| Original Caption: “Lindbergh speaks on radio network – Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, noted flyer, is shown as he spoke over a nationwide radio network, making a plea to the people of the United States to stay out of the European war. Col. Lindbergh has been relieved from a five-month period of service by the War Department.” On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s military forces attacked Poland in eastern Europe, and 2 days later, Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany. The European war was a reality. United States Army Reserve Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974) was deeply shocked by the entire affair. If Britain and France “wanted to fight a German eastward movement, why in heaven’s name pick this particular set of circumstances to fight over? They are in a hopeless position militarily.” He was convinced that if the Allies tried “to break the German Western Wall,” they would lose, unless America entered the war.” If the United States entered, Europe would be “still more prostrated” after the war ended. And he feared the consequences in America by that time. “The future of the human world hangs in the balance today. This war will change all of our lives.” Ever since his historic flight, the reclusive Lindbergh had been a figure of mystery to the American people. In all those years, he had never publicly revealed his political opinions or discussed his private feelings. Nor had he ever spoken on American radio, not even at the time of his son’s kidnapping. By September 7, he had prepared rough drafts of an article and 2 speeches, but was not satisfied with them. He wrote in his private journal that day: “I do not intend to stand by and see this country pushed into war, if it is not absolutely essential to the future welfare of the nation. Much as I dislike taking part in politics and public life, I intend to do so if necessary to stop the trend which is now going on in this country.” On Sunday, September 10, he telephoned diplomat William R. Castle (June 19, 1878 – October 13, 1963) and conservative broadcaster Fulton Lewis (April 30, 1903 – August 20, 1966) and reached the decision to make a radio broadcast the following week. Lewis made arrangements for the Mutual Broadcasting System to carry the address live on Friday evening, September 15, 1939. The National Broadcasting System and the Columbia Broadcasting System also carried it, providing full national coverage. During the days leading up to the 1st noninterventionist broadcast, Lindbergh worked on drafting his speech while continuing his duties with the Air Corps and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). On Thursday, September 14, the day before the broadcast, he told United States Army Air Corps General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold (June 25, 1886 – January 15, 1950) of his intention to speak out, though Arnold already knew and may have privately shared Lindbergh’s general view on the subject. The 2 officers agreed that Lindbergh should discontinue his “inactive-active” status with the Air Corps, but Lindbergh offered to help in the future if the General wished. The Colonel let Arnold read the draft of his radio address, and the General saw nothing improper in it so far as Lindbergh’s connection with the Air Corps was concerned. Lindbergh did not, however, permit Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring (May 31, 1887 – September 9, 1967), or anyone else in the Roosevelt administration, to see the speech before the broadcast. His noninterventionist activities never diminished the friendship and mutual respect that he and Arnold had for each other. Secretary Woodring, though a noninterventionist himself, was displeased when he learned that Lindbergh planned to speak. He would have prevented it if he could. Colonel Lindbergh spent Friday morning, September 15, at a long meeting of NACA. In the early afternoon, he returned to his Washington apartment for lunch with his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (June 22, 1906 – February 7, 2001), and Fulton Lewis. Later, he closeted himself with Lieutenant Colonel Truman Smith (August 25, 1893 – October 3, 1970), who had been trying to reach him all day. Smith, it turned out, was the unenthusiastic errand boy for an administration attempt to “buy off” Lindbergh with the promise of a high government position. Knowing that a Lindbergh broadcast would draw a huge audience, the White House scrambled to stop him. Smith passed on an oral message from Hap Arnold, who received it from War Secretary Harry Woodring, who in turn got it from unnamed White House officials. If Lindbergh canceled the speech, the message said, the administration would create a new cabinet post for him. He would be named secretary of the Air Corps, a position that would make him the coequal of Woodring and Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison (August 3, 1890 – July 31, 1969). Lindbergh stared incredulously at Smith, then burst out laughing. So did Smith, who said, “You see, they’re worried.” Hap Arnold knew that Lindbergh would turn down the proposition, Smith added, but since it had come from the War Secretary’s office, the Air Corps chief felt obliged to pass it on. Lindbergh, of course, did not accept the “offer,” but the episode further increased his misgivings about the Roosevelt administration. Castle had suggested that he and newsman Frank R. Kent (1877 – 1958) look over Lindbergh’s speech before he delivered it to assure its effectiveness, but Lindbergh did not turn to them. It was his practice to write all of his own non-interventionist speeches and articles, and he spent considerable time preparing them. Anne had read that 1st address carefully in advance and had suggested improvements; she did so with most of his speeches and articles. Arnold, Truman Smith, and Fulton Lewis saw the draft in its final form. At 2145 Hours that evening, standing before 6 microphones in a small room in the Carlton Hotel in Washington, Colonel Lindbergh broadcast his speech on “America and European Wars.” Thanks to enormous public interest in the speech, all 3 national radio networks carried it. He spoke without great oratorical flourishes, in a clipped, even-paced, slightly nasal tone. While