America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War - Hardcover

Brands, H. W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385550413 ISBN 13: 9780385550413

Verlag: Doubleday, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.

Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 launched a momentous period of decision-making for the United States. With fascism rampant abroad, should America take responsibility for its defeat?

For popular hero Charles Lindbergh, saying no to another world war only twenty years after the first was the obvious answer. Lindbergh had become famous and adored around the world after his historic first flight over the Atlantic in 1927. In the years since, he had emerged as a vocal critic of American involvement overseas, rallying Americans against foreign war as the leading spokesman the America First Committee. 

While Hitler advanced across Europe and threatened the British Isles, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt struggled to turn the tide of public opinion. With great effort, political shrewdness and outright deception—aided by secret British disinformation efforts in America—FDR readied the country for war. He pushed the US onto the world stage where it has stayed ever since.

In this gripping narrative, H.W. Brands sheds light on a crucial tipping point in American history and depicts the making of a legendary president.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

H. W. BRANDS holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written more than a dozen biographies and histories, including The General vs. the President, a New York Times bestseller, and Founding Partisans, his most recent book. Two of his biographies, The First American and Traitor to His Class, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Part One
The Allure of Neutrality

1

A more terrible thing couldn’t have happened to a more admirable man.

Such was the reaction of Americans as they read that the infant son of Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped. Lindbergh had become America’s hero five years earlier when he accomplished the historic feat of leaping the Atlantic in a single bound of flight. The twenty-five-year-old aviator paired the courage of the explorer with the technical know-how of the inventor: he was Lewis and Clark and Edison rolled into one. That he was handsome—tall and rangy, with the blond hair and blue eyes of his Swedish forebears—made Lucky Lindy irresistible to the newsreel cameras that were just beginning to bring important events to mass audiences almost as they happened. His natural shyness made him the more appealing; amid the din of the Roaring Twenties, his diffidence was endearing. He seemed the boy next door, if the boy next door were also inventive, brave and famous.

His wedding to Anne Morrow, the charming and talented daughter of a Wall Street banker turned diplomat, filled the tabloids and respectable papers alike. In due course the couple were blessed with a child, christened Charles and immediately called Little Lindy by the headline writers. Lindbergh built a home in rural New Jersey for his small family; in the late winter of 1932 they spent time there even though it wasn’t quite finished. On March 1 Anne and the child’s nurse put him to bed around seven; Lindbergh was reading in the study below. At ten the nurse checked on Little Lindy before she went to bed. She didn’t find him in the crib.

At first she thought the mother or father must have picked up the twenty-month-old and taken him to another room. When she checked with Anne and saw no baby, she began to be alarmed. When Lindbergh didn’t have him either, her alarm turned to panic.

Lindbergh dashed up the stairs to the bedroom. Seeing the empty crib, he searched the other rooms, on the chance young Lindy might suddenly have learned to climb out of the crib. Then he searched outside the house, realizing the possibility of finding the baby there was minuscule. He finally called the New Jersey state police. His son was missing, he said.

If American hearts had swelled with pride on watching the newsreels of Lindbergh in Paris, standing in front of The Spirit of St. Louis and receiving from France’s president the Cross of the Legion of Honor, those same hearts were wrenched by worry on reading of the disappearance, and on seeing newsreel clips from home movies Lindbergh had made of Little Lindy. Lindbergh and Anne had tried to shelter the baby from public view, but now they were persuaded to let the world into their home so that the public might assist in identifying and rescuing the child.

The home movies touched the heartstrings of every audience member in every theater where the newsreels played. Little Lindy was an angelic junior version of his father; the toddler’s smiling blue eyes, framed by golden curls, smiled sweetly and innocently into the camera. Millions of Americans felt as if their own child or grandchild or younger sibling had been stolen. Men from hundreds of miles around joined the search; people all across the country offered up prayers for the child’s safe return. More than a few vowed vengeance against the perpetrators should any harm befall the darling boy.

Government officials ordered their agencies to join the search. President Herbert Hoover put his best men on the job. Governor Franklin Roosevelt of neighboring New York state likewise stepped up. “I am personally deeply interested, because I know both Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh,” Roosevelt said from Albany. “My daughter, Mrs. Curtis Dall, was at school with Mrs. Lindbergh.”

The worry over the missing child turned to agony when, after weeks of investigation and negotiation, and the futile delivery of fifty thousand dollars in ransom money to someone claiming to speak for the kidnappers, the decomposing body of Little Lindy was found under a pile of brush a few miles from the Lindbergh home.

Lindbergh and Anne were devastated, although Lindbergh held himself together long enough to identify the remains of his child. Parents all over America shuddered in sympathy, imagining how they would feel in his circumstances. Lucky Lindy didn’t seem so lucky anymore; the man to whom so much had been given was now deprived of even more. People had admired Lindbergh as an ideal type; suddenly they identified with him in the shared humanity of suffering.

Individuals reached out, writing letters, sending telegrams, making phone calls. Herbert Hoover reiterated the backing of the federal government in the search for those who had taken—and killed—the baby. New York’s Roosevelt declared, “No crime has so moved the country during the last generation as has this one.” The governor added, “Every agency at my command has been instructed to bring the fiendish murderers to justice.”

At the time Roosevelt spoke, his promise was worth more than Hoover’s. Or rather, it would be if the manhunt took longer than a few months, as the lack of leads suggested it might.

By the summer of 1932 America knew that Hoover would not be reelected president. The stock market crash of 1929 hadn’t been his fault, most Americans acknowledged, but many blamed the Republican president for failing to pull the economy out of its post-crash dive, and for ignoring the pleas for help from the millions of Americans rendered jobless and homeless by the collapse of the economy the Republicans had spent the previous decade boasting about. Whoever won the Democratic nomination would surely defeat Hoover. And Roosevelt was the Democrats’ favorite.

Roosevelt didn’t know Lindbergh as well as his comment about his daughter—Anna Roosevelt Dall—and Anne Lindbergh suggested. Yet the trajectory of his life paralleled Lindbergh’s in certain respects. No one ever called Roosevelt “Lucky Frank,” though he too was blessed with good looks and sufficient wealth to pursue his interests—in his case, politics. He was vigorous and athletic, preferring sailboats to airplanes, and he charmed people with his winning smile and warm personality. Fortune smiled on him as he advanced through the ranks of the Democratic party, to the point where he was made his party’s nominee for vice president in 1920. In a Republican year, the ticket lost, but Roosevelt emerged unscathed—indeed, more appealing than ever. He was widely spoken of as a contender for the top of the ticket next time.

But in 1921 he contracted infantile paralysis, as polio was then called. He went to bed one evening feeling unusually tired; he woke up the next day paralyzed from the neck down. As word got out, Roosevelt received sympathy cards and letters from all parts of the country. Everyone wished him well; a few dared to pray for a speedy recovery. Most assumed his public life was over; cripples, to use the term of the time, were expected to stay home and out of sight if they could afford to. Fortunately for Roosevelt, he could; the family estate at Hyde Park, in the Hudson Valley, would be an appropriate retirement retreat.

Roosevelt retreated to Hyde Park, but he didn’t retire. He maintained his ties with Democratic leaders in New York and beyond, corresponding with them, speaking to them by phone and hosting them when they could visit Hyde Park. His wife, Eleanor, served as his proxy to local groups at first, then others farther afield.

He spent months at a time in Warm Springs, Georgia, a spa renowned for its soothing waters. While there he got to know the locals: humble whites and blacks...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Doubleday
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385550413
• ISBN 13: 9780385550413
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar