Lynne Olson’s ‘Those Angry Days’

This sentiment was grounded in America’s experience of World War I. The U.S. was brought into the conflict by Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned for re-election only months previously on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” That experience left the country with 116,708 dead, a mound of unpayable Allied debts, and a hegemonic position the country refused to accept, politically if not financially. Congressional hearings on war profiteering by the so-called “merchants of death” fanned anti-war opinion through much of the 1930s.

“Isolationism” is the name given to the movement opposed to the Roosevelt administration’s drift to war, especially after Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. The term was pejorative, and has remained so. It connotes a parochial, xenophobic Republicanism that rejects the inevitable responsibilities of world power for the soft comforts of peace.

But the avoidance of foreign conflicts and entangling alliances goes back to the Founding Fathers— to John Adams’s Plan of Treaties and George Washington’s Farewell Address. And, as the recent uproar over Barack Obama’s plan to bomb Syria shows, it’s a deep-seated impulse in our political culture. One might well construct a history of America around the struggle between interventionism— often a cover for imperial interests— and the desire to leave and be left alone.

Loner and hero

Never was this struggle more deeply joined than during the run-up to World War II. Several studies have addressed it, but Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days is particularly useful for its textured view and its close analysis of the major participants.

As the title indicates, Charles A. Lindbergh, a political loner who only reluctantly took the leadership of the Isolationist cause, gets equal billing if not equal attention with the chief player, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The book begins with a White House meeting between Roosevelt and Lindbergh in April 1939, at which FDR deployed his charm to in an attempt to neutralize Lindbergh’s potential opposition to a war for which Roosevelt was already preparing. No one, though, ever talked Lindbergh out of anything. The two men never met again.

Officially, Lindbergh was nothing more than a colonel in the Air Force reserve. But, although his benign views of Nazi Germany were already known, he was still the hero of the century for his solo flight across the Atlantic a dozen years earlier. Although he would be tarred as a Nazi sympathizer (if not an outright Nazi) in the next two and a half years, he reflected the feelings of many across the entire political spectrum that the looming conflict in Europe was a settling of scores between old imperial rivals rather than, as the Interventionists would increasingly characterize it, a battle between freedom and tyranny. The rub of it was that substantial truth could be found in both positions.

Fascist threat

Interventionists, who were especially thick among the East Coast elite, had much more than ideology in mind. A German-dominated Europe— not speculation but fact after the fall of France in June 1940— could dictate American terms of trade in the Atlantic, penetrate the Western Hemisphere and threaten the Panama Canal. An America so isolated could fall prey to fascism itself, a possibility already canvassed in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, and re-imagined decades later in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which Lindbergh, elected president in 1940, serves as a stalking-horse for fascist interests.

Even if fascism didn’t prevail, Roosevelt understood that a hostile Germany controlling the Atlantic sea lanes could plunge America back deep into the Depression from which it hadn’t yet emerged in the late 1930s. Albert Einstein added his own warning about the possibility of a super-weapon, the atomic bomb, which could offer the Germans an incalculable military advantage. With the Battle of Britain— Germany’s attempt to force England to its knees in the summer of 1940— these issues became critical. Key Roosevelt advisors— Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the playwright-turned-speechwriter Robert Sherwood— urged him to take every step short of war, and even to risk war itself, to ensure England’s survival.

The Isolationists, including Lindbergh and a number of prominent senators, continued to see the war in European terms. England, they thought, should reach a peace agreement with Germany. Its prospects were too bleak to continue its fight, and no American interest could justify what would be a transcontinental war between the U.S. and Germany in which America would effectively stand alone. A Fortress America could protect the Western Hemisphere from Nazi penetration, the Isolationists argued, and a non-belligerent Germany would have no reason to discourage American trade.

FDR: Indecisive, or shrewd?

This last argument gave Roosevelt a handle for a military buildup. Still, he proceeded with caution. Olson’s Roosevelt is not the hard-charging FDR of the early New Deal, but a tired and often seemingly indecisive man who, after his second-term reversals, frustrated his more aggressive advisors.

Alternatively, one might see him as cagey. A good politician knows when to lead public opinion and when to wait for and develop it. Germany had friends in the U.S., including prominent figures in the American military, and a deep vein of Anglophobia persisted throughout the country. The British, it was felt, had tricked us into war once; then postwar mistreatment of Germany fostered the rise of Hitler. This blood feud was not ours.

The British, for their part, mounted a fierce PR campaign in the States, working hand in glove with American intelligence. Unfortunately for them, the Battle of Britain coincided with America’s 1940 presidential campaign. Even though the Republicans, to universal astonishment, nominated the Interventionist Wendell Willkie, the dynamics of the campaign forced both candidates to the right. By the spring of 1941, with American assistance still lagging, the British position was desperate. Only Hitler’s invasion of Russia relieved the pressure, and then Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor brought America at last into the war. Isolationists and Interventionists alike had largely ignored the Pacific front. The war, when it came, arrived through the back door.

Lindbergh’s secrets

By then Isolationism was a losing cause in any case. Most Americans had come to see the war as inevitable. What’s more, the ships, planes and tanks commissioned by the government amounted to a second New Deal stimulus package. Lindbergh, who had resigned his commission, rushed to the colors along with almost everyone else; and although Roosevelt refused to reinstate his commission, he served under the radar in the Pacific with distinction: redesigning aircraft to increase their range and capacity, flying combat missions and shooting down a Japanese Zero.

Of all the personalities in Olson’s book, he is the most fascinating, perhaps because he was the most opaque. No one really knew Lindbergh, including his long-suffering wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose books and journals Olson liberally cites. As a public figure, he exhibited a stolid integrity, and yet in later life he would maintain multiple households for the seven children he secretly sired by three German and Austrian women, a story that came out only decades after his death in 1974. He would also, as he aged, visit the Smithsonian to gaze up at the Spirit of St. Louis, always incognito. Whatever he thought, he kept to himself.

Isolationism did attract a fringe of right-wing zealots, racists and anti-Semites. But it also numbered among its adherents the perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, the great constitutional historian Charles A. Beard, the young Gore Vidal, and two future American presidents, John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford. It was a lost cause, but not an ignoble one. We might remember the virtue it taught— mind your own business— and, in the light of Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole burden of imperial adventure we have assumed to our and others’ dire cost, the once-proud maxim of another president, John Quincy Adams: that America was not created to seek monsters to destroy.