WH AT IF. . .
Could a fascist really have run for the presidency of the United States in 1940 and won?
Who was Charles Lindbergh? Charles Lindbergh became famous in 1927 when he became the first man to fly across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. Suddenly, out of nowhere dropped this 25-year-old who was an incredibly brave pilot. And he had this crazy idea for getting across the ocean: he stripped all excess weight out of his aeroplane because the less weight the more fuel he could carry. Basically, what remained was a kite. With fuel. It was called the Spirit Of St Louis and he flew it across the Atlantic in 33½ hours. When he landed he became a worldwide hero, par ticularly in the US.
Folks, especially in the 1920s, were feeling disillusioned about heroes and society as a whole. Now, all of a sudden, here was this wholesome, handsome young man who didn’t smoke or drink. Americans saw in him not just a hero, but almost a superman. The kidnap and murder of his two-year-son Charles Jr in 1932 added another layer to the hero. Now, not only was Lindbergh a great American hero who was wholesome, moral and upstanding, but he was now also a tragic figure. Americans love those.
What were his political views like up to 1940? He had a really good mind but his politics were formed more by experience than academia. He was a staunch eugenicist through the 1930s, and he worked with a man named Dr Alexis Carrel, who wrote a book called Man The Unknown, which laid out his extreme views about eugenics, things like “the white race is drowning in a sea of inferiors” and “only the elite make the progress of the masses possible”. It was time with Carrel that worked to form Lindbergh’s untrained mind. Lindbergh bought into all Carrel’s rot.
They disparaged others who they believed threatened America’s “racial strength”, such as Russians, Jews, Asians and southern Europeans. Then, in the spring of 1936, Lindbergh had an opportunity to go to Hitler’s Germany to take a look at the Luftwaffe. In the few weeks he was there he became infatuated with how efficient and modern it was. He believed Hitler was the best thing that could’ve happened to Europe, even calling Hitler a “visionary”. By 1938, many people in the US and abroad suspected he was pro-Nazi.
What was Lindbergh’s stance on World War II? When he returned to the United States in 1939, he firmly believed Germany was saving Europe. He also saw it as Europe’s mess and wanted the United States to stay out of it, with one exception. If the United States was going to join Germany in its fight against the Russians and Japanese (what he deemed “lesser races”), that would have been something he found acceptable. Nowadays, some think of him an isolationist. He wasn’t. He was only isolationist in regard to the United States fighting against Nazi Germany. If, however, the US joined
