This picture is not from that speech.
The WMCA microphone gives it away
as in New York, probably at Madison Square Garden.
September 11, 1941: Charles Lindbergh gives a speech in Des Moines, Iowa. For 14 years, he has been America's biggest hero. Never again.
At the request of the U.S. Department of War, Lindbergh, who in 1927 became the 1st person to fly an airplane from the North American continent to the European continent, traveled to Nazi Germany several times between 1936 and 1938, to evaluate German aviation. General Henry "Hap" Arnold, eventually the only U.S. Air Force general to hold five-star rank, wrote in his autobiography, "Nobody gave us much useful information about Hitler's air force, the Luftwaffe, until Lindbergh came home in 1939." Lindbergh also undertook a survey of aviation in the the Soviet Union in 1938.
In 1938, Hugh Wilson, the American Ambassador to Germany, hosted a dinner for Lindbergh with Germany's air chief, Generalfieldmarschall Hermann Göring. At this dinner, Göring presented Lindbergh with the Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle.
Lindbergh's acceptance proved controversial after Kristallnacht, an anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany a few weeks later. Lindbergh declined to return the medal, later writing, "It seems to me that the returning of decorations, which were given in times of peace and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins."
Lindbergh subsequently accepted an invitation to inspect the rising power of the Luftwaffe. Impressed by German technology, and the apparently-large number of aircraft at their disposal, and influenced by the staggering number of deaths from World War I, he opposed U.S. entry into the impending European conflict. Invited by the French government to tell what he had been shown -- which was eventually discovered to have been exaggerated, for the Nazis' benefit -- Lindbergh's testimony influenced France into trying to avoid conflict with Nazi Germany through the Munich Agreement.
At the urging of Joseph P. Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Lindbergh wrote a secret memo to the British warning that a military response by Britain and France to Hitler's violation of the Munich Agreement would be disastrous. He claimed that France was militarily weak, and Britain over-reliant on its Royal Navy. In both cases, he had a point. But he also urgently recommended that they strengthen their air power to force Hitler to redirect his aggression against what he called "Asiatic Communism." Lindbergh's bigotry was showing.
On September 15, 1939, 2 weeks after the Nazis began World War II by invading Poland, Lindbergh gave a nationwide radio address, in which he called for isolationism, and indicated some pro-German sympathies and anti-Semitic insinuations about Jewish ownership of the media, saying, "We must ask who owns and influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station... If our people know the truth, our country is not likely to enter the war."
In fact, Lindbergh was fooling himself. Most of the nation's media was owned by conservative Republicans, not eager to go to war against Hitler, who had been opposing Communists and labor unions. Henry Luce, who ran Time magazine, and named Lindbergh the magazine's first "Man of the Year" in 1927, was an exception. And even he, born in China to American missionaries, was more eager to defend China from Imperial Japan than to defend Britain and France from Nazi Germany. Again, there was a matter of racism involved.
In a 1939 article for Reader's Digest, Lindbergh expressed pro-eugenics views: "We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races." He said that certain races have "demonstrated superior ability in the design, manufacture, and operation of machines," and that "The growth of our western civilization has been closely related to this superiority."
What's more, Lindbergh, raised in Minnesota but born in the "Motor City" of Detroit as the son of a former Congressman from Michigan, developed a friendship with the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who was well known for his anti-Semitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. In a famous comment about Lindbergh to Detroit's former FBI field office special agent in charge in July 1940, Ford said: "When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews."
In late 1940, Lindbergh became the spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, soon speaking to overflow crowds at Madison Square Garden in New York and Soldier Field in Chicago, with millions listening by radio. He argued emphatically that America had no business attacking Germany.
Lindbergh justified this stance in writings that were only published posthumously: "I was deeply concerned that the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler's destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia's forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization."
In his testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 23, 1941, opposing the Lend-Lease bill, Lindbergh proposed that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with the Nazis. President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly decried Lindbergh's views as those of a "defeatist and appeaser." On April 28, Lindbergh resigned his colonel’s commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, writing that he saw "no honorable alternative," given that Roosevelt had publicly questioned his loyalty.
At an America First rally at the Des Moines Coliseum in Iowa on September 11 -- which has been a problematic date in American history, going back at least as far as 1776 -- broadcast live over national radio, Lindbergh accused 3 groups of "pressing this country toward war: The British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration":
It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.
No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.
Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.
Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.
Lindbergh continued, telling half-truths:
I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.
We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.
His message was popular throughout many Northern and Midwestern communities, with large populations of German-Americans favorable to their ancestral homeland, and Irish-Americans who did not want their country to fight for Britain. But the South was anglolphilic, and supported a pro-British foreign policy.
What's more, Jewish Americans called Lindbergh out for his apparent anti-Semitism. And Americans of British, French, Dutch and Polish descent were furious with him. So were those of Russian and Ukrainian descent, as it had been nearly 3 months since Hitler had broken his Non-Aggression Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. These communities within America all turned on Lindbergh, their admiration of him turning to disgust.
