Earhart, Lindbergh and the Roosevelts

Lindbergh and Earhart together on January 25, 1933.

Does it seem curious to you that once Amelia Earhart announced her around the world flight plan, the Air Commerce Dept. rushed to build an airfield on Howland Island after not getting around to it since the island's acquisition?  Department officials could have just said, "Hey there, Amelia, there ain't no airfield on that stupid island and we don't have the budget to build one.  Sorry about that."

Instead, they leaped into action, scrounging equipment and personnel from the Dept. of Interior and the Navy to get an airfield built just in the nick of time.  What impelled them to do that?

Amelia and Eleanor flying on Eleanor's Curtiss Condor.

Well, I think the main reason was Earhart herself and her personality.  Unlike Charles Lindbergh, who loathed being in the public spotlight, Earhart enjoyed it, and more than that, understood how important it was that she engage with the press, the well-to-do and politicians in order to do what she wanted to do -- which was not only to fly herself but also to beat back the intense hostility to women flying (some arrogant jackasses still oppose women flying today).  

So she made friends, especially in high places.  Eleanor Roosevelt became fond of her, as did Franklin Roosevelt, and she visited them at the White House.  She wasn't a social climber, far from it. But she was outgoing and at ease in social situations.  

Two pals hanging out together.

She and Eleanor Roosevelt found each other kindred souls, so much so that Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to learn to fly herself, got a student pilot's license, and began learning to fly under Earhart's tutelage. But when her husband found out, he put the kibosh on her plans.  Eleanor did, however, continue to fly about the country in an Army YT-30 Curtis Condor that the Secret Service considered too dangerous for Franklin to fly in.  Together, Amelia and Eleanor labored to advance the rights of working women, especially women in aviation, and tried to prevent the march to another world war.  For all of this, by his own actions, Charles Lindbergh was left out in the cold. 

When Lindbergh became involved with the America First movement, he did so, even if he didn't intend it that way, as a political opponent of the Roosevelt Administration.  As such, he became a target of a political hatchet job, "brown smearing" as it was called.  He was accused of being a traitor, a Nazi-lover and other falsehoods.  He didn't understand what was happening.  All he wanted to do was prevent his fellow Americans from being killed in yet another European war, one of a never-ending series. (The Europeans are slaughtering each other still today, even as they face demographic collapse.)  Why these personal attacks, he wondered? (And why do they continue to this day, a half-century after his death?)  

I wonder what would have happened had Lindbergh been on as good terms with Eleanor Roosevelt as Amelia Earhart was, the three of them together working for peace.  Warmongers couldn't have attacked him so viciously if he were sheltered under the wing of Mrs. Roosevelt. And he might have got a hearing for his views among those who actually worked with FDR to shape American foreign policy.

Eleanor Roosevelt's Curtis Condor.

But Lindbergh was fundamentally a shy man who had to force himself to be a public figure.  I've read accounts of him attending various aviation-related conferences, such as the big Joint Navy Fighter Conference  at NAS Patuxent River in 1944, where no one noticed he was there.  He'd sit in the back, ask no questions, and depart.  He was hard to get to know, but once he thawed out he seems to have been a great friend and a person those who knew him admired greatly.  But a social mixer he was not.  And Earhart was.  Lindbergh's attempt at deterring the world's rush

Charles Lindbergh, a quiet, thoughtful man.

to war and America's participation in it had no effect and ended disastrously. After that utter failure, he devoted himself to writing his definitive account of his 1927 Atlantic crossing, The Spirit of St. Louis, a splendid read, but otherwise withdrew from public life, devoting himself to environmental causes, but staying in the background.

Anyway, when Earhart made plans for her around the world flight, she wrote a letter to her friend the president asking for help, and he gave it to his aides with a scribbled line at the top and the Air Commerce Dept. got cracking.  So did ambassadors to France, Holland and Britain, through whose airspace Earhart would need to pass.  The French and Dutch were more than happy to cooperate, but the British, typically hostile to the Yanks, regarding them as hegemon competitors, less so.

One thing that strikes me about the contrast between the personalities of Earhart and Lindbergh is how it demonstrates the importance of getting along with people and making friends in high places, cooperating with them when they need you so that they will be willing to cooperate with you when you need them.

