3
“A sound individual is produced by a sound lifestream.”
—C.A.L.
RAISED IN VIRTUAL ISOLATION AMONG LINDBERGHS, Lodges, and Lands, it was difficult for Charles Lindbergh ever to recognize that his kin might have differed from other people. He was proud that his family tree abounded with independent thinkers in a broad range of disciplines—most of which he would pursue. But he never perceived that many of his ancestors were prideful to the point of arrogance—rebels so far apart from the rest of society as to be above the law, so evangelical as to appear fanatical, so global in their vision as to be shortsighted. For all his fascination with detail, Lindbergh never examined his family history closely enough to see that it included financial malfeasance, flight from justice, bigamy, illegitimacy, melancholia, manic-depression, alcoholism, grievous generational conflicts, and wanton abandonment of families. But those undercurrents were always there. And so this third-generation Lindbergh was born with a deeply private nature and bred according to the principles of self-reliance—nonconformity and the innate understanding that greatness came at the inevitable price of being misunderstood.
THE BABY WAS FUSSED OVER from birth. With his long black hair, which quickly turned to golden curls, his bright blue eyes, and the already discernible Lindbergh dimpled chin, the child’s beauty was not lost on anybody—not even the impassive C.A., who arrived in Detroit two days after the delivery and stayed through the weekend. Witnessing mother and baby with her parents prompted emotions he had never felt before. “It is the noblest idea of God and the most beautiful reality in life that ever came to my knowledge,” C.A. wrote his mother-in-law after the experience. He became an attentive husband and even a demonstrative father, for a while.
When the baby was five weeks old, Charles’s mother took him on his first journey—almost eight hundred miles to Little Falls. There they joined C.A. in their new house on the river—staffed with a cook, a maid, and a coachman who oversaw the farm and lived in a tenant’s house across the road with a half-dozen men who fenced the land and built a large stable.
From his first three years, Lindbergh would later recall but a handful of stray memories, mostly of life along the Mississippi. He remembered the view of the river from his crib; and the swift-moving current, a quarter mile across, became an endless source of fascination for him. He also remembered his mother, with her hair powdered white, coming into a room downstairs, wringing her hands and crying, “Oh! I’m so nervous, I’m so nervous.” She was, in fact, preparing for a small acting performance which she was presenting that night for some party guests. “I can still see my mother coming into the room and I can still see her washing the powder off her hair after it was all over,” Lindbergh recalled decades later. “I felt that she would be all right again as soon as the powder was washed off, but I was worried about the effect it would have on the fish when it reached the river. I remember being assured by my mother that it would not make the fish nervous too.”
Evangeline L. L. Lindbergh had good reason to feel nervous. She never fit in with the townsfolk of Little Falls. Unlike most of the other local women, Evangeline was, after all, a city-bred, college-educated woman who had worked outside the home and who was living in a style more grand than C.A. had lived with his first wife. That she was also much younger than he only isolated her even more. “After the marriage,” remembered C.A.’s former sister-in-law, Mrs. Robert Herron, “she kept aloof and never had many friends.” Lindbergh maids regularly gossiped about their mistress’s wild temper and wilder spending habits. Tongues wagged about her fits of rage and willfulness toward C.A. and her constant nagging. In unkind moments, C.A.’s two sisters referred to Evangeline as the “Anvil Chorus,” “A.C.” for short. (Decades later some believed she was the model for Carol Kennicott, the stifled heroine in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, a novel based on the author’s hometown of Sauk Centre, not fifty miles from Little Falls.)
From the beginning the Lindberghs kept their baby outside as much as possible, even in winter. His first summers were spent in a baby carriage which sported a large green parasol. C.A. had purchased a flock of angora goats to clear the land; and there was a constant battle between whoever was looking after the baby and the animals, who were always butting the carriage trying to eat the parasol. Charles was weaned on goat’s milk and grew up surrounded by animals—cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens, and horses (including a saddle horse and a “bucking bronco”). There were pigeons in the barn, which Charles called “dubs,” and a family of six-toed cats that had to be disposed of because they were excessively fond of the “dubs.” With few children nearby, a succession of dogs became Charles’s playmates.
The boy’s prosperous surroundings reflected C.A.’s booming business in town. The senior Lindbergh’s legal reputation grew along with his land holdings—which included large parcels on the west side of the river, where he thought Little Falls residences would mushroom next. His passion for land became famous in the county, as did his reputation for buying at the seller’s price and selling at the buyer’s. As often as not, he was willing to carry paper, assuming mortgages and promissory notes along with his land parcels; he was even known to throw money back to buyers who needed an advance on their taxes. While serving on the boards of the two Little Falls banks, he was often quoted as saying, “To make money, in my opinion, is not the sole purpose of a bank.”
His reputation spread to neighboring counties. “Judges, and other attorneys, told stories about him,” wrote the senior Lindbergh’s friends Lynn and Dora B. Haines, “—not of sharpness and tricks, but of his straight-forward, uncompromising honesty.” Except with his wife, from whom he kept most of his finances as private as his emotions.
Early Sunday morning, August 6, 1905, C.A., Evangeline, and Grandmother Land took Charles in one of their four carriages for a long drive northwest of town. They stopped at a farm in which C.A. had an interest and returned to an early afternoon fried chicken dinner, after which they all went into the living room. Evangeline was playing piano, and C.A. was playing with Charles, carrying him up and down the room, shouting so loudly that Evangeline could hardly hear her music. In the midst of this ruckus, the cook entered the room and said as calmly as if she were announcing dinner, “Mrs. Lindbergh, the house is on fire.”
Everybody rushed outside and looked at the roof, which was in flames. While the house burned from the third floor down, the boy’s nurse hied him to the back of the barn so that he would not be frightened. But she kept screaming, “Charles, youmustn’twatch!”—which terrified him, indelibly etching his first vivid memory. Evangeline tried to gather valuables, while C.A. and the workmen tried to extinguish the fire. After twenty minutes, there was nothing to do but watch as the fire consumed the building. Charles pulled away from his nurse to see the black cloud covering the house, as its pine and cedar crackled.
The next day, Evangeline walked Charles through the ruins. Hardly a piece of charred wood remained. “Our entire house has sunk into the stone walls of its basement,” he would write fifty years later. “Out of the pit, smoke-smutted but sharp-cut against thick leaves and sky, rises our brick chimney, tall and spindly without a house around it.” The only object to remain completely undamaged was a small Mexican idol, a red-clay figurine Evangeline had purchased in Tijuana on her honeymoon. Some clothes and furniture and the upright piano were salvaged, as were all of the maid’s possessions. (Evangeline suspected her of accidentally starting the fire by knocking over her kerosene lamp; others believed oily rags had been the cause.) “Father will build us a new house,” Evangeline assured her three-and-one-half-year-old. “But my toys, and the big stairs,” he later remembered thinking, “and my room above the river, are gone forever—”
More than the Lindbergh house went up in smoke. Evangeline never recovered her pearl-and-diamond engagement ring … and, indeed, the Lindbergh marriage seemed to go with it. The solid house could never conceal the fact that the relationship within had been shaky from the start, that while C.A. and Evangeline might have been intellectually compatible, they were two decidely mismatched personalities—in the words of one of his friends, “an entire contrast in tastes, ideals, and ambitions.”