Even his own wife, Anne, a poet of some renown, saw that he had wrecked his reputation. Writing in her diary, she did him, and herself, no favors: "I have the greatest faith in Charles as a person -- in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness -- his nobility really... How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it? He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name 'Jew' is un-American -- even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?"
FDR blew his stack over the speech. To Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who was Jewish, he said, "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this: I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi." And he wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "When I read Lindbergh's speech I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by (Nazi propaganda minister Joseph) Goebbels himself. 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."
Still, despite 3 naval confrontations with German ships, FDR found too much opposition from Congress to get a Declaration of War on the Nazis. Then came December 7, and the attack of Nazi ally Japan upon the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. FDR asked Congress for a Declaration of War against Japan the next day, and got it. Three days later, Nazi Germany declared war against America, and Congress responded in kind.
Lindbergh did offer to fight for America, but, approaching his 40th birthday, he was denied the opportunity until 1944, serving as a private consultant to aviation companies in the interim. He flew 50 combat missions -- all in the Pacific Theater of the war, against Asiatic Japan, not European Germany.
After World War II, Lindbergh became an unofficial goodwill ambassador to the Germany that was being rebuilt, in part in America's image. But, while there, he had several affairs, and fathered several illegitimate children, which was not revealed to the public during his lifetime.
In 1969, due to his status as an aviation pioneer, he was invited to watch the Florida launch of Apollo 11, the 1st mission to land on the Moon. Other than that, he lived a very private life until his death in 1974. But his reputation never recovered from the Des Moines speech.
Sixty years later to the day after Lindbergh's speech, airplanes were used to attack America again. What he would have thought about it, only he would have known.
In his 2004 novel The Plot Against America, Jewish-American author Philip Roth imagined that Lindbergh had given his Des Moines speech over a year earlier, before the 1940 Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to oppose FDR, who was running for a 3rd term, on the basis that only he could stop Nazi Germany from taking over the world.
In this novel, an America less aware of Nazi atrocities, and more receptive to rhetoric in Germany's favor, rallied behind Lindbergh's isolationist message, and he was nominated for President, and defeated Roosevelt. His Administration became one that treated Jews as badly as black people were treated in the South.
It is revealed in the narrative that the reason Lindbergh was so willing to act as a puppet for the Nazis is that what was generally believed about the 1932 kidnapping of his toddler son wasn't true, that the son was alive and well in Germany, and that this would remain true as long as Lindbergh did the Nazis' bidding. A chilling miniseries version aired on HBO in 2020.
The Des Moines Coliseum, site of Lindbergh's September 11, 1941 speech, opened in 1908. It hosted speeches by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover -- but not Franklin Roosevelt. It served as home court for the Drake University basketball team, and hosted other sporting and entertainment events until it burned down in 1949. The site is now occupied by a federal courthouse.
*
September 11, 1941 was a Thursday. These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Yankee Stadium. Al Benton outpitched Marius Russo, both of them going the full 12 innings. Joe DiMaggio went 1-for-6. In the top of the 6th inning, catcher Bill Dickey was injured, and replaced by Ken Silvestri. This ended up being critical.
In the top of the 12th, Dutch Meyer singled, Russo mishandled Tuck Stainback's intended sacrifice bunt, Barney McCosky struck out, Rudy York was intentionally walked, and Pinky Higgins grounded back to Russo. But Silvestri was out of position, so, instead of trying to throw Meyer out at the plate, Russo threw to 3rd, forcing out Stainback, and Higgins was then thrown out at 1st for the 3rd out. But Meyer had already scored, and the run counted, and it made the difference.
Not that much of a difference, though: The Yankees had already clinched the American League Pennant.
* The New York Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-0 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Bob Carpenter pitched a 4-hit shutout. Mel Ott went 0-for-1... with 4 walks. Billy Jurges went 1-for-5, but the hit was a 3-run double.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-4 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Dolph Camilli hit a home run for the Dodgers. Dixie Walker singled home the winning run in the top of the 11th inning.
These teams were in a tense fight for the National League Pennant, and this win put the Dodgers up by 2 games. Stan Musial would make his major league debut for the Cardinals on September 17. It didn't help this season, as the Dodgers clinched the Pennant on September 25. But the Cardinals would win 4 of the next 5 Pennants, and remain the Dodgers' most competitive opponents for the rest of the 1940s.
* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 2-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.
* The Cleveland Indians swept a doubleheader from the Washington Senators, 8-5 and 3-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.
* A doubleheader was split at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the opener, 7-5. The Boston Braves won the nightcap, 10-0. Tom Earley allowed 9 hits, but kept the shutout.
* The Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Browns were not scheduled. At the time, the Red Sox' Ted Williams was batting .413.
* And the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies were also not scheduled.