he made no direct mention of the upcoming congressional fight over the Neutrality Act revisions, Lindbergh, his reedy, high-pitched voice containing a hint of a Midwestern twang, declared that sending munitions to the Western allies could never ensure victory. To “take part successfully” in the conflict, the country would have to send millions of American boys overseas—millions that “we are likely to lose…the best of American youth.” In his view, the war was not a battle of good versus evil, but rather a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. It was just another in a long history of internal European feuds, “a quarrel arising from the errors of the last war,” that Americans could—and should—do nothing to resolve. Lindbergh advised his massive audience to view the world situation as he did—with utter detachment, never allowing “our sentiment, our pity, our personal feelings of sympathy, to obscure the issue [or] to affect our children’s lives. We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife.” It was the duty of the United States, he added, to act as a repository of Western civilization, which was on the verge of being torn apart in Europe. “This is the test before America now.…As long as we maintain an army, a navy, and an air force worthy of the name, as long as America does not decay within, we need fear no invasion of this country.” Anne Lindbergh had reportedly edited the speech, and the line “We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife” was attributed to her. But if that was so, it was not a sentiment she shared. Unlike Lindbergh, she was never dispassionate about this war. On the day it was declared, she was consumed by visions of catastrophic destruction of the British and French air forces, Paris and London under endless bombardment, her French and British friends killed, “all the things we love…destroyed.” As she watched Charles make the broadcast in the Carlton, she prayed that the Lindberghs’ friends in Europe would realize how difficult it was for him to deliver the speech, to turn his back, in effect, on the countries that had given them sanctuary. Deep down, she knew they never would. She was fearful, too, of her own response. Could she follow Charles as his “loyal page” in the battle that had just begun? She was not entirely sure of the answer. “That is the nightmare—separation from him,” she wrote in her diary. “Suppose I should fail him?…I feel bitterly alone.” After listening to a rebroadcast later that evening at the Lewis home, Anne and Charles took a late train for New York. His battle against intervention was formally launched; it did not end until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II 27 months later. In laying out his central argument, Lindbergh took a moment to sound a disturbing note of racial supremacy. The real threat to Western civilization, he declared, came not from Germany but from the Soviet Union or some other “Asiatic intruder.” Instead of fighting one another, European countries – and the United States – should band together to “defend the white race against foreign invasion. Lindbergh’s advocacy of racial purity, which would become a hallmark of his speeches and writing over the next 2 years, was similar to the racial theories of Hitler and other Nazis. However, it was also a widespread belief throughout the United States and Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It had its origins in eugenics, a pseudoscience that advocated for the improvement of human hereditary traits through selective breeding. As the proponents of eugenics saw it, whites of Northern and Western European descent—”the exemplar of the highest type of civilization yet evolved”-were inherently su-perior, mentally and morally, to “the black, brown, and yellow races.” (Russians were included in the nonwhite category: the infusion of Mongol blood meant that the “racial characteristics of the Russian [had become] fundamentally more Asiatic than European.” Racist theories like those espoused by Lindbergh in his speech were still being put forward in the late 1930s by other well-known and influential Americans. They were also deeply embedded in the culture of the United States military. Books by prominent white supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard had long been mandatory reading at West Point and other Army institutions of higher learning. Taught that the white Aryan race had always taken “the leading part in the great drama of the world’s progress,” officers were encouraged to see themselves as the guardians of true Americanism, as embodied by Anglo-Saxon society. Perhaps because such attitudes were so commonplace, little public attention was paid at the time to Lindbergh’s references to race in his broadcast. As the White House had foreseen, however, the speech was a national sensation, not so much because of what was said (which was not very different from the arguments made by other isolationists) but because of who said it. Many newspapers and commentators criticized the speech – American journalist and interventionist Dorothy C. Thompson (July 9, 1893 – January 30, 1961) portrayed him as the pro-Nazi recipient of a German medal – and he received abusive mail. Lindbergh himself was not satisfied with his delivery. But the address also won much editorial praise and thousands of laudatory letters. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured in immediately after the broadcast from “all kinds and types of people,” Anne wrote Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (May 29, 1876 – September 7, 1954), her mother-in-law, “grateful mothers and fathers, school professors and teachers, businessmen, and farmers…C’s speech has answered a real need, a clear call in the confusion.” Among the letter writers was Hap Arnold, who told Lindbergh that his ardently isolationist boss, Secretary Woodring, thought the address “very well worded and very well delivered,” as did Arnold himself. Another of Lindbergh’s correspondents, however, was profoundly dismayed by what he had heard that night. A few weeks earlier, Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) had written to Lindbergh, asking him to deliver a letter to President Roosevelt on behalf of Einstein and 2 other noted physicists, Leo Szilard (February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) and Edward Teller (January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003). 