While the first house Charles ever knew was still smoldering, the family moved fifteen miles south, into a hotel in Uppsala. Within two weeks, C.A. and Evangeline had decided to rebuild on their original site; and so they moved back to Little Falls. C.A. camped out on the farm, while Evangeline and the children checked into the Buckman Hotel in town, Charles bunking with his mother in a plain room, with a bed, simple wooden furniture, and a washstand. “For me it was a dreary place,” Charles would later write. Without the Mississippi rushing outside his window, he spent much of his time hanging over a windowsill and looking down on the rutted, unpaved road below, with its board sidewalks and hitching posts. Whenever cabin fever set in, Evangeline took Charles for extended visits to Detroit. Meantime Lillian and Eva studied hard in the Little Falls schools in hopes of getting into college, for they realized they would be happier there than in what had become a contentious household.
By the end of the year, C.A. was too far out on a financial limb to allow anyone to proceed with that thought. “We are exceedingly poor in cash and will be for some time to come,” C.A. was forced to reveal to Evangeline in December 1905, “and our future expenses will have to be adjusted to our cash and not to what we want.” He said they had over two hundred thousand dollars worth of property to which he had become a “slave,” because there were debts totaling almost forty thousand dollars against the land with property taxes on top of that. “They both, our little daughters, have got to work,” C.A. insisted, “and it will be better for them.” C.A. began by selling the horses and cattle and discharging the farmhands. Without sacrifice on everyone’s part, he explained, “the future of our dear boy might be less advantageous.”
All plans that year were suddenly scaled down—starting with the new house. Gradually, Evangeline realized the reasons for rebuilding a structure half the size of its predecessor were not strictly economic. Months before the fire, Lillian and Eva had observed that C.A. had moved out of his wife’s bedroom; now they thought he might be moving out of the house altogether. The new house, built upon the basement of the old one, suggested as much.
“I have heard it called the queerest house in Minnesota,” Evangeline herself said of the one-and-a-half-story replacement. Only the first floor ever felt finished. The piano was moved into the living room; but the dining room, two bedrooms, sewing room, kitchen, and bathroom were jumbled in such a way as to produce a dark hallway with seven doors leading into it. “We used to laugh and say we had no fear of burglars at night,” Evangeline recalled, “because they would be lost and could not find their way around without making too much noise.”
For young Charles, the only part of the house that felt like home was the screened-in sleeping porch in the back, overlooking the Mississippi, partially open to the elements. He chose to spend all but the bitterest nights there. “I was in close contact with sun, wind, rain, and stars,” Lindbergh remembered of his “bedroom.” “My bed, a wide, folding-cot affair, was in the northwest corner. On stormy nights rain blown in through the screen would mist it. Some of the valley’s treetops rose slightly above its level.”
The second floor, a few small rooms under the gables and eaves, never became much more than an attic. Its pine floorboards remained unfinished, and no doors were hung. Although C.A. had ordered the foundation of the house to be raised so that he could build a library for himself in the basement, that room was never finished either.
Evangeline did everything to make the place her own. She had it painted gray with white trim; and she replanted the two large oval flower beds in front with irises and nasturtium and tiger lilies. Lilac and honeysuckle bushes lined the road in front of the house. Between Little Falls and whichever house in Detroit her parents were living, C.A. was happy to know there was always a place to “park” Evangeline and their son, for he was developing a new passion outside the home—politics.
THE UNITED STATES experienced an awkward adolescence as it entered the twentieth century. By its thirteenth decade as a nation it found itself caught between its agrarian youth and its industrial manhood. Nowhere were the growing pains felt more than in the Upper Mississippi Valley. The sound of an automobile down one of the roads in those parts was still enough to make a field hand lean against his hoe and marvel; but the nation’s breadbasket knew that a new kind of wealth was being created in the cities “out East.” A new generation of heartlanders began to fear they might be the next victims of the urban money interests.
Minnesota—a farm state with rapidly growing cities vibrant with factories and mills—was especially mindful. By 1905, more than half its residents lived in urban areas. But in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, the state’s centermost twelve counties, two-thirds of the population were still rural dwellers and the chief source of their income was agriculture; the largest city in the district, St. Cloud, claimed only ten thousand residents. Such districts began looking for new representatives, men who had grown up on farms, been educated at Midwestern colleges, and were willing to leave their small-town law practices for capital cities.
The incumbent congressman of Minnesota’s sixth district—two-term Republican Clarence B. Buckman—had evidently used his office to secure timber tracts for his own lumber interests; and many civic leaders in Little Falls, the district’s centermost town, felt C.A. Lindbergh was just the man to replace him. Nobody in the district was more concerned about financial abuses of power; and nobody had been more outspoken, regularly firing off letters to the editors of local newspapers. In fact, Lindbergh had just established an experimental farmers’ cooperative and a political quarterly of his own, in which he warned against the “favored class” in America, which he said “grabs the profits and leaves the industrious workers only a bare subsistence.” Farmers and small businessmen gathered in support.
Lindbergh asked his most important New York real-estate client, Howard P. Bell—who had just lost shore rights at a dam site because of a Buckman political deal—to help him decide whether or not to run. Bell thought it boiled down to personal considerations—“how much is it worth to … have the name and general repute of being a Congressman.” He granted that it would certainly enhance a law practice, but at “the cost of the thing in time, money, loss of opportunity at home.” Unwittingly, Bell had hit upon the final reason to support C.A.’s running: a scandal-free method of separating from his wife. In September 1906, Lindbergh won the Republican nomination by almost seven percent.
Although never at a loss for opinions, Lindbergh was no silver-tongued orator. Recordings of his voice do not exist, but C.A.’s informal writings suggest a trace of a Scandinavian accent and the fact that he never fully mastered English—“Every think running ok”; “Hinclosed are some notes”; “Spected you down soon.” But he was, by most reports, compelling—his passion compensating for his lapses in rhetoric. He repeatedly spoke of labor as the provider of “the main wealth of the world,” as “the most important factor in our civilization.”
Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District elected C.A. Lindbergh to the United States House of Representatives by a comfortable margin over his Democratic opponent, 16,762 to 13,115. The Sixtieth Congress would not convene until December 1907, but C.A. wasted no time in leaving town. While he familiarized himself with Washington, the rest of his family spent most of that year in Detroit with Dr. and Mrs. Land in a house they rented on Cass Avenue. Lillian graduated from Detroit Central High School and was permitted to start college at Ann Arbor, taking her fourteen-year-old sister along with her and seeing her through her third year of high school. Charles understood that his father’s election meant “certain changes in life”—many of them, such as attending church, “disagreeable.” Above all, it meant the loss of another home.
This period proved so upsetting that most of Lindbergh’s childhood became a blurry memory to him. Over the next sixty-five years he would write six autobiographical volumes, much of which dwell on his youth. One began as a letter and swelled into a fifty-page book solely on the subject, which he titled Boyhood on the Upper Mississippi. But the title itself bespeaks a sad irony—for Charles Lindbergh spent only a fraction of his youth on the upper Mississippi. Although the images of his time there would forever be the most colorful in his mind’s eye, most of his childhood was spent away from the farm.
From 1906 to 1917, he was there but two, sometimes three, months a year. The farther he traveled from Minnesota, the dimmer his recollections. And the most painful memories of his first eighteen years were subjected to selective amnesia, thus yielding but a few sentences in all his writing. Amazingly, when this stickler for accuracy compiled calendars of events in his childhood, they were riddled with errors, with major events forgotten and entire years mixed up. Later in life, Lindbergh would spend hours scrutinizing these formative years without ever analyzing them, averting his glance from that which was most personal—about his ancestors, his parents, or himself. “I have no recollection whatever of my daily routine during the early years of my life,” he would admit in his mid-thirties.
