Another of Lindbergh’s correspondents, however, was profoundly dismayed by what he had heard that night. A few weeks earlier, Albert Einstein had written to Lindbergh, asking him to deliver a letter to President Roosevelt on behalf of Einstein and two other noted physicists, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. The letter warned FDR that scientists in various countries were on the brink of producing an explosive nuclear chain reaction—a development that could lead to a bomb of extraordinary power. Noting that German scientists were among those hot on the trail of such a weapon, the letter urged Roosevelt to set up formal contact with physicists working on chain reactions in America.
Einstein had met Lindbergh in New York a few years earlier and, clearly unaware of his isolationist bent, suggested to his colleagues that the famed flier would be the perfect intermediary between them and the White House. When Lindbergh failed to respond to Einstein’s letter, Szilard wrote him a reminder on September 13. Two days later, Lindbergh delivered his speech, and the reason for his silence became obvious. “Lindbergh,” as Szilard ruefully noted to Einstein, “is not our man.”*
Most of those who wrote to Lindbergh had a different view, with many urging him to present a specific program for keeping America out of the war. After consulting with Truman Smith, William Castle, and others, Lindbergh decided to give a second nationwide radio address on October 13, in the middle of the fierce congressional debate over revision of the Neutrality Act. This time, he went on record as opposing the sale of U.S. planes, ships, and most other munitions to Britain and France, adding, however, that the Allies should be allowed to buy defensive weapons such as antiaircraft guns. Since Lindbergh himself had said repeatedly that the only effective defense against an air attack was a strong air force, he was basically ceding the advantage to Germany.
Lindbergh also claimed that Britain and France were responsible for starting the conflict, asserting that if they had “offered a hand to the struggling republic of Germany” at the end of World War I, “there would be no war today.” And, reiterating his belief in white solidarity and superiority, he declared: “Racial strength is vital; politics is luxury. If the white race is ever seriously threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French and Germans, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.”
Once again, he touched off a storm of reaction, but this time, much of the comment was intensely critical. “To many a U.S. citizen,” Time wrote, “he was a bum.” Social and business circles that had previously welcomed Lindbergh now gave him a chilly reception. They included the partners of J. P. Morgan and Co., who invited Lindbergh to lunch one October day at the Morgan headquarters on Wall Street.
During Dwight Morrow’s tenure at the House of Morgan, he had advised Lindbergh on his business dealings, and his colleagues at the firm had also befriended Morrow’s son-in-law, welcoming him and Anne into their homes and taking care of their finances while they were in Europe. But at the lunch, the partners made clear that they strongly opposed his stand on the neutrality law. The Morgan men, as one of them later noted, had long been “pro-Ally by inheritance, by instinct, by opinion, and so were almost all the people we knew on the Eastern seaboard of the United States.” After the lunch, Lindbergh noted in his journal that “obviously, my stand was extremely unpopular.… We all parted in a courteous (no personal feelings, you know) but tense atmosphere.”
The British reaction to Lindbergh’s speech was even more negative. As Anne had feared, Britons deeply resented his spurning of a country that had given him and his family refuge at a time when they needed it most. In late October, audiences at a London musical revue loudly cheered a song containing these lyrics:
Then there’s Colonel Lindbergh
Who made a pretty speech,
He’s somewhere in America,
We’re glad he’s out of reach.
Particularly painful to Anne was a column that Harold Nicolson wrote about her husband in The Spectator, a British current affairs weekly. Billed as an explanation of Lindbergh’s behavior, Nicolson’s piece contended that his “almost pathological” hatred of publicity and the press had led to a distrust of freedom of speech “and then, almost, of freedom [itself]. He began to loathe democracy.” In the ten-plus years since Lindbergh’s historic flight, Nicolson wrote, his “virility and ideas” had become “not merely inflexible but actually rigid; his self-confidence thickened into arrogance and his convictions hardened into granite.” Nonetheless, the British writer declared, people should realize that Lindbergh had never really grown up and thus should not judge him too harshly: “To this day he remains [a] fine boy from the Middle West.”