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. 2 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.” Other non-interventionists were encouraged by the aviator’s action and hoped he might serve a leadership role in unifying and strengthening the movement to keep the United States out of World War II. For example, former United States President Herbert C. Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) wrote to Lindbergh, congratulating him on his “really great address.” On Hoover’s initiative, the 2 met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on September 21 to discuss foreign policy and the possibility of forming a nonpartisan committee to prevent the country from going to war. (Lindbergh was skeptical, and Hoover was optimistic about the utility of committees. Through Hoover and Castle, the Colonel later met other leading Republicans and non-interventionists. He thought them able and responsible, but too conservative, too political, and not the caliber of leader that America required. Senator Harry F. Byrd (June 10, 1887 – October 20, 1966) arranged for Lindbergh to meet some of his Senate colleagues, including Walter F. George (January 29, 1878 – August 4, 1957) of Georgia and Hiram W. Johnson (September 2, 1866 – August 6, 1945), an old progressive and isolationist from California. Lindbergh also visited at length with the aging Senator William E. Borah (June 29, 1865 – January 19, 1940) of Idaho, a non-interventionist and the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee. The 2 men (both proudly independent) liked and respected each other immediately, and lunched together again later. Borah startled Lindbergh with the suggestion that the aviator would make a good candidate for President — neither the 1st nor the last time that idea would be broached, and neither the 1st nor the last time Lindbergh would reject it. The responses of non-interventionists encouraged Lindbergh to continue his active opposition to American involvement in the European war. The swift and terrifying military successes of Germany’s Blitzkrieg in Poland, the ineffectiveness of British and French military efforts, and the spirited controversy in the United States over revision of neutrality legislation also encouraged his further efforts. 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 2nd nationwide radio address in the midst of the fierce congressional debate over revising the Neutrality Act. Speaking on “Neutrality and War,” he made his 2nd nationwide noninterventionist broadcast on Friday evening, October 13, 1939. This time, he went on record as opposing the sale of United States planes, ships, and most other munitions to Britain and France, adding, however, that the Allies should be allowed to buy defensive weapons such as anti-aircraft 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 sparked a storm of reaction, but this time, much of the commentary was intensely critical. But he thought it “desirable to get people thinking about fundamental problems,” and he considered the resulting criticisms to be “of very secondary importance.” “To many a United States 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 Company, who invited Lindbergh to lunch 1 October day at the Morgan headquarters on Wall Street. During Dwight Morrow’s (January 11, 1873 – October 5, 1931) 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. However, at lunch, the partners made it clear that they strongly opposed his stance on the neutrality law. The Morgan men, as 1 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 (November 21, 1886 – May 1, 1968) 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 10-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 anti-appeasement 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 1st 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 a 150 newspapers nationwide and read by an estimated 8 to 10,000,000 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 1 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 1st met Lindbergh in 1930, 3 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 1 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 (December 5, 1899 – March 16, 1975), her biographer, noted. “She never forgot [what Lindbergh had done]; it formed, or helped to form, her impression of him.” 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 2 American newspapers, she had lived in Germany and Austria during Führer und Reichskanzler (“Leader and Reichchancellor”) Adolf Hitler’s (April 20, 1889 – April 30, 1945) rise to power, and had witnessed firsthand the sheer 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, at the direct order of the Führer. It was the 1st 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 4 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 (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951), 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 believed that the war was indeed a fight between good and evil, and that America had a moral obligation to intervene. “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.” 1st Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962), 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 Thompson 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 2 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, 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 United States will hit your Son,” 1 letter began. Another said, “Why not get out of the United States, 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 3 more columns that year, followed by 6 in 1940 and 4 in 1941. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0937.jpg |
| Image Size | 381.52 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1643 x 2048 |
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| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | September 15, 1939 |
| Location | |
| City | Washington |
| State or Province | District of Columbia |
| Country | United States |
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| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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