America First

Part One
The Allure of Neutrality

1

A more terrible thing couldn’t have happened to a more admirable man.

Such was the reaction of Americans as they read that the infant son of Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped. Lindbergh had become America’s hero five years earlier when he accomplished the historic feat of leaping the Atlantic in a single bound of flight. The twenty-five-year-old aviator paired the courage of the explorer with the technical know-how of the inventor: he was Lewis and Clark and Edison rolled into one. That he was handsome—tall and rangy, with the blond hair and blue eyes of his Swedish forebears—made Lucky Lindy irresistible to the newsreel cameras that were just beginning to bring important events to mass audiences almost as they happened. His natural shyness made him the more appealing; amid the din of the Roaring Twenties, his diffidence was endearing. He seemed the boy next door, if the boy next door were also inventive, brave and famous.

His wedding to Anne Morrow, the charming and talented daughter of a Wall Street banker turned diplomat, filled the tabloids and respectable papers alike. In due course the couple were blessed with a child, christened Charles and immediately called Little Lindy by the headline writers. Lindbergh built a home in rural New Jersey for his small family; in the late winter of 1932 they spent time there even though it wasn’t quite finished. On March 1 Anne and the child’s nurse put him to bed around seven; Lindbergh was reading in the study below. At ten the nurse checked on Little Lindy before she went to bed. She didn’t find him in the crib.

At first she thought the mother or father must have picked up the twenty-month-old and taken him to another room. When she checked with Anne and saw no baby, she began to be alarmed. When Lindbergh didn’t have him either, her alarm turned to panic.

Lindbergh dashed up the stairs to the bedroom. Seeing the empty crib, he searched the other rooms, on the chance young Lindy might suddenly have learned to climb out of the crib. Then he searched outside the house, realizing the possibility of finding the baby there was minuscule. He finally called the New Jersey state police. His son was missing, he said.

If American hearts had swelled with pride on watching the newsreels of Lindbergh in Paris, standing in front of The Spirit of St. Louis and receiving from France’s president the Cross of the Legion of Honor, those same hearts were wrenched by worry on reading of the disappearance, and on seeing newsreel clips from home movies Lindbergh had made of Little Lindy. Lindbergh and Anne had tried to shelter the baby from public view, but now they were persuaded to let the world into their home so that the public might assist in identifying and rescuing the child.

The home movies touched the heartstrings of every audience member in every theater where the newsreels played. Little Lindy was an angelic junior version of his father; the toddler’s smiling blue eyes, framed by golden curls, smiled sweetly and innocently into the camera. Millions of Americans felt as if their own child or grandchild or younger sibling had been stolen. Men from hundreds of miles around joined the search; people all across the country offered up prayers for the child’s safe return. More than a few vowed vengeance against the perpetrators should any harm befall the darling boy.

Government officials ordered their agencies to join the search. President Herbert Hoover put his best men on the job. Governor Franklin Roosevelt of neighboring New York state likewise stepped up. “I am personally deeply interested, because I know both Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh,” Roosevelt said from Albany. “My daughter, Mrs. Curtis Dall, was at school with Mrs. Lindbergh.”

The worry over the missing child turned to agony when, after weeks of investigation and negotiation, and the futile delivery of fifty thousand dollars in ransom money to someone claiming to speak for the kidnappers, the decomposing body of Little Lindy was found under a pile of brush a few miles from the Lindbergh home.

Lindbergh and Anne were devastated, although Lindbergh held himself together long enough to identify the remains of his child. Parents all over America shuddered in sympathy, imagining how they would feel in his circumstances. Lucky Lindy didn’t seem so lucky anymore; the man to whom so much had been given was now deprived of even more. People had admired Lindbergh as an ideal type; suddenly they identified with him in the shared humanity of suffering.

Individuals reached out, writing letters, sending telegrams, making phone calls. Herbert Hoover reiterated the backing of the federal government in the search for those who had taken—and killed—the baby. New York’s Roosevelt declared, “No crime has so moved the country during the last generation as has this one.” The governor added, “Every agency at my command has been instructed to bring the fiendish murderers to justice.”

