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• Charles A. Lindbergh

Charles Augustus Lindbergh, the only child of Swedish immigrant Charles August Lindbergh and Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh, was born in Detroit on 4th February, 1902. His father was a supporter of the Republican Party and in 1907 was elected to the House of Representatives.

His parents separated when he was a child and his mother became a chemistry teacher at Cass Technical High School. Lindbergh's education involved him studying in over twelve schools. This included schools in Michigan, California Washington and Minnesota.

Charles August Lindbergh was a strong opponent of America's entry into the First World War. Lindbergh argued that war had been declared for financial reasons and in 1917 he brought articles of impeachment against members of the Federal Reserve Board including Paul Warburg and William P. G. Harding. Lindbergh charged that the Federal Reserve Board members were involved "in a conspiracy to violate the Constitution and laws of the United States."

Lindbergh graduated from Little Falls High School in 1918. Lindbergh worked on the farm owned by his father's family before entering the University of Wisconsin. He did not stay long and left his studies to work for the Nebraska Aircraft Company. In 1923 Lindbergh joined the United States Air Service and by 1925 was a second lieutenant in the Reserves. The following year he began work as an airmail pilot between St Louis and Chicago.

Raymond Orteig, the owner of the Lafayette Hotel, announced that he was willing to pay $25,000 to the first person to fly nonstop between New York City and Paris, a distance of nearly 3,600 miles (5,800 km). Several well-known flying aces from the First World War tried to win the Orteig Prize. This included René Fonck who crashed on takeoff on 21st September, 1926, in a three-engine Sikorsky S-35. Charles Nungesser departed from France on 8th May, 1927, but he was never seen nor heard from again.

Lindbergh decided he would have an attempt on the prize. He obtained a $15,000 loan from the State National Bank of St. Louis and along with a $2,000 of his own savings and commissioned a custom built monoplane named Spirit of St Louis from the Ryan Aircraft Company of San Diego. Lindbergh left Curtiss Field on the morning of 20th May 1927 and took 33 hours for the 3,600 mile journey between the United States and France.

When Lindbergh arrived back in the United States President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Over 4 million people lined the parade route in New York and the mayor, Jimmy Walker, pined the city's Medal of Valor upon him. Over the next few months Lindbergh helped promote aviation through the Guggenheim Foundation Fund. This involved visiting 92 cities and making 147 speeches.

Lindbergh married Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow on 27th May, 1929, and eventually had six children. On 1st March 1932, Lindbergh's baby son was kidnapped from his home in Hopewell, New Jersey. He was later found dead and Bruno Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter, was executed for the crime on 3rd April, 1936. Lindbergh and his wife were devastated by this event and decided to move to Europe in December 1935 in order to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria". The Lindberghs did not return to the United States until April 1939.

In September 1940, Lindbergh helped Burton K. Wheeler and Norman Thomas to form the America First Committee (AFC). I t soon became the most powerful isolationist group in the United States. The AFC had four main principles: (1) The United States must build an impregnable defense for America; (2) No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America; (3) American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European War; (4) "Aid short of war" weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.

When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he realised that it would be vitally important to enlist the United States as Britain's ally. Churchill appointed William Stephenson as the head of the British Security Coordination (BSC). As William Boyd has pointed out: "The phrase is bland, almost defiantly ordinary, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact BSC, as it was generally known, represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history... With the US alongside Britain, Hitler would be defeated - eventually. Without the US (Russia was neutral at the time), the future looked unbearably bleak... polls in the US still showed that 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention."

Stephenson was particularly concerned with the growth of the America First Committee. Stephenson later recalled that Lindbergh soon emerged as the leader of the isolationist movement and this was a particular problem as he was considered to be a national hero. In the summer of 1940 Charles Lindbergh made several critical speeches of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After one particularly objectionable speech, he told Henry Morgenthau, "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi." He wrote to Henry Stimson and claimed that: "When I read Lindbergh's speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient."

Roosevelt was concerned about the impact that Lindbergh was having on American public opinion. He decided to recruit J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, in his campaign against Lindbergh. Roosevelt's attorney general, Robert Jackson commented, "The two men liked and understood each other." Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover to investigate Charles Lindbergh, one of the leaders of the American First Committee. He willingly did so for he had been upset by Lindbergh's critical comments about the failures of the FBI investigation into the kidnapping and murder of his infant son. He also provided detailed reports on other isolationists such as Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye and Hamilton Fish.

Roosevelt wrote to Hoover thanking him for this information. "I have intended writing you for some time to thank you for the many interesting and valuable reports that you have made to me regarding the fast moving situations of the last few months." Hoover replied on 14th June, 1940: "The letter is one of the most inspiring messages which I have ever been privileged to receive; and, indeed, I look upon it as rather a symbol of the principles for which our Nation stands. When the President of our country, bearing the weight of untold burdens, takes the time to express himself to one of his Bureau heads, there is implanted in the hearts of the recipients a renewed strength and vigor to carry on their tasks."

