Originally published December 2007.
No individual symbolizes the discomfort Americans feel about the neutrality period more than Charles Lindbergh. Some posit him as the U.S. version of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, a demagogue who could have led the nation and empire away from its destined role as leader of the "free world." Others are cognizant of the complexities of his life (and more importantly, the modesty of his actions) and in turn hazard attempts to explain him, finally and completely, that fail for the same reason the Lindbergh-as-Nazi myth succeeds: history does not render verdicts about its subjects, only governments and their courts and propagandists do. The historian goes not in search of men to judge—no, he wants to write, not much differently than how a novelist does. As such, the historian finds in Lindbergh an intriguing man, certainly, but in the end not someone remarkably creative or profound, or even of historical importance beyond aviation. Indeed, Lindbergh's sad fate, as we will disclose here, is that his life gauges the perils of modern celebrity-hood, and of the distorted perceptions of one's public acts that come when one's opponents in a democratic debate hurriedly want to end all the talk and let the killing begin.
Lindbergh became the most famous man in the nation, and perhaps the world, when in 1927 he became the first solo flier to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a continuous journey. With the adulation and obsessive attention of millions in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, Lindbergh grew obsessed with his privacy. In 1932, when his son, Charles, Jr., only two years old, was kidnapped and murdered, the press turned the crime into a money-making machine. Lindbergh did not just lament the "yellow" journalists that hounded him wherever he went; several observers have suggested he came to distrust Americans and doubt the promises of democratic society. He moved to England in December, 1935. Almost immediately, the looming threat of war interfered with the quiet life Lindbergh envisioned for himself, his wife Anne Morrow, and their second son, Jon. Lindbergh's close friend, the French scientist Alexis Carrel, with whom he had worked since late 1930 on developing a perfusion pump with which to transfer organs, was forced to leave his position at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Health in New York in part because of his controversial support for Mussolini. With the Italian conquest of Ethiopia earlier in 1935, the Fascist regime faced increased opposition from those in democratic nations who had previously proved willing to overlook its dictatorial approach. Later, once Germany had attacked France, Carrel wholeheartedly joined the side of his native nation, and looked disappointed upon Lindbergh's efforts to keep the U.S. out. And yet, because Carrel and Lindbergh had explored the possibilities of eugenics—Carrel expressing extremist views on the matter in his book Man, the Unknown [1935]—and not because Carrel then decided to collaborate with the Vichy regime (since at that point the two were rarely in communication and Lindbergh's views were already set) the scientist is seen as one of the many nefarious influences pushing Lindbergh, the naive mid-westerner, towards Nazism. In fact, Americans in the early Twentieth Century were often quite fond of eugenicist ideas, whether they be spewing hatred toward those of African descent or entertaining the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Later, we'll look further into this house of mirrors.
Within a half-year of his time in Britain, Lindbergh found himself embroiled in the diplomatic intrigue among Britain, France, and Germany in the period leading up to the German conquest of Czechoslovakia. In May, 1936, Truman Smith, the U.S. Military Attaché to Germany, who was responsible for reporting on the state of the German military, decided to use Lindbergh's fame to his diplomatic advantage. Asking Lindbergh if he would agree to tour German airplane factories and Luftwaffe bases, and asking the Nazi government if it would consent to such a visit, affirmative answers came from both ends; over the course of the next three years, Lindbergh made several visits to Germany, enacting one of the most infamous, and largely misunderstood, diplomatic careers of those dramatic times.
