Lindbergh Read online

  Lindbergh telephoned his backers in St. Louis and explained that if he was to be the first to Paris, he would have to forfeit the prize money. He was told to hell with the money and to leave when he was ready. Weather was still a problem; so was the weight that the extra gasoline needed for the crossing had added to his plane. Though Lindy had never tried to take off with a full load of fuel, he knew to do so required a lengthier runway than Curtiss Field provided. Accepting an invitation from Commander Byrd, he had The Spirit of St. Louis towed next door, to the longer airstrip at Roosevelt Field reserved for the America.

  If Charles Lindbergh was not yet destiny’s child as he made final preparations in the predawn drizzle at Roosevelt Field on May 20, 1927, he was certainly the media’s. The young aviator was greatly responsible for an escalating international interest in, if not a fervor over, the impending flights. News folk were taken by his pink-cheeked good looks and his stern, boyish daring in attempting a thirty-six-hundred-mile solo flight across the forbidding ocean without a radio, sextant, or front window. His silver-winged plane was designed in such a way that an oversize fuel tank in the nose section of the fuselage had precluded the cockpit from having a forward windshield. The only means the young pilot had of seeing straight ahead was through a periscope fixed in the roof or by hanging out the door window. His only guidance system would be the stars and a folding map. A few sandwiches and a canteen of water were to sustain him. Learning that friends had dubbed Lindbergh Lucky because he had escaped death by parachuting from troubled aircraft on more than one occasion and that other of his aerial antics had earned him appellations such as the Flying Fool, the national media were already calling him Lucky Lindy and the Flying Fool. As dawn broke at Roosevelt Field, he had gone without sleep for twenty-three hours—thanks in part to a noisy poker game in a room near his sleeping quarters—and would have no time to rest before embarking on what could be a day and a half aloft. The reporters on hand to see which of the three competing planes would leave first were clearly rooting for the rangy, six-foot-two, blue-eyed, tousled-haired, handsome former barnstorming airmail and military-reserve pilot whose father had been a congressman from Minnesota. At 7:52 A.M. Lindbergh did what his more conservative competitors dared not and took off in the overcast, barely clearing the telephone wires at the far end of the field.

  Radiophones and the transatlantic cable buzzed with word that he was en route. Newspapers around the world gave the story front-page attention and kept apace of his progress throughout the day. When he was spotted passing over St. John’s, Newfoundland, at 7:15 P.M., it seemed that every country on earth received instant word. At New York City’s Yankee Stadium, where Joseph Paul Cukoschay, a Lithuanian-born boxer known professionally as Jack Sharkey, knocked out fellow heavyweight contender Jimmy Maloney in the fifth round, the largest cheer of the evening came when an updated report on Lindbergh’s flight was conveyed over the public-address system. At the request of the announcer, the crowd of fifty thousand rose and offered a silent prayer for the young aviator’s safety, then noisily returned to the fisticuffs at hand.

  The greatest excitement seemed to be in France. Besides the fact that Lindbergh would be landing there, in the minds of the French he had named his aircraft not for a Missouri city but after the man that city’s name commemorated, one of their nation’s most venerated saints, King Louis IX, who died in 1270 during the Eighth Crusade of medical, not battle-related, causes. As in other cities, towns, and villages around the globe, bulletin boards sprung up on which the latest flight reports could be read. The government announced that, weather permitting, they would test out a new system of powerful lights that could lead The Spirit of St. Louis from the coast of France right into Paris.

  Thirty-three hours and twenty-nine minutes after leaving Roosevelt Field, and having traveled at an average speed of 107½ miles per hour, Lindbergh made a night landing at Paris’s Le Bourget Air Field, where a roaring crowd of twenty-five thousand well-wishers broke through police lines, rushed the plane, and hoisted him onto their shoulders. “Well, I did it,” were the first words from his lips. Then they bore him off to a celebration like none ever seen before, and possibly since.

