"For reasons that are not American."

C

But Lindbergh, after all, turned out to be just a man, and a deeply flawed one, at that. He exploited his relationship with Harry Guggenheim to gain entrée into a world of power and money, and once within it, neglected Guggenheim who was no longer --- had never really been --- socially acceptable to Lindbergh.  

 

Eugenics was and is junk science, but it was broadly accepted in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in America and in western Europe. A popular chart of the time displayed the "Five Varieties" of Mankind. Eugenicists spent hours taking detailed and worthless measures of skulls, eye sockets, anklebones and genitalia to "prove" that "White" northern Europeans were intrinsically superior to all other human beings. Lindbergh, of Swedish extraction, must have taken great pleasure in his self-proclaimed superiority

Charles Lindbergh was a racist. His racism was not limited to Jews, but extended to “negroes” as well, and to “Asiatics” of all types. Lindbergh was a strict adherent of Nordicism --- the idea that “Nordics,” northwestern Europeans, and the Germanic peoples especially, were inherently superior to all other “races” of Man. 

Lindbergh, of course, as the son of an immigrant Swede, was as “Nordic” as “Nordic” ever got. He also believed that by selective breeding (“eugenics”) the Nordic race could be improved. He said in one of his speeches:

“We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.”

 

40,000 white supremacists hide behind masks as they march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in 1928

  

It was all pseudo-scientific Social Darwinist claptrap, but it was very popular during Lindbergh’s early lifetime, especially among the circles in which Lindbergh found himself. 

Yale’s famous “Skull and Bones” was founded as a Eugenics Club. Eugenics nonsense became deadly when the National Socialists in Germany established a State based upon race, and set out to kill Lebensunwertes Leben, “Life Unworthy of Life,” including all Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.

 

Of anti-semitism Lindbergh wrote:

Charles Lindbergh with Henry and Edsel Ford. Henry Ford’s anti-Jewish paranoia was so severe it influences attitudes toward the Ford business empire today. Since Henry Ford’s death, the Ford Foundation and other Ford companies have become apologetically supportive of Jewish causes

"We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence ... Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country."

These attitudes were not unusual for the time. In 1928, 40,000 members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C.  Indiana was known as “The Klan State” since its government was entirely controlled by members of the KKK. Throughout the Midwest and the South no one could run for public office without Klan membership or, at least, Klan approval. Lindbergh was a product of this environment. He wrote:

 

“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.”

The highly exclusive and secret Yale fraternity Skull and Bones had its start as the Yale Eugenics Club in the 1830s. Just prior to World War II, Skull and Bones had uncomfortably close ties to the Nazi eugenics movement, which borrowed the Totenkopf --- The Death's Head --- from Skull and Bones and used it as a symbol of the SS.   Skull and Bones has always been a repository of national leaders in many fields --- sometimes due more to family connections and money than to intelligence, perseverance or hard work. Famous Skull and Bones members included: William H. Welch (Dean of Johns Hopkins University), William Howard Taft (President and Chief Justice of the United States), Henry L. Stimson (U.S. Secretary of State), Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I (financier), Percy Rockefeller (Director of Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil, and Remington Arms), Averell Harriman (founder of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and Governor of New York), Prescott Bush (U.S. Senator from Connecticut), David S. Ingalls (U.S. Navy Ace), Henry Luce (founder of Time-Life), George Herbert Walker, Jr. (financier), H.J. Heinz, Jr. (food magnate), McGeorge Bundy (National Security Advisor), F.O. Matthiessen (author), John Hersey (author), James Whitmore (actor), William Sloane Coffin (clergyman and peace activist), George H.W. Bush (President of the United States), William F. Buckley Jr. (founder of The National Review), David McCullough (author), George W. Bush (President of the United States and accused war criminal), Dana Milbank (commentator), Paul Giamatti (actor), and Juan Terry Trippe (founder of Pan American World Airways)

Lindbergh’s racial attitudes were hardened by his close friendship with fellow Michigander Henry Ford. Ford, though a genius in many ways, was a notoriously virulent Jew-hater. His book, The International Jew, explaining the Jewish “conspiracy” in simple terms any Model A-owning Midwestern farmer could understand and believe, was in the glove box of every new Ford automobile, right along with the Owner’s Manual.  Ford’s frankly anti-semitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent was read avidly. Many people admired Ford, and his wild assertions about Jewish cabals were believed by many. By way of being inflammatory, Henry Ford later bruited about the untrue rumor that Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Charles Junior’s accused killer, was a Jew. In some circles it is believed today. 

Henry Ford, in fact, is probably more responsible for the rise of anti-semitism in America than any other man. “The International Jew” was a fixation for Ford, and even Lindbergh said with a touch of asperity, that when he visited Ford, “we talk of nothing but the Jew.” 

Henry Ford receiving the Order of the German Eagle Cross. Even after World War II, Ford refused to repudiate the medal

 

Lindbergh’s racialist beliefs even informed his piloting. He saw the technological advance of aviation as a way in which the Nordic race could extend its hegemony over all the world. 

Juan Trippe’s own viewpoint was uneasily close to Lindbergh’s. Trippe saw Pan American Airways in almost religious terms as “The Chosen Instrument” to spread American hegemony over the world. He made no comments about race per se, only politics, but Juan Trippe spent much time with Lindbergh. Did they influence one another’s thoughts and actions?