As this point, we must address Max Wallace's The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich [2003]. The actual point Wallace wanted to make regarding Lindbergh is unclear: in the book's introduction, he only notes that Franklin Roosevelt at one point asserted that Lindbergh was a Nazi. In his conclusion, though, Wallace demurs from this insinuation--after "reviewing his correspondence and unpublished writings," he finds that the description of Lindbergh as a Nazi "is largely inaccurate"--which nonetheless had served as a fundamental basis of the book thus concluded! Even as a storyteller, Wallace is too much like the overbearing drunk on the stool next to you who, in the process of telling you about someone who has done him wrong, relies a little bit on hearsay and a whole lot on drawing wide-reaching conclusions from coincidental facts. The fundamental flaws of Wallace's book are easily understood and plentiful: the misleading introduction is only the first. That this book, as well as Philip Roth's Plot against America, received serious scrutiny and positive reviews reflects well enough the general lack of knowledge about the complexity of U.S. politics, both in the Thirties and in the wider "progressive" era, and a failure to understand that what is "politically correct," and more importantly what is beyond the pale in political and ideological debate at any given time, is in fact constantly in flux - indeed, debatable. The "great debate" over intervention itself was not so much about whether the U.S. would intervene—and of course events in East Asia would eventually decide the question, quite the opposite of what most had expected—but instead addressed how Americans should think about the Nazi government (and often the Soviet Union as well).
Any effort to define an equivalent of the Nazis within the United States of America would include groups like the German-American Bund, the Silver Legion, or the Christian Mobilizers. But Wallace devotes little if any attention to such groups. If Wallace were to focus on marginal figures, he would not only lose the book's main selling point - its dual-biography of the two potential Fascist leaders of the U.S., Ford and Lindbergh - but the entire notion of anti-interventionism as an equivalent to, or crucially supportive of, Nazism would prove to be bunk (as it indeed is). Even Charles Coughlin, the "radio priest" who over the course of the decade shifted from jeremiads against international commerce and the plutocracy to screeds against international commerce and the Jews, and as such peddled anti-Semitism to millions of people either through his radio program or his Social Justice publication, does not warrant much of Wallace's interest. No, far more effective to emphasize these men of greater national significance, Ford and Lindbergh, who even at the time were not so much men as they were symbols of "American" ingenuity and prowess in the age of the automobile and the airplane. In other words, Wallace never wanted to understand the degree to which Fascist beliefs and methods attracted the interest of Americans, or to which Americans directly aided the Nazis; like Roth, he wanted to sell a fantasy, wherein Ford and Lindbergh contributed significantly to the rise to power and continued success of the Nazis and envisioned similar kinds of anti-democratic, racist policies for their own nation.
No-one can doubt with any legitimacy Ford's anti-Semitism, the influence of his anti-Jewish publications on various leading Nazis, and the Ford company's extensive participation in the Germany economy during the Nazi regime. And yet, while sensationalist conclusions are hardly necessary when discussing the ignorant and duplicitous Ford, Wallace still cannot avoid them. And in comparing Lindbergh to Ford, Wallace errs badly, concocting an elaborate scheme whereby the aviator is responsible for the "appeasement" of the Nazis at Munich, at which point Wallace argues Britain and France could have successfully challenged Hitler, and thus precluded the Second World War. Quite an accusation! Like any bad historian, on this issue Wallace allows the great bugbear of causality to lead him astray. Having designated an historical event which ideally would not have happened, he then searches for as few causes of the effect as he desires - quite the sleuth!
If you follow Wallace's account, Truman Smith admired the Nazis, and served as a mentor of sorts to Lindbergh. Then again, Wallace claims at another point that both Smith and Lindbergh were duped by the Nazis, for whom the tours given to Lindbergh were an elaborate public-relations ploy designed to convince all involved that German air-power vastly out-ranked that of the British and the French. If you follow A. Scott Berg's biography of Lindbergh, simply titled Lindbergh [1998], which is obviously more sympathetic to his subject, then Smith is not such an especially important person in Lindbergh's life. Perhaps someday an historian will find himself bored enough to delve into this issue and come up with a compromise-position.
