As promised, I will now offer the bright side of the two heroes who emerged in the United States in the early 20th century. I had hoped to include Charles Lindbergh in my last post, but there was way to much hubris to deal with in writing about FDR, and the sad fact was, there was actually way more material, but I do hope y’all get the point. Much less principled men and politicians get the attention of the masses than do the true heroes who stand by their principles.
I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious”
-Robert A. Heinlein
Once again I will heavily reference the 5 year old article by John J. Dwyer from ‘New American’ called “FDR vs. Lindbergh: Setting the Record Straight”. John’s article weaves his article more of the angst that FDR had with the popular Lindbergh over the truth-telling Charles shared over the years. The example of the executive order FDR flubbed in replacing a private industry with army pilots was the first issue that Lindbergh brought to light in 1934:
Lindbergh had never pursued political causes and had retreated with Anne from public view — and the vulture-like pursuit of the media — following the staggering loss of their son, but then Roosevelt, riding a historic wave of success and popularity, issued an executive order in early 1934 that outlawed an entire industry, private airline mail carrying.
There is a lot to be said of those who prefer to stay out of the limelight and shine their own light via more humble arenas. Lindbergh at his core was a humble man, but sometimes even the humble has to stand up for what is right:
The “Lone Eagle” [Lindbergh’s nickname] burst back into the limelight with a brief letter to the president protesting his actions. Lindbergh declared them “unwarranted and contrary to American principles” in their wielding of federal government power over the private sector whose production funded that government.
FDR, on the other hand, was an arrogant SOB that came across as a more gentle soul in public. What a facade:
FDR attempted to portray Lindbergh as a tool of the airlines. “Don’t worry about Lindbergh,” he scowled to an aide. “We will get that fair-haired boy.”
About five years later, prompted once more to come out of the shadows, Lindbergh caught on to the war-fever that came out of the FDR camp and Charles could not let this one go either:
Lindbergh presciently discerned the gathering dangers to the nation, and began a series of radio broadcasts and public speeches in September 1939 against America’s involvement in yet another European war. In one speech, he issued “a plea for American independence,” asking, “Why in this second century of our national existence must we be confronted with the quarrels of the old world that our forefathers left behind when they settled in this country?”
This is straight up US founder’s non-intervention foreign policy. Reluctantly, Charles became political one more time:
Though he personally disdained public involvement in controversial political issues, he eventually joined America First, the 800,000-strong noninterventionist (but not pacifist) organization, and he crafted a platform comprised of four main elements: 1) an embargo on offensive weapons and munitions to warring nations, 2) the unrestricted sale of purely defensive armaments to anyone who wanted them to protect themselves from attack, 3) the prohibition of American shipping from the belligerent countries of Europe and their danger zones, 4) the refusal of credit to belligerent nations or their agents.
Lindbergh’s tenets were intended to ward off another experience like World War I wherein U.S. banks loaned the Allies the funds to buy American munitions and, hence, pushed strongly for American involvement in the war and for Allied victory in order to ensure repayment of their loans.
It sounds like a boat-load of common sense to me, but to a government trying to mask its failure of addressing the Great Depression Rx call the New Deal, it desperately needed some distraction. In response to this, FDR goes all out to get that “fair-haired boy”:
In response to Lindbergh’s opposition to the president’s aggressive policies, Roosevelt loosed all but the hounds of hell on him, and the media — a media that Lindbergh biographer Scott Berg stated “had grown to resent Lindbergh’s uncooperative attitude, [and] instantly revised history.” FDR’s political allies excoriated the aviator with an armada of untrue accusations. They called him an “isolationist,” though he advocated vigorous American commercial trading around the world and urged the United States not to “build a wall around our country and isolate ourselves from contact with the rest of the world.” .. Roosevelt’s allies also called Lindbergh a defeatist and appeaser of Germany, though at the same time Lindbergh managed to gain unprecedented access to the German Luftwaffe (the German air force) and became the first non-German to fly the legendary Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane, and he provided intelligence to the U.S. military about Nazi capabilities. Hap Arnold declared, “Lindbergh gave me the most accurate picture of the Luftwaffe, its equipment, leaders, apparent plans, training methods, and present defects that I had so far received,” and Arnold invited him to serve on an elite U.S. military aircraft development board.
Lindbergh was called a Nazi “fellow-traveler,” and Roosevelt and others privately said he was a Nazi. Yet Lindbergh spoke and wrote in many venues of his disgust with Nazi excesses and wrongdoing.
He was called an anti-Semite, primarily due, as historian Duffy wrote, “to a single claim he made,” in one Des Moines speech, “that Jews were among the influential groups [including the British and the Roosevelt administration] that shaped America’s war policies…. Lindbergh never blamed American Jews for their attitude toward the war. To the contrary, even as he criticized Jewish support for war, he expressed sympathy and understanding for the Jewish position.”
All this sounds too familiar, being called a Russian-bot today comes to mind. Some things never change either, like the “anti-Semite” accusation. But the propaganda smear was not enough for FDR, as he wanted to bury Lindbergh:
Roosevelt’s forces went after Lindbergh, other non-interventionists, and even critical letter-writers to the White House in additional ways, as Duffy chronicled. These included telephone wiretaps, room listening devices, public smear campaigns, and in general trying “to find some dirt” on them. The president himself initiated a cooperative venture with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in which the White House supplied the bureau the names and addresses of the letter senders so that the FBI could provide information on them.