Lindbergh never realized that his many pages of Tom Sawyer—like reminiscences—sunny days along the river, skinny-dipping, tree-climbing, watching “river-pigs” break log jams, running over the log jams himself—were, in fact, the exceptional days of his childhood. He was not consciously trying to varnish his youth. He simply learned at an early age to see and hear only that which he wanted to. By five years old he was already, in the words of his half-sister, “painfully shy”—hardly ever having played with another child and almost never having left his mother’s sight.
He learned to make much out of little, indulging in solitary pursuits. He became an ardent collector of stones, arrowheads, cigar bands, coins, stamps, guns, lead soldiers, marbles, cigarette cards—almost anything he could find and stash under one of the attic eaves. And he became an inveterate maker of lists, constantly updating accounts of his possessions, as though taking inventory of himself through his things. He was happiest alone, outside, at one with nature. “That farm was one of the most important things in my life,” he would write his mother in his mid-forties. “It taught me the value of water, trees, and sky—and solitude. Anyone who has not known these elements has not really lived.” Indeed, he later realized, “I am not happy living away from water or where I cannot see the sky on a clear night.”
One day, while playing alone on the upper floor of the house, he heard the distant noise of an engine. As it approached he realized it was louder than that of an automobile. He rushed to the window and climbed onto the roof. About two hundred yards away and barely higher than the treetops, he saw an airplane. It had two sets of wings, one above the other, with a man wearing a visored cap backwards sandwiched between. “Except in photographs, I had never seen an airplane before,” Charles later wrote. “The aviator, my mother told me, had come to Little Falls to give exhibitions and carry up into the air anyone who dared to ride with him.” She explained that it was both a dangerous and expensive proposition.
In the fall of 1907, C.A. Lindbergh gathered his family in the nation’s capital for the inauguration of his career as a Congressman. Lillian left college and took her sister, Eva, to join Evangeline and Charles in C.A.’s furnished apartment in the Romaine, at 1831 V Street N.W., near Rock Creek Park. Although the flat was spacious, the walls closed in on them. By Christmas, Lillian and Eva had been dispatched to relatives in St. Cloud. Charles spent as much time as possible playing alone in vacant lots, having imaginary adventures.
On December 2, 1907, Congressman Lindbergh joined his colleagues for the opening of the Sixtieth Congress. It was largely a day of ceremony, the swearing in of members followed by the re-election of the House Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois. Republicans had controlled the House in all but sixteen years since the Civil War; and, coercive as he was coarse, cigar-chomping “Uncle Joe” Cannon controlled a powerful legislative machine. As was customary, a photograph of the new Congress was taken, remarkable on this occasion because there, in one of the back rows, among the assembly of hoary heads, sat the vigorous forty-nine-year-old C.A. Lindbergh. Standing out even more glaringly in the photograph, in the aisle to his right, is a towheaded boy in a white sailor suit: his son, Charles.
The first two votes to come before this body were over leadership, in which Speaker Cannon and his rules from the Fifty-ninth Congress both received big majorities—Lindbergh’s votes among them. Only years later did Lindbergh impart to close friends that he had often asked himself why he had voted as he did. “I had come to Washington to do something, so I voted with the herd”; but, he just as quickly resolved, “I am going to wipe out that stigma if I can.” Over the next ten years in office, he would make good on his vow, hardly considering what new stigma such insurgency might bring upon him.
When Lindbergh took office, the Capitol walls were still shaking from a panic that October on Wall Street, a run on the banks that J. P. Morgan helped control. The solution scared Lindbergh more than the problem. Back home in Minnesota, C.A. had been warning people about the inequities in the American economy for years, how each wreck of the economy and rescue by a few powerful bankers only strengthened the Money Trust—“financial combinations in restraint of trade”—at the nation’s expense. He could not have arrived on the House floor at a timelier moment, as the crux of the national debate for the next few years would be the economy and the extension of new powers to the people.
During that decade of progressive reform, Lindbergh would prove no stranger in the House well; and there was never any doubt as to where he stood on any issue. He always sided with the hardworking farmer in his district and opposed the high-rolling “speculative parasites.”
The “insurgent” Republicans in the Senate—such men as Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, William Borah of Idaho, Albert Beveridge of Indiana, Albert Cummins of Iowa, and Moses Clapp of Minnesota—were debating many of the same issues with somewhat greater success. And so, when William Howard Taft assumed the Presidency from Roosevelt in 1909, many of the defiant House members challenged Speaker Cannon’s leadership of their house. Lindbergh claimed credit for being the first to call for Cannon’s ouster; and Rep. John Nelson of Wisconsin helped organize a group of rebel Republicans to fight for their cause. Nelson found that Lindbergh was “perhaps the most radical and independent of the group.” A sampling of eighteen roll calls between 1906 and 1912, which “reflect deviation from party leadership on the part of certain intransigent Republicans in the House of Representatives,” showed nobody scoring higher than C.A. Lindbergh. His strong support of Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 helped his own re-election to a fourth term; but Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the beneficiary of the schism in the Republican party, got elected President.
By then much of America—not just the progressive representatives—had been awakened to the dangers of the nation’s powerful bankers. Wrote muckraker Ida Tarbell in the May 1913 issue of The American Magazine, “It was a Swede from Minnesota who first raised in Congress the hue-and-cry of the MONEY TRUST HUNT—’a Swede who dreams,’ a fellow member describes him—Charles A. Lindbergh.” His colleagues never fully embraced his conspiracy theories nor endorsed his legislative proposals, but in 1912 the House did approve of a Money Trust investigation to be conducted by its Committee on Banking and Currency under the direction of Congressman Arsene Pujo. As Congressman Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota later said, it was Congressman Lindbergh whose “resolutions and speeches resulted in this monumental work. There had been much talk in the country about interlocking directorates, but the Pujo investigation proved their existence.
It gave the facts, statistics, and data. It called Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, and all the rest of the financial powers in America to Washington and placed them on the witness stand.
Control of money, tactics of secrecy, and “other forms of domination” were abuses of which the Pujo committee found such bankers as J. P. Morgan guilty. As early as 1908, the same charges were being leveled against C. A. Lindbergh—by his wife. Antagonism had replaced antipathy in their marriage; and by the end of the year, they decided to take one last stab at keeping the family together by separating. Evangeline would return to Minnesota—not to Little Falls, but to Minneapolis, where she could oversee Lillian as she transferred for her second year of college at the University of Minnesota and Eva as she completed high school.
“The crisp days of autumn were interesting enough,” Charles would remember of that year, though, in fact, he never did pinpoint which year of his life it was. He could recollect only that it was dreary without his knowing why. Around this time, Lindbergh developed what became a lifelong practice of internal conversations, a series of questions he would pose to himself. “I spend hours on end in dry heated rooms, with stuffy head and whitening skin,” he recalled of the period.
I grow tired of books and toys, and pressing my face against a frosted window. I move aimlessly about, experiment in strange new fields. Why can’t I hold ten marbles between ten toes? How long can a cream-filled chocolate last if I eat it with a pin—
He came down with measles that season, and he remembered being visited in bed by a doctor—the only such visit that would occur for sixty-five years—and taking bitter medicine. “The zero-cold months which followed left colorless space in my mind.”
Charles also obliterated from memory the years of tension between his mother and his half-sisters. Ever since their mother’s death, Lillian and Eva—four years apart in age—had been living out of a portmanteau, always being shipped off to Lindberghs in Minnesota or Lands in Detroit. While Evangeline had been able to deal with them when they were small, she could not cope with two headstrong teenagers at last rebelling against their years of neglect. Once settled at the University of Minnesota, Lillian became fond of pretty dresses and parties and a fellow student, Loren Roberts. One night after he kept her out until three o’clock in the morning, Evangeline scolded them both, insisting that it was “not a decent thing to do.” Eva sided with her sister and said she just did not see how they could possibly go on living together any longer.