Having made visits in 1936 and 1937, Lindbergh did indeed engage in what we would later call "shuttle diplomacy" in 1938 and early 1939. He did discourage the British and French from standing up to the Germans, making exaggerated claims about Germany's military prowess. Most accounts of the time, though, suggest that he was only telling U.S. Ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, and the Britons themselves, what they wanted to hear. While Wallace does argue with some effectiveness that Lindbergh's influence on the French was strong, though again he exaggerates his case, the notion that Lindbergh was a decisive influence on the British government is speculation. But not merely speculation. In fact, such ideas also suggest that Wallace wants to believe that the war could have been avoided. Nevermind that, indeed, it perhaps could have been. And indeed, as many starry-eyed Americans like to believe, perhaps Joseph Kennedy's son, John, would've pulled the U.S. out of Vietnam if he hadn't been assassinated. The problem with these kinds of counterfactuals is not so much their probability, but that self-proclaimed historians engage in such nonsense to begin with. After all, not matter how probable they may be, they are still counterfactuals - literally, against the facts. What benefit comes with these beliefs that the entire system was not to blame, but only a few dastardly individuals? Does it make the present-day reader feel better about their own submissiveness to the institutions that daily circumscribe their thoughts and actions? Ultimately, in presenting fantastical distortions of reality, Wallace's scenario shares a crucial trait with the conspiratorial accounts of Jewish bankers and communists derailing Germany - no, the entire world! - offered by the Nazis and the likes of Charles Coughlin: they are invitations to hatred.
Defenders of U.S. military and imperial might like Max Wallace tend to ignore two aspects of U.S. history that override the differences between interventionists and anti-interventionists: first, as far as most conservative Americans, and even many of a more liberal persuasion, were concerned, communism/ the Soviet Union (the two having been conflated) was a greater threat than Nazism; and second, as Lindbergh hoped, the European war ultimately descended into a German-Russian conflict, with the Americans playing a role relatively minimal, the nation coming out of the war in a remarkable advantageous position compared to every other major imperial power. As noted above, all sides of the "great debate" over intervention tended to ignore the questions arising from Japanese conquests in East Asia; and yet, it was precisely the strong presence of the U.S. in that region, and its ability to respond to Japanese aggression, that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and finally U.S. entry into the wider war. As we will see when we discuss Gerald Nye and the neutrality movement, those opposed to war focused on how to stay out of the European war, while those in favor only rarely pointed to Japanese abuses, even though at that point (before the German invasion of Russia, and before the Nazis, especially as they realized they would lose the war, perversely intensified the "final solution" to the "Jewish question") Japanese atrocities, in China and elsewhere, were often more gruesome.
Berg's long, intricate biography warns the reader away from a simplistic understanding of Lindbergh's political stance. Though Wallace is certain that Lindbergh overestimated the strength of the German Luftwaffe and thus rashly discouraged the British and the French from confronting Germany militarily in 1938, when Berg studies the report that Lindbergh and Truman Smith submitted in 1937, after Lindbergh's second visit to Germany, he comes up with a different take: "'A highly competent observer,' Truman wrote in conclusion, referring to Lindbergh, estimated that 'if the present progress curves of [America and Germany] should continue as they have in the past two years, Germany should obtain technical parity with the U.S. by 1941 or 1942.'" Smith argued that Germany wasn't up to par with Britain yet either. Furthermore, the report was used to try to build up support for increased funding for the Army Air Corps. Similarly, in Britain and France the same leaders who knew at the time that Lindbergh's accounts of German capabilities were exaggerated still appreciated the urgency he helped instill among the elites of their respective nations.
