Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (60 page)

On May 24, as the Germans swept toward Paris, Anne lunched with her mother in New York at the Cosmopolitan Club. How the English and French “will
hate
us,” Anne said to her. She realized that her loyalty to Charles would cost her her friendships; perhaps this was her contribution to the war.
³⁴

As Churchill called for a day of prayer in England, and crowds knelt in Ste. Genevieve in Paris, Anne prayed, too, not for victory, but for peace. “Thy will be done,” she wrote.
³⁵

In fact, Charles, not God, was Anne’s bulwark against despair.
Charles was one of the few men in the world who lived their lives on top of the facts. While her family and friends saw Charles as an “anti-Christ,” Anne saw him as the image of the divine.
³⁶

Even as her mother’s words were a monument to her father, Anne discarded his ideas.

The “old gods” were gone; the myth of democracy was dead; the optimism of her father had proved naïve. “Democracy,” with its economic and social disorder and its political inefficiency, did not seem worthy of preservation. Desperately, as if damming a river, Anne began an article that would confirm her solidity with the Christian church and refute the charge that Charles was “anti-Christ.” Later, Anne would call it “A Confession of Faith.”

Charles spoke to America again on June 15 from the NBC studios in Washington.
³⁷
He urged the United States to stay out of the war and recited his litany of warnings. England would inevitably fall to Germany, the strongest nation in human history. Any struggle to prevent this would be comparable to ancient wars; and to what purpose? To pit “one half of the white race against the other?”

Anne applauded his speech. It was beautifully delivered and all “of a piece.” The criticism it provoked was proof of its validity; she was certain it would turn Americans against the war.
³⁸

Ten days later, Charles visited his old friend Henry Ford, hoping to convince him to support his cause. Charles had given Ford his first airplane ride after his flight in 1927. Now it was time for Ford to return the favor. He asked him to join his campaign against the war, to lend his fame and prestige to the cause. Ford needed little convincing. He had spent the past two decades making his views clear. The Jews, he believed, were international plotters pushing our country into war. Their materialism had brought about a decline in American morals, culture, values, products, and entertainment. In 1918, when Ford bought the small country newspaper the
Dearborn Independent
, he had considered it a ten-million-dollar investment to counter the distortions of the Jewish press. Within a year and a half, the paper had become a mass-circulation, anti-Semitic propaganda sheet, and by 1927, it had a world circulation of half a million. Ford
used it as the core of the four-volume
International Jew
, which he had deliberately chosen not to copyright so that it could be printed freely throughout Europe and North America. It was said that Hitler had used it as a model for
Mein Kampf
. It was also said that Hitler kept a picture of Ford beside his desk and referred to him as “my inspiration.”
³⁹

Lindbergh found the old man, now over seventy, “alert, agile, and overflowing with new ideas.” As they drove in a new Mercury on a tour of factories dotting the River Rouge, they spoke of the future of American industry, boys’ camps, and the prospects of war. Charles had a “great admiration” for Ford’s unique genius and character. He felt that even Ford’s dreams were tinged with reality.
⁴⁰

What were Henry Ford’s “dreams” between 1939 and 1945?: Sustaining the leadership of Adolf Hitler to effect the military victory of his Nazi Reich.

In April of 1940, just two months before Charles’ visit to Dearborn, a poem was published in an in-house magazine of the Ford Motor Company’s German subsidiary, when Henry Ford was still in complete control of the German operation.

It read as follows:

Later, in a U.S. Army Report, it would be revealed that German Ford served as an “arsenal of Nazism” with the consent of headquarters in Dearborn. Until Pearl Harbor, Dearborn made huge profits by producing war material for the Reich. German sales would increase by more than half between 1938 and 1943 and the value of the German subsidiary would double during the course of the war. Ford vehicles would be deemed crucial to the revolutionary military strategy of blitzkrieg, and approximately, one third of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German army as of 1942 would be manufactured by Ford. Furthermore, during this period, the U.S. Treasury Department would conclude that the Ford Motor Company cooperated with the Nazis through its subsidiary in France, encouraging executives to work with German officials overseeing the occupation.

In May of 1941, when Charles was still a full-time consultant to the Ford Motor Company, Nazi officials would praise the Ford operation for facilitating their military victory and cooperating in “the establishment of an exemplary social state.”
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Unaware of his secret machinations but well versed in Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic views, the press chastised Charles for meeting with him. When Anne sought comfort from her friends, they were surprised by her loyalty to Charles. Thelma Crawford turned away in disgust, and Sue and George Vaillant gave Anne little consolation. Only Mina Curtiss remained dispassionate. Later, she said that her attitude was a denial of her being Jewish. For the moment, however, she comforted Anne. And Anne was still defending Charles, reasoning that even if his views were wrong, they were not immoral.
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Roosevelt had taken steps to increase the military budget and had authorized the call-up of two million men. For the first time, Charles feared for his physical safety and faced the prospect of leaving Anne alone. In a moment of tenderness, he sought to free her from dependency on him. What would she do, he asked, if she had to make it on her own? She answered, simply, “I don’t know.”

