Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as
reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:
A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the
media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the
newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed
the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and
the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd
called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told
supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed
their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding
rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had
to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the
nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold
back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close
off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus
solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve
our American way of life."
No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the
occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years
earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in
February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about
in the last week or so; it was the American First Committee led by heroic
pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months
before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that
year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a
nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and
the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader
Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others).
Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged"
language that got him into trouble in
Des Moines in September:
Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows
that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people
realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do
not.
Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and
influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our
government.
I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I
admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish
races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they
are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to
involve us in the war.
We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own
interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural
passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to
destruction.
But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:
