Charles Lindbergh

"The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one's outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?"

"Walked to Bill Castle's home at 6:00 — about ten minutes from the Anchorage. Fulton Lewis was the only other person there. The three of us had dinner together and discussed the European situation and the action this country should take if war breaks out over there. We are disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio and motion pictures. It may become very serious. Lewis told us of one instance where the Jewish advertising firms threatened to remove all their advertising from the Mutual system if a certain feature were permitted to go on the air. The threat was powerful enough to have the feature removed."

"The pressure for war is high and mounting. The people are opposed to it, but the Administration seems to have ‘the bit in its teeth’ and is hell-bent on its way to war. Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio and most of our motion pictures. There are the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘Anglophiles,’ and the British agents who are allowed free rein, the international financial interests, and many others."

"Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?"

"The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration. Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government."

"Now, all that I feared would happen has happened. We are at war all over the world, and we are unprepared for it from either a spiritual or a material standpoint. Fortunately, in spite of all that has been said, the oceans are still difficult to cross; and we have the time to adjust and prepare... We can, of course, be raided; but unless we let ourselves go completely to pieces internally, we cannot be invaded successfully. But this is only one part of the picture. We are in a war which requires us to attack if we are to win it. We must attack in Asia and in Europe, in fact, all over the world. That means raising and equipping an army of many millions and building shipping, which we have not now got. And after that, if we are to carry through our present war aims, it probably means the bloodiest and most devastating war of all history."

"We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely. Possibly the world will come to its senses sooner than I expect. But, as I have often said, the environment of human life has changed more rapidly and more extensively in recent years than it has ever changed before. When environment changes, there must be a corresponding change in life. That change must be so great that it is not likely to be completed in a decade or in a generation."

"Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?"

"The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them. If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as "yellow sons of bitches." Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here. It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy — for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts."

"What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific."

"It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time."

"Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter."

"If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."

"I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve."

"The wild world is the human world. Having evolved in it for millions of centuries, we are not far removed by a cloth of civilization. It is packed into our genes. In fact, the more power-driven, complex and delicate our civilization becomes, the more likelihood arises that a collapse will force us back to wildness. There is in wildness a natural wisdom that shapes all Earth's experiments with life. Can we tap this wisdom without experiencing the agony of reverting to wildness? Can we combine it with intellectual developments of which we feel so proud, use it to redirect our modern trends before they lead to a worse breakdown than past civilizations have experienced? I believe we can, and that to do so we must learn from the primitive."

"Looking at the mirror of life first caused me to question our civilization's trends. During years spent flying civil air routes and on military missions, I watched changes of shade and texture on the great surface below my wings. Stumplands appeared where forests were. Lakes climbed mountainsides. Ditches gridded marshlands: dust hazed prairies, highways, and power lines kept scarring ground from horizons to horizons. I watched crossroads become villages; villages, towns; towns turn into cities; suburbs spill over hills. Wherever I landed I heard similar reports: populations were expanding, farms spreading, timber prices rising with new construction. Speedboats and four-wheel-drive vehicles carried hunters into areas previously difficult to reach, while aircraft brought every latitude and longitude within fortnight-vacation range. As a result, virgin wilderness vanished, and wild animals dwindled in numbers. Now the American eagle is verging on extinction. Even the polar bear on its ice floes has become easy game for flying sportsmen. A peninsula named Udjung Kulon holds the last two or three dozen Javan rhinoceroses. The last herd of Arabian oryx has been machine-gunned by a sheik. Blue whales have nearly been harpooned out of their oceans. Pollution ruins bays and rivers. Refuse litters beaches. Dam projects threaten Colorado canyons, Hudson valleys, every place of natural beauty that can be a reservoir for power. Obviously, the scientific progress so alluring to me is destroying qualities of greater worth. Of course, virgin wilderness had to retreat as civilization advanced. That was inevitable. But I did not consider its possible disappearance. The world seemed so large I had assumed that portions would remain in primitive state, attainable at reasonable cost in time and effort. Days spent in laboratories, factories and offices were lightened by intuitive contact with wilderness outside. Had the choice confronted me, I would not have traded nature's miracles of life for all of science's toys. Was not my earth's surface more important than increasing the speed of transport and visiting the moon and Mars? If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of 50 years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in contact with nature more than science. This is a choice an individual still can make—but no longer mankind in general. Too few natural areas remain. Both by intent and indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us. Our emphasis of science has resulted in alarming rises in world populations that demand an ever-increasing emphasis of science to improve their standards and maintain their vigor. I have been forced to the conclusion that an overemphasis of science weakens human character and upsets life's essential balance. Science breeds technology. Technology leads to infinite complication. Examples are everywhere: in the intricacy of government and in that of business corporations: in automation and labor relations; in war, diplomacy, taxation, legislation, in almost every field of modern man's routine. From the growth of cities to that of military power, from medical requirements to social-welfare benefits, when progress is plotted against time, exponential curves result with which we cannot long conform. But what action should scientific man prescribe as a result of the curves he plots? How is their direction to be changed without another breakdown and return to wildness? Suppose technologists conclude theoretically that they are destroying their own culture. Are they capable of taking effective action to prevent such destruction? The failures of previous civilizations, and the crises existing for our own, show that man has not evolved the ability to cope with limitless complication. He has not discovered how to control his sciences' parabolas. Here I believe the human intellect can learn from primitive nature, for nature was conceived in cosmic power and thrives on infinite complication. No problem has been too difficult for it to solve. From the dynamics of an atom, nature produces the tranquility of a flower, the joy of a porpoise, the intellect of man–the miracle of life. In wilderness, I sense the miracle of life, and behind it, our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. The construction of an analogue computer or a supersonic airplane is simple when compared to the mixture of space and evolutionary eons represented by a cell. In primitive rather than in civilized surroundings I grow aware of man's evolving status, as though I were suddenly released from a hypnotic state. Life itself becomes the standard of all judgement. How could I have overlooked, even momentarily, such an obvious fact?"

