Although I’d never had much interest in American history when I was young, the name of Charles A. Lindbergh was certainly known to me, with the story of that early pioneering aviator always rating at least a few sentences in my introductory textbooks.
I’d vaguely known that Lindbergh had been the first to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight from New York City to Paris, becoming world famous for that daring exploit. A few years later, his story had turned tragic when the kidnapping of his infant son became one of our most infamous crimes, with the entire nation mourning when the young child’s body was found, and the Lindbergh Case prompted changes in federal law. Matters took another dark turn in the early 1940s as Lindbergh became one of America’s leading isolationists, fiercely opposing our entry in World War II, with some of his antisemitic public statements permanently shattering his once-heroic image and leading to accusations that he was a supporter of Nazi Germany.
That small handful of facts largely exhausted my knowledge of Lindbergh, who hardly loomed very large in our history books or our media. I’d never been drawn to the early history of aviation, so I vaguely lumped Lindbergh in with the Wright Brothers, and hardly questioned such minimal coverage.
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But very occasionally I’d see reviews of new books about Lindbergh in my newspapers or magazines, and as my interest in American history and our entrance into World War II grew over the last couple of decades, his apparent role in that controversy attracted my curiosity. One of those books had been Lindbergh, a well-regarded 1998 biography by A. Scott Berg, and a couple of years ago I happened to pick up a copy at a book sale for a dollar or two, eventually reading it in order to broaden my knowledge of a historical figure about whom I knew so little.
I found that Berg’s biography fully deserved its Pulitzer Prize, running well over 650 pages and being an excellent, very thorough, and even-handed treatment of its subject, well written and based upon exhaustive archival research.
Although it essentially confirmed the basic facts that I’d always known, I was shocked by the sheer scale of Lindbergh’s fame both in America and the rest of the world, discovering that during the 1920s and 1930s he had loomed far larger than what was suggested by the brief descriptions in the textbooks or media that I’d absorbed. Those accounts now seemed as severely distorted as if George Washington had been relegated to merely four or five sentences in all our American history textbooks.
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I think that most of us fail to realize how much our world has been transformed by the creation of the modern media and also just how recently that process unfolded. Large circulation daily newspapers providing news of breaking events only appeared during the mid to late nineteenth century, around the same time that popular national magazines began to hit their stride, while the even more powerful electronic media of films and radio followed during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. This important history was told in Prof. Paul Starr’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning volume The Creation of the Media, which I read last year, though I found his account rather plodding and dull.
These days all of us are aware of the tremendous role that celebrities play in American society and the rest of the West, with these individuals often exerting popular influence far greater than that of almost any of our leading political figures, let alone our academics or writers. But the elevation of such celebrities was impossible before the appearance of the modern media. And what I had completely failed to grasp until reading Berg’s biography was that Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic in 1927 had established him as the world’s first great international celebrity, transforming the flyer at the age of 25 into something entirely new in human history.
Lindbergh’s Wikipedia page runs nearly 25,000 words and one of its sections effectively summarizes many of the striking facts about the immediate consequences of his solo flight. As word spread that his plane was approaching its French destination, 150,000 Parisians flocked to the airport to await him, mobbing his aircraft for souvenirs. The United Press claimed that a million Belgians greeted him when he soon flew on to Brussels, apparently the greatest welcome ever accorded a private citizen. His next stop was in Britain, where a throng of 100,000 awaited his arrival at Croydon airport. These huge, unprecedented numbers were drawn to see a private citizen, being comparable to the largest crowds that had ever greeted the most important kings, emperors, or popes.
The New York Times announced Lindbergh’s achievement in an above-the-fold, page-wide headline “Lindbergh Does It!” When he finally returned to New York City a few weeks later, he was received by the mayor who gave him a ticker-tape parade and the governor who awarded him a special medal at a ceremony attended by 200,000. Contemporary news accounts claimed that some 4,000,000 people saw Lindbergh that day, and according to Berg people were “behaving as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it.”
The American government created an entirely new award for Lindbergh, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and it subsequently became one of our highest national honors. But because that wasn’t quite enough, a special act of Congress also gave him our Medal of Honor, hitherto restricted to our greatest combat heroes, which President Calvin Coolidge presented to Lindbergh at a White House ceremony. Time Magazine had been founded a couple of years earlier, and on January 2, 1928 it named Lindbergh its first Man of the Year, thereby starting a media tradition that has now lasted for nearly a century. At least 200 songs were written in tribute to his achievement.
Lindbergh soon published his autobiography, which was translated into most major languages and sold more than 650,000 copies during the first year at a time when our population was only one-third of its current size. Lindbergh then spent three months traveling over 22,000 miles to 82 different American cities, giving 147 speeches to 30 million people, representing more than a quarter of our country’s entire population. More than one quarter of the entire American population came out to see and hear Lindbergh in person.
I was absolutely stunned by all of these facts, which I’d never suspected. I’m hardly an expert on these sorts of matters, but I doubt if any later celebrity has ever matched Lindbergh’s mark during the century that followed.
Lindbergh’s flying achievement and the unprecedented scale of his global media celebrity also had some very practical consequences, setting off the huge “Lindbergh Boom” in the worldwide aviation industry. Within months of his triumph, applications for pilot’s licenses in the U.S. tripled, and over the next couple of years the number of U.S. airline passengers rose by an astonishing 3,000% while large numbers of new aviation companies were founded and funded. Thus, Lindbergh and his exploit probably played a huge role in the creation of the American airline industry, which otherwise might have taken many more years to fully come into existence.
Media-driven celebrity culture was an entirely new aspect of our society, and many observers expected the intense popular interest in Lindbergh to fade within a few months or a year, but they were mistaken. The youthful aviator was a rather shy and subdued Midwesterner who hardly seemed eager to be the center of so much public attention, but his diffident reaction provoked the media and the public to even greater continuing interest in all aspects of his life. Indeed, for the next dozen years, Lindbergh’s status as America’s greatest national hero would remain unchallenged.
On a goodwill trip to Mexico in late 1927, he met Anne Morrow, the youthful daughter of our ambassador Dwight Morrow, a former top Wall Street executive, and married her in 1929, with that story-book romance reigniting media attention, as did the birth less than a year later of their first son, Charles Jr.
The Lindbergh baby immediately became one of the most famous infants in American history, so his sudden kidnapping in 1932 produced an absolutely unprecedented wave of public anger and outrage. Although a large ransom was paid, the remains of the baby’s body was later found in a wooded area close to the Lindbergh home. A German immigrant was eventually arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for what the American media called “the crime of the century.” Famed journalist H.L. Mencken described the case as “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
This was the first such high-profile kidnapping in our national history, and federal law was changed as a consequence, giving jurisdiction to J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-crime investigative unit within the Justice Department. The resulting public attention helped his organization become the very powerful FBI.
Frustrated over the endless media hounding that his family endured and fearful of the lives of his other young children, Lindbergh went into self-imposed foreign exile in late 1935, moving to Europe and mostly living in Britain for the next several years until the eve of World War II.
