WAR & PEACE: Hounds in Cry

WAR & PEACE

For more than twelve years (since May 21, 1927) Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh has been a U. S. hero. He has been called "super-hero," "the perfection of man," "the Columbus of the Air," the "perfect gentle knight."

Last week to many a U. S. citizen he was a bum.* To a pack of U. S. newspaper pundits, he was worse than that: they thought they saw in his second Isolationist speech (TIME, Oct. 23) the spoor of a Nazi fox. Dorothy Thompson and Walter Lippmann read dread things between the naïve Lindbergh lines. Heywood Broun thought the speech "one of the most militaristic" ever made by an American. To Columnist Hugh S. Johnson he was "Poor Lindy" who had "stepped from his hero's niche."

Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt joined the hunt, noted:"She [Dorothy Thompson] sensed in Col. Lindbergh's speech a sympathy with Nazi ideals which I thought existed but could not bring myself to believe was really there." (Snapped Hugh Johnson next day at Mrs. Roosevelt: "That is exactly the kind of stuff that got us into the war in 1917.") Plainer people began to sound off. Ex-Heavyweight Champion Gene Tunney called Lindbergh's speech "impertinence." Michigan's Senator Prentiss Brown called it imperialistic. A Reserve Officer chaplain in Seattle spoke of "Herr von Lindbergh." Sculptor Suzanne Silvercruys of New York City told Canadians she was glad her memorial commemorating Lindbergh's Paris flight had been broken in shipment. The Communist weekly, New Masses, said the speech revealed the "intricate conspiracies of the House of Morgan." (Anne Lindbergh is the daughter of the late Dwight Morrow, Morgan partner.)

From England, where denunciation had been loudest, now came a "defense" more destructive than any attack so far. Wrote Author Harold Nicolson, in whose "Long Barn" estate at the foot of the Kentish weald Lindbergh stayed during his English exile: "He emerged from that ordeal (the 1932 kidnap-murder of his son) with a loathing for publicity that was almost pathological. He identified the outrage to his private life first with the popular press and then . . . with freedom of speech and then, almost, with freedom. He began to loathe democracy, . . . His self-confidence thickened into arrogance and his convictions hardened into granite. . . . His mind had been sharpened by fame and tragedy until it had become as hard as metal and as narrow as a chisel."

Tracing Lindbergh's admiration of the German air force, his alarm over British unpreparedness, Nicolson said: "He liked their grim efficiency and liked the mechanization of the State and he was not at all deterred by the suppression of free thought and free discussion. . . . The slow, organic will power of Britain eluded his observation. . . . He is and always will be not merely a schoolboy hero but also a schoolboy."

Colonel Lindbergh held his peace, and his chums hoped he would continue to. As hue & cry died away, observers noted that a lonely goat had crossed the trail—without diverting the attention of the pundit pack.