OKLAHOMA: The Unsilenced

• Share

What Charles Augustus Lindbergh has to say was becoming far less important to U.S. citizens than the argument over his continuing right to say it.

In Oklahoma City, last week, when it was announced that Lindbergh was booked to speak at municipal hall, citizens rushed to the city council with objections. Said the American Legion: "He advocates peace towards ruthless nations and his utterances provoke disunity . . . when our very preservation depends on unity." Said the Knights of Pythias: "[He] has repeatedly expressed himself as adverse to the principles of Americanism." The city council canceled the booking.

From the America First Committee, sponsoring the rally, from Oklahoma's Governor himself, redheaded Leon C. Phillips, came protests. From neighboring Kansas came a sizzler that scorched the grass on the prairies. Careful to point out that it did not agree with Lindbergh, William Allen White's Emporia Gazette snorted:

"Oklahoma is a queer, wild state . . . a place where they arrest people on account of the books in their libraries, where a 'nigger's got to know his place' . . . where the Ku Klux Klan still ranges in their primordial shirttails through the cow pastures and where cro-magnon men still roam the wilderness in dinner coats and black ties. . . . Also where they do not allow Charles Lindbergh to speak."

Lindbergh spoke at Oklahoma City, but in a baseball park outside the city limits. The burden of his remarks: if the U.S. tended to its knitting it could be safe from invasion; Germany was invincible; England was not to be trusted. ("England may turn against us as she has turned against France and Finland.") Sharing the sandlot rally with Isolationist Lindbergh was Isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who shouted: "I will not be silenced."

. . .

Plucked out of obscurity by Fight for Freedom, Inc. was another Lindbergh—Augustus, cousin of Charles Augustus. A onetime section hand on the railroad, now a Birmingham lawyer, 38-year-old Augustus set out last week on a rival speaking tour. His theme: "No man has a right to set himself up as a minority of one to sabotage his government, and that's what my cousin is doing."

He has never met his famous cousin. According to his wife, he tried to when Charles Lindbergh was in their neighborhood in 1927. "But the Colonel sort of snubbed us."