Although I found all these aspects of Lindbergh’s public life quite interesting and important, my original curiosity had centered on his later role as the leading public spokesman for the America First Committee (AFC), the national anti-war organization that unsuccessfully opposed our eventual entrance into World War II. Berg’s book devoted only a single lengthy chapter to that subject, hardly unreasonable since those events only occupied a year or two of his subject’s long life. But this only sketched out a story that I wanted to see covered in much greater detail.
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Therefore, I was very pleased last month when a review in the Wall Street Journal alerted me to the release of a new book devoted entirely to that topic. The author was Prof. H.W. Brands, who had published more than thirty popular biographies and histories, two of which had been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
In that Journal review, Roger Lowenstein criticized America First as “a revisionist study” but this merely raised my own interest, and just as I’d hoped the book provided exactly the sort of detailed narrative I had been seeking, a very thorough and seemingly even-handed account of those extremely important events. The subtitle was “Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War,” and it accurately characterized the political battle over war or peace during 1940 and 1941 in terms of its two leading protagonists, with the very powerful President Franklin D. Roosevelt facing off against the aviator who ranked as America’s greatest national hero and popular celebrity.
Once we recognize the huge role of media power in determining political outcomes, we see that the contest between an American president and a private citizen who had never held any elective or appointive office was far less one-sided than what might be suggested by our constitutional system of government. Lindbergh’s enormous media clout made him the one figure who could go toe-to-toe with one of America’s most powerful presidents in the arena of public opinion.
Indeed, a few years earlier Lindbergh and FDR had previously tangled on a far less weighty matter, which Berg covered in a half-dozen pages. In early 1934, Roosevelt had abruptly revoked all domestic airmail contracts between the federal government and numerous private airlines, suggesting that these had been awarded corruptly by the preceding Republican administration and instead ordering Army planes to assume responsibility for carrying the mail. The potential financial impact upon America’s nascent aviation industry was devastating, and Lindbergh sent a 275 word telegram of protest to the president, while also releasing a copy to the press, with his statement generating huge public attention.
FDR was outraged at this challenge and directed his minions to attack Lindbergh in the media and blacken his reputation, and for the next couple of months, a public battle was fought over the issue. The president’s Democratic allies had total control over Congress, so Lindbergh was called to testify before a special committee investigating the matter, speaking in a room packed with cameras and microphones. But despite these potentially hostile surroundings, Lindbergh completely carried the day, with one representative describing his resulting constituent mail as running 97% in Lindbergh’s favor. The New York Times and top Washington pundits also soon came out in support of the latter’s position.
One point the renowned aviator made was that Army flyers were probably inexperienced in carrying the very heavy mail payloads, and his warning proved correct, with a dozen of those planes soon crashing and killing their pilots. So despite some face-saving gestures, the result of what became known as the “Air-Mail Fiasco” was the complete surrender of the Roosevelt Administration, which returned airmail service to private carriers. As Berg explained, this was the first great political defeat that FDR had suffered since reaching the White House, and neither man ever forgot nor forgave that early skirmish.
This incident came years before the beginning of Brands’ narrative so he omitted it, but it surely helped to explain Lindbergh’s audacious willingness to directly challenge the president of the United States over the far more important matter of war and peace.
The battle over American involvement in World War II constituted one of the most momentous political turning points in our country’s modern history, and for more than 80 years this story has been obfuscated by a thick layer of congealed propaganda, with the true facts only very rarely if ever reaching any substantial mainstream audience.
America First, the huge antiwar organization that Lindbergh helped lead, lost that political battle and as a consequence for more than three generations it has been heavily condemned and even demonized in our media descriptions of that era, a fate extended to many of its leaders, Lindbergh foremost among them. This explains why the individual who probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero of the twentieth century was relegated to just a few sentences in my introductory history textbooks.
Many contrary accounts of those important events have been written and published, but nearly all of these have been carefully excluded from mainstream distribution, so that even among well-educated Americans I suspect that relatively few are fully aware that there were two sides to that story.
Given this extremely skewed intellectual landscape, Brands’ book represented a remarkable step forward, an even-handed account of that organization and the unsuccessful battle it waged. The book was written by a well-regarded mainstream historian, released by a leading publisher, and reviewed in the Journal and the Washington Post, two of our most influential national newspapers. The author was interviewed by NPR‘s All Things Considered, by the CBS radio network, and in various other venues. Probably nothing like this had happened for decades.
In reading Brands’ book, I soon came across a striking example of the author’s objectivity and courage.
Hitler occupied the Czech rump-state in early 1939, but simultaneously declared that he did not want to involve Germany in a major war. Roosevelt then issued a public response, challenging the German dictator to give assurances that he would not attack nor invade a list of some thirty countries in Europe and the Middle East. When this incident is described in our standard history books, FDR is usually praised for having clearly anticipated and warned against the Nazi plans for future aggression and conquest.
However, Brands also provided Hitler’s own reply, made in a speech before the Reichstag, and this presented a very different picture. Hitler emphasized that all the lands recently occupied by his forces had been under German rule for more than 600 years, since long before the American continent had been discovered by Europeans, let alone settled and the United States eventually established. He went on to note that American forces had repeatedly occupied the countries of Central America and the Caribbean, demonstrating the total hypocrisy of the accusations against him. Furthermore, he noted that FDR had included Ireland on the list of countries potentially threatened by Germany, but the Irish president had responded with a speech dismissing any such German threat but emphasizing that his country had instead long been subject to continual British aggression.
This incident occurred just a few months before the outbreak of World War II and by telling both sides of the story, Brands made it very clear who got the better of that public Roosevelt-Hitler exchange, information that I would never find in our mainstream histories.
In another passage of his very courageous book, Brands noted the astonishing vehemence with which FDR attacked his political opponents in the antiwar movement during early 1940, coming very close to accusing them of treason. They, in turn, believed that he was hoping to use the excuse of the war “to break the oldest taboo in American politics” and seek a third term. That was indeed exactly what happened later that year, and such a third term seemed FDR’s only hope of salvaging his place in history:
His first term had been filled with legislative accomplishment, but his second term had been a mess. After the botched attempt to pack the Supreme Court, he had tried to purge Democratic conservatives in 1938, and failed miserably. If he left the White House on schedule, he might be judged by history as mediocre or worse—especially if a Republican succeeded him and started to dismantle the New Deal. Roosevelt saw the war as his ticket to longevity in office, said the sceptics. He would talk about preserving freedom, but what he really intended to preserve was himself from oblivion.
Although Brands presents that passage as summarizing the views of FDR’s critics, my strong sense is that the author seemed to share that analysis. He had previously published a 2008 book on Roosevelt that ran nearly 900 pages and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and in his recent interviews he described FDR as “one of the slipperiest characters he had ever come across.”
I regarded Brands’ book as excellent and an important step forward in our mainstream understanding of the important historical topic he treats, with the author making few points that I would strongly dispute. However, I do think there were quite a number of elements that he failed to discuss or include, some of which seemed very relevant to his narrative.
Brands is a prolific author and although his book ran well over 400 pages, he apparently produced it in just a single year despite maintaining a considerable teaching load at the Austin campus of the University of Texas as he mentioned in his interviews.
His strong biographical focus led him to heavily rely upon Lindbergh’s Wartime Journals, an invaluable historical document that runs more than 1,000 pages and provided the bulk of the author’s references, mostly supplemented by contemporaneous news articles, speeches, and other similar texts. Such primary source material should be the foundation of any solid historical reconstruction.