Increasingly, Evangeline took out her anger toward C.A. on his daughters. She became furious at his indulging them with clothes allowances but crying poverty when she asked for the same thing. She resented having to discipline his daughters, to play the role of the wicked stepmother. One night that spring, Eva returned home late, violating a new curfew, only to be greeted by Evangeline’s slapping her in the face. “What was that for?” the sixteen-year-old girl asked, only to be told: “That’s what you deserve!”
Like her sister, Eva had the good sense to get out, to disengage from Evangeline and get on with her own life. She would attend Carleton College and intern in her father’s Washington office before marrying a journalist, George W. Christie. But for all intents and purposes, from the night of that slap, Evangeline had effectively ended her relationship with her husband’s daughters. They never lived together again, an explanation for which was never given to Charles. Through it all, Eva had long resented Charles’s being so indulged; but she later realized the price he had had to pay—that his youth must have been deeply “troubled,” for “there was no normal family life.”
In early summer 1909, Evangeline told C.A. that she wanted a divorce. Knowing it would prove unacceptable to the voters of Minnesota’s Sixth District, C.A. appealed to her better judgment, urging her to “let things slide” and continue living as they had been.
Evangeline discussed the matter with her mother in a series of letters written largely in numerical code. Each letter of the alphabet was assigned a number—A=7, B=16, C=21, and so forth; and whenever she had something to say about 21-7, she broke for paragraphs at a time into numbers. “I doubt that he can be held to anything and he will offer as little as possible,” Evangeline “enumerated” that June; “all I can see is that if a definite settlement can be made now it will be better—just because he has not the traits that can allow dependence.” She admitted that she no longer was even expecting to find happiness, “but as things are it seems that no one is justified in living as he proposes.” C.A. argued that if she tried to shake him down in court she would probably end up getting less money out of him than he was allowing her already. Fearing the loss of his congressional seat, he promised to treat her fairly so long as they remained married.
A few months of truce followed, during which C.A. spent time with “the boy” and treated his wife with the utmost respect in public. Evangeline and Charles often lunched with him in the House dining room and sat in the gallery when the legislature was in session. For Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, C.A. got Senator Nelson of Minnesota to make ten-year-old Charles a Senate page for the day, so that he could observe the entire ceremony from a special seat. C.A. even took his wife to two formal receptions at the White House.
But in private, the Lindberghs reverted to their old quarrels, mostly over finances. Evangeline’s trump cards remained C.A.’s fear of public exposure and the happiness of “the boy.” Even then, C.A.’s behavior was not always predictable, as the strain of his domestic situation often got the better of him. During one visit to his wife’s apartment, Charles began fidgeting, punching C.A., until Evangeline said, “You see, C.A., he’s cooped up here and needs an outlet for surplus energy.” C.A. said, “Get up on the chair, Charles, and I’ll fight you.” Charles did and kicked him in the groin. C.A. grabbed him by both arms and called him a “fool.” On other occasions C.A. teased Charles until he cried.
C.A. meant no harm. This was just his own frustrated way of trying to make a man out of the boy. Like Evangeline, he never scolded or disciplined Charles; and he never spoke down to him. “Shall we go for a tramp, Boss?” C.A. would ask when he wanted to take a walk in the country.
Both parents believed in giving Charles adult responsibilities, obliging him at an early age to exercise judgment. He was only seven when his father gave him a Savage .22-caliber repeating rifle; and the boy surprised them both when his first shot at a duck, more than fifty feet away, hit it right in the head. He received a Winchester 12-gauge automatic shotgun the year after that, before he was even big enough to steady it against his shoulder. C.A. taught him to fish and to swim naked in the chilly waters near the house in Little Falls. Charles especially remembered one day when he slipped on the slimy stones of the Mississippi’s bottom into a hole deeper than he was tall. “When I broke surface and coughed in a breath of air,” he later recalled, “I was startled to find that my father wasn’t running toward me. He just stood on shore and laughed. And then I realized that I was swimming by myself.” Within a few summers, Charles was able to swim across Pike Creek in flood and down the Mississippi’s rapids.
Charles grew up fast, becoming a rugged individualist like his father. And for all C.A.’s severity, Charles admired his unexpected wit. “Contrary to the impression of many people who knew him,” Charles later explained to his father’s biographer, “he had a great deal of humor,” which he masked with a serious expression, leaving most people unaware that he was enjoying himself tremendously. “A Swedish sense of humor,” Evangeline called it. “He could laugh wonderfully,” Charles observed; “but he had an extraordinaryability to control his facial expression when he wanted to.” Like his father, young Charles grew to gauge the funniness of a situation by how much laughter he suppressed.
The Lindberghs swallowed most of their emotions—except their increasing anger, which Charles learned to ignore. Although he did not recollect ever having to take sides, one parent or the other occasionally dragged him into the fray. After one testy exchange between them, Evangeline asked Charles if he considered it “quarreling” when she responded to C.A.’s insults as she had. “No,” he said, “you answered him just right. I don’t see what makes Father act so.”
Neither did Evangeline, who endured years of escalating humiliations. On two occasions C.A. called her a “bloodsucker” right in front of Charles. He took to questioning her mental condition … and, on at least one occasion, he struck her.
As painful was Evangeline’s realization that the persistent rumors about C.A. keeping company with another woman—his stenographer, who had moved from Little Falls to Washington—were true. After yet another overheated argument, she grabbed a gun and held it to C.A.’s head. “O.K., Evangeline,” C.A. said, “if you must do it, do it.” But she could only bring herself to throw the gun down and run off. In the end, she always caved in for the reason her mother reminded her: “As to divorce—you know that on account of Charles we must be careful …”
Through it all, the boy was spared the worst of his parents’ behavior. “I cannot recall my father ever saying a word against my mother,” Charles would later record. “She encouraged me to be with him as much of the time as possible and I believe that both my mother and my father always continued to care for each other although they were seldom together. One of the reasons my mother went to Washington seven or eight out of the ten winters my father was in Congress, was to give me the opportunity of seeing him frequently.” But Charles became chronically restless—finding that his parents’ living under one roof only bred greater contempt.
As he never settled in one place, Charles learned to take comfort in his rootlessness. Over a decade, Washington, D.C., became their official residence, with a breather in Minnesota every summer, and long visits in Detroit during their trips each way. While there was a semblance of regularity to Charles’s vagabond life, it was nonetheless disconcerting having to move every few months and having to spend most of his year in a place he disliked. “Through long winters,” he would later write, “I counted the weeks and days until spring when we would return to our Minnesota farm.” With its never finished house, the family always referred to it as “camp.”
Where “camp” filled Charles with a love of the outdoors, the Land house at 64 West Elizabeth Street in Detroit opened his eyes to the more interior wonders of science, a world of logic and intellect. “I never had a dull moment at Detroit,” Lindbergh would later recall of his visits, adding that there was “even more to do than on the farm in Minnesota.” Upon entering the small, gray frame house, a narrow hall lay ahead, a door on the left to the patients’ parlor, where there was always an intriguing stack of National Geographic magazines. Upstairs was a small parlor. To the rear of the room on one side was a curtain that opened into the master bedroom; on the other side a small hall led into the tiny bedroom of Evangeline’s brother, Charles; during Evangeline and young Charles’s visits, he turned the room with its narrow double bed over to them.
The boy’s interests lay downstairs—in Dr. Land’s dental rooms and laboratories. His grandfather’s rolltop desk was always cluttered with papers and pamphlets and plaster casts of patients’ mouths. A box contained a stuffed tarantula, centipede, scorpion, and horned toad; a safe held platinum foil and dental gold; cabinets were filled with polished stones and fossils—even a mammoth’s tooth.