Who looked askance at such military increases? Precisely the same neutralists and anti-interventionists whom Lindbergh would later join on stage at America First gatherings. Indeed, Lindbergh never shared the radical leftist views of many of his fellow America First members, whether they be neutralist Senators like Nye and Burton Wheeler, or the Socialist leader Norman Thomas, or intellectuals like John Flynn or Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard. Wallace points to a speech Lindbergh later gave wherein the aviator discounts the utility of increased military spending, his anti-war stance apparently having derailed his concern for U.S. "preparedness." Lindbergh did often came off sounding like more of a pacifist or anti-imperialist in his radio addresses, magazine articles, and America First speeches of 1939-1941 precisely because of the great influence of neutralist and other liberal and radical groups, politicians, and public intellectuals on the anti-interventionist movement. We will see more clearly with Gerald Nye's neutralist crusade how progressives helped define the terms of the "great debate," a debate that pitted them against fellow progressives. Wallace, though, merely sees another opportunity to make Lindbergh's actions match what the Nazis would supposedly want him to be doing; and avoids or mentions in passing, as if embarrassed, all other kinds of circumstantial evidence that would suggest otherwise. Using his logic, we could conclude that, since the Nazis discouraged the German-American Bund, and yet since members of that organization showed up at some America First meetings, that Lindbergh in fact was an anti-Nazi, sabotaging the cause of anti-interventionism - indeed, that he knew the obsessive attention he would attract would make the entire thing a charade! Quite a cunning individual! As facetious as we sound, Wallace's big findings are indeed so easily wrought.
Much like Lindbergh's traumatic experience with the death of his young child helps explain his aversion to modern urban, democratic culture, another aspect of his personal life explains why, despite his overall conservatism, in his anti-war speeches he comes off like an old progressive. In this case, it was not his experiences, but his father's. Charles August "C.A." Lindbergh, father to Charles Augustus Lindbergh—one could write an entire book using this difference in middle names as its foundation, and tell the story of not only these two men, but of the U.S. as it rose to imperial prominence—was a Representative for Minnesota who opposed intervention in the First World War and, when he ran for governor in 1918, was subject to smears and foul-play far more extreme than what his son would face two decades later, including physical attacks and persistent harassment. While Berg suggests that the father influenced the son, in reading the biography one senses that neither Lindbergh nor any retrospective commentator could possibly register exactly how this influence worked. As for Wallace's account, again he uses what he wants to: so the father's racist views, which were never significant in his political career, were supposedly passed down to his son, but his socialist and pacifist leanings were not. The urgency and consistency with which Lindbergh approached his anti-war activism (even when, intellectually speaking, his arguments failed) suggests otherwise. Whether speaking for large radio audiences or at America First meetings, Lindbergh approved of the neutrality legislation that had been passed in varying forms by Congress since 1935 and expressed a non-romantic perspective on inter-imperial conflict. Granted, these aspects rest uncomfortably within a larger framework of the racial divide between the West and the rest of the world. But, while Wallace sees this contradiction as a sign of deviance, and of the influence of what he calls "the intellectualized racism of the Nazis," as compared to "the everyday socialized racism of so many ordinary Americans" (an utterly ludicrous distinction, and a profoundly misguided one too) those of us not wearing ideological blinders call it as it is: a contradiction.
A few infamous incidents or aspects of Lindbergh's anti-interventionism should be addressed. First, although, as Wallace notes, Lindbergh did state he was not acting as an agent for the U.S. government when he engaged in his German inspections, nonetheless he could not, as Wallace goes on to imply, have purposely avoided giving useful information to U.S. leaders. Throughout his 1936 tour, Lindbergh was accompanied by Theodore Koenig, an assistant attaché to Truman Smith. As Berg mentions, Smith later wrote Lindbergh to tell him that after the aviator's visit Koenig had been allowed to see more factories and airfields than before. Wallace also fails to tell his reader that the speech Lindbergh gave in Germany in 1936 expressed stark reservations about advances in aviation. Berg quotes the following:
"'We who are in aviation carry a heavy responsibility on our shoulders,' Lindbergh said, 'for while we have been drawing the world closer together in peace we have stripped the armor of every nation in war. It is no longer possible to shield the heart of a country with its army. Armies can no more stop an air attack than a suit of mail can stop of a rifle bullet… Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value most, are laid bare to our bombardment.'"