  In an age of ballyhoo and instant fame, Charles Augustus Lindbergh instantly became the most monumentally heralded idol of his era, an honor with which he was amazingly and eloquently well prepared to deal, even though he would profess that he was not. Circling the Eiffel Tower on his way to Belgium, he had already received France’s Legion of Honor. Lindy dropped a farewell message on the Place de la Concorde that read, “Good-bye, dear Paris. Ten thousand thanks for your kindness to me.” Landing in Brussels, he told King Albert, “I have heard much of the famous soldier-king of the Belgians.”2 There was not always time or a need to speak. When he tried to land at England’s Croydon Aerodrome, a crowd of one hundred thousand broke through the police barricades and swarmed across the field, forcing Lindbergh back into the sky. On a second pass he touched down only to take off again as the surging thousands blocked his path. The field was cleared, and his third attempt was successful, but before he could climb out of the plane, the adoring mob was on him, leaving the official welcoming committee isolated in the distance.

  President Calvin Coolidge sent the U.S. Navy cruiser Memphis to bring him from England directly to Washington, D.C., where three U.S. mail trucks, displaying large signs that read THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES BY AIR MAIL CONGRATULATE LINDY, presented him with five hundred thousand letters of felicitations. The Western Union Telegraph Company and the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company, who had been advertising any of twenty different welcoming messages for thirty-six cents, delivered seventy-five thousand telegrams to the returning hero. A crowd of 150,000 shouted itself hoarse as he was driven up the capital’s Pennsylvania Avenue to where President Coolidge and another crowd of 150,000 was waiting. The president pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross to Lindbergh’s lapel and commissioned him—he had started his flight to Paris as a major in the National Guard Reserve—a colonel in the Officers Reserve Corps. He spent the night at the temporary White House and in the morning set off for New York City.

  Twelve thousand New York City policemen carrying no clubs linked arms, used their hands, or charged on horseback, trying to keep a roaring crowd of four million delirious New Yorkers from enveloping the ticker tape parade along narrow lower Broadway. When Lindbergh reached City Hall, Mayor James J. Walker presented him with the Medal of Valor. A quarter of a million spectators were on hand in Central Park to watch New York’s governor, Alfred Emanuel Smith, bestow upon the Lone Eagle the state Medal of Honor. Manhattan’s Wall Street matched the ardor of the rest of the city. Not only did it provide a good portion of the ticker tape used in Lucky Lindy’s parade—according to the New York City Street Cleaning Department, 1,800 tons of paper, compared with 155 tons after the armistice celebration in 1918—but trading in airplane stocks was brisk, continuing the rally that had started with shares in Wright Aeronautical Corporation, the manufacturer of the engine that powered The Spirit of St. Louis. Wright’s stock jumped from twenty-nine and three quarters to thirty-four and three-eighths when the plane was only halfway to Paris. Not to be outdone by Wall Street, the city’s Tin Pan Alley already had available in sheet music twenty-five songs honoring Lindbergh, and before the year was out that number would be multiplied by a hundred.

  Though Lindbergh hadn’t qualified to compete in the New York-to-Paris contest, Raymond Orteig awarded Lindy the twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize. Lindbergh was inundated with business offers, including fifty thousand dollars to endorse a brand of cigarettes, half a million dollars and 10 percent of the gross to star in a motion picture, and an estimated four hundred thousand if he would appear on the vaudeville circuit. He turned almost all of them down, thereby adding to his image the virtues of being both principled and not purchasable. He did choose to write a book on his flight. Its title, We, referred to Lindbergh and his airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. Not to buy a cop
y was un-American.

  For the United States’ boom-time Roaring Twenties, the attractive twenty-five-year-old was precisely the right man at the right moment. It was a hoopla era of yellow journalism obsessed with bigness, glamour, and daring, and he was the biggest and most glamorous and most daring. More headlines and front-page space were given to him than to any American hero before, and newsstand sales soared. The flapper set, high-rolling market speculators, and gangsters each honored him in their own inimitable styles—the Lindy Hop became the national dance rage; speakeasies and bootleggers sold drinks and entire brands of illicit booze with such names as Lone Eagle, American Eagle, and Charlie Boy; Lindbergh-style flying breeches became a hot item for fashionable tailors; the Chicago mobster Hymie (“Loud Mouth”) Levine, alleged inventor of the one-way ride, bought a hundred pairs of Lindy flying caps and goggles and passed them out among his friends. Building model airplanes, already a fad among the young, became a favorite pastime of prison inmates who could be trusted with knives or razor blades.