When his grandfather was not practicing, Charles played in the two operating rooms, with their hydraulic foot-pumped dental chairs. There were drills of all sizes and drawers “for hand instruments, bottles of acid, amalgum powder, rubber sheets, little wads of cotton to put under the tongue”; stuffed birds and a Rocky Mountain sheep’s head stared from all corners of the rooms. A drawing of prehistoric man hung on one wall. And then there was the laboratory that housed a dental furnace, a blowpipe bench-table, shelves full of chemical bottles, and a blacksmith’s anvil.
The basement below was even more fun. Because Charles’s grandfather and uncle did all their own home maintenance, pipe cutters, threaders, wrenches, coils of wire, and odd lengths of pipe hung everywhere. During each visit, Charles was taught to master a different tool—learning mechanical, chemical, and electrical laws. “Charles,” his grandfather often told him, reiterating the mantra of scientific experimentation, “you must have patience.”
The basement’s most amusing feature was a shooting gallery. When Charles was six, his grandfather gave him a .22-caliber single-shot Stevens rifle, with which he practiced in a short rifle range he and Charles’s uncle built. It featured a mechanical, steel-faced target about ten inches in diameter with a one-inch bull’s-eye cut out. When a bullet entered the hole, it tripped a mechanism that made an iron bird pop up.
Every night Grandmother Land prepared a large hot meal, at least one chicken or turkey every visit, served on warmed plates. And the dining room table was always brimming with his grandfather’s theories: the importance of mastication; the deleterious effects of automobiles on society; the deadly nature of cigarettes, which he called “coffin nails.” Lindbergh came to believe that “Science is the key to all mystery.”
In time, he realized another wonderful attraction in Detroit was his uncle. “I have no brother,” Charles lamented to his mother one day; and she said she would give him hers. From that day forward Charles Land, Jr., was referred to as such. Twenty-three years Charles’s senior, “Brother” had apprenticed to his father in dentistry, graduated from the Michigan School of Mines, and prospected in Canada before drifting into a life of avocations. A social misfit, he considered himself an inventor and had several patents to validate his claim. He was never at a loss for time in teaching Charles how to use his drafting instruments—or any other tools lying around the house. Always busy with some project, Brother’s presence helped make “64,” as the family referred to their residence, a welcome halfway house for Charles, a stimulating stopover between Little Falls and Washington. In all his analysis of why he found Detroit so special, he never considered the possibility that he found pleasure simply in its being the most traditional home he knew—one in which he was but a periodic visitor.
In the fall of 1909, Evangeline and C.A. established separate residences in Washington; but Charles faced a greater dread that year. At almost eight years of age he found himself, for the first time, having to start school. Until then, Evangeline had tutored her son in the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. (“I like my mother. My mother likes me” were the first two sentences she instructed him to copy.) Entering the second grade at the Force School, he remembered his first year of school as being “forced to sit still in a strange room, amid strange children, and surrounded by strange and unknown conventions … a vague memory of countless hours of sitting at a desk … waiting, waiting, waiting for the school to close.” He was allowed to change schools—as he did almost every year for the next decade. Because Evangeline insisted on their Detroit stopovers, Charles always started the schoolyear late and left early, and was, as a result, always behind in his studies. One of his teachers was distressed enough by his poor penmanship to threaten him with a bad report to his father. “No use to complain to him,” the boy said. “He can’t write even as well as I.”
After several years of spotty education, Evangeline felt a private school might help Charles buckle down. Although C.A. pled poverty and insisted that boys “must get knocked and knock back in order to stand the world’s knocking later,” he did concede that “it might be an advantage” for Charles to attend a private school because of his “peculiar situation.”
In 1913, he entered The Sidwell Friends School, which assembled in the Friends Meeting House on I Street in Northwest Washington. Although he never liked the name of the place, with what he considered its hollow promise of camaraderie, he remained for two years. It was “an improvement, but did not by any means end my troubles,” he later wrote. “I did not find much friendship among the children there. I did not understand them, nor they me.” Many of them made fun of his name. nicknaming him “Limburger” or sometimes, more simply, “Cheese.”
It was later reported that young Lindbergh palled around with his schoolmates Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of T.R. “The Roosevelt Gang,” was known to gather after school at nearby Henry’s drug store, where they would order sodas and charge them to the ringleaders’ father. But, future myth to the contrary, Lindbergh was not part of that gang or any other. He briefly became friendly with his deskmate and nobody else. “I took as little part in the games as possible and went home immediately after school was over,” he recalled. The day the boys were instructed in Greek folk-dancing, Charles caused a ruckus by flatly refusing to join hands. The “Cheese” stood alone.
“Home” became a series of boardinghouses, as Evangeline was always hunting for the least expensive room she could find for the two of them. One was in a boardinghouse at 1440 Massachusetts Avenue run by a prominent Virginia family on their uppers. The landlords lived in the basement rooms, while the “paying guests” climbed a set of long front steps to the reception room and the dining room, which was available to them only for meals. One flight up was the large front bedroom which Charles and Evangeline shared. Another of their houses offered a curtained alcove for the bed; and still another had a kitchenette, where Evangeline cooked their meals. Surrounded only by strange adults, there was never room for Charles to misbehave, or just be a boy. The boardinghouses constricted his already constrained personality; and at an early age, he became an overly polite silent sufferer.
To compensate for his obvious loneliness, Evangeline took Charles to all the national shrines and exhibitions. They often returned to Mt. Vernon, the Smithsonian Institution, the Navy Yards, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where young Charles was especially drawn to Hiram Powers’s “The Greek Slave,” a white marble statue of a naked girl in shackles.
It did not bother C.A. that his son lived such a friendless existence in Washington. So did C.A. “You and I can take hard knocks,” he told his son halfway through grade school. “We’ll get along no matter what happens.” C.A. showed him that hard work was more valuable than socializing, as he often became absorbed in his job to the point of obsession. He usually lunched on a loaf of bread and bottle of milk in his office, and he often slept on the black leather couch beside his desk. “Congressmen’s work seemed awfully boring to me,” Charles would later write, but he found the long corridors of Congress entertaining.
He amused himself one afternoon by locking all the doors in the toilet rooms from the inside. Another time he dropped light bulbs from the top floor of the House Office Building onto the street below. And Charles never failed to be impressed whenever his father took him onto the House floor itself. Other Congressmen objected to the boy’s presence in the chamber, insisting it was “not in keeping with the dignity of the House”; but the Lindberghs went their own way, trying not to laugh at those same men spitting apple peels on the carpet. Another of Charles’s favorite spots was in the House lobby, just outside the main chamber, where a weather map showed the entire country, marked in colored chalk. Remembered Lindbergh years later, “I always looked to see what the day was like at Little Falls and Detroit.”
Through it all, Charles developed an appreciation of his country’s heritage and an appetite for culture. He considered himself a witness to history in the making, and he took photographs at every opportunity. He watched a “Suffragette parade” on Pennsylvania Avenue, and he met Senate legends Champ Clark, Knute Nelson, and “Fighting Bob” La Follette. He asked “Uncle Joe” Cannon for his autograph—the first such request Lindbergh ever made—and was rebuffed, which so embarrassed him that he vowed to “confine my attention to collections which did not inconvenience other people in obtaining them.” He saw Teddy Roosevelt in the backseat of an open car pulling up to Union Station and William Howard Taft exercising by walking behind his horse-drawn carriage. He rolled Easter eggs on the White House lawn; and once, his father got Charles excused from school so that he might accompany him inside the White House, where he was presenting President Wilson some Indian gifts. The President shook hands with the boy and asked how he was. Charles said, “Very well, thank you,” and later reported that the audience had not scared him any as “the President was just a man even if he is President.”