At the time Roosevelt spoke, his promise was worth more than Hoover’s. Or rather, it would be if the manhunt took longer than a few months, as the lack of leads suggested it might.

By the summer of 1932 America knew that Hoover would not be reelected president. The stock market crash of 1929 hadn’t been his fault, most Americans acknowledged, but many blamed the Republican president for failing to pull the economy out of its post-crash dive, and for ignoring the pleas for help from the millions of Americans rendered jobless and homeless by the collapse of the economy the Republicans had spent the previous decade boasting about. Whoever won the Democratic nomination would surely defeat Hoover. And Roosevelt was the Democrats’ favorite.

Roosevelt didn’t know Lindbergh as well as his comment about his daughter—Anna Roosevelt Dall—and Anne Lindbergh suggested. Yet the trajectory of his life paralleled Lindbergh’s in certain respects. No one ever called Roosevelt “Lucky Frank,” though he too was blessed with good looks and sufficient wealth to pursue his interests—in his case, politics. He was vigorous and athletic, preferring sailboats to airplanes, and he charmed people with his winning smile and warm personality. Fortune smiled on him as he advanced through the ranks of the Democratic party, to the point where he was made his party’s nominee for vice president in 1920. In a Republican year, the ticket lost, but Roosevelt emerged unscathed—indeed, more appealing than ever. He was widely spoken of as a contender for the top of the ticket next time.

But in 1921 he contracted infantile paralysis, as polio was then called. He went to bed one evening feeling unusually tired; he woke up the next day paralyzed from the neck down. As word got out, Roosevelt received sympathy cards and letters from all parts of the country. Everyone wished him well; a few dared to pray for a speedy recovery. Most assumed his public life was over; cripples, to use the term of the time, were expected to stay home and out of sight if they could afford to. Fortunately for Roosevelt, he could; the family estate at Hyde Park, in the Hudson Valley, would be an appropriate retirement retreat.

Roosevelt retreated to Hyde Park, but he didn’t retire. He maintained his ties with Democratic leaders in New York and beyond, corresponding with them, speaking to them by phone and hosting them when they could visit Hyde Park. His wife, Eleanor, served as his proxy to local groups at first, then others farther afield.

He spent months at a time in Warm Springs, Georgia, a spa renowned for its soothing waters. While there he got to know the locals: humble whites and blacks often overlooked by one or both political parties.

People familiar with Roosevelt thought the experience of polio made him more empathetic. Before polio most of what he wanted came easily; afterward everything was harder. Therapy and time restored the use of his arms, but he never was able to walk again without braces and the supporting arm of an adult son or assistant. Yet he didn’t complain; his typical expression was a broad smile; the hearty hello with which he greeted visitors boomed louder than ever. If there had been a complaint against him before, it was that he was shallow, or seemed to be. Nothing had tested his mettle. People had admired him, but few had identified with him. What could he know about the travails of ordinary life, about the fact that bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own? After Roosevelt contracted polio, no one asked that question anymore.

Roosevelt’s ability to appreciate the problems of ordinary people, and Hoover’s perceived inability to do so, emerged in sharp relief during the summer of 1932. Unemployed veterans of the World War—as it was called before the second one—gathered in Washington to petition Congress for early payment of a pension bonus they had been promised. They argued that the bonus would boost the economy and that, on present trends of distress, some of them might not live long enough to receive the bonus when its scheduled date arrived. Congress, on the advice of Hoover, rejected the petition. Some of the veterans returned whence they had come, but many others, without money for travel and with nothing much to return to, remained in Washington, in an encampment near the Anacostia River.

Most of the vets weren’t political, but radicals circulated among them preaching the overthrow of the government. Hoover took fright and ordered the “bonus army” dispersed. Douglas MacArthur, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, personally led a column of regular troops against the vets. The result was a political fiasco: newsreels around the country showed the bonus camp in flames, women and children fleeing the violence, and the nation’s senior soldier grimly approving.