Charles urged her to listen to him, and to remember that if she were
ever left without him in times of need, she could earn her living as a writer, regardless of the government in power.
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“He frightens me,” she wrote, as if he could see into the future. But ironically, he also gave her confidence.
⁴⁴

But if he aroused fear, he also incited her anger. In the hope of forcing her to face independence, he criticized her for not writing more. Only two books in nine years? Why didn’t she compile an anthology so that her time since their return from France wouldn’t be such a personal waste? She was torn by the children, the housekeeping, and her writing. It was impossible to keep her mind focused on daily matters and yet nourish the abstract thinking required for writing.

But, she confided in her diary, her inability to write was more than a matter of finding time. She didn’t have the words. Her work before the war belonged to an era that no longer existed. Whitehead was right. The old world was dying and the new one had not yet begun.
⁴⁵

Charles, however, could not stop talking. On the sun-drenched afternoon of August 4, at a meeting in Chicago of Citizens to Keep-America-Out-of-War, Charles spoke to a crowd of forty thousand.
⁴⁶
His speech was reminiscent of Anne’s “Prayer for Peace.” “The world,” he said, “is not governed by principle or by Christian values; it is governed by power.”
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Hitler apparently agreed. His economic minister touted the wisdom of Lindbergh’s speech even as the Nazis were laughing at Charles’s naïveté. American shores were not invulnerable. After Europe would come the conquest of the United States.
⁴⁸

As the Luftwaffe continued its assault on England, Anne finished her “Confession of Faith.” Clothed in the religious and moral symbols of her childhood, her writing was a ritual form of self-absolution. The article would become her book
The Wave of the Future
.
⁴⁹
In forty-one pages, more a pamphlet than a book, Anne crystallized the thoughts in her diaries and articles, portraying the destruction of Western civilization as a divine and natural inevitability. Her desperation gave the book a tone of extreme urgency. Once more she apologized for being a woman, as if to placate a wrathful God. But she had to speak out and be heard.

How are we to get at the “truth,” she asks, and how are we to reevaluate
the evil by the standard of Christian morality? Is it merely a question of good against evil? Is it a matter of launching a crusade? The demons who persecute, kill, and steal—do they not commit terrible sins? And what about the “democracies?” she asks, contemptuously placing the word in quotation marks. With fire and brimstone, Anne condemns them for their sins. “Democracies,” she writes, are guilty of “sins of omission” and self-delusion. They can afford to be smug because they were among the “have” nations. Germany cannot, and the “democracies” refuse either to support them or to give them aid. If “territorial and economic concessions” had been made, there would be no Nazism and no war. She does not excuse Nazi evil; she merely explains it. Their evil springs from the barren earth of neglect.

Here all her theories coalesce in an attempt to paraphrase what she understands as Whitehead’s theory of history. “The wave of the future is coming,” and there will be no stopping it. It is a wave of human energy pushing toward a divine good, a conception of humanity, trying to come to birth, that obscures its purpose with horror and evil. Perhaps, she muses, it is retribution for our materialism and lack of spirituality. It is a war “we have begotten,” and the evils we deplore are “the scum on the wave of the future.”

Using an argument of Hitler’s in
Mein Kampf
, she considers the evils of the French Revolution. Certainly we do not question its fundamental moral imperative. The old morality does not suffice; heroic enterprise is no longer respected. We have to let them go, and we have to let “democracy” die with them. It has failed economically and morally and has eroded the “hardiness of the race.”

We cannot “save” civilization. The German “spirit” will crush our armies. Our own moral and spiritual disintegration is a greater threat to our existence than the possibility of invasion from abroad.

Her amoral logic fractures like light through a prism. The book stands as a philosophic consummation of all she and Charles believed. Finally their vision had a form.

Harcourt Brace rushed it to print. The book, published on October 3, 1940, the day after the birth of her daughter, Anne Jr., was a recapitulation of her husband’s views. It sold fifty thousand copies within the first two months. The Italians and Germans called Anne “noble,” and the American public regarded her as nothing less than satanic or, worse, Satan’s “little wife.” Male reviewers dismissed her as the mouthpiece for her husband’s fascist views, and female journalists attacked her directly. The only exception was the gentle E. B. White, who criticized her logic but not her character.
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But it was Dorothy Ducas who came closest to the truth. In
Who
magazine, she pegged Anne as an incompetent dreamer who lacked the courage of her idealistic parents. “The young woman,” she writes, “[who] knows little of the rushing, pushing, world of reality,” lives in a house divided against itself, caught between those she loves.
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Later, Anne would call it her “bridge book,”
⁵³
her attempt to cross the divide between her father’s Wilsonian principles and her husband’s vision and practicality. Anne was convinced that her father would have agreed with its spirit if not its methods.
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Once again, Anne was deluding herself. Dwight Morrow would have loathed both her methods and her ideas. Cold practicality would have held no weight for him in the face of Hitler’s devastation of humanity. Man, believed Morrow, worked in partnership with God; there was no inevitability to “natural law.” The future of a country rested on its moral fiber and ethics, not on momentary events. Morrow’s loyalties to democratic principle and to the European democracies would have rendered his daughter’s theories absurd. A humanist to the core, Morrow would have seen the notion of racial superiority as abhorrent. A man of diplomacy, dedicated to a covenant of nations, Morrow would have considered war the last resort, but he would have understood its moral imperative in certain crises.

To stop the walls of her marriage from crumbling, Anne sanctioned Hitler’s charnel house. In the name of loyalty to her husband, Anne validated the vision of a madman.