The condescending, wearily patient tone of Nicolson’s article masked real fury on the part of its author. A member of Parliament since 1935, Nicolson belonged to a small group of antiappeasement rebels in the House of Commons who believed that Britain was on the brink of catastrophe and that the Chamberlain government must do considerably more to defeat Hitler. He had no sympathy or patience for the views of this American he had once considered a friend.
Lindbergh, for his part, curtly dismissed Nicolson’s comments as “rather silly.” He commented in his journal: “Like so many others (I expected something better from him), he attacks me personally rather than the things I advocate with which he disagrees. Naturally, the English did not like my addresses, but I expected a somewhat more objective criticism.… However the country is at war, and one should be prepared to overlook and excuse many acts from [its] citizens.”
Anne could not be as dispassionate or loftily Olympian. When she first read “that biting little article,” she felt as though “my breath was knocked out of me.” The friendship of Nicolson, whose house in Kent had given her such happiness and whose warmth and encouragement helped her launch her writing career, had meant a great deal to her, and his disparagement of Charles was deeply hurtful.
Far more damaging to Lindbergh was a slashing attack by the celebrated political columnist Dorothy Thompson, America’s leading journalistic critic of Hitler and his regime. Syndicated by the New York Herald Tribune, Thompson’s column was carried by more than 150 newspapers nationwide and read by an estimated eight to ten million people a day. The massive size of her readership, combined with her weekly radio program on NBC and a popular monthly column in the Ladies’ Home Journal, had made Thompson one of the most influential molders of American public opinion in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
“People who had probably never read a book in their lives quoted her familiarly from day to day,” observed the journalist Vincent Sheean, a friend of Thompson’s. “She was as much a star as any baseball player or film actress.” Sheean’s point was underscored by the popularity of the 1942 movie Woman of the Year, whose main character, played by Katharine Hepburn, was a fictionalized, thinly disguised version of Thompson.
Dorothy Thompson had first met Lindbergh in 1930, three years after his flight to Paris, at a dinner party in northern California. Before dinner, Thompson had watched in horror as the young flier, playing one of the practical jokes of which he was so fond, stealthily poured mouthwash into a bottle of rare Burgundy being decanted on a sideboard. Prohibition still reigned in the country, and to Dorothy, “a very good Burgundy was a rare and precious thing,” Vincent Sheean noted. “She never forgot [what Lindbergh had done]; it formed, or helped to form, her impression of him.”
Columnist Dorothy Thompson testifies before a Senate committee in September 1939 in favor of repealing the ban on selling arms to Britain and France.
But irritating as his prank had been, it was his cool, unemotional rationalization of German aggression that really maddened her. Unlike Lindbergh, Thompson had not merely made a few quick, closely supervised trips to the Reich before announcing her views of the country to the world. As a foreign correspondent for two U.S. newspapers, she had lived in Germany and Austria during Hitler’s rise to power, had witnessed firsthand the sh
eer evil of his regime. She had watched as Nazi thugs broke into the houses of Jews, leftists, and other so-called enemies of the Reich, beat them with steel rods, knocked their teeth out, urinated on them, and made them kneel and kiss swastika-adorned flags. Nazism, she wrote in the early 1930s, “is a complete break with reason, with Humanism, with the Christian ethics that are at the base of liberalism and democracy.… It is the enemy of whatever is freedom-loving and life-affirming.”
In 1934, Thompson was expelled from Germany without warning, on direct orders from the Führer. It was the first time the Nazis had ever ejected an American reporter, and it made Thompson an international celebrity overnight. She began her newspaper column in 1936, and for the next four years, most of what she wrote took the form of caustic attacks on Nazi Germany, as well as on the indifference of other countries to the Nazi threat. “The spectacle of great, powerful, rich, democratic nations capitulating hour by hour to banditry, extortion, intimidation and violence is the most terrifying and discouraging sight in the world today,” she declared. “It is more discouraging than the aggression itself.” In another column, Thompson wrote that the “civilized world has had its face slapped and turned the other cheek so often that it’s become rotary.”
