Written by John J. Dwyer
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and American aviator Charles Lindbergh were the two greatest American icons of the first half of the 20th century. One led America throughout the Great Depression and WWII; the other gained fame when he risked his life to be the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, crossing between New York and Paris.
According to major media and many history books, President Roosevelt became more and more a statesman in office after being elected, and was largely responsible for America recovering from the Great Depression and for the Allies winning WWII, consequently spreading “democracy” throughout the world. Yet Lindbergh’s life after gaining public prominence was a study in wreck and ruin, with his son being kidnapped and murdered and Lindbergh becoming a speaker for an “isolationist” movement.
But the actual histories of the men suggest that “history” is often little more than propaganda that has been oft repeated. An accounting of the quality of the men’s judgments, their standards of behavior in interpersonal conflicts, and their personal accomplishments makes it logical that American history should, instead, laud Lindbergh while recoiling from Roosevelt.
Into Acclaim and Controversy
Modern Americans can scarcely imagine the emotion and awe with which peoples across the world regarded Lindbergh, who was widely christened “The Lone Eagle” following his pioneer 1927 transatlantic solo flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, just two decades after the first flight in history. Six world-renowned aviators had already died trying to accomplish the epic feat. When the shy, soft-spoken, boyishly handsome 25-year-old Midwesterner did it, his fame soared to greater heights perhaps than that of the astronauts who landed on the moon in a later generation. As chronicled in James P. Duffy’s Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America, hundreds of thousands of Parisians cheered him on. Thousands of police and 5,000 soldiers restrained crowds from him in Brussels. The English king and U.S. President Calvin Coolidge received him. Time magazine named him its first “Man of the Year.”
When his infant son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932, it was America’s crime of the century. Many considered it the worst crime since the crucifixion of Christ. The heart of the country beat as one with Charles Lindbergh and his brilliant, lovely wife, Anne.
Roosevelt’s rise to the national and international stage was not as sudden. He capitalized on the fact that his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most admired U.S. presidents and managed to become governor of New York. After winning two gubernatorial terms, “FDR” parlayed his own handsome visage, galvanizing charisma, and message of hope for Great Depression-ravaged America into the presidency in 1933 — and soon came into conflict with Lindbergh.
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. Instead, Roosevelt determined, the U.S. military would provide the air transportation for delivering air mail. Democrat Roosevelt charged that Republican companies were price- and route-fixing. (The Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals later ruled his actions arbitrary and without due process of law.) The Lone Eagle 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.
Round One was under way between two of the most legendary Americans in history, and the air mail controversy morphed overnight into an epic Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh showdown. Brave army pilots, ill trained for their new mail-carrying mission and flying planes far inferior to the airlines’ (one commercial liner, for instance, could carry the load of six army planes) and inadequate for either the pitch black of night or the freezing, snow-blown winter, began immediately to perish.
As the body count rose to 12 and accidents to 66, masses of air mail were delayed or never delivered, and public fury mounted at the administration. Roosevelt ignored the advice of friends and enemies, business people, military leaders, and government officials alike to reinstate private mail delivery and, instead, orchestrated a feverish, behind-the-scenes campaign to redirect blame for the burgeoning disaster, including against Lindbergh, whose statements legitimized the theretofore-unheard-of phenomenon of wide public criticism of Roosevelt. 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.”
However, the president soon had to admit defeat and ask Congress to pass legislation returning airmail service to private carriers, reversing his action of barely 90 days before.
Roosevelt ally Henry “Hap” Arnold, later five-star commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces during WWII, summarized the fiasco: “Within two weeks we were forced to realize that although the ‘will to do’ might get the job done, the price of our doing it was equal to the sacrifice of a wartime combat operation. Courage alone could not substitute for years of cross-country experience; for properly equipped airplanes; and for suitable blind flying instruments, such as the regular air-line mail pilots were using.”
New Deal Failure
Roosevelt’s tenure in office reinforced the perception that his need to be considered right trumped his desires to actually get things right.
His famed “first hundred days,” contrary to many of his campaign promises about avoiding the centralization of government power, unleashed an unparalleled blizzard of legislation in which the federal government sought to correct the supposed failures of the capitalistic system — through the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and many other new laws. “It is common sense to take a method and try it,” he explained. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” The nation had just suffered through three years of Herbert Hoover’s ineffectual post-stock market crash economic schemes, and the unemployment rate stood at over 23 percent at Roosevelt’s inauguration, so the majority of citizens were willing to give him a chance.
Though the realization gradually dawned on Roosevelt and his minions that no amount of constitutionally questionable New Deal programs and Machiavellian presidential scheming could end the Depression, Roosevelt kept his programs going full steam ahead. Near the end of Roosevelt’s second term, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, a key New Deal architect, penned this startling confession regarding the administration’s failure: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot.”
As nations on nearly every continent emerged from the economic cataclysm, U.S. unemployment skyrocketed back up to nine million workers in 1939 — 12 million if counting Americans employed at taxpayer-funded “make-work” jobs — a total nearly that of when Roosevelt first won the presidency, and after oceans of New Deal spending.
As the 1930s wound down, Roosevelt’s resolve not to take his hand off the tiller steering America’s economic course was creating the unemployment that would help impel him to push America into another world war and another face-off with Lindbergh.
In September 1939 when Germany and Russia invaded Poland, precipitating WWII, Roosevelt saw his chance to eliminate U.S. unemployment. Amity Schlaes opined in her Depression chronicle The Forgotten Man: “A war … would hand to Roosevelt the thing he had always lacked — a chance, quite literally, to provide jobs to the remaining unemployed. On the junket down the Potomac, for example, he could count 6,000 men at work at Langley Field; 12,000 at Portsmouth Navy Yard, where there had been 7,600; and new employment in the military or the prospect of it, for Americans elsewhere. Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now (1940) he did: he could make them soldiers.” Never mind that the private-sector unemployment problem was exacerbated by the economic drag caused by his costly Big Government programs — or that going to war would make government even more expensive.
Roosevelt’s only problem was convincing Americans of the necessity to fight — no easy chore. The American public was disgusted with Europe after it had torn itself to shreds for no legitimate reason in the “Great War,” dragging the United States into the fray to win the fight, then reneged on billions of dollars in war repayments while pillorying the United States as a villainous creditor called “Uncle Shylock” — not to mention America’s 460,000 deaths resulting from that war. The American public had no interest in saving England’s rapacious empire again, or in dealing with European geopolitics.
Roosevelt, again contrary to promises to the electorate, schemed and crafted plans to involve the United States in Europe’s latest war, while Lindbergh worked assiduously to keep America out of the war...
Read the rest here:
http://thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/17341-fdr-vs-lindbergh-setting-the-record-straight
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