Q: But his wife did engage in a discussion of that argument, didn't
she, in some respects in "Wave of the Future."
AS: His wife wrote in 1940 a very interesting book which, I think expressed
the feeling of a lot of people at the time. It's called "The Wave of the
Future." And gentle Anne Morrow Lindbergh set forth an argument, which is
hinted at in some of her husband's speeches, in which he says in effect,
democracy was great while it lasted, and all of us prefer it to anything else,
but democracy has reached its end. This democracy is dying and the wave of the
future is coming. Nazis and Fascists and Communism are all expressions of the
wave, but we don't like everything about these new orders. Those bad things
are scum on the wave of the future. She concludes the book by saying that
there is no resisting the wave of the future--that there's no fighting the wave
of the future anymore. As a child you could fight against the gigantic roller
that loomed up ahead of you suddenly. You learned that it was hopeless to
stand against it or, even worse, to run away. All you could do was to dive
into it or leap with it, otherwise it would surely overwhelm you and pound you
into the sand. The sense that democracy was finished, the inevitability of
these new authoritarian orders was something that both Charles and Anne Morrow
Lindbergh felt very acutely in 1940. And indeed many people did, in Europe and
some in the United States. That's why so many people in Europe collaborated
with Hitler and Mussolini.
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