Her preoccupation with the international situation extended to her personal life as well. At dinner parties and other social gatherings, she could talk of virtually nothing else. “If I ever divorce Dorothy,” her husband, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, once quipped, “I’ll name Adolf Hitler as co-respondent.” She was particularly angered by her own country’s inaction. “She plainly feels that America’s neutrality is a kind of cowardice,” noted The New Yorker, “and she has repeatedly implied that if the United States manages to keep out of the war, it will be without her approval.”
Unlike Lindbergh, Thompson passionately felt that the war was indeed a fight between good and evil and that America had a moral obligation to intercede. “Believe it or not,” she wrote, in a direct slap at the flier, “there are such things in the world as morality, as law, as conscience, as a noble concept of humanity, which once awake, are stronger than all ideologies.”
The fierceness of those beliefs undoubtedly contributed to the savagery of her assault on Lindbergh. He was, she wrote in her column, “a somber cretin,” a man “without human feeling,” a “pro-Nazi recipient of a German medal.” She charged that Lindbergh had “a notion to be the American Fuhrer.” While acknowledging she had no proof for this theory, she maintained that “Colonel Lindbergh’s inclination toward Fascism is well known to his friends.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, who had her own widely syndicated newspaper column, applauded Thompson for what she called her perceptive views about Lindbergh: “She sensed in Colonel Lindbergh’s speech a sympathy with Nazi ideals which I thought existed but could not bring myself to believe was really there.” There were others, however, who thought Thompson’s incendiary remarks had gone too far. Even Harold Ickes, who had attacked Lindbergh with similarly tough language a year before, wondered whether she should have written what she did. Although he “heartily approved of what she had to say,” Ickes went on to note: “Whether it was tactful to say all of this at once is questionable.”
Thompson’s column, as well as other press criticism of Lindbergh’s October speech, undoubtedly contributed to the torrent of hate mail that descended on him and his wife, including several letters threatening to kidnap and kill their two small sons. Always in the back of Anne’s mind was the searing memory of what had happened in March 1932—“that terrible, insane, evil world of The Case.” She now wrote in her diary: “We are thrown back again into that awful atmosphere.… One can’t take a chance. I feel angry and bitter and trapped again. Where can we live, where can we go?”
Although Lindbergh shared his wife’s concern, he was determined to continue his fight against American involvement in the war. “I feel I must do this, even if we have to put an armed guard in the house,” he wrote in his journal. Then came this bitter postscript: “It is a fine state of affairs in a country which feels it is civilized: people dislike what you do, so they threaten to kill your children.”
The Lindberghs weren’t alone, however, in feeling the lash of angry public opinion. For days after her anti-Lindbergh column, Dorothy Thompson received so many menacing letters that she told friends she feared for her safety. “I pray that the first bomb that is dropped on the U.S. will hit your Son,” one letter began. Another said: “Why not get out of the U.S., as we do not care to have your kind around?” Much of the mail was addressed to “Dorothy Thompson, Warmonger.” But Thompson refused to be cowed by the hostility directed at her. She would attack Lindbergh in three more columns that year, followed by six in 1940 and four in 1941.
Robert Sherwood.
ROBERT SHERWOOD WAS ANOTHER major U.S. writer profoundly affected by what Lindbergh had to say about America and the war. But unlike Dorothy Thompson, Sherwood did not publicly skewer the aviator—at least not then. His only comment about Lindbergh’s addresses came in the form of a mild letter to the editor of Time, which had cryptically stated in an article that Lindbergh, in his second broadcast, had “represented Nobody, yet everybody.” Sherwood protested: “I beg to say he did not represent me.”
