The Immortalists by David M. Friedman

Author:David M. Friedman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: en
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-02-25T06:00:00+00:00

Lindbergh soon made similar arguments elsewhere. In November 1939, an article he wrote, “Aviation, Geography and Race,” appeared in America’s best-selling magazine, Reader’s Digest. The racial views of Carrel—particularly those on the differing intellectual capabilities of the races—suffused Lindbergh’s text. Aviation, he wrote, “is a tool especially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe—one of the priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown.”

“We, the heirs of European culture,” Lindbergh wrote, “are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race…. It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again…. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves,…on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood…. Let us not commit racial suicide by internal conflict.”

There were many Americans who considered Lindbergh’s words heroic. The Republican senator William E. Borah of Idaho was so inspired that he urged Lindbergh to run for the Republican nomination for president in 1940. Herbert Hoover, whom Lindbergh had visited in his apartment at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, was also warm to this idea. (Lindbergh politely declined.) Thousands of letters and telegrams arrived at the Lindbergh home in Lloyd Neck, and at the radio stations that carried his speeches, the newspapers that reprinted them, and the magazines that published his other articles. “No one…exert[s] a deeper influence on public opinion than yourself,” DeWitt Wallace, the founder of Reader’s Digest, told Lindbergh. Ninety percent of the mail arriving at Lloyd Neck was positive, but Lindbergh was savvy enough to know that “the people who like what you say are more likely to write than those who don’t—at least,” he wrote in his journal, “that’s true in the intelligent classes.”

But there was criticism, too, some of it from unexpected sources. One American who attacked Lindbergh publicly was the former boxing champion Gene Tunney, who’d met Lindbergh several times after Lindbergh’s flight to Paris. (Tunney held the world heavyweight title in 1927, having vanquished Jack Dempsey.) Those meetings were friendly, so Lindbergh was surprised to learn of a speech Tunney gave in Boston, denouncing as “shocking impertinence” Lindbergh’s suggestion that America “desert” Britain in its time of need. Tunney, who’d served overseas in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War I, also heaped scorn on Lindbergh for accepting a medal from “those gangsters” in Germany.

As for expected sources, a veritable onslaught of scorn was directed at Lindbergh in Britain, where one member of Parliament stood up to say that Lindbergh’s Nazi medal—the “Service Cross of the German Eagle”—should have been shaped in the form of a “double cross.” The Briton Harold Nicolson, who wrote

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.