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
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.
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