  The bulk of the country, disillusioned by the press’s lurid exploitation of scandal, crime, and immortality, viewed Lindbergh as the reformation of traditional American values, not the least of which were chivalry, patriotism, self-dedication, and nobility of intention. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine as its very first Man of the Year, with the subcaption HE DEFEATED FAME. In the magazine’s text, under the title of “Heroes,” his habits were listed as “smokes not; drinks not. Does not gamble. Eats a thorough-going breakfast. Prefers a light luncheon and dinner when permitted. Avoids rich dishes. Likes sweets.” Time’s consulting calligrapher stated that Lindbergh’s handwriting revealed “superiority, intellectualism, cerebration, idealism, even mysticism.” The “Characteristics” of Time’s Man of the Year for 1927 were “modesty, taciturnity, diffidence, (women make him blush), singleness of purpose, courage, occasional curtness, phlegm.”3 The nation’s Prohibitionists, or “drys,” took him as their nominal leader. The second greatest hero in America that year was a baseball player and infamous tippler nicknamed the Sultan of Swat—Babe Ruth, who had hit a record-breaking sixty home runs.

  The wet-dry issue was essentially all that separated the two presidential candidates during the 1928 election, which pitted the pro-Prohibition Republican party’s Herbert Hoover against the anti-Prohibition Democratic party’s Alfred E. Smith. Both men advocated supply-side economics, a policy that the departing New Era Republican administration of President Calvin Coolidge had presided over for three years of unparalleled prosperity. Prosperity was the root issue of the election, a continuation of Republican-led affluence under the steady hand of Herbert Clark Hoover, whose campaign slogan was “a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.” The economy did look stronger than ever, as attested to by Henry Ford’s having manufactured his fifteen millionth Model T automobile several months before. Hoover beat Smith by a landslide six million votes. Not long after, the stock market crashed, panic reigned, and the prosperity unraveled.

  In his 1776 treatise, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the Scottish economist Adam Smith postulated that under certain conditions the production of goods creates its own demand and marketplace. A hundred fifty-three years later, on the eve of the Great Depression, this view of supply creating its own demand was a hallowed tenet for most of America’s business community. Economists would never agree on what caused the devastating financial collapse, but by 1929 America’s productivity had increased at a far more rapid pace than wages. Another imbalance was the distribution of earning power. Seventy-one percent of America’s families had an income under twenty-five hundred dollars, while the 24,000 richest families enjoyed incomes in excess of one hundred thousand dollars, including 513 families that reported incomes above one million dollars. Distribution of wealth was even more extreme. Some 2.3 percent of the families accounted for two thirds of all American savings, while 21.5 million families had no savings at all. The rich, during the six years of Coolidge-Hoover New Era prosperity, had become richer at a far faster rate than the poor had become less poor.

  Herbert Hoover had moved into the White House with the reputation of being a gruff humanitarian and miracle-performing manager. A dedicated Quaker, Hoover had lost both his parents before reaching his teens and worked his way up from near poverty to become an internationally famous geologist-engineer-metallurgist-financier who was widely quoted as having said that if a man “has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much.” Hoover was worth four million and known as the Great Engineer when America entered World War I, and he took charge of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which subsequently fed more than nine million people. He moved on to become America’s wartime food administrator and, later, the director general of the American Relief Administration, whose postwar European efforts were credited with saving upward of one hundred million lives.4 To “Hooverize” in those days meant to economize for a noble purpose. In many European towns, streets were named in his honor.