As a consequence, Brands has produced an excellent, important work. But it included no bibliography, and after reading his text and reviewing his references, I think it is quite possible that he might have been unaware of some of the important academic secondary literature that over the decades has greatly illuminated his historical topic.
For example, he provided no hint of the major purges in our media in which FDR successfully removed some of his most influential critics, thereby greatly strengthening his hand in his subsequent 1941 political battle against Lindbergh and the America First movement.
In addition, the author seemed unaware of historian Thomas Mahl’s crucial 1998 academic monograph on the huge, secret role that British intelligence operatives played in disrupting the political opposition to FDR’s interventionist policy, nor the very strong evidence that FDR deliberately manipulated Japan into attacking America at Pearl Harbor, thereby getting America into the war exactly as he had long desired.
Brands closed his book after that December 7th attack, and his epilogue quoted Robert Wood, the America First chairman, as glumly telling Lindbergh “well, he got us in through the back door.” But the author did not provide the political context explaining that very famous phrase so widely used by FDR’s opponents, a phrase that later became the title of Prof. Charles C. Tansill’s important 1952 book.
On the other hand, it is also quite possible that Brands was fully aware of all this material, but believed that citing or including such additional “conspiratorial” elements in his narrative would have pushed his work too far outside our ideological mainstream, thereby preventing his book from attracting the sort of major media coverage that it did. If so, I can certainly understand that strategic decision, given that his analysis already challenged so much of our standard historical narrative.
However, I do think it is worth presenting some of this additional background information by quoting a lengthy excerpt from my own 2018 discussion of these important historical events:
The year 1940 seemed to mark the point at which some of the most significant dissenting voices in the national media were either removed or intimidated into silence. Once that had been accomplished, the strategic landscape obviously shifted, facilitating political maneuvers that might have been far more difficult under a climate of robust press scrutiny.Given the overwhelming popular opposition to war intervention, Roosevelt’s prospects for an unprecedented third term might have seemed difficult, since he would either be forced to strongly commit himself to that position or else risk defeat against his Republican opponent, drawn from a party that was wholeheartedly anti-interventionist. But in one of the most unlikely twists in all of American political history, the June 1940 Republican convention held in Chicago selected as its nominee the obscure Wendell Willkie, a strongly pro-interventionist individual who had never previously held any public office and until just a few months earlier had been a committed lifelong Democrat. Two decades ago, historian Thomas E. Mahl thoroughly documented that British intelligence agents played a crucial role in that extremely unexpected turn of events, quite possibly even employing lethal means. The resulting Roosevelt-Willkie race thus provided voters virtually no choice on foreign policy matters, and FDR was reelected in a huge landslide, thereby largely freeing his hands to pursue a much more aggressive foreign policy.
Alarmed by their growing fear that America might be drawn into another world war without voters having had any say in the matter, a group of Yale Law students launched an anti-interventionist political organization that they named “The America First Committee,” and it quickly grew to 800,000 members, becoming the largest grass-roots political organization in our national history. Numerous prominent public figures joined or supported it, with the chairman of Sears, Roebuck serving as its head, and its youthful members included future presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford as well as other notables such as Gore Vidal, Potter Stewart, and Sargent Schriver. Flynn served as chairman of the New York City chapter, and the organization’s leading public spokesman was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who for decades had probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero.
Throughout 1941, enormous crowds across the country attended anti-war rallies addressed by Lindbergh and the other leaders, with many millions more listening to the radio broadcasts of the events. Mahl shows that British agents and their American supporters meanwhile continued their covert operations to counter this effort by organizing various political front-groups advocating American military involvement, and employing fair means or foul to neutralize their political opponents. Jewish individuals and organizations seem to have played an enormously disproportionate role in that effort.
At the same time, the Roosevelt Administration escalated its undeclared war against German submarines and other naval forces in the Atlantic, unsuccessfully seeking to provoke an incident that might stampede the country into war. FDR also promoted the most bizarre and ridiculous propaganda inventions aimed at terrifying naive Americans, such as claiming to have proof that the Germans—who possessed no large surface navy and were completely stymied by the English Channel—had formulated concrete plans to leap across two thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean and seize control of Latin America. British agents supplied some of the crude forgeries he cited as evidence.
These facts, now firmly established by decades of scholarship, provide some necessary context to Lindbergh’s famously controversial speech at an America First rally in September 1941. At that event, he charged that three groups in particular were “pressing this country toward war[:] the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration,” and thereby unleashed an enormous firestorm of media attacks and denunciations, including widespread accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies. Given the realities of the political situation, Lindbergh’s statement constituted a perfect illustration of Michael Kinsley’s famous quip that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” But as a consequence, Lindbergh’s once-heroic reputation suffered enormous and permanent damage, with the campaign of vilification echoing for the remaining three decades of his life, and even well beyond. Although he was not entirely purged from public life, his standing was certainly never even remotely the same.
Meanwhile, FDR’s drive to have America enter the war continued on various parallel tracks. Over the years, diplomatic historians have demonstrated that faced with such stubborn domestic opposition to direct military intervention in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration undertook a wide range of steps directly intended to provoke a Japanese attack and thereby achieve a “back door to war” as Prof. Charles C. Tansill later entitled his important 1952 book on that history. These measures include a complete freeze on Japanese assets, an embargo on the oil absolutely vital to the Japanese military, and the summary rejection of the Japanese Prime Minister’s personal plea to hold top-level governmental negotiations aimed at maintaining peace. As early as May 1940, FDR had ordered the Pacific Fleet relocated from its San Diego home port to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, a decision strongly opposed as unnecessarily provocative and dangerous by James Richardson, its commanding admiral, who was fired as a result.
Thus, the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 actually marked the success of Roosevelt’s strategy by putting America into the war. Indeed, some scholars have even pointed to considerable evidence that the highest levels of the U.S. government were fully aware of the impending attack and allowed it to proceed in order to ensure that a sufficiently large number of American casualties would sweep away all popular obstacles to full-scale involvement in the world war.
There was also a very strange domestic incident that immediately followed the Pearl Harbor attack, one which seems to have attracted far too little interest. In that era, films were the most powerful popular media, and although Gentiles constituted 97% of the population, they controlled only one of the major studios; perhaps coincidentally, Walt Disney was also the only high-ranking Hollywood figure perched squarely within the anti-war camp. And the day after the surprise Japanese attack, hundreds of U.S. troops seized control of Disney Studios, allegedly in order to help defend California from Japanese forces located thousands of miles away, with the military occupation continuing for the next eight months. Consider what suspicious minds might have thought if on September 12, 2001, President Bush had immediately ordered his military to seize the CBS network offices, claiming that such a step was necessary to help protect New York City against further Islamicist attacks.
Regarding that last incident, we should remember that Pearl Harbor was bombed on a Sunday and unless FDR and his top aides were fully aware of the pending Japanese assault, they surely would have been totally preoccupied with the aftermath of the disaster. It seems highly unlikely that the U.S. military would have been ready to seize control of Disney studios early Monday morning following an actual “surprise” attack.