This passage manages to suggest both a strong anti-war inclination, while also putting the lie to stereotypes about "isolationism" and its naïve assumption of U.S. impregnability from attack. For his 1937 visit, Lindbergh was indeed given tours alone, but as noted above he helped Smith write a report on Germany capability.
Wallace does not mention that Lindbergh clearly stated he decided not to move to Berlin in late 1938 because of the Kristallnacht of November 9, when synagogues and Jewish-owned business were destroyed and thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. As Berg quotes Lindbergh, "'I do not wish to make a move which would seem to support the German action against the Jews.'" Of course, we would not expect Wallace to understand that, precisely because he thought the Nazis had largely had a positive effect on Germany, and because he sincerely wanted peace between Germany and the West, Lindbergh was concerned with the anti-Jewish fanaticism of both the Nazis and the German people.
Another controversy came when Lindbergh and other America First speakers were photographed supposedly giving the Nazi salute at a meeting at Madison Square Garden. Wallace's dishonesty is most transparent on this matter. Every account of the meeting says that the speakers on the platform were giving the Bellamy salute, once a common accompaniment to the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. A photographer framed his shot, whether intentionally or not, in such a way that the U.S. flag which stood near the speakers did not appear; as Berg notes, Henry Luce, the notorious right-wing imperialist editor of Time and Life magazines, gladly ran the picture. Wallace also uses the photograph, saying in the caption that Lindbergh claimed he was waving to the crowd; he does not cite where he got this information. Wallace does not let the reader know that the speakers were giving the Bellamy salute, or even that the Bellamy salute ever existed. In fact, the gesture of only placing one's hand over the heart did not become the new norm until well into U.S. involvement in the war.
Finally, there are Lindbergh's comments on Jews in the infamous Des Moines speech for America First. Critical of "the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, [who] for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war," Lindbergh stated, "We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction." As Berg argues, "in suggesting the American Jews were 'other' people and that their interests were 'not America,' [Lindbergh] implied exclusion." Indeed, Lindbergh made quite a stupid gaffe in comparing the opinions of American Jews to those of a foreign people, and in using the same "un-American" claptrap his opponents were often resorting to. In the same speech, he also said, "No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany." This statement obviously does not make the other less offensive; rather, it suggests a hurried, confused mind, and a lack of intellectual self-discipline. Also, the pressures that came with political engagement of the kind Lindbergh had never desired or envisioned for himself had certainly taken a toll. His effectiveness as a political leader had surely come to an end with that speech of September 11, 1941.
The only historian to have explained the relationship between extremist groups and genuine anti-interventionism/Neutralism adequately is Geoffrey S. Smith, author of To Save a Nation: American 'Extremism,' the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II [1973; with new epilogue, 1992]. Unfortunately, since Smith's subject is the extremist groups and not the moderate or leftist Neutralist and anti-interventionist movements, he has difficulty defending his central argument: that exaggerated fears of the extremists on the part of liberal interventionists were in turn imposed upon all others opposed to intervention and thus made a reasonable debate on the issue impossible. Without delving into the particulars of the varieties of Neutralism/anti-interventionism, Smith cannot prove to the reader that they differed radically from the numerous right-wing crazies of the time. As such, To Save a Nation, while making a valuable contribution, does not compare favorably to Michael Paul Rogin's book, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter [1967], a work of central significance both to U.S. historiography and, ideally, to any potential historical understanding of their nation on the part of the reform-minded and other dissenters. It effectively delineates the difference between the reactionary strain of agrarian radicalism that ultimately led to Joseph McCarthy and the leftist agrarian movements that consistently avoided nativist and racist appeals and advocated activist economic policies and anti-imperialism.
