Nationality American Parents Martha Houghtaling | Role Aviator Name Laura Ingalls | |
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Born December 14, 1893 ( 1893-12-14 ) Brooklyn, New York Died January 10, 1967, Burbank, California, United States | ||
Little house on the prairie season 7 episode 1 laura ingalls wilder part 1
Laura Houghtaling Ingalls (December 14, 1893 – January 10, 1967) was a pilot who won the Harmon Trophy. She was arrested in December 1941 and convicted of failing to register as a paid German agent.
Contents
- Little house on the prairie season 7 episode 1 laura ingalls wilder part 1
- Early life
- Sibling
- Personal life
- Aviation
- Aviation records
- Timeline
- Activities as a German agent
- References
Early life
She was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 14, 1893 to Francis Abbott Ingalls I and Martha Houghtaling (1865–19??). Martha was the daughter of David Harrison Houghtaling of Kingston, New York, who was a descendant of Jan Willemsen Hoogteling, who arrived in New Amsterdam on May 9, 1661.
Regarding her mother, Laura wrote: "My mother, partly through ill health, was extremely emotional and without adequate self-discipline; spoiled by her parents who thought she was wonderful and could do anything. Brilliant along certain lines, she possessed the trait I find most exciting in the American character, viz. the ability to hurdle difficulties and achieve the reputedly impossible. I grew up under such influence."
Sibling
Her brother was Francis Abbott Ingalls II (1895–1978) who was also born in Brooklyn. Francis registered for the draft while he was attending military school in Tuxedo Park, New York as a private in the infantry. He was an officer in both World War I and World War II. Francis married Mabel Morgan Satterlee (1901–1993) on September 19, 1926. Mabel was the daughter of Herbert Livingston Satterlee and Louisa Pierpont Morgan, the daughter of J. P. Morgan.
Personal life
Laura Houghtaling Ingalls was a distant cousin of Little House on the Prairie's Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was befriended by her daughter; Rose Wilder Lane.
Aviation
Her most well-known flights were made in 1934 and they earned her a Harmon Trophy. Ingalls flew in a Lockheed Air Express from Mexico to Chile, over the Andes Mountains to Rio de Janeiro, to Cuba and then to Floyd Bennett Field in New York, marking the first flight over the Andes by an American woman, the first solo flight around South America in a landplane, the first flight by a woman from North America to South America, and setting a woman's distance record of 17,000 miles.
Aviation records
Timeline
Activities as a German agent
In December 1941, Ingalls was charged by a grand jury with failing to register with the government as a paid Nazi agent, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. She had been receiving approximately $300 a month from Baron Ulrich von Gienanth (Ulrich Freiherr von Gienanth), the head of the Gestapo in the US, and, officially, second secretary of the German Embassy in Washington. During the trial, it came out that von Gienanth had encouraged Ingalls's participation in the non-interventionist America First Committee, which proved to be a source of significant embarrassment to that organization.
Ingalls had been arrested in late September 1939 for violating White House airspace, but she was released within hours, after a flight in which she dropped anti-Lend-Lease pamphlets over Washington, D.C. from her Lockheed Orion monoplane. Following the defeat of France, she approached von Gienanth with the idea of a solo flight to Europe, where she would continue her campaign to promote the Nazi cause. Von Gienanth told her to stay in America to continue her work with the America First Committee, for whom she gave popular speeches in which she derided America's "lousy democracy" and gave Nazi salutes. He praised her oratory skills. She had made a careful study of Mein Kampf, on which she based many of her speeches, as well as pamphlets by Hitler such as My New Order and Germany and the Jewish Question, and Elizabeth Dilling's books The Roosevelt Red Record and The Octopus. She expected Hitler to win the war; in April 1941, she wrote to a German official, "Some day I will shout my triumph to a great leader and a great people... Heil Hitler!" After the German declaration of war on December 11, 1941, she went straight to Washington to receive a list of contacts from von Gienath, and was arrested a week later.
At her trial, the FBI testified that they had kept her under surveillance for several months. Ingalls was sentenced to eight months to two years in prison on February 20, 1942. She was transferred from the District of Columbia jail to the West Virginia Women's Reformatory in Alderson, West Virginia, on July 14, 1943, after fighting with an inmate. She was released on October 5, 1943 after serving 20 months.
Prison had not altered her views, however. A few months after her release, she stated her opinion of the Normandy landings:
This whole invasion is a power lust, blood drunk orgy in a war which is unholy and for which the U.S. will be called to terrible accounting. . . . They [the Nazis] fight the common enemy. They fight for the independence of Europe—independence from the Jews. Bravo!
In July 1944, after her probation ended, Ingalls was arrested at the Mexican border. Her suitcase contained seditious materials, including notes that she had made of Japanese and German short-wave radio broadcasts. She was prevented from entering Mexico, but was not prosecuted. Ingalls applied for a presidential pardon in 1950, but her application for clemency was rejected by two successive Pardon Attorneys. On the latter occasion, the reply stated that Ingalls had been of "special value to the Nazi propaganda machine".
She died on January 10, 1967, in Burbank, California, aged 73.