Also absent from Brands’ book was any mention of Oswald Garrison Villard, who as the longtime owner and publisher of The Nation had spent decades as one of the top figures of American liberalism, co-founding both the American Anti-Imperialist League and the NAACP. Villard similarly became a co-founder of America First, but he apparently had little interaction with Lindbergh, receiving only a single very cursory mention in Lindbergh’s journals. Therefore, Brands’ heavy reliance upon that source probably explained the curious omission of Villard from his narrative.
Brands’ 75 minute book interview on the CBS Eye on the World was with John Batchelor, a name well known to me. Batchelor had been a former student of the late Prof. Stephen Cohen of New York and Princeton Universities, and over the last few years he had hosted Cohen on a weekly basis. This provided the noted scholar with his sole mainstream media platform following his purge from nearly all other venues because of his strong opposition to America’s ongoing slide into severe conflict with Russia. In a 2021 article, I discussed Cohen’s unsuccessful efforts in that regard and noted the eerie echoes of what Villard had faced nearly eighty years earlier.
For decades Prof. Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University had ranked as one of America’s leading Russia scholars, and certainly the most prominent such figure in left-liberal circles. As far back as the 1970s his Sovieticus columns had regularly appeared in the pages of The Nation, our premier leftwing opinion magazine, and during the Gorbachev Era and the ensuing collapse of the USSR, I often saw him on the PBS Newshour, debating America’s Soviet policy with his conservative counterparts. Meanwhile, his numerous scholarly books on Soviet and Russian history were respectfully reviewed in elite mainstream publications. Not only was Cohen clearly the foremost Russia expert within the American Left, but no other name of even remotely comparable stature came to mind, and his 1988 second marriage to Katrina vanden Heuvel, who went on to serve as Publisher and Editor of The Nation for nearly a quarter-century, certainly cemented that impression of his influence.Cohen had devoted his entire career to fostering an amicable relationship between Russia and America. But when Victoria Nuland and other Neocons gained influence during the late Obama Administration, they shattered that dream in an instant by orchestrating the violent early 2014 uprising and coup that replaced Ukraine’s independent-minded government with what amounted to an American quasi-puppet regime. Not only did this development threaten to push NATO to Russia’s border in absolute violation of the guarantees once given to Gorbachev, but it seemed likely to place the West in control of overwhelmingly Russian Crimea, home to Russia’s most important naval base, and only Putin’s quick moves forestalled that risk by restoring the peninsula to his country through annexation. A violent civil war and secessionist movement in the remainder of Ukraine quickly broke out, costing the lives of many thousands of ethnic Russians over the next few years, while periodically threatening to ignite a full scale war between Russia and the West…
Unfortunately, the editorial decisions of Cohen’s own magazine may have considerably diminished the impact of his very important message. The scholar was arguing our media and political policies were raising the terrible risk of war with nuclear-armed Russia, yet I don’t recall any Nation cover-stories highlighting that danger, and although its website hosted his weekly podcasts and very occasionally ran his articles, such material was usually buried in obscurity so that it attracted minimal coverage and discussion. Although this defensiveness may have been necessary to avoid a backlash from angry subscribers, the obvious result was to minimize the gravity of Cohen’s message. Why should Nation readers take his dire warnings of global war seriously if Nation editors apparently did not? Indeed, once I made arrangements in late 2019 to begin republishing and regularly featuring Cohen’s columns and radio shows, they attracted far more interest and supportive comments on our website than they did on his own, demonstrating the huge ideological hurdles he had faced from his own community.
Cohen may or may not have been aware of the eerie parallel between his own predicament and a similar situation that had unfolded at that same publication around the time of his birth in 1938. From 1900 to the mid-1930s, the Nation had been owned and edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, a name now almost forgotten but once one of the leading liberal figures of the era, co-founder of the NAACP and grandson of famed Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, while also ranking as one of America’s foremost anti-imperialists and anti-militarists. His father had been a German immigrant, and when he published writings critical of American involvement in World War I, his magazine was legally suppressed by the harsh wartime censorship laws, being temporarily banned from the US mails. But by the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of both elite and ordinary Americans had swung around to his position, and concluded that his opposition to our participation in the Great War had been correct all along.
Although he finally sold the Nation in 1935 during the depths of the Great Depression, the magazine he had run for more than three decades continued to feature his weekly commentary, which strongly supported FDR’s New Deal policies and fiercely criticized Hitler and the Nazis. But near the end of the 1930s, he grew alarmed that another world war might be on the horizon, once again involving America, and his anti-war views began sharply diverging from those of the other writers, so that his decades-long column was finally dropped in 1940. Diverting a sweeping ideological tide had proved as difficult for Villard in the late 1930s as it became for Cohen three generations later.
Although unlike Villard, John T. Flynn was not entirely omitted from Brands’ book, he only made a very brief cameo appearance in a few paragraphs near the end of the author’s narrative. After Lindbergh’s very candid September 1941 speech in Des Moines provoked a firestorm of national controversy, Brands explained that although a majority of the America First leadership wanted to issue a statement supporting those remarks, Flynn objected so strongly that they instead took no public stand. Flynn was also the only figure who felt that Lindbergh should publicly declare that his controversial statements only represented his personal views.
In his private journals, Lindbergh emphasized that Flynn was one of the most liberal members of the committee but explained that his extreme sensitivity to any accusations of antisemitism led him to take positions that seemed logically inconsistent:
Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines, but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn’s attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private. But apparently he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is done.
Although Brands didn’t mention it, Flynn’s position becomes much more understandable when we consider that he was the chairman of the New York City chapter of America First. Not only was that city very heavily Jewish, but as he privately acknowledged, the local Jewish population was vehemently pro-war, almost uniformly so. However, he regarded such truths as completely unmentionable in public, and was horrified when Lindbergh did so.
For years, Flynn had been one of America’s most influential progressive journalists and in that same 2018 article, I discussed some of the very surprising facts I had discovered as I began investigating the lost history of that era.
Take the case of John T. Flynn, probably unknown today to all but one American in a hundred, if even that. Given my much broader ideological explorations, I had sometimes seen him hailed as an important figure in the Old Right, a founder of the America First Committee, and someone friendly to both Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society, though falsely smeared by his opponents as a proto-fascist or Nazi-sympathizer. This sort of description seemed to form a consistent if somewhat disputed picture in my mind.So imagine my surprise at discovering that throughout the 1930s he had been one of the single most influential liberal voices in American society, a writer on economics and politics whose status may have roughly approximated that of Paul Krugman, though with a strong muck-raking tinge. His weekly column in The New Republic allowed him to serve as a lodestar for America’s progressive elites, while his regular appearances in Colliers, an illustrated mass circulation weekly reaching many millions of Americans, provided him a platform comparable to that of a major television personality in the later heyday of network TV.
To some extent, Flynn’s prominence may be objectively quantified. A few years ago, I happened to mention his name to a well-read and committed liberal born in the 1930s, and she unsurprisingly drew a complete blank, but wondered if he might have been a little like Walter Lippmann, the very famous columnist of that era. When I checked, I saw that across the hundreds of periodicals in my archiving system, there were just 23 articles by Lippmann from the 1930s but fully 489 by Flynn.
