Partial History: FDR and America First

Franklin Roosevelt’s battle with the famous aviator and anti-interventionist Charles Lindbergh is often presented as a morality play showing Roosevelt to be the long-sighted hero in the war on fascism. Since then, Democrats have lobbed charges of fascism against Republicans, the latest being Donald Trump.

So, one wonders at the timing of two books this year. On September 24, came the latest of thirty books by history professor H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War, which followed the June 4, release of Awakening the Spirit of America: FDR’s War of Words with Charles Lindbergh — and the Battle to Save Democracy by former director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Paul M. Sparrow.

Brands’s use of the antagonists’ speeches, correspondence, and journals to weave a storyline, some say, offers an unfiltered objective account.

But the technique deceives. Brands remains the FDR fanboy he was in his earlier book, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008), where he wondered, “What traumas or epiphanies had transformed a Hudson Valley patrician into a champion of the common people of America?”

And where he also marveled at how the “signature line of his first inaugural address — that the only thing America had to fear was fear itself — spoken in his confident tenor, had “flashed across the radio waves to every neighborhood, village, and hamlet in the country” and “soothed the worst of the fears and allowed the president and Congress to pull the financial system back from the brink.”

In America First, Brands briefly describes Lindbergh’s upbringing as the son of an anti-interventionist (World War I) Minnesota Congressman, his technical precocity, his solitariness, the first world-famous solo transatlantic flight in 1927, and the kidnapping and murder of his young son.

FDR is still the heroic “traitor to his class.” He “charmed people with his winning smile.” After contracting polio, he retreated to the “soothing waters” of Warm Springs, Georgia, where he got to know “humble whites and blacks often overlooked by one or both political parties.” He became more “empathetic.” He did not complain; “his typical expression was a broad smile; the hearty hello with which he greeted visitors boomed louder than ever.”

The image was cultivated, though. Although FDR called himself a “cracker farmer,” he belonged to the most exclusive clubs where decisions were made with fellow East Coast millionaires, as Lynne Olson details in her 2013 title, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941.

As he campaigned for president, writes Brands, Roosevelt promised “a ‘new deal’ between government and the ordinary people of America without elaborating” and “steered especially clear of foreign affairs.” As president, he expertly maneuvered the American public, a feat illustrated by a photo caption for the Pearl Harbor bombing: “Miscues by Lindbergh and the antiwar movement, combined with Roosevelt’s political savvy, made full-scale American intervention almost inevitable by the autumn of 1941.” FDR’s “savvy” included a British spy and propaganda agency in Rockefeller Center and taps on telephone lines of the anti-interventionist organization America First.

Lindbergh, when he made speeches for America First, assumed that explanations would convince. In describing Lindbergh’s famous speech on September 11, 1941, in Des Moines, Brands refrains from speculating about Lindbergh’s “hidden” or “unspoken antisemitism” (unlike Sparrow). He notes that Lindbergh’s reference to American Jews being one of the three groups agitating for war (the other two being the British and the FDR administration) was accompanied by statements of sympathy and concern.

Brands places Lindbergh’s “anti-Semitism” within his views about the “white” race (a term not given historical context). Little is said about Roosevelt’s attitude towards Jews — outside of his circle of men of wealth and advanced degrees — other than that FDR gave “lukewarm support” (as did “Jewish leaders”) to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’ idea of relocating persecuted Jews to Alaska.

FDR was more interested in exploiting Lindbergh’s faux pas in Des Moines. Riding on public outrage, he tarred Lindbergh a “Copperhead,” a “Fifth Columnist,” and finally Nazi sympathizer. Surrogates amplified the charges.

But Lindbergh had inspired FDR’s wrath earlier, in 1934, when he criticized him over breach of contract and the deaths of twelve military pilots — recounted in Olson’s book, as well as in Wayne S. Cole’s Charles Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (1974), A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh (1998), and especially in James P. Duffy’s Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America (2010, Regnery).

Democrats during the 1934 midterm election season ginned up charges against airmail delivery contracts that had been assigned during the Herbert Hoover administration, after the McNary-Watres Act of 1930. Seeing opportunities, some airlines lobbied for cancellations through postmaster general James Farley. Farley talked to Roosevelt and recommended that carriers continue mail delivery until June 1, allowing time for new bids. But FDR overruled Farley and the attorney general, and ignoring protests, issued an executive order for Army delivery of airmail.

