Jewish
Frontier

It was hardly with a moment of shock or dismay that I reacted to the response of a forty-something colleague when I mentioned to her the recent passing ofAnne Morrow Lindbergh "Who is she?" she asked. Figures.

Of course Anne and her illustrious but controversial husband Charles, were of a different time — a different generation. With almost seventy four years of "Lucky Linda's" history-shattering trans-Atlantic flight having elapsed, small wonder that primarily octogenarians and trivia buffs remain among the few who remember the May 20, 1927 event.

Fitting firmly into the former category and marginally into the Jeopardy set permits a bit of nostalgia to emerge — that fourth-grade teacher exuberantly informed us ofLindbergh's heroic feat — my first in the "where were you when?" department. As a rather precocious 16 year-old high schooler in winter 1935, I devoured the New York Daily Mirror's day-by-day transcripts of the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for his 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh's First-born twenty-month-old Charles Jr. — a horrific event that the American press dubbed "The Crime of the Century." It would alter the lives of the famous couple forever.

American Jewry, particularly of the preWorld War II generation, also remembers the Lindberghs, especially husband Charles, for his proIsolationist, Nazi, anti-Semitic stance that irreparably diminished and tarnished his reputation as well as his wife's.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who died on February 7 at age 94 merited a full page obituary in the New York Times and one of equivalent length in the Los Angeles Times — a rare honor indeed.

Both newspapers, to their credit, did not minimize the controversial aspects of the lives of both the Lindberghs. The Los Angeles Times writes that "at various times... (Mrs.) Lindbergh was the most envied, pitied and hated woman in America" and goes on to say that in her 1940 book The Wave of the Future (she wrote more than two dozen), which argued against American involvement in World War II, she mirrored her husband's isolationist views and also "was condemned as a pro-Nazi traitor, a reputation that took years to fade." Her tome was reviled as the "most despised book of the day." She did later recant much of the work.

In 1938, Charles, who had made favorable public statements about German air power, accepted a swastika-adorned medal from its government. For the next three years he made speeches about American involvement in the war in Europe, culminating in an autumn 1941 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, organized by the isolationist America First Committee. There he alleged that three groups were pressing the country toward war: the Roosevelt administration, the British and the Jews. Scott Berg, in his 1998 bestselling biography Lindbergh, quotes "leaders of the Jewish race are not American in interests and viewpoints" and refers to American Jews as "other people." Berg continues, "the day after the speech he awoke... to a Niagara of invective. Few men in American history had ever been so reviled." The Roosevelt administration branded him "the No. I Nazi fellow-traveler." Berg says that "in truth Charles Lindbergh, in spite of having made speeches for the aforementioned America First Committee, [he] was never associated with any pro-Nazi or antisemitic organization; he never attended any Bund meetings and since more than four months before the outbreak of war in Europe, he had neither consorted nor consulted with anyone known to have any connections with the Third Reich."

Berg does devote considerable space to Lindbergh's bizarre fascination with Germany from 1936 to 1939. He (Lindbergh) describes Germany as "the most interesting in the world today. I have come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people." He lauds Hitler as having "far more character and vision than I thought existed in the German leader who has been painted in so many different ways by the accounts in America and England. He is undoubtedly a great man." In one public pronouncement he stated that "their [the Jews] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government." Berg carefully refutes all of these allegations.

Of course, Lindbergh, though thoroughly excoriated for his diatribes, continued to make speeches for the America First Committee. Noteworthy was his New York Madison Square Garden address on October 30, 1941. Anne doesn't come across as even remotely unscathed. After the 1936 Berlin Olympics she displayed an effusiveness for Hitler in her writings that even her editor recommended that she temper. In November 1938 she rented a house in the Berlin suburb of Wansee, renown for its infamous conference that yielded "the final solution." A record exists of a letter that Charles wrote to then Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph Kennedy, ironically on November 97, 1938: Kristallnacht, when one hundred synagogues in Germany were destroyed, thousands of Jewishowned businesses were demolished and thousands of Jews were arrested and imprisoned. The letter continues to evince Lindbergh's interest in Germany as expressed to the elder Kennedy, himself regrettably an admirer of the New Order. The November 26, 1938 issue of The New Yorker carried the following "We say Good-Bye to Col. Charles A. Lindbergh who wants to go and live in Berlin, presumably occupying a house that once belonged to Jews."

In 1980, Mrs. Lindbergh told CBS' Morley Safer about her dismay at her husband's anti-Jewish remarks four decades earlier. According to her New York Times obituary, she said "it was terribly stupid." She is also quoted as saying that same year in her diary volume that she "experienced a profound feeling of profound grief over what her husband had said and decided that it was at best a bid for antiSemitism." In 1977 Lindbergh's Wartime Journals were published, for the most part, unedited. "The bulk of the omissions," Berg writes, "centered on one subject: the Jews." He continues "in writing about a single tribe he was segregating them in his mind from the rest of the nation, and to that extent he was like many of his countrymen, anti-Semitic." A journal entry written in 1939 regarding a rough trans-Atlantic crossing refers disparagingly to Jewish passengers on the ship becoming sea-sick. Lindbergh goes on the say that "imagine the United States taking these Jews in addition to those we already have. There are too many in places like New York already. A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many..."

Berg cites Lindbergh's 1939 cozy relationships with a former American diplomat, one William Castle, described as a rock-solid conservative with close ties to the Republican National Committee, as well as the archconservative Fulton Lewis Jr., a name quite familiar to anyone recalling that sordid era. Lindbergh again wrote in his journal of his pre-occupation with Jewish influences in "press, radio and motion pictures," referring to them as the "Educational agencies in this country." In his concluding chapter "Aloha," Berg relates that "more than thirty years after his isolationist statements, Lindbergh still refused to recant anything."

Without trying to sound like an apologist for Charles Lindbergh, one comes away with the feeling that for all his heroic exploits, and there were many, in addition to his solo flight across the Atlantic, due to ignorance, stupidity or possible arrogance, he had little or no concept of what anti-Semitism was all about. In spite of protestations that he was not a Jewhater, his record and writings belie that fact. Anne, undoubtedly brighter and more sensitive, appears to have been aware of the long-term implications ofher husband's anti-Semitic fervor, although she regrettably never saw Fit to repudiate it publicly.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's recent passing rings down yet another proverbial curtain on a facet of contemporary American history: that men of good will deplore and disdain forever.