Much of Flynn’s early prominence came from his important role in the 1932 Senate Pecora Commission, which had pilloried the grandees of Wall Street for the 1929 stock market collapse, and whose recommendations ultimately led to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other important financial reforms. Following an impressive career in newspaper journalism, he had moved over to The New Republic as a weekly columnist in 1930. Although initially sympathetic to Franklin Roosevelt’s goals, he soon became skeptical about the effectiveness of his methods, noting the sluggish expansion of public works projects and wondering whether the vaunted NRA was actually more beneficial to big business owners than to ordinary workers.
As the years went by, his criticism of the Roosevelt Administration turned harsher on economic and eventually foreign policy grounds, and he incurred its enormous hostility as a consequence. Roosevelt began sending personal letters to leading editors demanding that Flynn be barred from any prominent American print outlet, and perhaps as a consequence he lost his longstanding New Republic column immediately following FDR’s 1940 reelection, and his name disappeared from mainstream periodicals. However, he still authored a number of best-selling books over the years sharply attacking Roosevelt, and after the war his byline occasionally surfaced in much less mainstream and influential publications. A decade ago the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute republished a couple of Flynn’s books, and a lengthy introduction by Prof. Ralph Raico sketched in some of this background.
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Supporters of my local Palo Alto library hold a monthly book sale at which donated items are sold for a pittance, and I usually drop by to browse the shelves out of curiosity for what I might find. A few years ago, I happened to notice one of Flynn’s FDR books, published in 1948, and bought it for a quarter. The material presented on the yellowing pages of The Roosevelt Myth were eye-opening to me.
Anyone can write a book saying anything, and if some obscure right-winger leveled astonishing charges against a liberal president, I might not pay much attention. But if Paul Krugman had spent years expressing growing doubts about Barack Obama’s policies and effectiveness, then finally turned against him and published a national best-seller denouncing his administration, surely those opinions would carry much more weight. And so it was with Flynn’s accusations against Roosevelt.
I am no expert on the New Deal Era, but Flynn’s work seemed soberly and persuasively written, although in a journalistic muck-raking style, and he makes all sorts of claims I had never previously encountered. My software system provides cross-referenced book reviews and I read a dozen of these. A few from around the time of the book’s publication were extremely critical, denouncing the contents as total nonsense written by a notoriously crazed “Roosevelt-hater.” But no specific rebuttals were provided and the general tone was much like that of the numerous Wall Street Journal op-eds from the mid-2000s which issued blanket denunciations of books written by “crazed Bush-haters.” Indeed, the sum-total of one 1949 review consisted of the single sentence “Unadulterated venom from a professional F.D.R.-hater.” However, other, more recent reviews, admittedly drawn from the libertarian camp, were overwhelmingly favorable. Having no great expertise, I cannot effectively judge.
But Flynn’s claims were extremely precise, detailed, and specific, including numerous names, dates, and references. Most surprisingly, he accused the Roosevelts of exhibiting an extraordinary degree of familial financial corruption, which he claimed may have been unprecedented in American history. Apparently, despite his wealthy and elite background FDR’s eldest son Elliott never attended college and had essentially no professional qualifications in anything. But soon after FDR became president, he began soliciting large personal payments and “investments” from wealthy businessmen who needed favors from the massively growing federal government, and seemingly did so with FDR’s full knowledge and approval. The situation sounded a little like Billy Carter’s notorious activities during the late 1970s, but the money involved totaled as much as $50 million in present-day dollars relative to the household income of that era. I had never heard a word about this.
Even more shocking was the case of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who also had never attended college and apparently had little formal education of any sort. Soon after FDR was inaugurated, she began a major round of very well-paid personal advertising for corporate consumer products such as soap and took all sorts of other large payments over the next few years from various businesses, especially those crucially dependent upon government regulatory decisions. Imagine if recent First Ladies such as Michelle Obama or Laura Bush were constantly seen in TV ads hawking cars and diapers and fast food. The payments Eleanor personally received over the course of the FDR’s dozen years in office allegedly came to an astonishing $150 million, again relative to current family incomes. This, too, was something that I had never suspected. And all this was occurring during the very depths of the Great Depression, when a huge fraction of the country was desperately poor. Perhaps Juan and Eva Peron just didn’t hire the right PR people or simply aimed too low.
Obviously, the unprecedented growth in the spending and regulatory power of the federal government during the New Deal years increased opportunities for this sort of personal graft by an enormous amount. But Flynn notes how odd the situation seemed since FDR’s inherited fortune meant that he had already come into office as one of the wealthiest presidents of modern times. And as far as I’ve heard, his successor Harry S. Truman left the White House about as poor as he had entered it.
Some of Flynn’s other shocking claims were easier to verify. He argues that the New Deal was largely a failure and in support of that contention notes that when FDR entered office in 1933 there were 11 million unemployed and in 1938 after six years of enormous government spending and deficits and the creation of an alphabet soup of New Deal programs there were…11 million unemployed. That claim appears to be factually correct.
Flynn’s final break with FDR came over the latter’s foreign policy of the late 1930s.
Such an interventionist foreign policy may have represented a remarkable reversal of Roosevelt’s promises. All my introductory history books had always indicated that an Isolationist-leaning Congress had passed the various Neutrality Acts of the mid-1930s over FDR’s strong opposition and that these were intended to handcuff him. But according to Flynn, FDR had not only initially proposed that very legislation to his close Congressional allies, but actually made his personal advocacy and support for the Neutrality laws ones of the most popular centerpieces of his successful 1936 reelection campaign, thereby helping him carry the Mid West against Kansas Gov. Alf Landon. Once gain, Flynn provides a very specific and detailed description of that history. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia provides the opposite, totally conventional account.Leaving aside the extraordinary level of family financial corruption alleged by Flynn, his portrayal of FDR reminds me more of “W” than any other recent president. We must remember that “W” had run for office promising a “humble” foreign policy and the removal of various kinds of anti-Muslim government profiling, but quickly reversed himself when the 9/11 attacks gave him the opportunity to enter the history books as a “war president.”
The background of the book’s appearance provides an indication of the publication obstacles faced by critics of government policy. Notwithstanding Flynn’s outsize reputation and his previous string of best-sellers, his manuscript was rejected by virtually every major publisher, and in desperation, he finally turned to an obscure Irish-American house. Yet despite such an inauspicious launch and his near-complete exclusion from mainstream media outlets, his book quickly rose to the #2 spot on The New York Times list. Merely a decade earlier, he had been at the pinnacle of American influence, and the ongoing blacklisting by the mainstream media had apparently not yet fully managed to smother his memory.
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Much additional information on Flynn’s political activities and his involvement with the America First Committee was provided in An American First, a short book published nearly a half-century ago by Arlington House, a small conservative press. The author was Michele Flynn Stenehjelm, a young historian and archivist who happened to be Flynn’s own grand-daughter, and she drew very heavily upon the AFC archives to flesh out her account.
Brands’ overwhelming focus upon Lindbergh and his biographical orientation led him to reasonably rely upon the latter’s extensive and revealing Wartime Journals for coverage of the same events. Although Flynn was mentioned on some eighteen pages of that thousand page compilation, I noticed that while he was correctly named “John T. Flynn” in the actual journal entries themselves, the index mistakenly listed him as “John R. Flynn,” underscoring how that once highly influential journalist and public figure had become almost totally forgotten by 1970, when the volume was compiled and published. Although nothing in Stenehjelm’s own account substantially contradicted Lindbergh’s material, it obviously provided a much more detailed and somewhat different perspective on those same important events.