In June 1912, C.A. arranged for Charles to attend the Aeronautical Trials at Fort Myer. Evangeline and Charles traveled by streetcar to Virginia, where they found a grandstand set up. A half-dozen airplanes, tuning up their engines, stood before them. “Then,” Lindbergh recalled of the moment, “one of the planes took off and raced a motor car around the oval track in front of us. You could see its pilot clearly, out in front—pants’ legs flapping, and cap visor pointed backward to streamline in the wind.” The experience was so “intense and fascinating,” Lindbergh would recall toward the end of his life, “that I wanted to fly myself.”
Almost every Christmas and Easter, Charles and his mother made other trips to broaden his horizons, visiting Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and New York City twice. Once they went from Detroit to Washington by way of the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. In January 1913, weeks before his eleventh birthday, Charles was excused from school so that he could make a most extraordinary voyage.
C.A. sat on a House Committee visiting Panama while the canal was under construction; and his reports home were so enthusiastic, he and Evangeline decided it would be an invaluable opportunity for their son to see this modern wonder being constructed. On January 3, 1913, she and Charles boarded the Colón, a second-class boat, in New York City. They shared a stateroom on the port side, saloon deck, and dined with the captain, who explained at dinner that night that the worsening weather was delaying their departure.
The next morning Charles arose a little after five and went on deck, which he found covered in snow with a hard wind blowing, as they weighed anchor. Leaving the Lusitania in the berth beside them, they sailed the better part of a week. At daybreak on January 10, the Colón pulled into its eponymous homeport, Charles standing at the bow of the hurricane deck, looking through his binoculars at the lights of the approaching city.
The next week was filled with the stuff of boys’ dreams, all of which Charles detailed in a diary. He saw the forests and jungles just outside the city, heard the tales of outlaws still terrorizing the towns, gazed on Morgan the Pirate’s castle, underground “torcher chambers,” alligators, monkeys, green lizards, tarantulas, coral snakes, deer, wild hogs, armadillos, wild turkeys, sloths, sharks, and butterflies galore. He watched great steam shovels gnawing away at mountains, creating the awesome canal. Sailing on theAncon, Evangeline and Charles returned to a pier near Asbury Park, New Jersey, on January twenty-seventh.
YOU ARE LIVING in an extraordinary time,” C.A., then approaching sixty, told Charles back in Washington. “Great changes are coming. Great things are going to happen. I may not live to see them, but you will.” Between 1914 and 1916, when the Panama Canal opened for traffic, the world caught glimpses of this new age, evidence of a shrinking world. R. F. Scott had reached the South Pole, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson explored Arctic Canada; Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental telephone call; and Henry Ford produced his millionth car, paving the way for America’s becoming an automobile society.
With advancements in technology bringing people everywhere closer, a royal assassination in remote Serbia in August 1914 impacted not only Europe but even farms in the American Midwest. “It is true that Europe is ablaze and the destruction of life and property is tremendous; but nothing should be destroyed here as a result of the war,” said Rep. Lindbergh in response to a war revenue tax proposed by the Wilson administration, “so why should we allow the European war to destroy our reason?”
Over the first two years of the Great War, Lindbergh increasingly spoke out, but his suggestions that the Money Trust and industrialists were fueling the war fell on deaf ears. In search of a bigger power base, he sacrificed a sixth Congressional term in order to run for the United States Senate. In the spring of 1916, when Charles was fourteen, C.A. pulled him from school in Washington to help him in his campaign back home. C.A. was not merely providing Charles with another educational experience; he needed his expertise.
Four years earlier, C.A. had sprung “Maria” (pronounced ma-RYE-a) on his family—a Ford Model T tourabout with Ford’s standard foot-pedal gearshift, carbide headlights, hand crank, squeeze rubber-bulb horn, folding waterproof cloth top, and quick fasten-on curtains for rainy days. C.A. had bought Maria for campaigning; but Charles was the only family member who had mastered the machine, having learned to drive at eleven. By the 1916 spring primary in Minnesota, the boy had hundreds of miles of driving experience; and he had shot up to almost six feet in height, so that his feet, at last, could comfortably reach the pedals.
In hopes of better serving the campaign, the two Charles Lindberghs picked up a new Saxon Light Six automobile in Minneapolis for $935. The fourteen-year-old drove the crude back roads of Minnesota, which offered only blaze marks painted onto fenceposts and telegraph poles instead of signposts to mark the way. They stayed in small-town hotels for a dollar a night. In and out of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as far downriver as Winona, as far north as Duluth, Charles logged three thousand miles, averaging seventy-five miles a day. When he was not driving, he distributed pamphlets in the meeting halls and on the farms where C.A. spoke. Charles professed little interest in the content of the speeches himself—“While I wanted very much to have my father win,” he later wrote, “my primary interest in his campaign trips lay in the opportunity they gave me to be with him and to drive.” Hearing him harp upon the themes of trusts and non-intervention, how wartime waste of resources benefited the few at the expense of the many, could not help leaving an impression.
Besides Lindbergh and the reform-minded incumbent Moses Clapp, running for the Senatorial nomination were former Governor A. O. Eberhart and a trust-busting St. Paul lawyer named Frank B. Kellogg. Senator La Follette considered Lindbergh the most “radical” of the contenders, and he felt the less controversial Clapp could “accomplish more for the general movement than any of the announced candidates.” Kellogg, with his theme of preparedness for war, won; and Lindbergh finished a humiliating fourth.
Because C.A. would be retreating to Washington for only a few months in the fall, Evangeline felt no obligation to return with Charles. After ten years, they were still little more than gypsies among the establishment there, having made no friends. No sooner had Charles entered Little Falls High School than his mother developed an urge to visit the opposite coast, for reasons never explained to Charles.
The unspoken truth was that Evangeline had family business. Her stepdaughter Lillian, who had never been a robust child, had recently gone with her husband and daughter to California, hoping its climate might help her fight a case of tuberculosis. The climate provided no cure, and the doctors feared for her life. Evangeline wanted to see her one last time, so that their relationship might not end on a lingering dissonant note. Charles pleaded to make the trip—because it meant he would be able to drive. It was agreed that he could attend school in California for the rest of the year and that it would be yet another “great adventure and experience” for him.
Accompanied by Evangeline’s brother and a new fox terrier named Wahgoosh (Chippewa for “fox”), they set off that October, expecting to arrive within two weeks. Despite his experience driving the campaign trails of Minnesota, nothing prepared him for the journey to California. They went West by going south and immediately hit bad weather and poor roads. After one particularly heavy rain in Missouri, they had to remain at a small-town hotel until the clay road had dried. They were slowed farther along by the inadequacy of the Saxon for such a trip. Its springs proved too weak to stand the strain, so that every time Charles approached a bump in the road, he had either to slow to a crawl or strain the springs further. After forty days on the road—highways sometimes narrowing to sandy trails—they arrived in Los Angeles. They checked into the Hotel Armondale, downtown on South Flower Street.
Charles’s sketchy accounts of his time in California—little more than a few published sentences—reflect his ignorance of its purpose. He did not know that his mother had written Eva to ask if she could visit her ailing sister. “My feelings were running very high,” Eva later recalled, “knowing as I did how shamefully she had treated my sister and how strongly we all felt that that had contributed to undermining the health of a sensitive fragile girl.” With Lillian failing fast, Eva wrote to her father for advice. When he instructed her to decide for herself, she denied the visit.