The most prominent protestor, internationally famous aviator, chair of the technical committee of Transcontinental Air Transport, and colonel in the U.S. Army Officers’ Reserve Corps, Charles Lindbergh made the front page of the February 12 New York Times for his telegram to Roosevelt condemning the cancellations and his agreement “with veteran mail pilots that the lives of men inexperienced in mail operations, and flying planes not equipped with radio or the blind flying instruments necessary for the service, may be risked.”

Vowing to “get that fair-haired boy,” FDR questioned Lindbergh’s pay. (Lindbergh, in solidarity with pilots experiencing salary cutbacks, voluntarily cut his own.) After the resulting deadly crashes and delivery delays brought public outcry, FDR lied that General Staff member Douglas MacArthur had assured him about safety and asked Congress to pass a bill returning airmail delivery to private carriers (but making companies suing over contract cancellations ineligible). Lindbergh testified at a March 16 committee hearing about lack of due process (confirmed by the D.C. Court of Appeals in February 1935).

Brands ignores this unflattering controversy and spins the one about the London economic conference in summer 1933, claiming that FDR’s statement, “The sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency in changing terms of the currencies of other nations,” was an adroit strategy of waving “the flag of nationalism.” It was really an excuse for one of FDR’s sudden reversals — on his promise to stabilize currency by establishing an internationally agreed-on price for gold. It landed like a “bombshell” in Europe.

Diplomatic historian Frederick Marks III traces FDR’s disastrous foreign policy to the fact that he had “little intellectual or moral commitment to a specific strategy” and rejected “the advice of nearly all his counselors.” Indeed, even as president, FDR remained a dilettantish country squire.

“Misrepresentation, ambivalence, and prevarication” resulted in “false hope on the part of Tokyo” and the view in the Third Reich that “Western policy [was] a colossal bluff built upon a militarily defunct United States,” writes Marks. Indeed, FDR’s announcement in 1933 to reduce the already small Army of 140,000 caused MacArthur to famously explode in anger. In 1937, FDR reduced the War Department’s requested appropriation by $40 million.

Writes Marks, “FDR refused to carry the case for rearmament until opinion polls showed him lagging well behind Congress and the public. All at once, he became a consistent advocate of Allied resistance to Germany.”

This differs from Brands’s textbook depiction of FDR monitoring Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party that spawned “bellicose nationalism” in several countries, including Spain and Germany, where Hitler “assumed the chancellorship at almost the same moment Roosevelt became the American president.” When in the summer of 1937 “Japan’s militarists escalated their occupation of Manchuria into a regular war against China,” Roosevelt hoped that Americans’ isolationism might weaken. (Actually, Japan was battling Communists in China.)

Concerned about the 1938 elections, “Roosevelt kept America aloof from the crisis over Czechoslovakia” (Hitler’s invasion on September 30). “He had squandered his big win of 1936 on a failed attempt to reform the Supreme Court by adding new justices.” (Packing the court with pro-Roosevelt justices was hardly “reform.”) FDR wrote a letter to the governments of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Britain, and France, urging “negotiations” and emphasizing that the United States had no “political entanglements” — with zero effect.

Meanwhile, in London, Lindbergh was writing in his journal that he did not believe that Hitler, though “a mystic and a fanatic,” would “throw Europe into a major war over the present situation.” At the time of the Munich accord Lindbergh was in Paris, invited by Ambassador William Bullitt who was seeking to circumvent American neutrality laws by having American manufacturers build warplanes in Canada for Britain and France, which Lindbergh had determined were badly needed. Largely because of concerns about incentivizing war, Lindbergh suggested that France instead buy planes from Germany.

Next, Lindbergh and his wife Anne “proceeded to Germany.” Actually, Lindbergh’s visits to Germany, in 1936, 1937, and 1938 were at invitation of the United States Military Attaché in Berlin, Truman Smith — to assess German air power. The 1938 invitation was accompanied by one from Ambassador Hugh R. Wilson, who, as Duffy points out, hoped that Lindbergh would help him connect with Hermann Goering, believed to be “the most reasonable of the Nazi leaders” and potentially helpful in increasing Jewish emigration by changing German policy to allow émigrés to take their money and possessions with them.

