Lindbergh, Charles

(1902–1974)

   On 20–21 May 1927, Lindbergh, then a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, emerged from virtual obscurity to almost instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize–winning solo nonstop flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris in the single-seat, singleengine airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh, an army reserve officer, was also awarded the nation’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit. Before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the iconic Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the United States out of Europe’s conflict and he became a leader of the antiwar and isolationist America First Committee. In the aftermath of his visit to Germany in 1936, Lindbergh praised German accomplishments in aviation, and in 1938 he received a medal, the Service Cross of the German Eagle, from the German government. In the months prior to Pearl Harbor, however, Lindbergh gave a speech under the auspices of the American First Committee in Des Moines, Iowa, on 11 September 1941, where he criticized America’s involvement by way of its support of Great Britain and singled out the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews as the “major agitators for war.” Although he understood the Jews’ desire for “the overthrow of Nazi Germany,” Lindbergh expressed concern over “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” The speech severely damaged Lindbergh’s reputation inasmuch as he had repeated the same types of stereotypes that one associated with anti-Semites. Rabbi Irving F. Reichart of Temple Emanu-El of San Francisco retorted, “Hitler himself could not have delivered a more diabolical speech.” Lindbergh claimed he was not anti-Semitic but simply responding to facts. He never apologized for his remarks because he believed that what he had said was true. President Franklin D. Roosevelt disliked Lindbergh’s outspoken opposition to intervention and his policies such as the Lend-Lease Act. Roosevelt said to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in May 1940, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” Nonetheless, Lindbergh supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew many combat missions in the Pacific theater of World War II as a civilian consultant, even though President Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel’s commission that he had resigned earlier in 1939.