Col. Charles Lindbergh’s speech at Chicago Sunday urging the United States to cooperate with Germany if it wins the war drew increasingly bitter denunciations today, with notables in various fields branding him the country’s foremost fifth columnist.
One of the most scathing attacks against the aviator is contained in a two column editorial entitled “Denouncing Charles A. Lindbergh” by Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM, on the front page of that newspaper. The editorial is coupled with a photograph showing Lindbergh chatting with Marshal Hermann Goering during the flier’s visit to Berlin in 1938.
“I say very simply that Col. Lindbergh in his speech in Chicago Sunday identified himself as Spokesman No. 1 for the Fifth Column,” Ingersoll says. “The Fifth Column, in America as in Madrid, is a group who love their country’s enemies and who first argue and then fight for them.
Col. Lindbergh in his speech made “naked and unashamed” fifth column statements, the editor charges. “Lindbergh is a political novice. His speech was post-graduate work, Obviously, he was helped in writing it. Who are the people who did his thinking and helped in his writing? Who are his gang?”
Col. Lindbergh was charged by L. M. Birkhead, director of the Friends of Democracy, Inc. with following the official Nazi line and of giving “aid and comfort to Hitlerism and the enemies of American democracy,” in a telegram to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in which Col. Stimson was asked to clarify in a public statement Lindbergh’s present connection with any of the armed or reserve forces of the United States Army.
In the Senate yesterday, Senator Claude Pepper (Dem., Fla.) said: “The American people will have to decide whether they are going to follow the chief of the fifth column in this country–Col. Lindbergh–or are going to follow Gen. (John J.) Pershing.”
Senator Josh Lee (Dem., Okla.) said that if Col. Lindbergh “had not earned the German medal when it was presented to him, he has by now earned it.”
In a radio speech Monday night, Senator Scott D. Lucas (Dem., Okla.) said he “was not only amazed but somewhat shocked by Col. Lindbergh’s attitude of complacency toward Adolf Hitler.”
The flier also is attacked in cartoons in the New York press today. Rollin Kirby of the New York Post depicts the Colonel flying through the air astride an airplane whose fuselage is an umbrella carrying the inscription “Appeasement.” The cartoon is entitled “En Route to Berchtesgaden.” Charles Martin of the PM Staff shows Lindbergh attaching a tag marked “Aryan” to an apparatus labelled “Lindbergh Mechanical Heart.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