Charles Lindbergh just didn't have the personality to do that.  I've long been interested in Lindbergh and have read, as far as I know, everything that he and his wife, Anne Morrow, ever published.  I like him. and her even more. Lindbergh wasn't suitable to be a public figure.  He was a reserved Midwesterner who kept his own council, a pacifist and non-interventionist, a nature-lover, a thoughtful man who loved flying for the adventure and beauty of it.  He was happiest alone in the air and human beings in large numbers made him uncomfortable.  A bit of a sperg, he didn't really understand people.  He just was who he was, said what he thought without consideration of its affect on others and was in no way a schmoozer or glad-hander.

So, when Christmas of 1933 rolled around and the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, making radical moves to try to end the Depression, encountering much opposition from business leaders and conservatives of both parties in congress and the senate, invited the most admired man in America, Lindbergh, to have Christmas dinner with him, Lindbergh, instead of jumping at the chance to enter the president of the United States' circle of acquaintances, said, no thanks, I want to spend Christmas with my family. It didn't occur to him that Roosevelt would consider that a snub, or that Roosevelt wanted to gain popularity by associating with an adulated hero, and that if he, Lindbergh, helped Roosevelt, someday Roosevelt might help him.

Air mail pilot Lindbergh knew the Army couldn't deliver mail.

Then the next year during the Air Mail fiasco that saw many Army Air Corps pilots killed, some friends of Lindbergh, instead of holding his peace or moderating his words, Lindbergh,  a former air mail pilot himself, let loose both barrels at President Roosevelt, who had ordered the Air Corps to do something it was not trained or equipped to do.  Roosevelt never forgave him.  Had Lindbergh had a different personality, he already would have been on friendly terms with the president, could have advised him on how to handle the air mail issue, explained why the Air Corps couldn't be used, avoided all those deaths.  He could have become a confidant of Roosevelt, had his word have weight, helped the president handle events where he, FDR, had no expertise and neither did his so-called "brain trust" university professor advisors.

Panay sinking in the  news.

In 1933, Roosevelt's and Lindbergh's views on foreign affairs had affinities.  In that first year of his presidency, FDR believed that the Great War really was the war to end all wars, as it was purported to be.  Believing there would be no more wars, and looking for ways to cut government expenses, he was considering abolishing the federal army, leaving home defense to the state guards, which could be mustered into national service should the need arise.  He said as much to Dwight Eisenhower, at the time chief aide to Douglas MacArthur, then the Army Chief of Staff, when Eisenhower approached him about developing a modern armored corps, the army then having only 12 new tanks.  Roosevelt dismissed the need since there would be no more major wars.  Eisenhower told him he was wrong and that Europe would be at war again by 1940. FDR could not believe the Europeans would be so crazy as to repeat the horrors of the Great War ever again and denied Eisenhower's request.

Also in 1933, Roosevelt praised Hitler, admiring how he was managing the German economy and pulling it out of the Depression.

As late as December, 1937, when the Japanese sank the USS Panay, a navy gunboat escorting three Standard Oil tankers on the Yangtze river near Nanking, sinking them as well, a clear act of war, Roosevelt, sided with the Midwestern non-interventionists against the war hawks in his own administration like Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who urged a declaration of war.  The day after the Panay was sunk, the Japanese began the destruction of Nanking, slaughtering between 160,000 and 300,000 civilians in four days, one of the great atrocities of the 20th century. Still, Roosevelt resisted calls for war.

News report of FDR's Quarantine speech.

But it was in 1937 that Roosevelt came to believe, as Eisenhower had told him, that Europe was bound for war again. With Japan already at war with China, something had to be done to stop this and he proposed in his famous October 5 speech in Chicago an international quarantine against the "epidemic of world lawlessness" by aggressive nations. He didn't name them but commentators thought he was specifically targeting Japan, but it seems in retrospect that he  meant Germany and Italy and, probably, Francoist forces in Spain as well.  Japan's actions two months later had to have cemented his conviction that the United States could not stand by and do nothing while the world raced toward another catastrophe, one even greater and more widespread than had been the Great War.

