Anyone else watching? Lindbergh takes on FDR in the 1940 presidential election, and what happens next. I’m a sucker for alternative history. The first episode aired last night and I thought it was pretty good. Fine cast; good costumes, cars, streetscapes etc. from 1940; interesting (and foreboding) plot. I haven’t read the Roth novel but know its broad outlines.
FDR certainly agreed with you. I think it’s more complicated than that, although the show may make him out to be more of a patsy or a useful dunce, if not an outright pro-Nazi villain.
I think Lindbergh genuinely wanted to keep the U.S. out of another bloody world war. And, like many Americans (including some Democrats), he opposed breaking the no-third-term tradition set by Washington. He was a racist and anti-Semite, as many people were back then, but not murderously so, by all accounts. He did admire the Nazis for seeming to pull Germany out of the political turmoil and economic mess it was in after WWI, and for their aviation accomplishments. But when he saw the concentration camps at the end of the war he was horrified.
Hap Arnold wrote in his bio that Lindbergh brought back very useful info on the Luftwaffe after his visits to Germany. Lindbergh went on to fly combat missions in the Pacific during WWII, coming under fire and shooting down at least one enemy plane (as a civilian!). He also gave U.S. military pilots useful tips on extending the range of their aircraft. For more: Charles Lindbergh - Wikipedia
I hold no brief for Lindbergh and find a lot in him to criticize, but I’m not convinced he was “a fascist at heart.”
I thought it was mostly just okay, even though I like this sort of thing. Don’t need the adulterous affair going on, at least not in the first episode. Set the tone for the story and then put in some tits, ass, and explosions if your story really needs it. I wish that the main family was more connected to Lindbergh so we could see what was really happening behind the scenes. And where is the point of divergence here from real history?
I will definitely be watching the second episode, but I hope it tightens up.
Yes, tighten up! It is pretty slow in the first half, I suppose to set the mood. It got more interesting when more was happening outside of that house and neighborhood.
I can’t help but notice anachronisms in shows like these. I liked that they showed an older model car in the mix, but none of these cars have dents or rust or cracked windows. And there would have been at least a few trucks (early pickups), since most families could afford only one vehicle.
Lindbergh’s historic house in Little Falls Minnesota has a good controversy summary. At least the site isn’t hiding his viewpoints. I can see how a slight twist in history would lead him into running against FDR, for many reasons.
No he wasnt. He was a America First, since England suckered us into the Great War. That cost us many millions of $ and 350K casualties, just so England could retain it’s Empire and be the greatest Naval power, and so France could get revenge for the Franco-Prussian war. They lied to get us in, then crapped on what we wanted for peace.
There is absolutely no evidence that Lindberg was a Nazi or anything like that.
You mean other than his antisemitic views and inflammatory racist comments? It’s true that he ended up supporting the war effort after Pearl Harbor, but I don’t know that he ever recanted his remarks about Jews. As I recall it, America entered WWI because of relentless attacks on American shipping, the promise to resume unrestricted sinking of neutral ships, and trying to incite Mexico to declare war on the U.S. I’m not familiar with the lies you refer to.
Wibur Carr, now hidden by the mists of time, is considered to be the bureaucratic father of the
modern State Department. Was he also an anti-Semite? Did his policies, combined with the
economic conditions, immigration restrictions and isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s,
encourage his zealous anti-Semitic successors like Breckinridge Long to implement more
stringent restrictionist regulations? Even when Congress exposed the paranoia and anti-Semitism
of Breckinridge Long, the State Department kept him in a position of power and influence.
Could he and his co-workers deport the Oswego refugees? After all, founding father Carr had
been a stickler to quota rules.
Wilbur Carr Becomes Mr. State Department
Even if Wilbur Carr had not intended to be obstructionist or anti-Semitic, he helped to
create almost impenetrable “paper walls” for desperate Jewish refugees wanting to flee to the
United States. Ironically, two children of Jewish immigrants to the United States, Ruth Gruber
and Henry Morgentau played important roles breeching those paper walls.
Some consider FDR anti-semitic, even.
But FDR was certainly no Nazi. Many staunch anti-nazi Americans were racists in the late 1930s, that was just the way things were. Wilson was perhaps the most racist American president in modern times… not counting trump.
*The British luxury passenger liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed a century ago. The sinking was deemed an atrocity of war and encouraged American intervention in World War I. But the ship was carrying munitions through a war zone and left unprotected by the Royal Navy. The “Great War” was a thoroughly modern conflict, enshrouded in government lies.