In the interviews and public lectures on his new book, Brands mentioned that although all of America’s many other wars have always been subject to “revisionism,” a heavy critical reexamination taking place years after the end of the conflict, that has not been the case for World War II. Instead, the greatest military conflict in human history has only been further enshrined in the media as “the Good War” that was fought by “the Greatest Generation.” In a very long 2019 article, I discussed the true history of that conflict and also explained some of the reasons it had remained so immune from any mainstream reevaluation.
As Brands explained, Lindbergh and his allies had argued that Hitler did not want war and was instead seeking to redress some of the outrageous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that had been imposed upon a prostrate Germany two decades earlier.
Indeed, all of Hitler’s democratic Weimar predecessors had made similar efforts, but whereas they had failed, he had managed to succeed, largely through bluff, while also annexing German Austria and the German Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, in both cases with the overwhelming support of their populations.
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Hitler’s final demand, that 95% German Danzig be returned to Germany just as its inhabitants desired, was an absolutely reasonable one, and only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British led the Poles to refuse that request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France. Indeed, he was generally quite friendly towards the Poles and had been hoping to enlist Poland as a German ally against the menace of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
As a Harvard freshman, I had taken an introductory history course, and one of the primary required texts on World War II had been that of A.J.P. Taylor, a renowned Oxford University historian. His famous 1961 work Origins of the Second World War had very persuasively laid out exactly this case, and I’d never found any reason to question the judgment of my professors who had assigned it.
The recent 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict that consumed so many tens of millions of lives naturally provoked numerous historical articles, and the resulting discussion led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years. I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received. The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it surely ranks as Taylor’s most famous work, and I can easily understand why it was still on my college required reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking study, I made a remarkable discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical acclaim, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.
Taylor was hardly alone in suffering such retribution. Indeed, as I have gradually discovered over the last decade or so, his fate seems to have been an exceptionally mild one, with his great existing stature partially insulating him from the backlash following his objective analysis of the historical facts. And such extremely serious professional consequences were especially common on our side of the Atlantic, where many of the victims lost their long-held media or academic positions, and permanently vanished from public view during the years around World War II.
A strong American parallel to Taylor came in the case of historian Harry Elmer Barnes, a figure almost unknown to me, but in his day an academic of great influence and stature:
Imagine my shock at later discovering that Barnes had actually been one of the most frequent early contributors to Foreign Affairs, serving as a primary book reviewer for that venerable publication from its 1922 founding onward, while his stature as one of America’s premier liberal academics was indicated by his scores of appearances in The Nation and The New Republic throughout that decade. Indeed, he is credited with having played a central role in “revising” the history of the First World War so as to remove the cartoonish picture of unspeakable German wickedness left behind as a legacy of the dishonest wartime propaganda produced by the opposing British and American governments. And his professional stature was demonstrated by his thirty-five or more books, many of them influential academic volumes, along with his numerous articles in The American Historical Review, Political Science Quarterly, and other leading journals.A few years ago I happened to mention Barnes to an eminent American academic scholar whose general focus in political science and foreign policy was quite similar, and yet the name meant nothing. By the end of the 1930s, Barnes had become a leading critic of America’s proposed involvement in World War II, and was permanently “disappeared” as a consequence, barred from all mainstream media outlets, while a major newspaper chain was heavily pressured into abruptly terminating his long-running syndicated national column in May 1940.
Many of Barnes’ friends and allies fell in that same ideological purge, which he described in his own writings and which continued after the end of the war:
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Over a dozen years after his disappearance from our national media, Barnes managed to publish Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, a lengthy collection of essays by scholars and other experts discussing the circumstances surrounding America’s entrance into World War II, and have it produced and distributed by a small printer in Idaho. His own contribution was a 30,000 word essay entitled “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout” and discussed the tremendous obstacles faced by the dissident thinkers of that period.
The book itself was dedicated to the memory of his friend, historian Charles A. Beard. Since the early years of the 20th century, Beard had ranked as an intellectual figure of the greatest stature and influence, co-founder of The New School in New York and serving terms as president of both The American Historical Association and The American Political Science Association. As a leading supporter of the New Deal economic policies, he was overwhelmingly lauded for his views.
Yet once he turned against Roosevelt’s bellicose foreign policy, publishers shut their doors to him, and only his personal friendship with the head of the Yale University Press allowed his critical 1948 volume President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 to even appear in print. Beard’s stellar reputation seems to have begun a rapid decline from that point onward, so that by 1968 historian Richard Hofstadter could write: “Today Beard’s reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival”. Indeed, Beard’s once-dominant “economic interpretation of history” might these days almost be dismissed as promoting “dangerous conspiracy theories,” and I suspect few non-historians have even heard of him.
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Another major contributor to the Barnes volume was William Henry Chamberlin, who for decades had been ranked among America’s leading foreign policy journalists, with more than 15 books to his credit, most of them widely and favorably reviewed. Yet America’s Second Crusade, his critical 1950 analysis of America’s entry into World War II, failed to find a mainstream publisher, and when it did appear was widely ignored by reviewers. Prior to its publication, his byline had regularly run in our most influential national magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Harpers. But afterward, his writing was almost entirely confined to small circulation newsletters and periodicals, appealing to narrow conservative or libertarian audiences.
In these days of the Internet, anyone can easily establish a website to publish his views, thus making them immediately available to everyone in the world. Social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter can bring interesting or controversial material to the attention of millions with just a couple of mouse-clicks, completely bypassing the need for the support of establishmentarian intermediaries. It is easy for us to forget just how extremely challenging the dissemination of dissenting ideas remained back in the days of print, paper, and ink, and recognize that an individual purged from his regular outlet might require many years to regain any significant foothold for the distribution of his work.
Years before A.J.P. Taylor ventured into those troubled waters, other British writers had faced similar ideological perils, as a distinguished British naval historian discovered in 1953:
The author of Unconditional Hatred was Captain Russell Grenfell, a British naval officer who had served with distinction in the First World War, and later helped direct the Royal Navy Staff College, while publishing six highly-regarded books on naval strategy and serving as the Naval Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Grenfell recognized that great quantities of extreme propaganda almost inevitably accompany any major war, but with several years having passed since the close of hostilities, he was growing concerned that unless an antidote were soon widely applied, the lingering poison of such wartime exaggerations might threaten the future peace of Europe.His considerable historical erudition and his reserved academic tone shine through in this fascinating volume, which focuses primarily upon the events of the two world wars, but often contains digressions into the Napoleonic conflicts or even earlier ones. One of the intriguing aspects of his discussion is that much of the anti-German propaganda he seeks to debunk would today be considered so absurd and ridiculous it has been almost entirely forgotten, while much of the extremely hostile picture we currently have of Hitler’s Germany receives almost no mention whatsoever, possibly because it had not yet been established or was then still considered too outlandish for anyone to take seriously. Among other matters, he reports with considerable disapproval that leading British newspapers had carried headlined articles about the horrific tortures that were being inflicted upon German prisoners at war crimes trials in order to coerce all sorts of dubious confessions out of them.
