Charles Lindbergh Sr. – Swedish Pioneer and Great American
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Charles Lindbergh Sr. – Swedish Pioneer and Great American
C.A. Lindbergh was the father of the aviator Charles Lindbergh, but also a giant of a man himself known to one of his contemporaries as an “untamed polar bear.” In the early 1900s, he warned Americans about a crime-in-progress – the economic takeover by what he called The Money Trust, the “financial fat fellows” whose power was becoming monstrous, leading to wars for profit.
Lindbergh the elder saw how the hardships set up by this industrial slave system “buries the soul very deep,” and so makes a person easy prey. In his book, Why is Your Country at War, he wrote, “The most extreme example in all history of the soul being led from home to venture in distant foreign fields on mercy’s errands, came to us through the European war.” He continued, “this most sensitive of all human qualities, the soul, was led to run riot, because it was fed by falsehoods as well as truths with no possible means to separate the false from the true…”
A Swede Who Dreams: Charles Lindbergh Sr.
Charles August Lindbergh, known as C.A., was born Carl Månsson in Stockholm, Sweden to a father who had been elected to the Farmer Estate of the Riksdag (Swedish parliament) in 1847. C.A. was born 1858 to his father’s mistress, and when faced with charges of financial misdeeds, his parents immigrated with their infant to the wilds of northern Minnesota.
Young Charles was part of creating a homestead by hand out of logs, sod or whatever was available and by sharing tools with other families. He wrote, “This was the primitive condition of the white race everywhere in America.” C.A. had to do more when a sawmill tragedy left his father with one arm. Wrote C.A., “My parents met with the misfortunes that visited many of the early pioneers and some severe accidental misfortunes in addition.”
Like a lot of pioneer children, he was unschooled. “I had become so imbued with the grandeur of God’s Creation that, when a school was started, I could not divert my attention from Nature to books.”
The Handsomest Man in Little Falls
With some private tutelage as a teen, he was able to attend law school at The University of Michigan and return to set up a practice in Little Falls, Minnesota. He gained a reputation for being upstanding and generous, and when he started acquiring land, he would often help others – he was known for buying at the seller’s price and selling at the buyer’s price.
He would also float mortgages and promissory notes for those in trouble or extend funds to those dealing with tax burdens. He was often saying, “To make money, in my opinion, is not the sole purpose of a bank.”
At this time, he had two daughters and a son, the one who would later be the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, born on February 4, 1902. And when his reputation for being a trustworthy character grew, he was asked by the town’s leaders to run for political office. He was elected in 1906 to go to Washington and fight against a “favored class” he said, “grabs the profits and leaves the industrious workers only a bare subsistence.”
The Money Trust
C.A. went to Washington DC and sometimes with his young son Charles by his side, he denounced the “wealth grabbers.” He saw how an invisible money power was using the 1907 panic to force Americans to guarantee a bunch of watered stocks and securities given out by them previously. He wrote, “that guarantee would make the people pay the interest of the watered stocks forever. By this method the greatest steal ever contemplated since the beginning of humanity would be accomplished.”
He could see that The Money Trust had its roots in Europe but with traitorous allies like early treasurer Alexander Hamilton, the one founding father celebrated today, as in the blackwashed Broadway musical, Hamilton. In his book Banking and Currency and The Money Trust, he showed evidence that even before the US Civil War, English “money lenders” were scheming to transition America from chattel to industrial slavery.
As a smoking gun, he presented the leaked Hazard Circular of 1862 from financial interests abroad, which stated: “Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and all chattel slavery abolished. This I and my European friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan led by England, is that capital shall control labor and wages.”
He warned that The Money Trust was intentionally creating perpetual debt, even calling it a “national blessing” and a way to control labor and wages. From the Hazard Circular, “The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money.”
Indicting the Federal Reserve
In a pinnacle moment on February 12, 1917, he dared to indict the five members of the Federal Reserve Board for high crimes and misdemeanors which he said was interlocked with the Money Trust to parasite off the labor of Americans. He was ahead of his time, yet also a man of his time for naming the apex financial predators who had the power to craft laws of banking and currency to enrich themselves. Among them, he said were J.P. Morgan, Kuhn Loeb & Co, along with the Rockefeller Institute and Carnegie Foundation.
He saw that they were already using their vast wealth and control of media to refashion their image as “Builders of America,” rather than what he called “Cancers of American Business” and “Destroyers of American Independence.“ He lamented that Americans have been asleep, saying, “A few, however, were awake all the time putting the rest of us in a vice. So we find the existing order of things strangulating – menacing our hold on life. We have become extremely uncomfortable – even irritable. We Americans have an intolerable condition to overcome.”
Charles Lindbergh Sr. Presenting Solutions
C.A. Lindbergh saw that most were mired in the “false system” and proposed a second fair system be cultivated to rise next to the existing one so there would be less suffering. “Under the rule of the ‘dollar’ – human life has fallen to its lowest value,” he wrote. “But time heals all things. No longer will the masses accept, ‘Error for truth, darkness for light, wrong for right, or lust for love.’”
He also wanted to see a move beyond the two parties, saying,” I do not see how we can longer look upon them as worthy of blind support…They have allowed us to be unmercifully exploited.” In C.A. Lindbergh’s life span from before the US Civil War to the early 1920s, he saw a “shift of property from the plain people to the speculator” and his later life was devoted to holding off that predatory force.
With the help of his flying son, he ran for office in 1918 as a Nonpartisan candidate and during the campaign and later running for governor, his plane was sabotaged, he was shot at, and barred from speaking in some towns. He was not elected, and then later he ran for his old seat in Congress under the Farmer-Labor Party, but he died before the election in 1924.
Makings of a Great Man
C.A. Lindbergh wrote that history was “conclusive proof” that there have been too few of those with honesty and ability to carry such a cause as his “running through generations and in which temptations were many.” And though he died before seeing his son’s achievements and fame, he sensed something about young Charles, beyond his good-looks, that was drawing others because he was “plain, unassuming, and kindly.”
He wrote his daughter, “He does seem like the real stuff with the making of a big man, and these are times we need them. In the line of work he is at I do not suppose there is a chance for a big man, and yet there may be.”
Sources (both available on Archive.org):
Banking and Currency and The Money Trust, 1913, by Charles A. Lindbergh
Lindbergh, 1998, A Scott Berg
Article author: Molly / Published: 9th day of Hrēþ-mōnaþ 2270.RE / 9th day of March 2020
