One Summer: America, 1927

‘many of Hitler’s accomplishments would have been impossible without some fanaticism’.
    The Lindberghs gave serious thought to moving to Germany. At the very moment that they were doing so, Germany underwent the notorious outburst known as Kristallnacht, when citizens across the nation attacked Jewish shops and property. (‘Kristallnacht’, or ‘night of glass’, refers to the broken glass they left behind.) Kristallnacht has an almost festive sound, as if it were a night of light-hearted pranks and merriment. In fact, it was state-countenanced terror. In his book Hitlerland , Andrew Nagorski recounts one incident in which a young boy was flung from an upstairs window into the street below. As the injured boy tried to crawl away, members of the crowd took turns kicking him. He was saved by a passing American. Kristallnacht horrified the world.
    The Lindberghs were shocked, to be sure, but in their own peculiar way. Anne wrote in her diary: ‘You just get to feeling you can understand and work with these people when they do something stupid and brutal and undisciplined like that. I am shocked and very upset. How can we go there to live?’ Two things are pretty astonishing here. First, though Mrs Lindbergh is clearly troubled by this particular outburst (‘something stupid and brutal and undisciplined’), she betrays no discomfort with the general German attitude to Jews. Second, in her own words, Kristallnacht didn’t make living in Germany an intolerable proposition, but simply a challenging one.
    For the first time, people began to wonder if Charles Lindbergh was really a suitable hero for the nation. Much worse was to come.
     
    The Lindberghs, it was said, were offered a house in Berlin confiscated from Jews, but in the end elected to come home. Charles became closely involved with an organization called America First, which was formed to oppose American involvement in another European war. In September 1941, he travelled to Des Moines, Iowa, to deliver a speech, to be carried on national radio, explaining why he believed that war with Germany was wrong. A crowd of 8,000 jammed into the Des Moines Coliseum that evening. Lindbergh’s speech was not scheduled to begin until 9.30 p.m., so that the audience could first hear a national radio address from the White House by Franklin Roosevelt. It is a forgotten fact, but America was already close to war by September 1941. German U-boats had recently sunk three American freighters and attacked a naval ship, the USS Greer . Many America First supporters maintained that the American ships had deliberately provoked the attacks, an assertion that many others found outrageous. All this meant that there was a good deal of tension in the air when Lindbergh rose at the conclusion of Roosevelt’s broadcast and moved to a lectern at centre stage. In a voice often described as reedy, Lindbergh declared that three specific forces – the British, the Jews and Franklin Delano Roosevelt – were leading America to war by wilfully distorting the truth. ‘I am speaking here only of war agitators, not of those sincere but misguided men and women who, confused by misinformation and frightened by propaganda, follow the lead of the war agitators,’ he said.
    Lindbergh’s remarks were met by boos and applause in roughly equal measure. At each interruption he paused till the noise subsided. Not once did he look at the audience or take his eyes from his prepared text. The Jews, he went on, were a particularly malign influence because of their ownership and domination of ‘our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government’. He concededthat Jews were right to be upset by the persecution of their race in Germany, but maintained that a pro-war policy had dangers not only for ‘us’ but also for ‘them’. He didn’t elaborate on why he thought that.
    Britain, he said, was ‘not strong enough to win the war that she declared against Germany’. Finally, he dropped in a piece of weird Carrelesque idealism. ‘Rather than go to war with Germany,’ he suggested, ‘America should join with her and England to form a mighty “Western wall” of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.’ It was an extraordinary speech and it finished him as an American hero.
    An editorial in the next morning’s Des Moines Register tried to strike a judicious tone. ‘It may have been courageous for Col. Lindbergh to say what