Indeed, the British were propaganda pros, creating an entire “information” operation based in the U.S. dedicated to misleading America into the conflict. London began with a brilliant campaign built on the faked “Belgian atrocities” allegedly committed by the German Army. Years after the Lusitania went to the ocean’s bottom the British government still obstructed efforts to learn the truth about the ship.*
Note that the RMS Lusitania was listed in the 1914 Janes as a Armed Merchant cruiser, and had gun mounts for 6" guns, but they had not yet been mounted. Legally, it was a warship, carrying illegal munitions.
I’m largely with Dr. Deth here (except for the unnecessary attack on Trump, but I won’t hijack the thread any further).
This was the 1930s. Racism, especially casual racism, was par for the course. From my study of history, the America First and Lindbergh beliefs were rather benign for that time and not so terribly outrageous for this day and time (except for the casual racism).
IIRC, the idea was that we were barely more than 20 years removed from a horrific European war. Now they were having troubles again. Why should we spill our blood over there? Hitler is conquering countries? Well, let the fucking UK deal with it, not us again. And if you look under the surface, Hitler is doing some good things. Efficient machine production, keeping an orderly society, and yes, keeping the Jews in their place, but *wink wink, couldn’t we use a little of that here? But bottom line, even if we hate it, it is not our fight. We have people out of work here. America First!
And then all of these people, once Pearl Harbor was attacked, completely joined in the fight. After the war, they were proven devastatingly wrong about Hitler.
I don’t think Lindbergh felt the need to apologize about his Jewish comments because, again,and even after WWII, they were very mild for the times. I guess the best analogy might be a white guy in 1965 who is pretty ambivalent about the Civil Rights Movement but doesn’t want a black guy dating his daughter. If he found out (in an alternate universe) that Mississippi was secretly exterminating blacks in concentration camps, he would have been appalled. Yet he would still not only be unapologetic about his belief regarding dating his daughter, but would reaffirm it.
In short, I think Lindbergh and company were proven wrong by history and their casual racism was wrong by today’s standards, but an accusation that he and his group were Nazis is very lacking in evidence.
I hope this show doesn’t go down the road of Lindbergh getting elected and forming an alliance with Germany against the UK because that is simply not supported by any real evidence.
And I’m in complete agreement that Lindbergh was not likely to have joined the Nazis in any way (despite his anti-Semitism, which as others have noted, was shared by many Americans of the time).
People sometimes mistakenly think Lindbergh was of German ancestry (he was in fact Swedish on his father’s side, and English and French on his mother’s) leading them to falsely attribute to him affinity for the Germans. It may have run the other way: the rotund Goerring seems to have had a serious bromance crush on the tall, slim, blond Aryan-looking aviation hero. It’s been speculated (I think it was in the A. Scott Berg biography) that Goerring refrained from invading Sweden out of respect for Lindbergh.
Another aspect of Lindbergh’s questionable moral character: He fathered 7 children with 3 mistresses. All were German (!) and two were sisters (!!).
That they were all German might say something about his attitude towards Germany. (Although all this was well post-war.)
At best you could describe him as a Nationalist. So he admired other such people like Hitler. But he was still America first. So no subsuming our interests to Germany’s. In addition, he viewed rivalries between nations as natural with America’s goal to come out first in such rivalries.
Lindbergh’s other family is a fascinating twist in the life of such a straight-laced public figure–he was a teetotalling prig who disapproved of ‘immoral’ activities like nightclubs and jazz music. Had it come out while he was alive, it would have been on a par with Bill Cosby’s misdeeds.
But in his defense, Lindbergh appears to have been motivated by an actual desire to have more children, as opposed to being a philandering cad. Biographer Walter Ross quoted a source who had attended a dinner party with at the Lindberghs home as remembering Lindbergh saying that a family should have at least twelve kids, and his wife (who had born six children) as replying something like, “Good luck with that, buster”. Ross speculated that Lindbergh’s desire for such a large family may have resulted from his lonely upbringing as the only child of divorced parents; personally, I think it may have also been his fascist streak showing, believing that the world needed as many as possible of his ‘superior genes’ in the future–you can be fascist without being a Nazi.
In any event, he wholeheartedly supported the mistresses and the children.
As a subversive German joke of the day went, “If the Nazis have their way, eventually we’ll all be as blonde as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels and as thin as Goering!”