LINDBERGH’S FOLLOWING

Evening Star, Issue 23700, 7 October 1940, Page 7

LINDBERGH’S FOLLOWING

NAZIS SEIZE OPPORTUNITY DEVELOPMENTS IN U.S.A. “ Lindbergh already has a following here . . . and there is evidence that the Nazis are now openly working with him,’' says Robert Waithman, the New York correspondent of the Bonaon ‘ News-Chronicle,’ in the following article, which was published on August 1): I think the gods are beginning to write chapter three of the strange and shocking story of Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who dew the Atlantic and lived with triumph, who suffered the cruel loss of an infant son and lived with tragedy', and who now is casting over the United States a now and sombre shadow. The gods must know how chapter three is going to end—whether the bid Lindbergh is making is due to fall short the loader of a Fascist faction in Ameand to dissolve into the field of dead newspapers or whether, as sober men here arc now wondering, the secretive young colonel is going to emerge ns idea. The Lindbergh story, as newspapermen say, is still running. 1 think it is going to bear a good deal of watching. Last Sunday the rather amateurish voice of Lindbergh came over the radio for tho third time since the war began. Th© young colonel was talking to tho nation again. By what right he spoke over a national network as though he wore the wise leader of the people is not tho least fantastic point in the fantastic story. “ CONVERTING OLD ASSETS.” Thirteen years ago ho was an obscure air pilot, and then he performed a gallant feat at a moment when America was short of gallantry, and the public, working through its newspapers, made him a giant. The tragedy that followed added to his stature. The curious thing that is happening now is that ho is converting some old assets—using his old gianthood for a purpose nobody could have foreseen. The conversion of those old assets was about to begin in 1935, when Lindbergh was arriving in England to seek peace and sanctuary from kidnappers—but I did not know that when I was waiting at the port of Cobb, in Eire, with other reporters to meet his ship, .nor did anyone else. $ The first of his assets wore realised in September, 1938, when Lindbergh, newly returned from bis travels in Germany, was extolling the Nazi air force and deriding our own Air Force and helping Mr Chamberlain along tho road to Munich. But tho big cashing of Lindbergh’s assets, vaguely foreshadowed by the two earlier speeches, came last Sunday, when he used his national audience to place himself before the people as the naked apostle of appeasement and cooperation with the Nazis. The speech was full of confused nonsense about haves and have-nots, and the injustice of Versailles and the European struggles for territory. It spoke at one moment of co-opcration with Germany and the next moment of tho necessity of a great rearmament programme. It was a speech which anybody could tear to pieces, and it is being torn to pieces hero this week. Editorials are being written and addresses are being given denouncing Lindbergh as “ deluded ” and as a “ prattler,” and more pointedly calling him “ Number One Fifth Columnist ” in this country. But neither Lindbergh nor the so far unidentified figures who are backing Lindbergh will mind that. The fact which sober Americans in high places now have to face is that Lindbergh already has a following bore. It was inevitable that lie should. You cannot broadcast three times over a national network without acquiring some sort of following; and if you say what you know a certain number of people will want to hear. You can assure yourself of a favourite reaction in advance. This Lindbergh has done. In the first two speeches he confined himself to isolationist talk, for which he could be sure there was a readymade audience. Thus consolidated, he could, in the American idiom, “ take off the wraps ” —and he did. He now has to wait and measure the reaction to the bolder move. SOME ODD FACTS. Of course, there will be millions of Americans who won’t need this week’s editorials and public denunciations to see the ugly shape of Fascism behind Lindbergh’s words. But for anyone who may have been believing that “ It Can’t Happen Here ” there are some odd facts which, while they do not prove that it can happen here, do suggest that Lindbergh may have to be observed carefully. The National Broadcasting Company reported the receipt of between 10 and 15 thousand telegrams, letters, and post cards after Lindbergh's last broadcast. Most of them (one calculation says 10 to 1, another 15 to 1) were supporting him. This was when ho spoke on isolationist themes. A broadcasting company spokesman further says that the response, which continued for weeks, was the largest over elicited by a single speaker. From whom were tho letters and telegrams coming? Many of them undoubtedly came from good Americans who are members of such organisations as the Citizens. Keep America Out of T Var Committee, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Gold Star Mothers—which sponsored or backed the meeting at Chicago at which Lindbergh spoke last Sunday, and which flourish on the long- : it! 1 >*iitod isolationism in tho middlewest and far-west. Twenty thousand people attended the Chicago meeting. Between American Isolationism and Nazi Fascism there is a gulf as wide as the Atlantic; •"d there is neither right nor cause for serious alarm over tho response to Lindbergh’s previous speeches; but there is evidence that tho Nazis arc now openly working with him. Whether Lindbergh understands this or not is, for the moment, beside the point. GERMANS’ SUPPORT. More cogent is the revelation, tirst that the Gornian-American Alliance, which is tho successor in Chicago of tho now disorganised German-Ainerican Dund, broadcast to its members instructions to attend last Sunday’s meeting Attend en masse ”)—and tho second that the German short wave broadcast has since followed up the meeting with the particularly insolent suggestion that a •* Link ” organisation should now be ftirmed in the United States with the slogan “ Don’t scold your best atter-the-war customer.” Before the war it was calculated that more than 150 groups with Fascist leanings wore in existence in the United States; among them Father ConglT'n's lately quiescent organisation, the Ku Klux Klan, tho Knights of the White Camellia, tho Silver Shirts, and so on. Since war began both German and Italian societies have been furiously

reorganising. One of the latest Nazi tie-ups here'is with the Irish Republican army. In these carefully co-ordinated organisations the groundwork for an American Fascism and the nucleus of an American “ fifth column ” have been painstakingly laid. There is no longer, much doubt but that behind tho scenes thri movement has boon led and perhaps financed by the German Embassy and Consulates in Urn country, nr In- Nazis working with credentials that the Embassy and Consulates have furnished. An inference which may now be made is that the Nazis think the time has come for the next phase—tho production of a native American leader who can work openly, protected by demo cratic tolerance. The inference which is being made in some quarters here is that Lindbergh, whether he knows it or not, has been picked for the job. 1 think it is too soon to be sure of that. But it looks as though tho gods are still at work ou tho Lindbergh story.