Grenfell’s book was banned from all mainstream publishers and was only released by a small Irish-American press, and a book by a leading expert on France suffered the same fate:
On French matters, Grenfell provides several extended references to a 1952 book entitled France: The Tragic Years, 1939-1947 by Sisley Huddleston, an author totally unfamiliar to me, and this whet my curiosity. One helpful use of my content-archiving system is to easily provide the proper context for long-forgotten writers, and Huddleston’s scores of appearances in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The New Republic, plus his thirty well-regarded books on France, seem to confirm that he spent decades as one of the leading interpreters of France to educated American and British readers. Indeed, his exclusive interview with British Prime Minister Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference became an international scoop. As with so many other writers, after World War II his American publisher necessarily became Devin-Adair, which released a posthumous 1955 edition of his book.
As I went on to conclude:
We may easily imagine that some prominent and highly-regarded individual at the peak of his career and public influence might suddenly take leave of his senses and begin promoting eccentric and erroneous theories, thereby ensuring his downfall. Under such circumstances, his claims may be treated with great skepticism and perhaps simply disregarded.But when the number of such very reputable yet contrary voices becomes sufficiently large and the claims they make seem generally consistent with each other, we can no longer casually dismiss their critiques. Their committed stance on these controversial matters had proved fatal to their continued public standing, and although they must have recognized these likely consequences, they nonetheless followed that path, even going to the trouble of writing lengthy books presenting their views, and seeking out some publisher somewhere who was willing to release these.
John T. Flynn, Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, Russell Grenfell, Sisley Huddleston, and numerous other scholars and journalists of the highest caliber and reputation all told a rather consistent story of the Second World War but one at total variance with that of today’s established narrative, and they did so at the cost of destroying their careers. A decade or two later, renowned historian A.J.P. Taylor reaffirmed this same basic narrative, and was purged from Oxford as a consequence. I find it very difficult to explain the behavior of all these individuals unless they were presenting a truthful account.
If a ruling political establishment and its media organs offer lavish rewards of funding, promotion, and public acclaim to those who endorse its party-line propaganda while casting into outer darkness those who dissent, the pronouncements of the former should be viewed with considerable suspicion. Barnes popularized the phrase “court historians” to describe those disingenuous and opportunistic individuals who follow the prevailing political winds, and our present-day media outlets are certainly replete with such types.
According to both Brands and Berg, one of Lindbergh’s close friends was Truman Smith, a high-ranking figure in Military Intelligence whose name appeared in dozens of Lindbergh’s journal entries. Although bound by military discipline, Smith fully shared Lindbergh’s views on the world situation, and similar sentiments seemed very widespread throughout our entire officer corps. Smith frequently corresponded with John Beaty, one of his brother officers, and my articles have repeatedly discussed Beaty’s later published work on those controversial issues:
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Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled The Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a position of considerable responsibility.
As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.
Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm, and then became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.
Books by unknown authors that are released by tiny publishers rarely sell many copies, but the work came to the attention of George E. Stratemeyer, a retired general who had been one of Douglas MacArthur’s commanders, and he wrote Beaty a letter of endorsement. Beaty began including that letter in his promotional materials, drawing the ire of the ADL, whose national chairman contacted Stratemeyer, demanding that he repudiate the book, which was described as a “primer for lunatic fringe groups” all across America. Instead, Stratemeyer delivered a blistering reply to the ADL, denouncing it for making “veiled threats” against “free expression and thoughts” and trying to establish Soviet-style repression in the United States. He declared that every “loyal citizen” should read The Iron Curtain Over America, whose pages finally revealed the truth about our national predicament, and he began actively promoting the book around the country while attacking the Jewish attempt to silence him. Numerous other top American generals and admirals soon joined Stratemeyer in publicly endorsing the work, as did a couple of influential members of the U.S. Senate, leading to its enormous national sales.
All these books and many others by once very highly regarded academics and journalists had challenged our official narrative of World War II, and all their authors had been purged from respectability and mainstream access as a consequence. This naturally led me to consider the central issue of the origins of that conflict, and I discovered that one of Flynn’s prewar columns provided revelations far more explosive than the later 1940 speculation that FDR had hoped to use the ongoing war to run for a third term and remain in office.
Perhaps the most obvious of these is the question of the true origins of the war, which laid waste to much of Europe, killed perhaps fifty or sixty million, and gave rise to the subsequent Cold War era in which Communist regimes controlled half of the entire Eurasian world-continent. Taylor, Irving, and numerous others have thoroughly debunked the ridiculous mythology that the cause lay in Hitler’s mad desire for world conquest, but if the German dictator clearly bore only minor responsibility, was there indeed any true culprit? Or did this massively-destructive world war come about in somewhat similar fashion to its predecessor, which our conventional histories treat as mostly due to a collection of blunders, misunderstandings, and thoughtless escalations.During the 1930s, John T. Flynn was one of America’s most influential progressive journalists, and although he had begun as a strong supporter of Roosevelt and his New Deal, he gradually became a sharp critic, concluding that FDR’s various governmental schemes had failed to revive the American economy. Then in 1937 a new economic collapse spiked unemployment back to the same levels as when the president had first entered office, confirming Flynn in his harsh verdict. And as I wrote last year:
Indeed, Flynn alleges that by late 1937, FDR had turned towards an aggressive foreign policy aimed at involving the country in a major foreign war, primarily because he believed that this was the only route out of his desperate economic and political box, a stratagem not unknown among national leaders throughout history. In his January 5, 1938 New Republic column, he alerted his disbelieving readers to the looming prospect of a large naval military build-up and warfare on the horizon after a top Roosevelt adviser had privately boasted to him that a large bout of “military Keynesianism” and a major war would cure the country’s seemingly insurmountable economic problems. At that time, war with Japan, possibly over Latin American interests, seemed the intended goal, but developing events in Europe soon persuaded FDR that fomenting a general war against Germany was the best course of action. Memoirs and other historical documents obtained by later researchers seem to generally support Flynn’s accusations by indicating that Roosevelt ordered his diplomats to exert enormous pressure upon both the British and Polish governments to avoid any negotiated settlement with Germany, thereby leading to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
The last point is an important one since the confidential opinions of those closest to important historical events should be accorded considerable evidentiary weight. In a recent article John Wear mustered the numerous contemporaneous assessments that implicated FDR as a pivotal figure in orchestrating the world war by his constant pressure upon the British political leadership, a policy that he privately even admitted could mean his impeachment if revealed. Among other testimony, we have the statements of the Polish and British ambassadors to Washington and the American ambassador to London, who also passed along the concurring opinion of Prime Minister Chamberlain himself. Indeed, the German capture and publication of secret Polish diplomatic documents in 1939 had already revealed much of this information, and William Henry Chamberlin confirmed their authenticity in his 1950 book. But since the mainstream media never reported any of this information, these facts remain little known even today.