"I feel transported from the modern to a Mesozoic era, freed from the blindness caused by our clocked environment of time. Ages turn to seconds as I voyage back and forth. Man becomes a recent advent among Earth's contending forms, and civilization but a flash in evolutionary progress. Surrounded by wildness I become less aware of my individuality than the life stream individuals manifest: that tenuous, immortal quality probing an unknown future and trailing, unbroken, beyond the vaguest past. Thus stripped of my culture's armor, I am an animal among various others, emerged to represent my species' progress, the momentary form and outlook of mankind. Whether in Florida's Everglades, Tanzania's Serengeti, or Java's Udjung Kulon, I see animals about me as earthly experiments with life; and so I feel myself. Each of us represents a life stream attempting to survive, to take advantage of every opportunity arising. The heron lengthens its legs to wade. The lion sharpens its teeth to kill. The rhinoceros thickens its skin for protection. Man develops his intellect to gain domination of the Earth, and by comparison, the speed with which he has gained this domination is astounding–another of those exponential curves that mount like an explosion. In civilization's sky-scraping cities I feel my superiority to lower animals confirmed by man's unchallenged rule. I view other creatures with a god's aloofness; for I have intellect, and they, no more than instinct. But surrounded by wildness, representing the human life stream with diverse competing life streams close at hand, I start doubting my superiority. I am struck by the physical perfection of other species in contrast to my own, amazed at the beauty, health and balance nature has achieved through instinct's influence. I ask myself what the intellect has done to warrant its prestige. As Earth's most messy, destructive and defective animal, man's record gives him little cause for pride. Our present intellectual superiority is no guarantee of great wisdom or survival power in our genes. Anthropologists often warn that Homo sapiens may be only an overspecialized branch on the trunk of evolution."

"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."

"Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it."

"I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress."

"I owned the world that hour as I rode over it... free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them."

"Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest..."

"Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization."

"Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?"

"What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all."

"Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance."

"Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization."

"Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe — one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown."

"A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them? The second and third generations, of what numbers and stuff will they be? How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger — one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge."

"Air power is new to all our countries. It brings advantages to some and weakens others; it calls for readjustment everywhere. If only there were some way to measure the changing character of men, some yardstick to reapportion influence among the nations, some way to demonstrate in peace the strength of arms in war. But with all of its dimensions, its clocks, and weights, and figures, science fails us when we ask a measure for the rights of men. They cannot be judged by numbers, by distance, weight, or time; or by counting heads without a thought of what may lie within. Those intangible qualities of character, such as courage, faith, and skill, evade all systems, slip through the bars of every cage. They can be recognized, but not measured."

"The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action. Military strength has become more dynamic and less tangible. A new alignment of power has taken place, and there is no adequate peacetime measure for its effect on the influence of nations. There seems no way to agree on the rights it brings to some and takes from others."

"Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races. We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples."

"In some future incarnation from our life stream, we may even understand the reason for our existence in forms of earthly life. The growing knowledge of science does not refute man's intuition of the mystical. Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or in time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes. Only in the twentieth century do we realize that space is not empty, that it is packed with energy; it may be existence's source. Then, if space has produced existence and the form of man, can we deduce from it a form for God?"

"I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? ... As one identity, I was born in AD 1902. But as AD twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed though past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream — temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. ... I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen. It is molecules probing through time, found smooth-flowing, adjusted to shaped and shaping banks, roiled by rocks and tree trunks — composed again. Now it ends, apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall. Near the fall's brink, I saw death as death cannot be seen. I stared at the very end of life, and at life that forms beyond, at the fact of immortality. Dark water bent, broke, disintegrated, transformed to apparition — a tall, stately ghost soul emerged from body, and the finite individuality of the whole becomes the infinite individuality of particles. Mist drifted, disappeared in air, a vanishing of spirit. Far below in the valley, I saw another river, reincarnated from the first, its particles reorganized to form a second body. It carried the same name. It was similar in appearance. It also ended at a lava brink. Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming."

"I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars."

