Told  /  Comparison

Back When American Fascism Was Bad

On the cancelling of Charles Lindbergh.
Wikimedia Commons

By the late 1930s, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were open and obsequious admirers of Adolf Hitler. In Anne’s letters, she lamented that the hostile international reaction to Kristallnacht scuttled the couple’s plans to move to Berlin in 1938. Hermann Goering decorated Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, which he never gave back, even after World War II. In 1940, over a year prior to Lindbergh’s Cancellation, FDR told Henry Morgenthau, Jr., “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this: I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.”

Lindbergh was a leading light of the America First movement which advocated non-interventionism in Europe after Germany invaded its neighbors France and Poland. America First did not represent the views of the whole nation, but it was not merely a fringe position. Many Americans felt that war was best avoided.

Yet Lindbergh’s motives were not born of pacifism. This he made clear in a national radio address on September 11, 1941, that removed all doubt among a public who still adored him but increasingly wondered about his loyalties.

The address was short, pleading for non-intervention and blaming the push for war on three culprits: the Roosevelt administration (who he claimed wanted a crisis to extend FDR’s hold on power), Great Britain (too weak to defend itself), and International Jewry (of course).

Even the age of social media has never replicated what happened to Lindbergh next. The speech absolutely, categorically finished him in the eyes of a country that had adored him even as he threw up red flags. He might as well have concluded it by bursting into a cloud of mist.

The Iowa Speech has come to mind frequently as I’ve followed the ascendant white nationalism of the American right, the current high tolerance for antisemitism, and other bigotries in political discourse. Lindbergh’s words seem almost quaint by comparison. Read his speech alongside a transcript of any Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham show and marvel at which speakers’ careers managed to survive their words. Lindbergh—despite expressing a loathsome form of prejudice and conspiratorial thinking—almost sounds polite in comparison.


I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

Well golly!