Heritage Month Day Nine: Charles Lindbergh

Happy Charles Lindbergh Day!

For day nine of Heritage History month, we’re going with someone who exemplified so well the American spirit of adventure, courage, and fierce independence. Charles Lindbergh was the son of the Minnesota representative who was among the very few to oppose US entry into the First World War. Lindbergh lived a life of high notoriety and mass popularity; yet never having been the product of regime celebrity propaganda, Lindbergh’s was truly an organic fame—a self-made hero.

He was Time’s Man of the Year in 1928, a Hoover appointee to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal. He was in a sustained tension with FDR and the Northeastern Elite, and even after he was smeared for his anti-interventionism, he was rehabilitated by Eisenhower as a national hero.

Charles Lindbergh was a key player in the original America First movement: a coalition of anti-interventionist activists who were strongly critical not only of American involvement in World War II, but also in the overall trajectory of Anglo-American foreign policy. The chairman of the American First Committee, General Robert E. Wood, would constantly urge Lindbergh to take over the leadership of the committee because Lindbergh, more than anyone else in the movement, had the ability to capture the attention and enthusiasm of the everyday American.

In the interwar years, Americans for the most part were still cynical about being heavily involved in world affairs. Neoconservatives have this understanding of America that necessitates her participation in setting and enforcing a global vision, but such an instinct was once foreign to the true conservative instinct of non-intervention that characterized the American electorate. Americans were frustrated with the human and financial cost of the First World War, and saw in people like Lindbergh a voice to express their discontent with the various Big War interests.

By the time 1941 came around—the year of Pearl Harbor and American entry into the World War—Lindbergh was already an American legend, having been the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in his plane “Spirit of St. Louis.” This event, at the time, was even more spectacular and instilled more national pride and enthusiasm in the American spirit of triumph than would even the landing on the moon.

33 hours of lonely flight in the stretch between continents would prove to be a grueling, even superhuman, achievement. But even this was a capstone on an aviation career of daring, grit, and ingenuity. Lindbergh was always willing to push the engineering capabilities to new heights in the preparation for such—at the time— an advanced feat.

Thus, by the time of the FDR administration’s war fever, Lindbergh was already a voice held in high esteem to a land of Americans who simply had no conception of the eventual consequences of US entry into the war in Europe. It was only a few months before Pearl Harbor that Lindbergh would give his world famous “Des Moines Speech” in which he warned of the war agitators: “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” Such an act brought down upon his head the ire of the entire Anglo-American establishment. It’s one thing to vocalize dissent by pointing fingers—by Noticing, as it were— it’s another when a popular hero does it. Needless to say, it placed the FDR administration in direct confrontation with the will of the people.

Pearl Harbor, of course, would prove to be exactly the fodder the entire Anglo-American establishment needed to get the war they had longed for since its inception in 1939. America First would not be able to survive the effects of such a world-historical event. It was dead until Pat Buchanan.

Lindbergh had a keen sense of what was happening in the world. In the postwar ideological consensus, ideology and propositions are the foundation of a nation and a people. Lindbergh understood that this artificial understanding of nationhood was on the rise, that it sought to conquer the old world of ethnocultural bonds, and that the consequences would be devastating for Western Civilization. He pointed out time and again that Europe was on a suicide path and that America should seek peace and good favor with both sides, for Europe is our patrimony. We belong to Europe as a child to its parents. Anticipating twenty-first century third world invasions, he once noted:

"Our bond with Europe is a bond of race and not of political ideology.” And elsewhere: "If the white race is ever . . . threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French, and Germans, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction."

In other words, peace with Europe based on shared experiences and patrimony, a shared culture. The new cults of ideological adhesion (in Liberal Democracy and Marxism) threatened the continuity of our civilization. It's hard, at this point, to dismiss such warnings.