On 13th February, 1941, the President approved the establishment of "a small special intelligence and fact finding unit" that would be led by the journalist, John Franklin Carter. Carter later admitted: "The overall condition was attached to the operation by President Roosevelt that it should be entirely secret and would be promptly disavowed in the event of publicity... That year's military appropriations act included an Emergency Fund for the President, from which FDR transferred $10,000 to the State Department... to finance Carter, ostensibly by buying from him surveys on conditions in various countries, with Germany leading the list."

Adolf Berle was placed in charge of distributing the funds. On 20th February, Berle recorded: ""Jay Franklin (J.F. Carter) came in to see me today. He stated as a result of his conversation with the President and with you, and preparatory to the work he had been asked to do, he had spent some seven hundred dollars, and that he would be broke by the end of this week.... He wanted an advance of some kind against the compensation which he would eventually receive for his work. Accordingly I lent him seven hundred dollars.... I am not, of course, familiar with what the President has asked him to do, nor do I wish to be."

On 21st April, 1941, Rex Stout made a speech in New York City where he attacked the activities of Lindbergh: "I wish I could look you in the eye, Colonel Lindbergh, when I tell you that you simply don't know what it's all about.... A desperate war is being fought, and the winners of the war will win the oceans. No matter what we do, we shall be either one of the winners, or one of the losers; no shivering neutral will get a bite of anything but crow when the shooting stops. It would therefore seem to be plain imbecility not to go in with Britain and win.... Every fascist and pro-Nazi publication in America, without exception, applauds and approves of him.... Dozens of times in the past year he has been enthusiastically quoted in the newspapers of Germany and Italy and Japan."

Stout then went onto defend himself against the attacks he had received from America First Committee: "The America First Committee is calling people like me, who are convinced that we should go in with Britain now and win, a gang of warmongers.... If a 1941 warmonger is a man who advocates that we should immediately send warships and the men we have trained to sail them and shoot their guns, and airplanes and the boys we have trained to fly them and drop their bombs, send them to meet our acknowledged deadly enemy where he is, and attack him and defeat him, then count me in."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was furious with Lindbergh after a speech he made on 23rd April, 1941, which included the following passage: "It is not only our right but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend. I ask you to look at the map of Europe today and see if you can suggest any way in which we could win this war if we entered it. Suppose we had a large army in America, trained and equipped. Where would we send it to fight? The campaigns of the war. show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an army, on a hostile coast."

On 11th September, 1941, Lindbergh made a controversial speech in Des Moines: "The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire... These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence... It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany... But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences."

Lindbergh speech resulted in some critics describing him as anti-Semitic. He recorded in his diary on 18th September that John T. Flynn, one of the leaders of the America First Committee paid him a visit: "John Flynn came at 11:00; and we talked the situation over for an hour. Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines, but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn's attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private. But apparently he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is done."

According to Joseph E. Persico, the author of Roosevelt's Secret War (2001): "Within days, he delivered a fifty-page report for placement in the President's night time reading file. Thus armed, FDR was able to fire back when a reporter at a press conference asked him why Colonel Lindbergh had not been called to active duty. That was simple. Lindbergh, the President explained, was the equivalent of the arch-Civil War Copperhead Clement L. Vallandigham. The thrust drew blood. Lindbergh wrote FDR three days later resigning his commission as a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve. In Roosevelt's mind, his assignment to Carter had not been prompted by personal animus. Lindbergh, in FDR's eyes, was an enemy of his country, as dangerous as any fifth columnist, and had to be exposed."

President Roosevelt told Henry Morgenthau, "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi." He wrote to Henry Stimson and claimed that: "When I read Lindbergh's speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient." Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover to keep a watch on him. He willingly did so for he had been upset by Lindbergh's critical comments about the failures of the FBI investigation into the kidnapping and murder of his infant son.

By the spring of 1941, the British Security Coordination estimated that there were 700 chapters and nearly a million members of isolationist groups. Leading isolationists were monitored, targeted and harassed. This was often done by the Fight for Freedom, a group funded by the BSC and led by Allen Dulles. For example, when Lindbergh, made speeches, thousands of handbills were handed out attacking him as an appeaser and Nazi lover.

The AFC influenced public opinion through publications and speeches and eventually had 450 local chapters and over 800,000 members. The AFC was dissolved four days after the Japanese Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor on 7th December, 1941. Hamilton Stuyvesan Fish later recalled: "Franklin Roosevelt took us into a war without telling the people anything about it. He served an ultimatum which we knew nothing about. We were forced into the war. It was the biggest cover-up ever perpetrated in the United States of America."

Lindbergh now sought to be recommissioned in the USAAF, but the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, under instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, declined the request. Instead he joined United Aircraft and in 1944 he became the company's technical representative in the Pacific Theater of Operations. In his six months in the Pacific in 1944, Lindbergh took part in fighter bomber raids on Japanese positions, flying about 50 combat missions against the Japanese Air Force.

Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Spirit of St. Louis (1953). In 1954 Lindbergh was appointed a Brigadier General in the Air Force Reserves.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh died at Maui, Hawaii, on 26th August, 1974.