Beyond his thorough histories of Coughlin's activities and of William Dudley Pelley's Silver Legion and Fritz Kuhn's German-American Bund, other individuals and groups are discussed at least briefly, including the No Foreign War Committee led by Verne Marshall and the varied organizations and publications of George Sylvester Viereck. The reader particularly interested in right-wing radicalism, though, should focus less on these particular histories and instead turn to the chapter, "The Myth of Fascism, the Bogey of Anti-Semitism," for an interpretation of 1930's extremism, especially its complex anti-Semitism, and the roots of both in agrarian dissent going back to the late-Nineteenth Century. However, Smith is not following the example of Richard Hofstadter, who claimed to disclose Joseph McCarthy's dark origins in the "paranoid style" of psychologically-tormented Populist agrarianists. Smith, like Rogin, justly criticizes Hofstadter's work.
Smith argues that Coughlin and other extremists could not even begin to oppose the Lend-Lease bill proposed by Roosevelt in early 1941, as by that point they had been largely discredited. Though Smith effectively shows that only fringe groups like the Bund openly supported the Nazis (and yet did not receive support in kind from the Germans themselves, who after all always wanted the U.S. to stay out of the war) as far as a rapidly increasing number of Americans were concerned, opposition to U.S. intervention or refusal to voice at least a modicum of sympathy for the British and occupied Europe amounted to Nazism. As Smith suggests, Coughlin was generally too inconsistent and incompetent to come out fully for any cause or any nation; still, as noted above, the views of the "radio priest" were despicable, if not initially then certainly by 1937, reaching a nadir when Social Justice followed Henry Ford's example and published parts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, though hardly as extensively or with as much expository support as Ford's Dearborn Independent had. In contrast, America First, established in 1940, disavowed the support of extremists and drew large crowds up until the Pearl Harbor attack. While the organization's opposition to aid for the British put it at odds with what polls suggested a majority of Americans supported, still it served its purpose as a counterweight in mainstream political debate to the Roosevelt administration, which until December 7, 1941, disingenuously claimed it did not want to intervene militarily.
Smith makes the crucial point to consider about the origins of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Created in May, 1938, at the urging of Representative Samuel Dickstein, who "spoke loudly and often of the threat posed by the Bund and other Nazi sympathizers," but chaired by the Texan Democrat Martin Dies, the Committee soon became a "cruel joke," as "the continuing American dialogue with and distrust of Marxian socialism, the liberal orientation (and, by implication, socialist appearance) of the New Deal, and the dearth of a national experience with anything that could be equated with contemporary Nazism, combined to determine the Committee's decision that domestic communism was by far the greatest menace." Soon enough, Coughlin, Pelley, and other right-wingers spoke approvingly of the Committee's work, even as in the long run they "stood to suffer as a result": Americans "had placed them in the same ideological bullpen as their archenemies, the hated Bolsheviks." And moreover, the trap had already been set for Lindbergh and other anti-interventionists to be smeared as pro-Nazi.
As for the comment above—that Lindbergh's anti-Semitism, from the evidence provided by Berg and Wallace, is not markedly distinct for the times in which he lived—Smith offers a corroborating take on the issue:
"When Lindbergh named the Jews as one of the three main groups seeking intervention, the outraged response of interventionists seemed to draw a distinct ethical barrier between a tolerant Roosevelt administration and its bigoted, extremist opponents. Yet, as White House policies toward Jewish refugees from the European conflict indicate, this view is at best misleading. While denouncing glandular anti-Semites like the Bundists, Pelley, Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, and, allegedly, Lindbergh, pre-Pearl Harbor interventionists either could not see, or more likely found it impolitic to admit, that their own house was permeated by a powerful, albeit genteel, anti-Semitism.
"Recent scholarship demonstrates that fully one-third of the American populace was prepared to approve anti-Jewish immigration measures, hardly astonishing in a nation still confronting economic woes. The fate of the Wagner-Rogers Bill in February 1939 indicated that two-thirds of Americans polled opposed the measure to admit twenty thousand additional Jewish refugee children beyond the annual quota of twenty-seven thousand persons from Germany and Austria. Skeptical Americans saw the bill as 'a wedge for thousands more' while several Jewish leaders worried that passage actually would strengthen anti-Semitism.