Meantime, C.A. rushed across the country to be at his daughter’s bedside. Around eleven o’clock on the night of November third, he leaned over to put his lips to her forehead, and she whispered, “Father, I am dying.” And in the next moment, she proved to be right.
Evangeline did all she was allowed, which was to send Eva a letter of condolence. In it she said she was “no longer bitter.” The letter incensed Eva even more, for she did not know what Evangeline had to be bitter about. Eva asked her father if she even had to reply. As before, C.A. left the decision to Eva, though he did ask her to consider the feelings of young Charles, to give him “as little trub and as much chance as possible.
He has reached the age of sensitivity and is developing along lines that give promise. I wish to make it as easy for him as possible, but I could not live with her. I would rather be dead a hundred times. She can’t help herself. No grudges toward such a person should be entertained, for she wishes when in the right mood to do right. And she has been punished for her eccentricities and always will be. I am sorry for her but can’t allow that to destroy my existence as it would if I tried to live with her….
“I am awfully sorry for the boy,” C.A. said in closing the subject. “He feels so hurt. To my judgement you should answer for his sake … but you need not do it if it [is] too hard against your wish. Yield a little for the sake of the innocent boy …”
She did not. She had caught sight of Charles a few times in the past few years; and, frankly, she could not keep her eyes off him. “He was so good-looking,” she recalled of the teenager. “I saw him grow tall and he was always handsome. And very shy.” But Eva could never get past her feelings for his mother. “I could and do forgive all she did to me,” Eva confessed more than sixty years later, “but not what she did to my father and sister. Only insanity explains it. She made life miserable for all of us.” And while she said she did always try to “protect” her half-brother, she noted, “I have always felt that Charles was hurt terribly.” Eva destroyed Evangeline’s condolence letter, never to respond.
Evangeline remained on the West Coast, where Charles entered the eleventh grade at Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach. He made no friends there, sticking to himself, his family, and his dog, in the small cottage they rented on the beach. As in Washington, his mother prized any education for Charles found outside the classroom over that within. Taking the wheel, the boy drove her in the Saxon on trips from San Diego to San Francisco, visiting the missions along the way. They made another long visit to Catalina Island, where he gathered moonstones. He and his mother found another beach near Redondo with serpentines, which they set about collecting, and one afternoon they gathered too many of the green rocks to carry home. Charles suggested his picking up their Saxon at the local garage and coming back for his mother and their treasures. By the time he returned, night had fallen, and the Saxon’s headlamps would not light; so he had to make his way to the beach by the small light on the windshield. A policemanhappened to see him and cited him for driving without a license. The next day in court it was further revealed that Charles was also underage. The Lindberghs thought it outrageous that he was prohibited from driving, especially as he had safely delivered his family halfway across the country.
They might have stayed in California indefinitely were it not for a letter from Detroit late in the winter of 1917. Grandmother Land had developed breast cancer; and by April, Evangeline and her brother decided their California sojourn must end. Brother went ahead by train; and, disobeying the court order, Charles drove his mother and dog the forty days home to Little Falls.
There, Grandmother Land would spend as many of her final hours as possible in a room Evangeline and Charles kept constantly fresh for her with newly cut pine boughs. During the last eighteen months of her life, her only grandchild was forced into early manhood—heading the household, finishing high school, running the farm, keeping the books, caring for his mother and grandmother.
By the time Charles and Evangeline had returned to Little Falls, Woodrow Wilson had been re-inaugurated President largely because he had “kept us out of war.” But during the winter of 1916 to 1917, American intervention became inevitable. While his family had been in California, Congressman Lindbergh did not slink away from Capitol Hill. He spent his last months in office taking some of the most dramatic stands of his career.
On February 12, 1917, he delivered a tirade on the floor of the House against the Federal Reserve Board, which he believed was in cahoots with the Money Trust. On the House floor, without warning, he impeached the five members of the Federal Reserve Board of high crimes and misdemeanors—starting with its governor, Warren Harding. He listed fifteen counts, specifically citing such co-conspirators as National City Bank of New York, Kuhn, Loeb, and Company, and J. P. Morgan. “Don’t worry if the press slams me,” C.A. wrote his daughter Eva. “I hit the board a hard blow, and they are sore.”
On March 1, 1917, the United States edged closer to war when the House voted on a bill authorizing the arming of American merchant ships. The tally was 403 to 14, with Lindbergh among that most radical minority, almost all Midwesterners. One month later—a new Congress in place—America entered the war.
C.A. began sniffing out new opportunities. After a hernia operation (which he endured without anesthesia, taking his mind off the pain by discussing international economics for the hour with a friend), he returned to Minnesota. He spent most of his time in the Twin Cities, where he entered third-party politics. Worse than oblivion, he began sliding into political ignominy, becoming a crank. More than ever, Lindbergh took to writing articles and books about his constant bugaboo, the Money Trust. While he was neither a pacifist nor a socialist, he argued that it was not right to send poor farmboys off to war in Europe so that others might profit. “The trouble with war is that it kills off the best men a country has,” C.A. used to say.
“It is impossible according to the big press to be a true American unless you are pro-British. If you are really for America first, last, and all the time, and solely for America and for the masses primarily, then you are classed as pro-German by the big press which are supported by the speculators,” Lindbergh would write in 1917—words that would resonate in the life of his son twenty years later.
In 1918, C.A. Lindbergh ran in the Republican gubernatorial primary, receiving support from the Nonpartisan League—an agrarian protest party that sought to combat agricultural trusts through state ownership. Socialistic sentiments crept into his speeches. The election will forever stand as one of the most opprobrious in Minnesota’s history if not, as it was then considered, “the hottest ever in the U. S.” Charles chose never to recall the humiliations of this political fracas in any of his autobiographical writings. But journalist Harrison Salisbury, who was a child in Minneapolis at the time, later searched out the records of the campaign to confirm what he had heard, discovering—
… that mobs trailed Charles Lindbergh, Sr…. He was arrested on charges of conspiracy along with the Nonpartisan Leaguers; a rally at Madison, Minnesota, was broken up with fire hoses; he was hanged in effigy in Red Wing, dragged from the speaking platform, threatened with lynching, and he escaped from one town amid a volley of shots.
While there was only talk of tar and feathers, there was an actual record of “the vicious, vituperative, life-threatening mob action against a man who had fought against the war but once we got into it had said: ‘A few would destroy democracy to win the war and the rest of us would win the war to establish democracy.’” One day that spring several men presented themselves as government agents at the National Capital Press in Washington, D.C., and announced that the printing plates of Lindbergh’s Why Is Your Country at War and Banking and Currency were to be destroyed because of their “seditious” nature. There was never any official record of the incident or its perpetrators, but the goons did their job. The former title was reprinted a few years later, reset from one of the few hundred copies which had already been published and distributed in Minnesota.
Lindbergh lost the governor’s primary by almost fifteen percentage points, but he did not end his political career there. In the summer of 1918 Bernard Baruch invited him to serve on the War Industries Board. Lindbergh was sworn in, but “a storm of protests” from Reserve Banks forced him to resign. He embarked on another venture, in Minneapolis, publishing Lindbergh’s National Farmer, a large-format magazine that would serve as his mouthpiece while he kept a hand in Minnesota’s newest political movement, the coalition between farmers and labor. With Farmer-Labor support, he ran for his old House seat in 1920, only to be trounced by his Republican successor, losing by more than a two-to-one margin.
Swearing off politics, Lindbergh went fishing for new business involvements—a bank, a book, and real estate. His missives to his son were mostly advisory, about finances or farming, occasionally about his professional life. He sent money home in dribs and drabs, only when it was absolutely necessary, and he deeded the Little Falls property over to Charles a few parcels at a time.