Trippe’s racial attitudes were essentially private. As head of an international airline, it behooved Trippe to keep at least the appearance of an open mind toward the mixed multitude of the world. The social rejection he had suffered as “Wang” and as a “Sheff” outsider at Yale also may have diluted the received prejudices of his social set --- the very prejudices Lindbergh the accepted outsider embraced wholeheartedly. In any event, the two men disagreed vehemently when Trippe supported the Roosevelt Administration’s policies regarding preparedness for a new World War.

The Nazi eugenics program was twofold: To eliminate, by murder or sterilization the untermenschen (subhumans) of the world, and to breed a race of blond-haired and blue-eyed Aryan ubermenschen (supermen). Note the Hitler haircut on the servile Hitler Youth in the center

Lindbergh, for his part, was appallingly naïve, and easily led along paths by charismatic sycophants who flattered him into espousing various causes. He embraced very questionable --- sometimes intolerable --- positions.

Lindbergh’s open and frankly admitted admiration of the Nazi movement after 1933, and his eventual decoration by Hitler, bothered many Americans, especially when he unwisely stated that American ingenuity would not be enough to win in any contest against a newly-rising Germany.  Lindbergh’s popularity began to decline in America. 

Charles Lindbergh receiving the Order of the German Eagle Cross from Hermann Goering

By this time after Charles Jr.’s murder, the Lindberghs were living in a self-exile in Great Britain. Charles himself wanted very much to move to Wannsee, a wealthy suburb of Berlin. American friends, even among the “eugenics” crowd, warned him that such a move would destroy his reputation in America. He ignored them at first.  It was discovered after his death that he had three entire other families living in Germany. Among the three “second” families, he had had children with two sisters, making some of his German children half-siblings and first cousins both.  So much for eugenics. Anne and his American family were apparently clueless as to these facts.

Wannsee House. Goering convinced Lindbergh not to buy the house "because it had been owned by Jews" ( because it's hard to get the smell out?). The house was later the site of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 when the Nazis decided to exterminate all the Jews in the world. Parenthetically, a title search shows that the house was owned only by supporters of the National Socialist movement. Goering simply did not want Lindbergh to own the property

Charles did find his coveted estate, but was ultimately dissuaded from buying the Wannsee property by Hermann Goering, “because it had been owned by Jews.”  The house was later used by the Nazi leadership for the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where was laid out the plan for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” --- the Holocaust was born in what would have been Charles Lindbergh’s living room.

 

Anne and Charles returned to the United States in April 1939. When World War II erupted, Lindbergh became the most famous mouthpiece of the populist “America First” Movement, dedicated to keeping the United States out of the war. Lindbergh blamed American war fervor, not surprisingly, on the British and the Jews. He touted Germany as a “natural ally” of America.  He openly challenged Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy of war preparedness. He also blasted Communism, calling it “an Asiatic disease.” He drew great crowds, and was instrumental in flummoxing American aid to Britain in the critical days of the Battle of Britain.  

Lindbergh at an America First rally

Lindbergh’s positions were eroding, however. Hitler’s brutal seizure of the Low Countries and his humiliation of France awakened many Americans to the fact that Nazi Germany was truly a deadly enemy. After the London Blitz, Americans reacted favorably to the defiant bravery of the old Mother Country, and Lindbergh’s praise of Germany became increasingly unpopular.

Lindbergh addressing a crowd on September 11, 1941

Part of Lindbergh's "patriotic" speech that day. It was widely reported in the media. Lindbergh was severely criticized for his divisive comments

America First collapsed on December 7, 1941. Yet, even after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war against America on December 8th, Lindbergh argued for a limited war only against Japan. He was roundly condemned. The Board of Pan American expelled him.  The U.S. Army Air Corps refused to reactivate his officer’s commission (he was a Reserve Colonel by this time). The public ignored and largely forgot about him as the war seized everyone’s attention.

After Pearl Harbor, the public turned on Lindbergh for his pro-Axis views. Too characteristically, he blamed the Jews for his sudden unpopularity, asserting that they controlled the world press. As the country unified behind the war effort Lindbergh found himself discredited

Even after the war, he remained an obscured figure. His racialist theories were considered bankrupt and his anti-semitism was considered particularly foul in light of the Holocaust. 

In the 1950s Lindbergh stated publicly that he was “horrified” by what the Nazis had done, but his history of Isolationism, his general racism, and his anti-semitism were too well embedded in the public mind by then for the public to forgive and forget. He would never reclaim his former glory and influence. “Nobody gives a hoot for my opinions,” he complained in the 1960s. 

The government did quietly reactivate his commission in 1954, making him a Brigadier General in the Air Force, and he returned, in a reduced role, to Pan American. 

As he aged, he mellowed. He spoke out in favor of protecting the environment (and lobbied against Pan Am’s switch to jets). He refused to wear anything but organic fibers or eat anything processed. He even directed that he be buried in bio-degradable clothing. 

Charles A. Lindbergh is buried in the Palapala Ho'omau churchyard

He wrote toward the end of his life, “All the achievements of mankind have value only to the extent that they preserve and improve the quality of life."   

It was a wise comment by a man who had waited too long to make it.

Charles A. Lindbergh died in Maui in 1974, having almost singlehandedly remade the universe of aviation.

 

Lindbergh's ugly opinions made him persona non grata for many years during and after World War II. In the 1960s he became a devout environmentalist, but he had squandered his reputation years before, and no one listened anymore even when he made sense. When he died in 1974, it hardly made news, but Pan American remembered their long debt to him for opening up the world's air routes by naming a new jet clipper for him in 1977. Anne Morrow Lindbergh tried desperately to rehabilitate her husband’s poor reputation through books and speeches, but had little success