"Even more important in shaping the State Department's restrictive immigration policy after 1938 was the fear shared by Roosevelt, [J. Edgar] Hoover, and Under Secretary of State Breckenridge Long that Jewish refugees might themselves be part of a fifth-column recruited to serve Hitler's interests in the United States. Long personally disliked Jews, and he and the President were known to share a chuckle at anti-Semitic jokes. In private moments, F.D.R. exhibited some dubious views on racial issues, including thoughts of cross-breeding Europeans and Asians to subdue the delinquent traits of the Japanese. On one occasion, he told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that 'you either have to castrate the German people or you have to treat them in such a manner that they can't go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.' Roosevelt also disdained the Burmese as 'dislikeable,' and he told Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference in 1945 that the Vietnamese were 'a people of small stature… and not war-like.' On another occasion, as he discussed with associates the Puerto Rican birthrate, the President insinuated, jokingly, the need to use 'the methods which Hitler used effectively,' in this case an electric current, 'very simple and painless,' that would 'sterilize subjects in about twenty seconds.'"
Despite these copious examples, Smith misses a crucial larger point to be made on this matter: the base of support for intervention and for the Democratic party generally remained the racially-segregated South, which in the Thirties was only slowly moving away from the period of repeated lynchings of African Americans—these lynchings for white Southerners essentially serving as a celebration of the degraded position of former slaves in the Jim Crow era. The Democratic party would have never held power without the solid support of the southeastern states, and the Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt would have never been able to set the terms of the debate over neutrality or engage in secretive and dishonest efforts to push their people towards war without the cover provided by their legions of reliable Democratic votes in the southeast.
In his book's conclusion, Max Wallace, having finally stated plainly that Lindbergh was not a Nazi, still wants to put forth a harsh rebuke of some sort, and thus strives to show Lindbergh's anti-Semitism. We wonder why anyone besides Lindbergh himself would want to know with such certainty how Lindbergh thought and felt about Jews, unless Lindbergh had been in the position to force anti-Semitism upon others or to persecute Jews; and yet he never was. [A fundamental problem with Roth's Plot against America lies with his notion of Lindbergh-as-President, since not only would Lindbergh have never run for the office, but in 1940 the Republicans nominated Wendell Wilkie, a rare internationalist among their ranks; as such, Roth fails to write a conceivable fictionalized history.] Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, did hold high office. And yet we can't imagine Wallace working as hard to understand Roosevelt's racism—or, if not racism, then his unwillingness to challenge the racism of the southeastern states. And yet, beyond Roth's unwittingly-absurdist world, the only U.S. president to engage in Nazi-like policies was Roosevelt himself, when he sent approximately 120 thousand Japanese Americans to internment camps. Wallace continually demands, and quotes others demanding, to know why Lindbergh never showed any concern over the plight of the European Jews. And yet, how few Americans have asked the same question of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, with regard to the Vietnamese, even though they—again, unlike Lindbergh, but like Roosevelt—were the ones actually making the decision for war and bloodshed? When will Americans confront long-standing, unquestioned beliefs in the inferiority of East Asians that allowed the murder of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians to pass without much trepidation on the part of many Americans?
Were the Vietnamese too willing to forgive us? By fighting back, are the nationalists of Iraq and Palestine, or the radicals of politicized Islam, insuring they won't be dehumanized? I think so; unfortunately, their belief that they have no other choice is not unjustified. And thus, we come again to the basic reason why Lindbergh's opinions on race and politics have been subject to such scrutiny: he chose the losing side in a debate in which there had to be one, final, correct position. He didn't rush to war even though he was among the elite of a rising imperial power that held an advantageous position with which to rise to the top of the "great power" heap. He wasn't a ruthless, means-justify-the-ends guy. He didn't play the game. As such, he questions what Americans do, and what "America" means. In part, he tried to deny Americans an enemy to fight against, one of their mirror-image/doppelganger sources of identity and purpose. As far as most Americans are concerned, there's no greater crime.