One of the best-known literary figures in New York and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, the forty-three-year-old Sherwood was the author of several popular Broadway plays. His latest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which had opened a few months before, was a smash hit and would soon win him a second Pulitzer Prize. (He would collect two more Pulitzers, as well as an Academy Award, before the end of his career.)
Sherwood had fought in World War I and, haunted by his experiences, had emerged from the conflict an embittered pacifist. Yet by the fall of 1939, he had also become convinced that Hitler represented a mortal danger not only to Europe but to the United States and the rest of the world. The playwright was struggling with the question of how to respond to such a threat when he tuned in to Lindbergh’s two speeches. The shock and outrage he felt propelled him into action. Over the next year, he would become one of the foremost activists in the fight for intervention—a crusade that would ultimately land him in the White House as a key aide to the president. And, as with Thompson, his chief bête noire would be Charles Lindbergh, a man he had once considered a hero.
Sherwood had always needed heroes to believe in. Beneath his veneer of sophisticated charm and wit lay an unrepentant romantic and idealist. “Sherwood remains an incorrigible optimist,” noted The New Yorker. “He has a faith in the ultimate triumph of the democratic principle.”
The son of a Wall Street stockbroker, Sherwood came from an affluent, well-connected New York family. His father had gone to Harvard, where he helped found the humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon and was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, the university’s famed theatrical society. Following in his father’s footsteps, Sherwood also attended Harvard, becoming the Hasty Pudding’s star playwright and president of the Lampoon. He was still at Harvard when World War I broke out. Believing that America had an obligation to aid the Allies, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was turned down because, at six foot seven, he was considered too tall. Undeterred, he dropped out of school and joined a Canadian regiment—the Fifth Royal Highlanders, also known as the Black Watch. The unit was sent to France in early 1917.
That August, the Black Watch, along with other Canadian forces, played a major role in the battle of Vimy Ridge, suffering heavy casualties. Among the injured was Sherwood, who, having been gassed the month before, fell into a booby trap during the fighting and was severely cut by barbed wire. His wounds became badly infected, and he developed respiratory and heart problems from the gassing, which resulted in several months of hospitalization.
Although horrified by the bloodbath he had witnessed, Sherwood still believed that the war’s terrible sacrifices were justified by the Allied victory, which he was sure would result in a w
orld of justice, altruism, and peace. When that didn’t happen, he felt duped and betrayed. He returned to New York disillusioned, cynical, and a rabid opponent of the League of Nations. In 1920, he cast his first presidential vote for Warren Harding, thus, as he later put it, doing “my bit in the great betrayal.… [W]hat I and all other Americans got from Harding’s victory was a decade of hypocrisy, corruption, crime, glorification of greed and depravity, to be followed logically by a decade of ascendant Hitlerism.”
That insight, however, would come many years later. In the present, Sherwood, like other veterans, underwent a difficult readjustment to civilian life. Seeking an escape from his nightmares, he threw himself into the heedless good times of the twenties. At the age of twenty-three, he got a job at Vanity Fair, a slick, sophisticated monthly that published literary essays, short stories, and poetry, as well as in-the-know articles about the theater, art, and high society. There he met twenty-five-year-old Dorothy Parker and twenty-eight-year-old Robert Benchley, another product of Harvard. The three staffers became inseparable, so much so that when Sherwood left Vanity Fair to write for a humor magazine called Life,† Parker and Benchley quickly followed him.
The trio lunched every day at the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel, near Life’s office in midtown Manhattan. Soon, other writers and editors joined them. In time, the group came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table, regarded by its members and much of New York as the embodiment of urban wit and sophistication. In addition to Sherwood, Parker, and Benchley, its regulars included playwrights Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman; columnists Heywood Broun and Franklin P. Adams; critic Alexander Woollcott; New Yorker editor Harold Ross; and novelist Edna Ferber. Other luminaries, like writer Ring Lardner, comedian Harpo Marx, and actress Helen Hayes would occasionally stop by.