Roosevelt watched from New York. He turned to adviser Felix Frankfurter and said, “This will elect me.”

It did elect him, aided by his refusal to say anything specific about almost any issue before the public. The election was Roosevelt’s to lose, and he stuck to the path of hopeful banality. He promised a “new deal” between government and the ordinary people of America, without elaborating. He let voters imagine what they wanted, and most imagined he couldn’t be worse than Hoover.

Roosevelt steered especially clear of foreign affairs. He understood that most Americans cared about other people and countries only intermittently. At a time when their jobs, life savings and futures were in peril, they wanted to hear what their government would do about their concerns, not those of folks far away. Roosevelt appreciated that America’s depression was aggravated by the global slump, which might best be remedied by coordination among the major trading powers, including the United States. But coordination required putting foreigners ahead of Americans on some matters, and Roosevelt wasn’t going to ask Americans to make that sacrifice.

An economic conference in London in the summer of 1933 gave the new president a chance to wave the flag of American nationalism. He kept the delegates in suspense; they knew that with a single sentence he could blast their hopes for a collective approach to the international slump. They labored for weeks devising a scheme to align exchange rates; all that remained was a signal of American cooperation. Roosevelt delivered just the opposite. The United States would insist on the status quo, he declared, no matter the havoc it did to other countries. “The sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency in changing terms of the currencies of other nations,” the president declared. Every nation must look out for itself, and devil take the hindmost.

2

The search for the killer of the Lindbergh baby moved slowly, but in September 1934 the police arrested Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an immigrant from Germany living in the Bronx. The trial commenced the following January, and while it held promise of justice for the murdered child, it compelled his parents to relive the horrible moments of his disappearance and death. The Lindberghs found themselves at the center of a media circus, with print reporters and newspaper photographers competing with radio broadcasters and newsreel teams for a glimpse, the more heartrending the better, of the suffering couple. The jury delivered a verdict of guilty, and the judge pronounced a sentence of death. Hauptmann was duly executed.

Lindbergh and Anne hoped the scrutiny would ease after the case closed, but it didn’t. The Lindbergh story meant profits for the newspapers and newsreels, and they weren’t going to let it go. Photographers followed them and harassed Jon, their younger son. On one occasion Jon’s teacher was driving the child home from school when a car full of glowering men pulled alongside and forced the teacher’s car to a stop. The teacher knew of threats against Jon the Lindberghs had been receiving, and, fearing the worst, she tried to shield the boy with her body. That the men were photographers rather than kidnappers, and that they contented themselves with pushing cameras rather than guns into Jon’s face, hardly eased the terror the teacher felt or the anger Jon’s parents experienced on learning of the incident.

By late 1935 Lindbergh had had enough. He spirited Anne and Jon away on a liner to England, informing only one reporter, whom he swore to secrecy until after the ship had cleared American waters. “Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh has given up residence in the United States and is on his way to establish his home in England,” the front-page story said. “With him are his wife and 3-year-old son, Jon. Threats of kidnapping and even of death to the little lad, recurring repeatedly since his birth, caused the father and mother to make the decision. These threats have increased both in number and virulence recently.” The authorities could do little against the threats, given America’s emphasis on freedom and the First Amendment. “And so the man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero and a good-will ambassador between the peoples of the world is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”

At the time Lindbergh left America, the American verdict on the World War was overwhelmingly negative. Woodrow Wilson had led the country into the war proclaiming that America’s participation was necessary to make the world safe for democracy; the struggle was touted by its supporters as the war to end all wars. The American side won but began to fall apart at the peace conference, which imposed punitive and humiliating conditions on Germany that all but guaranteed German resistance. Economic disruption in several countries during the 1920s led to political turbulence that intensified amid the depression of the 1930s. By the middle of that decade democracy, which the World War was supposed to have saved, had been bludgeoned to death in Germany and Italy and was imperiled elsewhere. War, which the World War was supposed to have ended, once more loomed.