COLONEL CHARLES LINDBERGH has again been broadcasting to the American people. He urged them (as he had every right to do) not to repeal the Neutrality Acts; but he also abused Canada for entering the war on the ground that “as an American country” she should have remained neutral. This extension of the Monroe doctrine has caused surprise in the United States and rage in Canada. Even in this country there are those who contend that the respect which all classes showed for his privacy might have tempted him to prolong that privacy until the crisis in our national existence had been surmounted. I do not agree with this criticism. I have myself enjoyed much hospitality in Germany and in Italy, but do not feel precluded thereby from expressing my views upon the foreign policy of Herr Hitler or Count Ciano. I see no need to excuse Colonel Lindbergh; I want to explain him.

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   His grandfather emigrated from Sweden, and on reaching the United States changed his name from Manson to Lindbergh. His father was a gentle, conscientious, almost fanatical Democrat. He represented Minnesota in Congress, and belonged to a small group of insurgents who fought the governing classes and Wall Street with might and main. As a child in Washington young Lindbergh spent much time listening to Victor Murdoch and other fiery radicals from the Middle West denouncing the whole political system of the United States and the “decadent Europeanism” of the Atlantic seaboard. Congressman Lindbergh died, and young Charles returned with his mother to the bleak farm in Minnesota and to the rigours of an impoverished boyhood. This tough existence was scarcely mitigated by the three terms which he spent in the engineering school at Wisconsin University. He entered the flying corps and became a pilot upon the St. Louis-Chicago route. At 10 p.m. on May 21st, 1927, he landed at Le Bourget, having flown the Atlantic alone.

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   He returned to the United States in a blaze of glory. The American public had been deeply disappointed that the war had produced no romantic figure, and they seized upon their “lone eagle” as the embodiment of all that American youth should be. His charm, his boyishness and his modesty were everywhere acclaimed. He drove in triumph through New York; he was the guest of the President at the White House; he visited every State in the Union and was accorded the freedom of seventy-eight cities. He found himself a national, even a world-hero, at the age of twenty-five. His head was not turned by this apotheosis; it merely became completely stiff. He remained from then onwards the lad from Minnesota, the slim pilot upon the Chicago-St. Louis trail. The ideas which he had acquired from his father, or at the University of Wisconsin, were no whit changed by contact with men of great experience of or wide outlook upon world affairs; when wealth came to him, and with it the contact with gentler and more sensitive minds, he retained unaltered his simple habits of life; he never drank or smoked; his life was completely ascetic; he continued to prefer corned beef to terrapin; he continued to believe that virility was the highest human virtue and that anything which might sap that virility (such as art, literature or music) must be something un-American, some “poisonous honey stolen from France.” To this day he remains the fine boy from the Middle West.

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   The strain was terrific. How was this young man to maintain his own simplicity, his own few clear-cut convictions, against the adulation of a whole continent? It was almost with ferocity that he struggled to remain himself. And in the process of that arduous struggle his simplicity became muscle-bound; his virility-ideal became, not merely inflexible, but actually rigid; his self-confidence thickened into arrogance; and his convictions hardened into granite. He became impervious to anything outside his own legend – the legend of the lad from Minnesota whose head could not be turned. Then came the murder of his child. The suffering which that dreadful crime entailed upon himself and those he loved did pierce the armour and enforce a change. He emerged from that ordeal with a loathing of publicity which was almost pathological. He identified the outrage to his private life, first with the popular Press, and then, by inevitable associations, with freedom of speech and then, almost, with freedom. He began to loathe democracy.

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   We cannot blame him. The life which he and his were forced to lead became abnormal. He is not possessed of any sense of humour and was unable to add that lovely lubricant to the harsh grating of his machine. He could not buy a stick of chocolate without being mobbed in the drug-store; when he visited a theatre both he and Mrs. Lindbergh were forced to assume disguise. I remember him telling me a story which explained much. He told me that when his child had been kidnapped he received a clue which seemed at the time hopeful. He leapt into his car to follow it up. As he left Princeton he found four Press cars following in his wake. He stopped and addressed the leading car. “Yes, boys,” he said, “I have got a clue. But unless I am left alone to follow it up, there is no chance of success. I beg you as human beings not to follow me.” The younger newspaper men were embarrassed by this appeal. An older one answered for them. “Sorry, Colonel,” he said, “but business is business.” Lindbergh turned his car back to Princeton and drove home in white anger. “So you see,” he said to me, "I have cause to hate the Press."

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   It is not true to say that Colonel Lindbergh was ungrateful to the British Press and people for the reserve with which they treated him when he was living over here. He came to me one day in London and asked whether he could help in any way. “I'd like,” he said, with his shy smile, “to do something in return.” I introduced him to two Cabinet Ministers. Little came of his suggestion. He went to Germany. Like most aviators, Colonel Lindbergh is certain that any modern war will be settled in the air. He was shown all the more modern types of German aeroplanes and given full facilities to observe their pilots practising. He became convinced that both in men and pilots the Germans possessed the mightiest air-force in the world. There were other things that he admired. He liked their grim efficiency, he liked the mechanisation of the State, he was not at all deterred by the suppression of free thought and free discussion; he admired the conditioning of a whole generation to the ideals of harsh self-sacrifice; the rush and rattle of it all impressed him immensely.

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   He would return to the little Kentish village where he lived. Slowly the smoke of burning weeds would rise against the autumn woods, and lazily the apples would drop in the orchard. His mind had been sharpened by fame and tragedy until it had become as hard, as metallic, and as narrow as a chisel. The slow, organic will-power of Britain eluded his observation; he regarded our indifference to the mechanical as a proof that we, as they say in Minnesota, were “incurably effete.” He liked England; he had no desire to see her murdered; he hoped that we should run away before Marshal Goering could catch us.

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Let us not allow this incident to blind us to the great qualities of Charles Lindbergh; he is, and always will be, not merely a school-boy hero, but also a school boy.