Part 32

As I looked over it at the Dublin airdrome I really marveled that anyone should have been rash enough even to go in the air with it, much less try to fly the Atlantic. He built it, or rebuilt it, practically as a boy would build a scooter out of a soapbox and a pair of old roller skates. It looked it. The nose of the engine hood was a mass of patches soldered by Corrigan himself into a crazy-quilt design. The door behind which Corrigan crouched for twenty-eight hours was fastened together with a piece of baling wire. The reserve gasoline tanks put together by Corrigan, left him so little room that he had to sit hunched forward with his knees cramped, and not enough window space to see the ground when landing. It had cost Corrigan $325, saved nickel by nickel.

The inspiration for all of Corrigan’s sacrifice was his hero worship of Lindbergh. As a young mechanic Corrigan had helped build the _Spirit of St. Louis_ in the Ryan Airlines plant in San Diego, California, and from that time on he had lived for but one ambition, to emulate his hero. The older flyer had millions of admirers but none could have been more fervent than the little mechanic who once wrote, “It was often necessary to work till midnight on the _Spirit of St. Louis_ and then come back at eight the next morning, but everyone was glad to do that as they all seemed to be inspired by the fellow that the plane was being built for--Lindbergh.”

When Corrigan landed in Dublin, it was an event sufficiently sensational, and the “wrong-way” aspect of it so eccentric, that the world gave its attention and hundreds of cables and radiograms poured into the American Legation where the Minister, John Cudahy, had given Corrigan quarters. Every hour scores of congratulations were reaching Corrigan but he was visibly unhappy. I asked him what was the matter.

“No cable from Lindbergh,” Corrigan replied. “That was the thing I wanted most of all. Maybe it will come later.” It never did come. Lindbergh never found time nor inclination to send the single word which would have meant more to Corrigan than all the other applause and rewards he won. I have related this to friends of Lindbergh and their answer was, “Typical.”

After the first uproar over Lindbergh’s greatest flight had subsided somewhat, he made his good-will flights. His marriage to the gifted Anne Morrow, daughter of the brilliant Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow, linked him now with America’s greatest financial house, and put the Swedish immigrant’s son definitely in the category of those who have a stake to protect against social disturbance, and the consequences of war. The fact that the marriage was a love match, and that his wife had every quality of a distinguished person and was a poet in her own right, helped establish Lindbergh even more firmly in the affections of the American public. The American feeling toward him had mellowed from hysterical hero worship to what seemed to be a love which would endure.

Then came the heart-breaking tragedy of the kidnaping and murder of his child. All fathers, all mothers, throughout the world suffered with the Lindberghs. Years later during the Spanish Civil War, when I was imprisoned by orders of the Gestapo in San Sebastian, with me was a Spanish workman who that night was taken from the cell and shot, and I remember how just before the door opened and he was summoned by his executioners, he was discussing the Lindbergh kidnaping.

The world-wide outpouring of sympathy with the Lindberghs during that woeful period of their lives was surpassed only by the intense, personal, national compassion of America for them in their pain. Now Lindbergh had become no longer just the national hero, but one for whom the nation felt the intimacy of suffering shared. He responded by leaving the country with his family to quit the scene of their sorrow, to find a sanctuary to heal their wounds, to escape public attention, and to find a safety for his children he felt he could not find in the United States.

This was the turning point of his relationship with his country. His country was ready to forgive because it felt it could understand his need for a refuge, but for Lindbergh his residence abroad was a true renunciation of democratic America, and this I believe to be the key to his subsequent political activity and his present defiance of the vast majority of his fellow citizens.

He found his sought-for refuge in England where he was given every consideration. The door of every home from Buckingham Palace down was open to him, but the British afforded him all the privacy he wanted. If it had been only privacy he sought, he could have led a restful secluded life in the country home of Harold Nicolson, his father-in-law’s biographer, and could have remained at peace until Hitler disturbed it. Lindbergh spent just enough time in England to convince him that England was soft, England couldn’t take it, England would lose if it ever went to war. It was bad luck that Lindbergh should have lived in England during a time when it _was_ soft, just as we are soft today. It was the England of pacifism, faith in the principle that if you want peace badly enough you can have it, just by refusing to fight. It was the England of the Oxford Union when the debating society boys voted not to fight “for King and Country.” It was the England which needed waking up, just as we need it today. It was an England that could get hard, if it had the time, just as we can get hard too, if we have the time.

