Listen! The Wind!

J. Edwin Russell, a prominent citizen of New Hyde Park, N. Y.* (pop.: 3,314) last week announced that a local library club had voted 13-to-2 to boycott Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book, Listen! The Wind! "I objected," ejaculated Mr. Russell, "to the purchase of this book, and as an American citizen refuse to be a partner to any operation that means royalty or profit to Mr. & Mrs. Lindbergh in the light of the recent publicity they have had."

That same day Mr. Lindbergh received another kind of publicity in headlines announcing: LINDBERGH GIVES U. S. NAZI AIR DATA: LINDBERGH BARES NAZIS' AIR POWER: LINDY AIR SECRETS STIR CAPITOL.

The story told beneath the headlines was that all the time Charles Augustus Lindbergh was supposedly hobnobbing with Nazis in Berlin, and tattling on Soviet Russia to friends of Nazis in Great Britain,* he was actually functioning as a sort of U. S. spy abroad; that instead of letting Messrs. Hitler, Goebbels, et al. dupe him, he was making fools of them for the benefit of world Democracy.

Hero Lindbergh's friends in Berlin have indeed given him rare chances to look with a knowing eye at German armaments and more important, into the laboratories where German researchers find new ways to build and kill. Hitler & Co. being anxious to frighten Great Britain and France before Munich, it is more than likely that his reports on German air strength which repolished his reputation last week were the same which helped to tarnish it a few weeks earlier. Certainly the German Government knew, if the U. S. public had forgotten, that Colonel Lindbergh is still an officer of the U. S. Air Corps Reserve, and a member of the Government-supported National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, whose function is to develop and gather aeronautical information.

Interesting has been the information which Charles Lindbergh gathered and channeled to the U. S. through N. A. C. A. and air attaches abroad. It supplemented a wealth of similar data flooding in to the State, War and Navy Departments in Washington who were well aware that Germany had more fighting planes than any other nation. Charles Lindbergh's principal contribution to U. S. knowledge was that Germany, far ahead in mass-production of planes, is now prepared to invade the world's commercial air markets.

*On Long Island, about 70 miles from Franklin Roosevelt's Hyde Park. *In Miami last week, Columnist Walter Winchell quoted vacationing Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy to the effect that Charles Lindbergh passed on his gleanings to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the instance of Mr. Kennedy; not, as previously reported, through or at the request of Nancy Astor's "Cliveden Set."

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