Brands quotes Lindbergh’s brief journal account about being surprised by Goering’s presentation to him of the German Eagle medal at a dinner at the American Embassy on October 19. Lindbergh accepted it politely; a protest would only have harmed the American cause.

But, Ickes, in his Bastille Day speech in July 1941, put Lindbergh, whom he called the “Knight of the German Eagle,” in the company of Hitler’s “mouthpieces and fellow-travelers.” Knowing that Ickes was Roosevelt’s mouthpiece, Lindbergh sent Roosevelt a letter reminding him that the medal was received “while I was carrying out the request of your Ambassador.” This sole mention comes off as little more than pique.

Brands quotes extensively from Lindbergh’s March 31, 1939, journal entry complaining about England’s passivity beginning in 1934: “She took part in Versailles. She stood by and watched Germany rearm and march into the Rhineland.… and was about to guarantee Polish integrity.”

FDR Cautious on Hitler

But we do not learn about Roosevelt’s appeasement efforts, which, except for the Four Power Pact, was “the keynote of Roosevelt’s approach to Hitler,” according to Marks. For example, in September 1935, Roosevelt sent business friend Samuel Fuller to “ascertain Hitler’s price for a comprehensive peace settlement.” Fuller met Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht at the American embassy. But the resulting possible “return of German colonies, currency stabilization, and a new trade treaty with the United States” was rejected by the British.

When German troops entered the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, the White House was silent. The First Lady’s March 19 column even downplayed the situation: she was sure everyone had a “lighter heart” knowing that Hitler would meet with the League of Nations. A couple days later, FDR sought liberalized world trade and multilateral disarmament in exchange for canceling debts and reducing American tariffs.

Stalin and the Soviet Union are barely mentioned. Bullitt began his tenure as ambassador in Moscow starry-eyed, but, as George F. Kennan wrote, was soon advocating a hard line against the Communist regime, “which most of us in the embassy whole-heartedly supported but which FDR, caring little about the specific issues involved, had no intention whatsoever of adopting.” In 1936, Roosevelt reassigned Bullitt to France. Brands reveals that the German government was funding Lindbergh’s ally, Senator Ernest Lundeen, but ignores Stalin’s role in influence operations.

Brands quotes from Lindbergh’s journal during his third visit to the Soviet Union, in 1938. Lindbergh found the Soviet warplanes “not as good as the similar designs of the United States, Germany, and England,” though “effective in a modern war.” Lindbergh recounts that Igor Sikorsky told him that 30 to 40 million Russians had been killed since the Revolution, but did not give a source for the figures.

Brands fails to confirm that, indeed, tens of millions had been killed. Such verification (and the fact that many of those killed were Jews) would allow the reader to better understand Lindbergh’s statement that he would “rather see my country ally herself with England or even with Germany, with all her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.”

After Senator Key Pittman had rebutted Lindbergh’s June 15, 1940, radio address by mocking Lindbergh’s claim that an American “invading army would be sent to Germany” (imagine!), Roosevelt received a slew of letters, many unsigned. Roosevelt forwarded them to the FBI. Brands fills four pages with quotations from those condemning Lindbergh.

Brands at the end reveals The Moral of the Story. Lindbergh is a “reactionary,” although he “got much right in his campaign against modernity”: his prediction of Britain losing much of her power and empire, of “half of Europe” being under communist rule, and the abdication of Congress’s war-making powers to the Executive resulting in international military entanglements.

But what Lindbergh got wrong was the American people: they had few “regrets” about interventionism and becoming a superpower. As part of Lindbergh’s legacy, “isolationism remain[s] a concept approachable only at peril to one’s reputation for seriousness in foreign policy,” as evidenced in Trump’s loss in 2020.

Brands’ selections lead to this conclusion. But, for one thing, Pearl Harbor was not evidence of Roosevelt’s “savviness.” FDR, as was his wont, failed to heed the warnings about the fleet’s vulnerability. FDR’s latest presidential heir has proven to be similarly dangerously undisciplined. So the America First candidate won in 2024.

READ MORE from Mary Grabar:

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