"Lindbergh's arrival in Paris became the defining moment of his life, that event on which all his future actions hinged — as though they were but a predestined series of equal but opposite reactions, fraught with irony... In the spring of 1927, Lindbergh had been too consumed by what he called "the single objective of landing my plane at Paris" to have considered its aftermath. "To plan beyond that had seemed an act of arrogance I could not afford," he would later write. Even if he had thought farther ahead, however, he could never have predicted the unprecedented global response to his arrival. By that year, radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds. What was more, motion pictures had just mastered the synchronization of sound, allowing dramatic moments to be preserved in all their glory and distributed worldwide. For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event — almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator — of apparently impeccable character — the new technology found its first superstar. The reception in Paris was only a harbinger of the unprecedented worship people would pay Lindbergh for years. Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human endeavor, and that he was, after all, only a man. The public saw more than that... Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth."

"As the first American airman to exhibit "the right stuff," Lindbergh inspired his country's first astronauts by sheer example. But more than that, he was — unknown to the public — the man most responsible for securing the funding that underwrote the research of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the inventor of the modern rocket. A friend of the first man to fly an airplane, Lindbergh lived long enough in a fast-moving world to befriend the first man to walk on the moon."

"Lindbergh believed all the elements of the earth and heavens are connected, through space and time. The configurations of molecules in each moment help create the next. Thus he considered his defining moment just another step in the development of aviation and exploration — a summit built on all those that preceded it and a springboard to all those that would follow. Only by looking back, Lindbergh believed, could mankind move forward. "In some future incarnation from our life stream," he wrote in later years, "we may understand the reason for our existence in forms of earthly life.""

"No source, however, captures the war hates and war crimes of this merciless struggle more soberly than Charles Lindbergh's diary. For over four months in mid-1944, Lindbergh lived and flew as a civilian observer with U.S. forces based in New Guinea, and as the weeks passed he became deeply troubled, not by the willingness to kill on the part of the soldiers, which he accepted as an inherent part of the war, but by the utter contempt in which Allied fighting men held their Japanese adversaries. The famous "Lone Eagle," whose isolationist sentiments had placed him among the conservative opponents of President Roosevelt's policies, really hearkened back to what [J. Glenn Gray] has called the more chivalrous tradition of the professional militarist, who accepts the necessity of war while maintaining respect for his adversaries, recognizing courage as courage and duty as duty, irrespective of the uniform worn. Lindbergh found no such sentiments among the Allied forces in the Pacific, where officers and enlisted men alike saw the enemy simply as animals and "yellow sons of bitches," and his detailed journal may be the most forthright firsthand account available of the "other" side of the Pacific War."

"On May 18, 1944, about two weeks after Lindbergh had tied in with a Marine unit, he recorded that the camps were full of reports of Japanese torture and the beheading of captured American pilots. A month later, on June 21, he summarized the conversation of an American general who told how an unsuspecting Japanese prisoner was given a cigarette and then seized from behind and had his throat "slit from ear to ear" as a demonstration of how to kill Japanese. Lindbergh's objections were met with tolerant scorn and pity."

"On August 30, Lindbergh visited Tarawa, recalled the terrible casualties there, and told of a naval officer who lined up the few Japanese captured, kept those who could speak English for questioning, and had the rest killed. In early September, he noted that on some islands Marines actually dug up dead bodies in their search for gold teeth. Elsewhere they collected noses as well as ears, teeth, and skulls. When Lindbergh finally left the Pacific islands and cleared customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any bones in his baggage. It was, he was told, a routine question."

"In fact a de facto state of war between Germany and the United States had existed since September 11, 1941, when Roosevelt had authorized American naval commanders who encountered German vessels to fire at them 'on sight'. This was possible because the tide of American public opinion had been running against the Axis powers, despite the best efforts of isolationists like Senator Hiram W. Johnson, neutralists like the lawyer and legal historian Charles Warren and crypto-fascists like the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Ordinary Americans did not want war. Many believed they had been duped into the last war by the machinations of British imperialists and North-Eastern business interests. They were strongly attracted to the neutralists' idea that by prohibiting military supplies or loans to combatant countries Congress could avoid another such entanglement. But they supported American rearmament from as early as 193 6. They clearly favoured Britain over Germany from 1938 onwards. Above all, Americans did not want to see an Axis victory - and by September 1939 a majority of voters saw that this was best insured against by supplying arms and material to Britain. The German victories of 1940 caused that view to spread. There was public support, too, for the sanctions imposed on Japan which set the course for Pearl Harbor."

"Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in."

"Charles was a stubborn Swede, you know, and he himself never felt the need to explain his feelings about where he stood and about past statements. But I feel free now to elaborate on his actual attitudes. He never wanted to be regarded as a hero or leader, and he never had political ambitions. His prewar isolationist speeches were given in all sincerity for what he thought was the good of the country and the world. ... He was accused of being anti-Semetic, but in the 45 years I lived with him I never heard him make a remark against the Jews, not a crack or joke, and neither did any of our children."

"No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint! But then what could I know in 1960 of 1963 or 1968 or 1974 or 2001 or 2016? ... However prescient The Plot Against America might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It's the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. ... Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac."

"The people of England are about finished with him. Americans are beginning to feel the same way, and the halo of hero worship around Lindbergh's head is getting pretty well tarnished."