  President Herbert Hoover, renowned for being a wise and often infallible manager, at first seemed stunned by the onslaught of the Great Depression; then he tried to initiate many measures that would later be attributed to his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As the crisis worsened, he became blind to the fact that help was required for millions of his fellow citizens; he grew rigid in his resolve to do nothing. Complicating matters was Hoover’s dichotomous personality. He was both shy and publicity hungry, private and egocentric, incisive and stubborn. Failure was anathema to him, and when the counterdepression actions he initiated did not work, he first refused to admit they had failed and later became withdrawn. Worst of all was the national perception of his personality. He was an aloof and reserved man, characteristics his campaign publicity staff had successfully sold to the voters as scientific detachment and administrative efficiency. Now, with public suffering and desperation reaching unimaginable proportions, his cool demeanor was viewed as fiendish indifference by millions of his countrymen. Some politicians and political writers feared that anarchy was near.

  The Democrats, whose national convention was approaching, scrambled to find the right candidate with which to claim the White House. As the pressure mounted on all sides, Hoover took to locking himself in his office in times of extreme stress. The group he tried to shut himself off from the most, and whom he had grown to detest, was the very one he had done so much to court in his early political career: the media. They were demons attempting to blame the entire depression on him and had to be avoided at all costs. The irony was that Herbert Hoover had been the first candidate ever to employ a press agent during a presidential campaign.

  Charles Lindbergh’s popularity and prestige did nothing but rise. His desire to help develop aviation resulted in his taking The Spirit of St. Louis on a highly publicized three-month flying tour of the United States in 1927, which was underwritten by the Daniel Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics. In an even more widely reported incident at the end of 1927, he was flying the plane to Mexico on a goodwill mission when he temporarily got lost, and the world skipped a heartbeat. The next year he joined Transcontinental Air Transport, a passenger airline, as a technical director.

  Lindy’s displeasure with the press often rivaled that of Herbert Hoover, particularly when it came to his private life. Fame, he believed, was a handicap except when it was used to generate enthusiasm in a grand cause. His cause was aviation. He had become its greatest promoter, and toward this end he could be cooperative and genuinely congenial with the fourth estate. Those reporters he seemed to favor were from conservative publications that sustained his American-hero image and that he could usually manipulate. But even they were victims of an elaborate deception he worked out after the announcement of his engagement to Anne Spencer Morrow, the daughter of millionaire Dwight W. Morrow, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and a former partner of J. P. Morgan, Jr.

  The subterfuge at Next Da
y Hill, the Morrow estate in Englewood, New Jersey, was Lindbergh at his illusive best. Few impending royal or state weddings received the attention afforded that of Lindbergh and his twenty-three-year-old fiancée. Reporters and cameramen camped outside the gates of Next Day Hill, where the ceremony was to be held on an unspecified date in the future. Comings and goings were closely watched to determine if the big event was about to take place. Lindy, wishing to have privacy on his honeymoon, was correct in assuming that newsmen expected he and his bride would fly to wherever it as they were going after the ceremony. His favorite aircraft, a two-seater Curtis Falcon with a six-hundred-horsepower engine, was at Roosevelt Field, and the day before the wedding he called there with orders to have the plane serviced and ready for flight at 8:00 the next morning.5 A host of media people hurried to the field and joined those already watching the hangar in which the fully prepared Curtis Falcon was waiting. A second strategy was directed at the press people beyond the gates of Next Day Hill. Lindy would later fess up and claim that on May 27, 1929, he and Anne drove out of the Morrow estate several times, wearing the same outfits. As friends arrived later in the day for a small reception being given in honor of Lindy’s mother, who had come east for the wedding, nobody expected anything but the announced party. To the surprise of the guests and most of the servants, the marriage ceremony was performed, with Anne wearing a simple white chiffon wedding dress and Charles in a plain blue business suit. The cake, which had been smuggled in, was sliced. When Lindy and Anne drove through the gates on their usual afternoon spin, he was wearing the business suit, and she had changed back into the dress reporters had seen earlier in the day. Anne waved to them, and they waved back, thinking no more of it. The car drove down the hill and turned the usual corner toward the ferry. A little farther on it pulled into a back street, where a friend was waiting with Lindy’s Franklin. When Dwight Morrow, at 6:45 P.M., told the press that the reception had actually been the wedding, the young couple was safely aboard a secret honeymoon yacht.