With America at war, C.A. felt the farm should step up food production. He stocked it with cattle and sheep, which doubled Charles’s duties. “Ours is a grand country and our flag is the Flag,” C.A. wrote Charles, inspiriting him for the hard work ahead; “—keep it flying, not as an approval that we like the political machine, but that it represents our country …”
On top of basic farm chores, Charles still had his final year of high school to complete. If the road into town was not too snowy, he would bicycle to Little Falls High, often coming home for lunch; if the path was too thick, he would walk—even when temperatures dropped to forty degrees below zero. For the first time, Charles found himself excelling in a few subjects, Physics and Mechanical Drawing; but he found it almost impossible to stay interested in school with all the challenges of the farm. By the second term it seemed unlikely that he would pass the final examinations required for a diploma.
Then one day at a school assembly, the principal announced that “food was so badly needed in connection with the war that any student who wanted to work on a farm could leave school and still receive full academic credit just as though he had attended his classes and taken examinations.” Charles would return to Little Falls High only once more, on June 5, 1918, to collect his diploma.
Few of his seventy-five classmates had ever even spoken to him; and years later, when a magazine tried to capture Charles’s life in Little Falls, his former classmates could barely sketch a picture of an outsider. “Nobody recalls young Lindbergh’s ever having attended a social function or having looked at a girl,” read the article. “His favorite pastime was to hang around Martin Engstrom’s hardware store, where he could gaze at the latest mechanical gadgets …”
Making plans for farm expansion, Charles read up on animal husbandry, and he decided to breed Guernsey cattle, Duroc-Jersey hogs, Shropshire sheep, leghorn chickens, and Toulouse geese. “I concluded that the farm should be mechanized and ordered a La Cross three-wheeled tractor with a two-gang plow,” Lindbergh recalled. “Later I ordered and installed an Empire milking machine and took on the Empire agency for the general Little Falls area.”
Even with the assistance of a seventy-year-old Norwegian tenant farmer named Daniel Thompson, Charles spent most of his days alone among the heifers and ewes his father had bought. C.A. had got a very good price on the latter because, in fact, they were half-starved. Unfortunately, when lambing time came, most of the mothers died, leaving Charles and Evangeline to nurse the offspring. Every morning he would bring little wet lambs to the kitchen where they warmed them in baskets or tubs and fed them milk from bottles. Some literally died in their laps; but Charles and Evangeline saved sixty of them. The cows were a lot easier to raise but required great amounts of time, as some of them refused to be milked by anyone but Charles.
By the spring of 1918, Charles also had six thousand chicks along with their many other birds. The incubators had to be kept at an even temperature, which meant that during cold nights Charles repeatedly had to awaken himself to regulate them. One morning, however, he found the room black with smoke. The incubator lamp had malfunctioned, roasting all the chicks and burning thousands of eggs.
When he was not tending the animals, trees had to be cut, barked, notched, and fitted to make log houses for the hogs. A suspension bridge needed to be built over Pike Creek, fences had to be built or mended, ice had to be hauled. After experimenting with concrete, he poured a small pond for his ducks, about one yard in diameter and a few inches deep. “I tried to make the sides slope in such a way that the freezing of water in winter would not crack them and so that small ducklings could climb out in summer regardless of the water level.” He called his circular creation the “Moo Pond,” having been told that “moo” was the Chippewa word for dirty. He signed his name to his handiwork, and added that of his companion Wahgoosh as well. After eighty years of extreme Minnesota weather, the pond remains without a single crack in it.
At a farm auction on November 11, 1918, activity was suspended when the auctioneer stopped gabbling to announce that the armistice in Europe had been signed. “Time was allowed for celebration before the sale continued,” Lindbergh later wrote about that moment. Most of the older men who farmed Morrison County knew what they had to return to, but Lindbergh was at a crossroads. He had assumed the war would continue at least until his eighteenth birthday, at which time he would enlist in the armed services. Beyond that he thought he might take a university course in engineering.
Just days before Charles’s seventeenth birthday—February 1, 1919—C.A. wrote a letter appraising his son and praising him as well. It was a rare document not only because it marked one of the few times he remembered his son’s birthday but also because its sentiments were as unmasked as any he ever revealed to Charles. He suggested that Charles make a few changes in his life, that he ease up and enjoy himself more. “I am not disappointed with you in any way,” C.A. wrote. “I like to see you want to work, but don’t want you to overdo the work. I have one thing that I take pride in above all others, and that is that you are able to buck the world alone and independent if it was necessary. I love that quality in a person, and especially in you, because it was hardly forced on you. You gripped it yourself.”
Keeping busy kept Charles from feeling lonely. The only times he indulged himself were at night, when he would escape by the golden light of his kerosene lantern. He had discovered the writings of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who wrote spellbinding accounts of his life among the Eskimos; and he took a shine to poet Robert W. Service, some of whose ballads he had even committed to memory, such as this stanza from “The Law of the Yukon”:
This is the Law of the Yukon; that only
the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the Weak shall perish, and
only the Fit survive.
And beginning with the November 1917 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, he thrilled at “Tam o’ the Scoots,” a cliff-hanging serial of a bold, blue-eyed Scottish pilot during the Great War, in nineteen parts.
There was, of course, a bonnie lass at the end of the stories, but the pretty girl was not what intrigued Lindbergh. For this solitary boy up in Minnesota, Tam “represented chivalry and daring in my own day as did King Arthur’s knights in childhood stories. If I joined the Army,” Lindbergh had decided, “I would apply for the branch of aviation and, if possible, learn to be the pilot of a scout.”
For months Charles had even begun to dream of having a plane of his own. During the war he had become addicted to newspaper accounts of aerial combat, anything he could read about Fonck and Richtofen and Rickenbacker and the gallants of the Lafayette Escadrille. And when the war ended, there were still a few more installments of “Tam o’ the Scoots” to run in Everybody’s that he would read—before undressing in the warmth of the sewing room of the Little Falls house, putting on an old fur-lined coat of his father’s, and crawling through a window into his bed outside on the sleeping porch. On cold winter nights, Wahgoosh would crawl in beside him. Evangeline would step outside briefly to shake her son’s hand goodnight.
In the morning, Wahgoosh would join Charles in a bowl of coffee. Wahgoosh took his with cream and sugar. One morning Evangeline called repeatedly for the dog, but he would not come. Later, Charles found him dead in the well. A deranged neighbor, apparently so enraged at the sheer happiness of Charles’s only friend, had beaten the playful fox terrier to death with a crowbar.
Charles kept putting off his decision about the future, opting to keep working the farm. For the first time since infancy, he stayed in one place for more than a year. But after eighteen years of transience, he was ambivalent about staying in Little Falls indefinitely. On one hand, he enjoyed working the Minnesota soil of his forefathers; on the other, he was intrigued with modern machinery and wanted to see more of the world. He bought himself a twin-cylinder Excelsior motorcycle and was exhilarated by “its power and speed”; but he did not know where he wanted to go. His parents told him repeatedly that a college degree “helps you get along in later life.”
Thinking he might become a mechanical engineer, he scouted Midwestern colleges and selected the University of Wisconsin in Madison—“probably more because of its nearby lakes than because of its high engineering standards.” He began the “difficult and rather heartbreaking procedure” of liquidating the farm’s assets, its equipment and animals. And by the end of the summer of 1920, new tenants were working the land.
Then the eighteen-year-old rode his Excelsior 350 miles from Little Falls to Madison. Except for a handful of days here and there over the next few years, Charles would never live on the farm again.
Late that summer, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh also made a big decision about her future. She packed a bag for Madison.