But Lindbergh formed his opinion of England then, and from his public speeches he seems too stubborn to allow even the epic heroism of England today in battle to change his judgment. Nicolson, long-standing family friend of the Morrows, mailed Lindbergh a postcard every week during the Battle of Britain, when the people of England were persevering under a hurricane of bombs and were calling it their “finest hour.” Each postcard had the one sentence: “Do you still think we are soft?” Perhaps he still thinks so, long after the Germans have stopped thinking so. At any rate, he left England for a tour of the continent, and thereupon came the second turning point in the development of his political views.

When he left America he left it embittered by the tragedy of his child, and he left convinced that it would never have happened except in a corrupt, gang-ridden democracy. It was, indeed, one of the lowest periods in America’s public life, when kidnaping for ransom had become widespread for the first time in any modern civilized state, and the power of the gangs was a national humiliation. In a sense it was true that it was the fault of democracy, but the virtue of democracy is that slowly but almost always sooner or later we correct the faults and bring under control the license which ever threatens democratic liberty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not grown up when Lindbergh fled America.

He visited many places on the continent, but the visits to Germany and the Soviet Union were decisive. Here were crystallized the political ideas which had been fermenting within him ever since he felt the thrill that came with the first taste of power over the throngs of Americans gathered to adore him. In Russia he found the object of his political hatred: the poverty, squalor, dirt, inefficiency, and cruelty of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He was treated well by the Bolshevik authorities, who as Russians regarded him as an artist, a genius of the air, a man who, like a great singer, could be considered outside of politics.

His political slate was up to that time blank. The Russians often welcome foreign celebrities supposed to be without politics. They gave Harpo Marx a cordial reception. Lindbergh was shown the Red Army, its Air Corps, the aviation factories, and no doubt the Bolsheviks thought he was impressed. A layman traveling through Russia is shocked at the wretched state of the people, their poor clothing, bad food, their brutal overcrowding. You may be sure that this was not the prime object of Lindbergh’s attention. Lindbergh is not interested in human beings. He is interested in machines. In Russia he saw the poorest machine he had ever seen. He observed that the ponderous Bolshevik society operated with an unparalleled waste of man power and with unmatched inefficiency. He saw the Soviet Air factories, and declared he detected the slovenly workmanship which mars all Soviet production. He reviewed portions of the Red Army Air Corps and registered his opinion that most of the planes were obsolete or obsolescent.

In Nazi Germany Lindbergh found the object of his political admiration, even affection, for here at last he had found the perfect machine. Not only was it the antithesis in every material respect of the Soviet Union, a streamlined, chromium-plated, eighteen-jewel model of totalitarian clockwork, compared with the dilapidated Soviet jalopy, but the Nazi machine also promised to banish the Soviet menace from the face of the earth. Lindbergh had in Germany first an aesthetic delight in the efficiency of the machine, then a moral satisfaction in the thought that it would eradicate the blot of Bolshevism.

Finally a personal consideration came to him. The kidnaping and death of his baby could never have happened in Nazi Germany. Common crime was almost unknown in Nazi Germany. He failed to reflect that under the dictators crime is reserved as the monopoly of the State, and that from any normal human standpoint there is more crime committed in Nazi Germany in a year than in America in ten years of its most besotted gangster period, only in Germany it is all committed by the State. Lindbergh loved Germany.

He saw the great Army, then in the last stages of readying itself to spring upon Europe and set out to conquer the world. He saw the great Luftwaffe, and Goering himself “surprised” him by pinning the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with Star on his breast before he could help himself. Lindbergh has not yet divested himself of his Nazi decoration. He laid down his commission because he quarreled with the President of the United States, but he has no quarrel with Hitler.

Lindbergh was so delighted with the whole atmosphere of this perfectly functioning totalitarian machine that he was contemplating making his residence in Berlin, where an American news agency reported that the apartment of a Jew, liquidated in the monster pogrom of November 1938, had been offered him. He stayed long enough to become convinced that the Nazis were the wave, which, whether we liked it or not, would eventually engulf the world. Lindbergh liked it. Here were no democratic gangsterism, corruption, private crime. Here were no Bolshevik slackness, squalor, waste. Here was the New Order, of superior men, like himself, of tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryans, like himself, of Nordics, like himself. He felt among his own kind.

The Terror, the concentration camps, the murderous persecution of the Jews and political opponents, the suppression of free speech, of the press, of worship, even of thought and conscience! What of it! This was only the scum on the wave of the future, and as for the suppression of the press, _that_ at least was no scum, that was sheer progress. The literal enslavement of a whole population! Well, they like it, don’t they? What of the fact that the entire machine and every part of it was built for war, and for war which if successful in Europe would eventually reach and thrust at the heart of America? Nonsense, the Germans could whip Europe all right, indeed Lindbergh declared his conviction they would, but they intended no harm to America. He knew, because hadn’t they been nice to him, an American? Anyway, he wouldn’t say anything about it in public, but if the truth be known, America could go a long way and do worse than by emulating some of the Nazis’ virtues.

