,000 people arrived to greet him, and the good-looking young pilot instantly became a global celebrity. American president Calvin Coolidge awarded him a Distinguished Flying Cross, while Congress gave him a Medal of Honor. Lindbergh was named Time’s first-ever Person of the Year, and the 25-year-old remained the youngest honoree for more than 90 years, until 16-year-old Greta Thunberg snagged the title in 2019.

He married Anne Morrow, a future author and daughter of a successful businessman, in 1929, and the two eventually had six children. Their eldest, Charles Lindbergh Jr., was born in 1930, but was kidnapped from the family’s New Jersey home in 1932. The toddler’s body was later found in the woods near their home, and his abduction and murder was so widely covered that it became known as one of the crimes of the century. A German immigrant, Richard Hauptman, was eventually convicted of the crime and executed in 1936.

What was his involvement with the Nazis?

Lindbergh was a national hero who had suffered a great and very public tragedy—he’d accumulated about as much goodwill as any celebrity could. But his actions in the years leading to World War II irreparably damaged his reputation.

With Germany building up its military might in the 1930s, the United States government asked Lindbergh, then living in Europe to escape the hounding of the American press, to tour the nation’s flying fleet and report his findings. He was vocal about his admiration for German’s aircraft technology, and, during a 1938 dinner at the home of the US ambassador to Germany, was awarded a medal from Luftwaffe commander Herman Göring on behalf of Adolf Hitler himself. Kristallnacht, which found 7,000 businesses owned by German Jews destroyed while tens of thousands of Jews were taken to concentration camps, was just a few weeks later. Facing pressure to return the medal, Lindbergh refused.

Lindbergh wasn’t shy about his white supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs. In 1939, he wrote for Reader’s Digest that Americans “can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” According to him, Hitler “accomplished results (good in addition to bad) which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism.”

His wife was a fan of Hitler, too, writing in a letter home that the dictator was “a very great man, like an inspired religious leader—and as such rather fanatical—but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has rather a broad view.”

“A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos,” Lindbergh wrote in a 1939 diary entry. “And we are getting too many.”

His father had opposed America’s entry into World War I, and as German aggressions mounted, Lindbergh adopted a similar stance. He became a spokesman for the America First Committee (sound familiar?), which advocated for the US staying out of the European war, and counted among its 800,000 members future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart and president Gerald Ford. It also included some of the nation’s most prominent anti-Semites, like Lindbergh’s close friend Henry Ford. (When asked what they talked about during Lindbergh’s visits to Ford’s plant, the automaker reportedly replied, “When Charles comes out here, we only discuss the Jews.”) And Lindbergh was one of the organization’s spokesmen.

America First Committee Meeting

In early 1941, Lindbergh testified before Congress in opposition of the Lend-Lease Act, which eventually passed and allowed the US to offer aid to Allied nations. In September of that year, Lindbergh delivered an infamous speech in Des Moines, Iowa. In The Plot Against America, Herman Levin listens to the speech on the radio. In the deeply anti-Semitic speech, Lindbergh blamed American Jews for the tilt towards war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” he said. Even by the standards of the day, the remarks were considered outrageous. The Des Moines Register condemned it as being “so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this country.”

The America First Committee disbanded on December 10th, 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor made war truly unavoidable. Lindbergh would fly combat missions as a consultant for Ford’s B-24 manufacturing company, though his effort to rejoin the air force was shut down by FDR. Later, historian Arthur Schlesigner would write of an effort by isolationists to urge Lindbergh to run for president as a Republican opposing FDR in 1940, which inspired Roth to write The Plot Against America.

His reputation permanently tarnished by his Nazi sympathizes, Lindbergh died in Hawaii in 1974. But his affection for Germany survived the war: He fathered seven secret children in the nation during the 1950s and ‘60s by three women that included a pair of sisters.