Y’all thought that these tactics against whistle-blowers was a recent thing, think again. Politics operates primarily on having dirt on other people as leverage. Government in particular thrives on this, which is why the NSA does what it does every single day with your tax money, spy on everything you say and do and track wherever you go, the ultimate police state.
But I digress .. back to some more principled Lindbergh moments:
The enduring vindictiveness of Roosevelt evidenced itself in his determination to keep Lindbergh from any military role in the U.S. war effort, despite the aviator’s wholehearted support of the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and his stature as one of the world’s foremost aviation experts. Wiser heads eventually prevailed, and Lindbergh’s wartime resumé was extraordinary.
He corrected problems in the Army’s B-24 Liberator bomber, flew high-altitude test flights in the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, and conducted dangerous research on combating airborne oxygen blackouts, using himself as guinea pig. At 42 years old — virtually invalid age for a fighter pilot — he flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific. Colonel Charles MacDonald, commander of the famed “Satan’s Angels” fighter group, said, “Lindbergh was indefatigable. He flew more missions than was normally expected of a regular combat pilot. He dive-bombed enemy positions, sank barges, and patrolled our landing forces on Noemfoor Island. He was shot at by almost every anti-aircraft gun the Nips [Japanese] had in western New Guinea.”
He also increased the bomb load of the Navy’s F4U Corsair fighter plane to 4,000 pounds, the heaviest ever carried by the fighter, then personally dropped it on Wotje Island, demolishing a Japanese anti-aircraft gun battery. After he devised how to extend the P-38 Lightning fighter’s flight distance by hundreds of miles, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific Douglas MacArthur engaged him as a consultant and offered him whatever plane he wished to fly. Lindbergh’s discovery of how to improve the P-38’s flying distance enabled the fighter plane to escort bombers to the Japanese-held island of Palau, aiding in the capture of the island and leading to its use as a launching pad for MacArthur’s triumphant return to the Philippines.
In a head-to-head aerial dogfight with a Japanese group commander, Lindbergh missed crashing head-on with the enemy’s plane by five feet and shot it down. Aiding a fellow pilot in another dogfight, he got jumped by a Mitsubishi Zero that fired from directly behind him as he “commended [his] soul to God,” but another American fighter shot down the Zero in the nick of time.
I never hear of all this. My last recollection from my history teachers was that Charles melted into obscurity after challenging the thought that the US must enter WWII.
Charles experience in the South Pacific left him reflective on what he saw. Once again he would not keep quiet:
Having personally confronted the true horrors of war in the Pacific, though, Lindbergh bitterly denounced it in his private journal: “As the awful truth of the German crimes against the Jewish people came out, here we were, doing the same thing to the Japs.” He wrote about the attitudes he encountered: “‘They really are lower than beasts. Every one of ’em ought to be exterminated.’ How many times I heard American officers in the Pacific say those very words!… And ‘Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’”
He chronicled the shooting of Japanese soldiers attempting to surrender so that other Japanese soldiers would remain in the jungle and slowly starve; Marines firing on unarmed Japanese swimming ashore at Midway; troops machine-gunning prisoners on a Hollandia airstrip; Australians shoving captured Japanese out of transport planes over the New Guinea mountains; Japanese shinbones carved off for letter openers and pen trays; Japanese heads buried in ant hills “to get them clean for souvenirs”; and “the infantry’s favorite occupation” of poking through the mouths of Japanese corpses for gold-filled teeth. He added, “What is barbaric on one side of the earth is still barbaric on the other.”
“Judge not that ye be not judged,” he continued. “It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation.” He also wrote of the legacy of using violence to solve mankind’s ills: lynchings, witch-burnings, “burnings at the stake for the benefit of Christ and God.”
Epic stuff that history books failed to capture. This is all by design as the US Empire has to hide heroes like this to keep the narrative intact that the US Empire, the state, is worthy of worship. As a result, the masses say the pledge, worship that flag, do your duty and vote, but don’t you dare be critical of the US government, that would be unpatriotic, or would it? What did our founders do with the British Empire?
So now what? In summary:
Franklin Roosevelt graduated onto the front of textbooks, currency, and best presidents’ lists. Charles Lindbergh, meanwhile, won the laurels of hatred and slander reserved for the truest patriot, he who loves his country enough to criticize her for her own good — a lesson that patriots of today know only too well is repeated almost daily in America through the cooperation of likeminded media and politicians.
Charles would lead a quite life after WWII retiring to Hawaii and dying there in 1974. I never even knew he was still living when I was reading about him in my history books and World Book Encyclopedias.
It is time to unearth these real heroes from having been buried by our government. We can’t afford to return to the days like John Adams’ administration when the Alien and Sedition Act made it a crime to be critical of the US government:
Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it a crime for anyone to criticize the government ”through writing or any other shape, form, or fashion.” Specifically, criticizing the president, Congress, the military, or the flag was made illegal.
Just over 20 years after divorcing the British Empire, the federation, now under the Constitution did this? Fast forward another 100 years and then you had this:
U.S. Sedition Act of 1918 … made it a crime to ”willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.”
Our true history ain’t pretty, can’t we just be honest about this?
A true test of freedom is when you find out who you can’t criticize, am I right?
Enough for now, get out there and enjoy your weekend all!
-SF1