In his national bestseller published a decade later, Flynn revealed that he had gotten the information in his 1938 TNR column directly from a top FDR aide, and he also expanded on the details:
In January, 1938, I talked with one of the President’s most intimate advisers. I asked him if the President knew we were in a depression. He said that of course he did. I asked what the President proposed to do. He answered: “Resume spending.” I then suggested he would find difficulty in getting objects on which the federal government could spend. He said he knew that. What, then, I asked, will the President spend on? He laughed and replied in a single word: “Battleships.” I asked why. He said: “You know we are going to have a war.” And when I asked whom we were going to fight he said “Japan” and when I asked where and what about, he said “in South America.” “Well,” I said, “you are moving logically there. If your only hope is spending and the only thing you have to spend on is national defense, then you have got to have an enemy to defend against and a war in prospect.”Apparently the best hope of a war at that moment for popular consumption was with the Japs, who had just sunk the Panay, and as there was little chance of arousing the American people to fight around Japan, South America seemed a more likely battleground to stimulate our fears and emotions. There is nothing new about this. Kings and ministers have toyed with this device for ages and convinced themselves they were acting wisely and nobly.
Although Brands’ book omits most of this important material, it still clearly stands head and shoulders above any other recent, widely-reviewed mainstream work that comes to my mind.
The importance of America First is best demonstrated by the sort of total nonsense it seeks to replace, nonsense that has become so deeply embedded in our media over the generations that even most educated Americans probably only possess a cartoonish or even completely false understanding of that era.
For example, several months ago Brands gave a talk on his new book to the Hudson Library & Historical Society, presumably attracting the sort of thoughtful individuals who would turn out to listen to a public lecture on a work of serious non-fiction. He took questions from his appreciative audience but one of the first of these raised the astonishingly outrageous allegations that Lindbergh was a deranged eugenicist who had actually murdered his own infant son as part of his diabolical scientific research.
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Brands correctly dismissed that claim as total nonsense based upon no evidence, and indeed such a bizarre accusation sounds like something one might only encounter on the most conspiratorial fringes of the Internet. But it was instead the central thesis of Suspect No. 1, a 2020 book that ran some 550 pages written by Lise Pearlman, a retired judge. Not only was that work of total lunacy released by a respectable press and filled with a page of glowing blurbs from best-selling authors and other prominent figures, but it received the singular honor of a long and favorable, full-page review and discussion in the prestigious print edition of the New York Times, bringing it to my attention last year and prompted me to purchase and read it. In sharp contrast, Brands’ own meticulously documented book on Lindbergh has so far been totally ignored by the Times.
Similarly, another popular political podcaster who interviewed Brands explained that he’d always had a strongly negative view of Lindbergh, vaguely citing his supposed “arrogance,” a rather strange comment given the popular hero had always been regarded as so remarkably modest by his own contemporaries. I suspect that this merely reflects the residue of more than eighty years of unremittently hostile treatment by so much of our media.
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A good example of the sort of books that have promoted such an extremely negative view of Lindbergh over the decades may be seen in The American Axis, published in 2003 by Max Wallace, a Jewish Holocaust researcher. Although I’d actually purchased that book a half-dozen years ago, I only now finally decided to read it in conjunction with Brands’ work.
Although not filled with the total lunacy that characterized Pearlman’s text, I found the Wallace book to be biased, shallow, and distorted as the author advanced his thesis that Lindbergh together with renowned industrialist Henry Ford constituted the leadership of America’s pro-Nazi movement, the “American Axis” of the title. Although Wallace clearly regarded the Detroit billionaire as the senior figure in that evil project, Lindbergh also came under very harsh criticism, much of it obviously unfair and debunked by both Berg and Brands.
For example, Wallace repeated the scurrilous accusation that Lindbergh’s considerable over-estimate of German air power around the time of the Czech Crisis in 1938 was a key factor in persuading the British and the French to come to terms with Hitler’s demands at the Munich Conference. But only after devoting much of nearly twenty pages to that indictment did Wallace add a few sentences admitting that British, French, and American intelligence sources had all produced very similar over-estimates of German capabilities around the same time. Even after that devastating concession, the author still condemned Lindbergh on the grounds that the latter’s international fame meant his statements carried far greater weight than such secret intelligence reports.
Similarly, FDR’s outrage over Lindbergh’s strong public opposition to his efforts to involve our country in World War II led the president to viciously slur his critic as a Nazi in his private correspondence and conversations. But instead of condemning such absurd accusations, Wallace instead reported those statements in a supportive manner as indicated in these two passages from May 1940. I think that he intended that they should remain in the minds of his readers as objective descriptions of Lindbergh’s true beliefs
On May 20, the day after Lindbergh’s air defense speech, the President was having lunch with his treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau. After a brief discussion of this latest radio address, the President put down his fork, turned to his most trusted Cabinet official and declared, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”
“When I read Lindbergh’s speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself,” the President wrote to Henry Stimson, a Republication politician whom Roosevelt had recently asked to serve as his new secretary of war. “What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.”
Although I was hardly impressed with the Wallace book, it did provide some very useful information regarding the permanent destruction of Lindbergh’s reputation that resulted from his leadership of the antiwar movement prior to World War II, including his very candid remarks regarding the powerful Jewish forces that he faced on the other side.
Arnold Forster was then a young Jewish lawyer serving as the chief attorney of the ADL, and interviewed by Wallace sixty years later at the age of 92, he “remembered Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech as if it were yesterday”:
When I heard him utter those words, I—along with every Jew in America—felt as we had been kicked in the gut.
Although Berg was much more skeptical of this sort of reaction to Lindbergh, he passed along a similar anecdote regarding a young Jewish copy boy on the New York Daily News who attended the October 1941 America First rally at Madison Square Garden:
“There in the midst of many, open Nazi-sympathizers was the hero of my childhood, Lindy, and I literally sickened by the spectacle,” he recalled. “I felt betrayed.” Millions felt the same.
The factual reality of Lindbergh’s accurate, innocuous public statements in Des Moines and the total lack of any Nazi sympathizers on the speakers’ platform of the New York City rally had less impact than the visceral reaction of large numbers of extremely agitated Jewish activists, who began ceaselessly working to transform America’s greatest national hero into an un-person. Wallace explained that in the postwar era,
The man who had once dominated the front pages of American newspapers now rarely registered in the public eye. In some years, in fact, there is not a single reference to him in the New York Times index.
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An exception came in 1954 when Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography The Spirit of St. Louis. This led Jewish Hollywood mogul Jack Warner to release a big-budget 1957 screen adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart on the thirtieth anniversary of Lindbergh’s historic flight. But despite the critical acclaim for a film packed with excitement and the massive publicity campaign, the movie became a gigantic box-office flop, the “most disastrous failure” in the history of the Warner Brothers studio. According to Wallace, pressure by Jewish activists still outraged over “Lindbergh’s enduring reputation as an anti-Semite” led theaters to refuse to even book the film.
More than forty years later little had changed. Wallace explained that director Steven Spielberg bought the rights to Berg’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning biography and announced his plans to produce a major Hollywood biopic of his “boyhood hero” Lindbergh, a powerful affirmation of the aviator’s heroism that would shape his enduring legacy. But waves of angry Jewish activists soon denounced and attacked Spielberg, concerned that the film like the biography would downplay Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies. The Jewish Hollywood titan soon retreated under that barrage, saying that he had not been aware of his subject’s anti-Semitism. But according to Berg, this was total nonsense, with Lindbergh’s alleged anti-Semitism being the central topic the two men had discussed at their first meeting.
These examples indicate how agitated rank-and-file Jewish activists can effectively police even the most powerful figures in their own community.
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