Liberty? Bah, Lindbergh would take order and efficiency any day ahead of liberty and inefficiency. Besides, Lindbergh was one of the class of superior men, superior in talent, ability, and comprehension of what society needs, who in a totalitarian state would enjoy all the freedom he wanted since his ideas would conform with those of the rulers and he would belong to the company of masters of the New Order. He had nothing to fear from a Nazi conquest.

With these thoughts in mind Lindbergh returned first to England and told them they had better give up because the Russians were no good and the Germans knew it, and the Germans were strong enough to conquer all Europe, and the proof was in the air forces he had just inspected. His advice was believed to have had something to do with the disaster of Munich, when Britain and France, convinced their cause was hopeless, lost a war without fighting it. In every point of his argument Lindbergh had agreed with Hitler, and in every point Lindbergh and Hitler were correct, save in one point. They made a mistake about England.

When England recovered from the shock of Munich, she began to throw off her weakness and get tough. But Lindbergh had left for America. He did not have time to see England recover the manhood which seemed lost when he was there. Lindbergh came home now bursting with a message, eager to lead, anxious to play a political role, and resolved as he has been all his life to be content with nothing less than the greatest role. “Lindbergh will be the next President of the United States. He is our man.” So said the Belgian friend of the Nazis. The British Lindbergh, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, is on the political bottom; he is in Brixton prison. Mosley is no less sincere a man than Lindbergh. Vidkun Quisling is on the political top; he is Hitler’s man in Norway. The political future of Lindbergh will obviously depend largely upon whether Germany or our side wins the war.

Q. _Why did Lindbergh attack the Jews?_

A. Because anti-Semitism is an integral part of Hitlerism. If you are not against Hitler you are for him, and if you are for Hitler you will be compelled, sooner or later, and whether you intend it or not, to become an anti-Semite. Every country now under Hitler’s heel has officially sponsored and promoted anti-Semitism. It was easy to read Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism between the lines of his references to the “foreign” influences at work in America. He waited only until he thought the time ripe for his public announcement, but the results proved his calculation wrong. His statement against the Jews brought a roar of repudiation from all creeds and classes of the nation, and the only approval came from the group around Lindbergh who constitute what might be called the America First’s Quisling Committee. Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism could be sufficiently explained on the ground of temperament. He admires, he understands, and loves only machines and he could hardly be expected to understand or appreciate, much less approve, the spiritual values which for thousands of years have upheld the Jews through adversities which would have annihilated scores of more numerous but less faithful communities.

Q. _What is to be the fate of the Jews?_

A. If Hitler’s power is not destroyed, if Hitler were to win, all Jews under his domination would be condemned to slow death. Why slow? Why doesn’t Hitler kill them all at once? Because he enjoys watching them suffer, has a sadistic pleasure in it; because he needs their labor power for the menial tasks to which he assigns them; and because he probably feels that until he conquers the whole world it would be wiser not to outrage what there is left of world opinion.

Besides, Hitler finds the Jews useful wherever he wishes to divide a conquered population, as in France where the hostages he shoots are for the most part called Jews or Communists. Every time he shoots a Jewish hostage he says to the non-Jews, “You see, if it were not for your Jews, you and I could get along perfectly together!” By this device of making the Jew the scapegoat, he works to arouse anti-Semitism among the vanquished and anti-Semitism in any form anywhere is the most faithful handmaid of Hitlerism.

Therefore, he has not completely eliminated the Jews from any part of his territories, but has allowed to remain, under conditions of the most abject servitude, 200,000 out of the original 660,000 in Germany proper; 40,000 out of the original 190,000 in Austria; 100,000 out of 380,000 in Czechoslovakia; 20,000 out of 156,000 in Holland; 30,000 out of 63,000 in Belgium; an estimated 380,000 native and foreign Jews in France, occupied and unoccupied; 750,000 in Hungary, including everyone with one-quarter Jewish blood; 300,000 in truncated Rumania; 97,000 in Latvia; 177,000 in Lithuania; 5,000 in Esthonia; and 100,000 in Greece. These figures are cited by _The American Hebrew_. Poland must come in a separate category since there Hitler has apparently set out to exterminate the 3,000,000 Jews without the restraint he seems to have put on himself elsewhere.

Nobody knows how many of the Polish Jews have died; their fate is only more dreadful than that inflicted upon the entire Polish population. Sober observers believe that twenty per cent of the Polish population as a whole have been killed or have died as a result of the two years of German and Russian occupation. If this is true, then of the 6,000,000 dead, one must reckon that at least 1,000,000 are Jews. Whether this figure is too high or too low, the obvious intent of the Germans in Poland is to wipe out the Jews altogether, and the wonder is that any at all are living today.

In Soviet Russia the 5,000,000 Jews are not subject to any official discrimination, but suffer as the rest of the population from the generally wretched conditions of life aggravated by the war. These conditions of life in the Soviet Union would be intolerable under normal circumstances, especially since the Jews, like other faiths, have been deprived of the facilities formally to practice their religion, but now that Europe under the Nazis has become a charnel house for Jews, the Soviet Union must seem like a haven of refuge. There seems to be no alternative for the Jews except that they suffer death at the hands of Hitlerism, or that Hitlerism be destroyed. It can be destroyed better with the outspoken, avowed help of the Jews of the world, and especially the Jews of America.

It is shocking, indeed, to observe the names of a few Jews on isolationist committees, and one wonders what mental processes have brought them there. Do they imagine that if America remains aloof and Hitler wins the rest of the world, that the Jews, or any other Americans, will be safe? No, if Hitler wins the rest of the world, the Lindberghs of America will boldly put their anti-Semitism to work, and the fate of the Jews in America will approximate that of their brothers abroad. There is no choice for the Jews of America but to put all the strength of their bodies and souls and purses to work against the enemy of all mankind. There is no reason for them to apologize for fighting the universal scourge. The anti-Semite is a friend of Hitler. The friend of Hitler is the enemy of the United States.

Q. _I would like to read you a passage from a speech of Lindbergh delivered shortly after the German invasion of Russia, and ask you what you think of it, as it is quite confusing to me. The passage reads: “The longer this war in Europe continues, the more confused its issues become. When it started Germany and Russia were lined up against England and France. Now, less than two years later we find Russia and England fighting France and Germany. Winter before last, when Russia was fighting Finland, the interventionists demanded that we send all possible aid to Finland. Now, when Russia is fighting Finland again they demand that we send all possible aid to Russia.... Finland and France are now our enemies; Russia our friend. We have been asked to defend the English way of life, and the Chinese way of life. We are now asked to defend the Russian way of life.... Judging from Europe’s record, if we enter this war, we can’t be sure whether we will have Germany or Russia for a partner by the time we finish it. We don’t even know whether we will end up with France or England on our side. It is quite possible that we would find ourselves alone fighting the entire world before it was over.”_

A. The confusion is of Lindbergh’s own making. There is a simple key to all the apparent contradictions he brings out. The key is that Hitler Germany was, is, and will remain the enemy until Hitlerism is destroyed. The correct way to express the relationships which Lindbergh has put so confusingly is: All nations fighting Germany are fighting on our side; all nations fighting on the side of Germany are fighting against us. When a nation, for any reason, switches sides, for or against Germany, it automatically switches sides for or against us. The question of friendship, of liking for any of these nations, or of approval of their “way of life” does not decide the matter. The matter is decided solely by the effect the particular nation is having on Germany’s war.

Let us examine each of Lindbergh’s statements in turn. He says the longer the war continues, the more confused its issues become. Not at all--the longer it lasts the more plain it becomes that the issue is: Germany against the world. Do not be confused by the fact that some countries which were fighting Germany, now come out on Germany’s side. As Germany conquers one country after another, she attempts to force them into fighting for her, as in the case of France. No matter what Hitler’s puppet government in France does, we know that the true France is no friend of Germany, but an implacable enemy. Napoleon at one time had half a dozen armies raised from among the peoples he had conquered, marching under his banners. But the moment Napoleon suffered reverses, they revolted. So it will be with Hitler.

Finland’s position is easy to understand if you reflect that she was so much subject to Hitler’s coercion that she had to behave almost as though she too had been conquered. It would have been suicide if Finland, resisting Germany’s demands that she join the German side, should have had to fight both the German and the Russian armies. That way Poland was torn to pieces. It would have been unthinkable that Finland, so recently mutilated by Russia, should have admitted the Red Army to her territories. It was inevitable that Finland should choose the lesser of two evils. And so we, understanding Finland’s plight, must classify her on Germany’s side and embargo goods to her. But we can still think of her as a friend, and only as a technical enemy by force of circumstances.