Here was where he and Lindbergh parted ways, Lindbergh being staunchly opposed to any American involvement in overseas conflicts.  But what if Lindbergh had been by that time a long-time friend and confident of Roosevelt?  Would he have influenced Roosevelt, convincing him there was nothing the U.S. could do to stop other nations from warring with each other if they wanted to -- or would Roosevelt have convinced Lindbergh that the only way to achieve true world peace was for America to forcefully step into the world arena and compel peace on a truculent world?  

By that time, Roosevelt considered Europe "an incubator of wars," in his phrase, and believed the only way to end its eternal wars was to dismantle the European empires and impose a global system of free trade among free nations, none of which would be allowed to attack any other.  Aggressive acts would be punished by a "police" force, essentially the American armed forces and the auxiliary forces of nations who subscribed to the American world view. He intended to maintain a large military presence in Europe to ensure the forfeiture of those countries' empires and forestall any recrudescence of European imperialism.  

I'm simplifying Roosevelt's views, but that's the gist of it. And isn't it pretty much what happened after World War II?  

I've written previously about Roosevelt's view and plans and intend to write more about him soon.  He is a fascinating man and, in my view, the most significant president in U.S. history other than Lincoln, with the possible exception of Polk.

Could FDR and Lindbergh have become allies?

I think there was a good chance FDR could have, if not converted Lindbergh to his views, at least have made him understand what he intended to do and why he believed American intervention by force of arms in world affairs would lead to the long-lasting peace and the preservation of Western civilization that Lindbergh feared was on the brink of extinction.  After all, Roosevelt's and Lindbergh's views of what must be done by America to stop European wars was almost identical.  The difference was that Roosevelt intended to do it and Lindbergh did not want him to. As friends, could the two have reached a compromise, a compromise that directed American foreign policy?

Of course, who can say?  But it is an interesting speculation.  Can you imagine Lindbergh standing side by side with Roosevelt saying that we had to fight for peace in the most literal sense? Or Roosevelt standing with Lindbergh while announcing strict adherence to the Neutrality Acts and urging a negotiated settlement between the belligerents during the "Phony War" phase of the European conflict?  And also announcing he was joining with Hitler, who had volunteered to mediate the Japan-China war, to seek a negotiated settlement to that conflict?

Instead, instead.... Well, we know how it went with Roosevelt and Lindbergh and it wasn't  Roosevelt who suffered.  And it wasn't just Lindbergh who had his life and career derailed, pushed into obscurity.  I think the entire country suffered because Lindbergh didn't know how to chat with the press and get along with those in power.  It may be a stretch to believe so, and it may not at all be true, but I think that, considering the mood of the country in the 1930s that brought about the Neutrality Acts, there was a slim chance that a savvy politician like FDR could have been persuaded by popular pacifists like Lindbergh to stay out of the European War if he had not seen them as merely opponents who had to be pushed aside, but as trusted confidants.  Just a chance. The Pacific War, well, that was on Japan, and, to a pretty good extent, Philippine president Manuel Quezon. But that is a whole 'nother post.  Suffice it to say he got on the wrong side of Roosevelt, too.  But it wasn't because he was a sperg, it was because he was a fool.

And if America had stayed out of the European war, and if Japan had by-passed the Philippines, not attacked Pearl Harbor and other U.S. possessions, instead only seizing the European empire holdings in the Far East (as it was then called), so no U.S.-Japan war, what would the world have been like?  What would it be like today?

Earhart's letter:

Here are the words of Charles Lindbergh as Europe plunged western civilization into a catastrophic war. You can see why those wielding the whip hand hate him to this day.

When war broke out, Lindbergh flew combat missions with the Marines and the Army Air Force in the South Pacific.  He showed the Marine pilots that an F4U could lift a 4,000-lb bomb load and the Army pilots how to extend the range of the P-38 by hundreds of miles.

When necessity required it, he put aside his pacifism.  But doing so troubled him all the rest of his life. He wrote, "War is like flame. Where it sweeps, life disappears."

Lindbergh taking off in an F4U-1A of VF-24, Roi Namur, Kwajelein.

Lindbergh with the Marines.

An excerpt from Charles Lindbergh's September 11, 1941, anti-war speech: