The Spirit of St. Louis before Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight, May 1927.
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RELIGION MAY HAVE VANQUISHED SCIENCE (AT LEAST ACCORDING to the law) in the Scopes case but modernity was a juggernaut that could not easily be turned back. In the 1920s numerous new technologies transformed the way people lived and worked, but the development of flight was perhaps the fastest-paced and the most revolutionary of the changes taking place. Man was a terrestrial creature and to imagine him moving through the air like a bird required a leap of faith and imagination as well as of machinery. Orville and Wilbur Wright had achieved lift-off for the first time at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina in 1903. The Frenchman Louis Blériot successfully crossed the English Channel six years later. The Great War stimulated a new interest in aviation and by its end in 1918 planes were being used for fighting as well as reconnaissance. Over 50,000 aircraft were built in Britain alone during the war years.
The French, whose flying aces (aviators who had downed five enemy aircraft) had found international fame as gladiators of the air during the war, were as interested in the possibilities of peacetime flight as the Americans. The International Air Traffic Association (IATA) was founded in Paris in 1919. Ten years later it had twenty-three members and its headquarters in The Hague attempted to standardize timetables and safety systems. Established in 1923, Air Union ferried passengers—75 percent of whom were Americans in these early years—across the English Channel. It merged with Air Orient in 1933 to form Air France. Early flight conditions were an unsettling combination of discomfort and luxury: passengers were expected to be up at dawn to catch their planes and even the shortest flights might make numerous emergency landings en route, but they were lavished with caviar while on board.
America’s first air-mail service began in 1918, shuttling daily between New York and Washington. From 1923 the Post Office started contracting air-mail deliveries to private companies, and the following year letters could be sent across the continent by air mail from New York to San Francisco via Chicago and Cheyenne. In 1926 the Air Commerce Act was passed, giving the U.S. Government power to regulate and encourage commercial aviation by building a national network of post routes, airports, beacons, floodlights, boundary markers and weather stations. The service was almost prohibitively expensive, though: until 1928, when it was reduced to a flat rate of five cents a letter, air-mail postage might cost twenty-five cents at a time when a land-mail postcard stamp cost only one cent.
From the start air mail was closely linked to passenger air travel. Because flying was so expensive, pilots flying the first air-mail routes were encouraged to carry paying passengers. But mail planes could only accommodate one or two passengers alongside the pilot, so transporting people rather than mailbags wasn’t initially seen as a viable commercial enterprise. All that would change in 1927.
In the spring of 1922, a shy college dropout from Minnesota enrolled as the only student at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation’s flying school in the provincial city of Lincoln. At the end of the first week, during which he had begun his practical training as an aviation mechanic, twenty-year-old Charles Lindbergh was taken up for his inaugural flight. He was as captivated as he had known he would be. As a child, Lindbergh had spent long afternoons lying on his back in a field near his house, screened by long grass, dreaming of swooping and floating among the clouds above him.
He used to imagine himself with wings, “soaring through the air from one river bank to the other, over the stones of the rapids, above log jams, above the tops of trees and fences.” But the reality of flight was even more thrilling than he had hoped. In the air, he wrote later, “I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.” From the first second of that lift-off he knew that he had found his path in life. Just ten years of flying, he believed, “would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”
Flying became for him an almost mystical experience. Lindbergh described flying by moonlight as times of transcendence. “Its light floods through woods and fields; reflects up from bends of rivers; shines on the silver wings of my biplane, turning them a greenish hue. It makes the earth seem more of a planet; and me a part of the heavens above it, as though I too had the right to an orbit in the sky.”
In 1924 Lindbergh enrolled in the army’s new Air Service from which, two years later, he graduated first in his class. An army doctor who examined him during this period noted his perfect hearing and sight, describing him as an “optimum type—slow and purposeful, yet quick of reaction, alert, congenial, [and] intelligent.” Lindbergh set himself the highest of standards for his conduct as well as his physical achievements, listing fifty-nine qualities towards which he strove including Diligence, Manliness, Zeal, Reserve, Concentration and Balance.
As he perfected his craft during the early 1920s Lindbergh notched up his hours working as a stunt pilot, barnstorming through the country offering rides to anyone with $5 or performing tricks under the name “Daredevil Lindbergh.”
Parachute-jumping and wing-walking were both regarded as suicidal—especially when the plane was looping the loop—but the fearless Lindbergh insisted that with careful preparation and precautions the risks were minimal. At college, he and a friend had amused themselves by shooting coins out of each other’s fingers at fifty feet; being wired up to a wing at a hundred miles an hour, even if it was upside down, was hardly a frightening prospect by comparison.
When the St. Louis air-mail service opened in April 1926 Lindbergh was chosen as the route’s chief pilot. He and two other aviators flew five round trips a week between Chicago and St. Louis for the handsome salary of $400 a month. Their planes were army-salvage de Havilland observation bi-planes with single engines, fondly known as Flaming Coffins because so few pilots survived crashing them.
Two hundred people came to St. Louis’s Lambert airfield to watch the dedication ceremony before Lindbergh took off on the city’s first official mail flight. He and his fellow pilots, postal clerks and executives “felt we were taking part in an event which pointed the way toward a new and marvelous era.” But to Lindbergh’s disappointment, popular interest declined after that first burst of enthusiasm. For him, flight combined “science, freedom, beauty [and] adventure” and he was evangelical about the future of aviation, taking immense pride in being part of “man’s conquest of the air.” To ordinary people, though, an air-mail letter or even a flight in an airplane at a county fair were diverting gimmicks rather than heralds of a dazzling new future.
Lindbergh and his team were the explorers of the age, flying long distances in uncertain conditions in insecure planes. To begin with, they flew without night-flying equipment, carrying only a pocket torch (“pilot furnished,” Lindbergh wryly noted) and an emergency flare, although eventually they were given red and green navigation lights. Despite these conditions Lindbergh’s St Louis-Chicago run had the best record among the routes converging on Chicago, successfully completing 99 percent of their scheduled flights.
Several times, in poor weather, Lindbergh was forced to make crash landings on to Midwestern cornfields and cow pastures. He became known as the only pilot to have successfully saved his own life four times by parachuting out of his failing plane. His former Staff Sergeant wrote to congratulate him on his escapes: “It appears to me as though you are favored by the angels.”
Although Lindbergh loved the camaraderie and pioneering spirit of mail-route life, he was soon made restless by its monotony. As he flew along the same route day after day he dreamed up new challenges for himself, the most persistent of which was the idea of flying the Atlantic. In 1919 two English pilots, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, had flown the 2,000 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland. In the same year Raymond Orteig, a French-born hotelier living in New York, had focused pilots’ attention on the 3,600-mile New York-Paris route by offering a prize of $25,000 for the first non-stop flight in either direction.
By 1926 several failed attempts at the Orteig prize had been made. Lindbergh thought he knew why: the planes were too heavy, carrying too many engines and too many pilots and crew members. One French team of four had set off in a magnificent triple-engine bi-plane upholstered with red leather and equipped with a bed and a batch of croissants; only the two pilots had survived the crash at take-off. Lindbergh reckoned that the more weight and engines a plane had, the greater the possibility of failure. What he wanted was simple: “one set of wings, one engine, one pilot.”
Money was his first objective. His own savings of $2,000 wouldn’t cover an aircraft engine, let alone an entire plane. Emphasizing the as-yet-untapped commercial possibilities of air travel and its benefits to St. Louis in particular if it were to become an “aviation city,” Lindbergh persuaded a consortium headed by two businessmen he had taught to fly and his former commanding officer, and supported by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, to guarantee him the $15,000 he estimated he would need. His successful crossing would, he promised, “promote nationwide interest in aeronautics, demonstrate [the] perfection of modern equipment” and help make America “first in the air.”
Finding a plane was more difficult. Lindbergh was well known in Midwestern and military flying circles, but on the East Coast, where the major aeronautical companies were based, he was a nobody. Fokker turned his request down flat. They told him he would need at least $90,000 to buy and outfit one of their specially made planes, but even if he could afford their fee they would reserve the right to veto any pilot attempting an Atlantic flight. And only a fool, they implied, would attempt the flight with fewer than three engines.
Lindbergh deliberately set up his appointment with the Wright Aeronautical Corporation using a five-dollar long-distance telephone call from St. Louis to ensure that he would “get past the girl at the desk.” He invested in a tailor-made suit and a new blue overcoat and suitcase for his trip to New Jersey where the company was based. But his efforts to impress came to nothing. The Wright executive was friendly but told him that the plane in which he was interested, the Wright-Bellanca, was only a prototype. He suggested Lindbergh speak to its designer, Guiseppe Bellanca, and arranged a meeting between them for the following evening. Bellanca was encouraging but, lacking his own production facilities, could only offer Lindbergh the chance to buy a plane in an existing three-motored design for $29,000, double Lindbergh’s entire budget.
Several months later Bellanca got in touch with Lindbergh again. The aggressive young owner of the prototype in which Lindbergh had been interested was willing to sell it for $15,000. Although Lindbergh hesitated over the price, his backers agreed to cover the cost. But as he held out the check, Charles Levine, the plane’s owner, added a caveat: he, too, reserved the right to choose the plane’s crew. “You understand we cannot let just anybody pilot our airplane across the ocean.”
Furious, Lindbergh had just one option left: the tiny Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego, which had started out building planes from war-surplus aircraft parts. He went to California to discuss the plane he hoped they could build him. Ryan was based in the port area of San Diego and comprised one dilapidated building with “no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines warming up; and the unmistakable smell of dead fish from a nearby cannery [mixed] with the banana odor of dope from drying wings,” but Lindbergh was immediately impressed by its workmanlike approach. With a Wright-Whirlwind engine and any extras included at cost price, Ryan would charge Lindbergh and his sponsors $10,580 to build the Spirit of St Louis.
While his plane was being built Lindbergh spent his days meticulously studying nautical charts, planning his route (using fifty-cent drugstore maps for his journey over American land) and writing endless “To do” lists. He worked closely with Ryan’s chief engineer, Donald Hall, to mold the plane around his needs, adapting everything to his long-distance flight plans and his own experience.
Flight efficiency was to be the primary consideration, then safety in case of a crash, and finally Lindbergh’s own comfort. Everything unnecessary—even night-flying equipment, a radio, a sextant and gauges on the gasoline tanks—was jettisoned for the sake of weight. Every pound saved meant the plane could travel further without refueling. Lindbergh turned down the idea of an additional cockpit because the space could be used to store more gasoline. “I’d rather have extra gasoline than an extra man.”
The empty plane, made of spruce and piano wire and covered in cotton finished with cellulose acetate dope in silver-grey, weighed 2150lb, of which five hundred pounds was the air-cooled, 223-hp radial Wright-Whirlwind propeller engine stored in the nose of the fuselage. “Nine delicate, fincovered cylinders of aluminum and steel,” mused Lindbergh. “On this intricate perfection I’m to trust my life across the Atlantic Ocean.”
The Spirit of St Louis stood just under ten feet tall. She was nearly twenty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of forty-six feet, and carried 450 gallons of gasoline and forty spare pounds of oil. She was a monoplane, because single wings could cope better with ice in the freezing nighttime conditions high above the North Atlantic. Lindbergh’s seat in the cockpit was made of lightweight wicker.
Her accident equipment was minimal: a small black rubber raft weighing ten pounds; a knife; some flares and matches stored in bicycle inner-tubes; basic fishing equipment; a hacksaw; some “awful” crumbly army-ration chocolate-like stuff. A parachute, weighing twenty pounds, was rejected—it meant losing twenty minutes’ worth of fuel. Even drinking water Lindbergh thought would weigh too much; he ordered the prototype of a newly invented cup that would convert moisture from his breath into water.
Lindbergh himself was the last item, six foot two tall and (clothed) weighing a slim 170 pounds. He planned to wear a zippered flying suit made of wool-lined waterproof cloth weighing nine pounds, specially chosen because it would keep him warm if he crashed, even when wet. Underneath the flying suit he would wear army breeches and boots, a shirt and light jacket and a red-and-blue-striped tie. His vulnerability on the flight, alone and out of all contact, would be intense. “For the first time in my life,” his mother Evangeline wrote to him, “I realize that Columbus also had a mother.”
Spirit was ready towards the end of April 1927. Inspired by Lindbergh’s quiet determination, knowing that other teams were preparing to make their own attempts at the flight, Ryan’s thirty-five men had worked for long hours, often without pay, to finish her as quickly as possible. Lindbergh spent ten days performing twenty-three test flights. Spirit’s top speed was 128 mph and he tested her take-off carrying 350 gallons of fuel. He was delighted to find that her performance was far beyond what he had hoped for.
Further encouragement had come that March with news of the arrival in Paris of a French team from Tehran, a non-stop journey of 3,200 miles, admittedly overland. In April information arrived about some of the other teams attempting the New York-Paris flight. Two of the U.S. teams, a $100,000 Fokker and the Bellanca owned by Charles Levine (who had decided to use his own pilots to make his own bid for the prize), had encountered problems and were waiting for repairs to be completed; a pair of French former flying aces had crashed during their final test flight and been killed; a two-man team sponsored by the American Legion had also crashed, killing both pilots. Lindbergh was shaken by his fellow pilots’ bad luck, but the fact that his rivals’ planes were large, multi-engine craft confirmed his conviction that the Spirit of St Louis was the airplane best fitted to successfully fly the Atlantic.
On 10 May Lindbergh took off from San Diego headed for New York, stopping for a night in St. Louis to consult with his backers about the competition—and casually breaking the records for the fastest times from the Pacific coast to St. Louis, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts. Two days earlier two French flying aces had taken off for New York from Le Bourget airfield outside Paris in their single-engine bi-plane, L’oiseau blanc. By the time Lindbergh landed at Curtiss Field in Long Island on the afternoon of 12 May, hopes of the French team arriving in New York were fading.
The two American planes waiting to make their Atlantic attempts were in nearby hangars, and Lindbergh was surprised to find a spirit of cooperation and shared endeavor among the engineers and aviation companies there. People who had been unwilling to help him when he wanted to find a plane to fly across the Atlantic, or who were attached to one of the other teams waiting to make their attempt, were happily making repairs to Lindbergh’s instruments, checking over his engines, sharing weather information or offering him free use of their runways. Men who had been far-off heroes to Lindbergh—one of those who had developed the Whirlwind engine in his plane, the French flying ace René Fonck, and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker—stopped by his hangar to wish him luck.
Lindbergh’s youth, his good looks and the courage of his decision to fly solo all combined to make him the focus of unrelenting journalistic attention for the first time since he had declared his intention of competing for the Orteig prize. At press conferences he was asked questions like, “Have you got a sweetheart?” and “How do you feel about girls?” Reporters called him the Flyin’ Fool and pushed their way into his bedroom hoping to steal a picture of him shaving in his pajamas; from then on, Lindbergh locked his door. So many journalists crowded the airfield when he landed after one test flight that he broke his tail skid trying to avoid them.
Thirty thousand enthusiasts came out to Curtiss Field on the Sunday before Lindbergh’s flight. He received hundreds of good-luck letters and telegrams from fans, many offering advice or hoping to interest him in business propositions, many more hoping he would post their letters in Paris. Interested grandees like Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Harry Guggenheim wished him well. Lindbergh fended off requests from theatrical agents and Hollywood producers promising to make him a star.
When his mother arrived from Detroit to say goodbye she refused to kiss him for the photographers, protesting that they came “of an undemonstrative Nordic race” (the Lindberghs’ independent, non-conformist Swedish-Scottish bloodlines made them the anti-immigration lobby’s idea of ideal Americans) but a tabloid faked one of them kissing anyway. The usually unperturbed Lindbergh was angry. “They didn’t care how much they hurt her feelings or frightened her about my flight, as long as they got their pictures and their stories.”
After ten days, Lindbergh heard that the overcast weather was forecast to break the next day and he decided to leave the following morning—before his rivals, who he guessed would wait until they knew for sure that the cloud cover was clearing. Only a mail pilot, with flying experience in all weathers, would have dared start his journey in such uncertain conditions.
After a sleepless night, Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field at 7.51 on the windless, rain-sodden morning of 20 May in front of a crowd of several hundred. Spirit, fully laden with 451 gallons of gasoline, bounced along the runway and cleared the telegraph wires at the end of the field by just twenty feet. A newspaper plane flew alongside him as far as Long Island Sound. News came over the wire that Lloyd’s of London were not taking bets on Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris because they considered he had too slim a chance of making it. Fortunately, without a radio he would not have heard it.
The thirty-five-mile stretch of ocean between Long Island and Connecticut was the longest expanse of water Lindbergh had yet flown over. When he reached the Atlantic coast, “looking ahead at the unbroken horizon and limitless expanse of water,” he was “struck by my arrogance in attempting such a flight.” His little Spirit resembled nothing more than “a butterfly blown out to sea” but to him she felt more like “a living partner in adventure than a machine of cloth and steel.”
America held its breath. “Alone?’ demanded Harold Anderson in the New York Sun. “Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Enterprise? . . . Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?”
For the next twenty-eight hours Lindbergh fought off sleep, kept awake by the instability of his plane—“this little box with fabric walls”—an unexpected blessing because it meant he could not switch off for a second. He preferred not to eat, knowing that his empty stomach would also keep him alert, and kept the plastic windows out of their frames, fearing the barrier they would create between him and the outside elements, the crystal “communion of water, land and sky.”
He was acutely conscious of his vulnerability as he flew over Newfoundland. “Nine barrels of gasoline and oil, wrapped up in fabric; two hundred and twenty horsepower, harnessed by a layer of cloth—vulnerable to a pin prick, yet protecting an airplane and its pilot on a flight across an ocean, between the continents—suspended at this moment five hundred feet above a frigid, northern land.”
And yet there was also a strange sense of security and peace. Life had suddenly become wholly simple. His cockpit was tailored to him “like a suit of clothes”: “Each dial and lever is in the proper place for glance or touch; and the slightest pressure on the controls brings response.” The only thing he had to do was fly, and that felt “like living in a hermit’s mountain cabin after being surrounded by the luxury and countless responsibilities of a city residence.” He became minutely conscious of every detail of his surroundings—the weld marks on the tubing, a dot of paint on the altimeter’s face—and “the grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life.” He was utterly alone.
The urge to sleep was strongest in the dark, when he was over open water. It felt like a leaden coat pressing down upon his shoulders. He forced himself to squeeze his dry eyes open and shut, to stamp on the floor of the cockpit, shaking the tiny plane, to flex his cramped muscles as he sat. Concentration was his only weapon against sleep—the power of his mind over his body. Relentlessly he made himself think of possible problems and how he would deal with them, created imaginary emergencies, checked and rechecked his route, envisaged how he would cope if he crashed.
Throughout the freezing, misty, moonless night, ghostly spirits crowded around him in the tiny cockpit, “neither intruders nor strangers,” speaking intangible messages of great importance, discussing the flight, offering advice, reassuring him. Dazed with exhaustion, Lindbergh accepted them as normal because he was so far removed from everyday life, existing only in “this strange, living dream.” The next day he could not remember a word the spirits had said to him.
Mirages of land appeared on the horizon in front of him alongside shimmering ice cakes and vast icebergs. For a time he flew with his head thrown back, looking up through the skylight at the stars just visible in the thickening night fog and the mountainous clouds, racing perilous ice-storms. He was entirely “conscious of the minuteness of my plane and of the magnitude of the world.”
“Aren’t my silver wings fully as remarkable as those Daedalus made of wax and feathers?” Lindbergh wondered. “Sometimes, flying feels too god-like to be attained by man.” The implications of his record-breaking solo flight, should he survive it, pressed upon him. “Will men fly through the air in the future without seeing what I have seen, without feeling what I have felt? Is that true of all things we call human progress—do the gods retire as commerce and science advance?”
Waiting for dawn in the unmarked night over cold unfriendly seas, on the second morning of his journey (and the third without sleep), he felt senseless, accomplishing only what he needed to do to survive in a state of semiconsciousness. After more than twenty hours of flight, Lindbergh remembered that he had smelling salts in his medical kit. He broke open one of the capsules but was so out of touch with reality that he could not smell it and his eyes did not water. He felt as though he was hanging in space, divorced from his body. Finally he saw beneath him harbingers of land: a porpoise leaping through the water, then a gull, then the black specks of fishing boats—and at last the emerald-green fields of the west coast of Ireland.
When he reached the mouth of the Seine nearly five hours later he remembered that he had neither eaten nor drunk anything since leaving New York. Someone had handed him five drugstore sandwiches as he left and he attempted a few mouthfuls before packing them carefully away. His mouth was too dry to swallow and he didn’t want to taint his landing with discarded sandwich wrappings. He flew over Paris, which looked like a “lake of stars,” and circled the Eiffel Tower (then the tallest man-made structure in the world) at 4,000 feet, waggling his wings.
Lindbergh’s moment of greatest confusion came when he arrived at Le Bourget airfield on the outskirts of Paris, just over thirty-three hours after he had lifted off. Where the empty field should have been was an erratic pattern of lights, dimming the beacons he was expecting to see, and a long string of pairs of lights reaching off into the distance. Flying past a second time, he realized that these were the headlights of thousands of Parisians coming out to greet him.
In the crowds beneath him were Harry and Caresse Crosby, marveling at the crowds, the colored flares and the great floodlights sweeping the sky. Lindbergh’s engine whirred like a toy as he circled the field in preparation for landing. Lost and then captured in the moving lights, the Spiritgleamed and flashed in the night sky like a shark darting through water. A mood of suspense built as they waited for his approach. “Then sharp swift in the gold glare of the searchlights a small white hawk of a plane swoops hawk-like down and across the field—C’est lui Lindberg [sic], LINDBERG! And there is a pandemonium, wild animals let loose and a stampede towards the plane . . . thousands of hands weaving like maggots over the silver wings of the Spirit of Saint-Louis . . . scratching and tearing.”
The 150,000-strong crowd surged on to the runway as Spirit landed and the mob lifted Lindbergh out of the plane. He said later that “it was like drowning in a human sea.” A couple of French pilots, realizing how disorientated Lindbergh must be, quickly threw a coat over his shoulders, took off his helmet and placed it on the head of a nearby American reporter, and spirited him into the airfield’s office, leaving his substitute to the crowds, who carried the wrong man triumphantly towards the official reception committee. His hosts laughed off Lindbergh’s worries about not having a French visa; France was his, they said. After meeting the American ambassador, at whose house he was to stay, his new friends bundled him into a car bound for Paris by back roads. Spirit was left under armed guard to protect her from souvenir hunters.
News of the hero’s safe arrival was wired to New York and bells rang out across the country. That night, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, a new version of the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, was danced in Lindbergh’s honor to accompanying screams of “Lindy’s done it, Lindy’s done it!”
Ambassador Herrick’s motorcade took so long to get back to Paris through the celebrating throngs that Lindbergh had eaten his first meal in two days (light soup and an egg) and had a bath by the time his host arrived home at 3 a.m. After a short press briefing Lindbergh got into bed, sixty-three hours after he had last slept.
Herrick cabled Evangeline Lindbergh in Detroit: “Warmest congratulations Stop Your incomparable son has honored me by being my guest Stop He is in fine condition and sleeping sweetly under Uncle Sams roof.” When she went out to meet the press, Evangeline’s usual restraint failed her. With tears in her eyes, she said that although she had never doubted that her son would complete his journey, “I am so happy that it is over, more happy than I can ever tell . . . He has accomplished the greatest undertaking of his life, and I am proud to be the mother of such a boy.”
The next few days—and weeks, and months—passed in a whirl. When, next afternoon, Herrick led Lindbergh on to a balcony to wave to the cheering crowds below, he realized that his flight had transformed his life forever. Aged twenty-five, he had become public property. Everywhere he went people pressed forward to shake his hand, to touch his clothes, to congratulate and applaud him. From then on, he reflected years later, life “could hardly have been more amazing if I had landed on another planet instead of at Paris.”
Harry Crosby and his father were among hundreds who called on Herrick to meet Lindbergh the day after his landing. Thousands more lined the streets every time he ventured out in public. Lindbergh insisted on calling on the parents of the French airmen who had disappeared while making their Atlantic attempt two weeks earlier. He paid his respects to Louis Blériot, who told him that he was his heir “and the prophet of a new era.” Most of his time was spent at receptions and meeting the press. He was presented with the Legion of Honor. Everywhere his behavior was marked by patience, good-humor, courtesy and humility—an achievement, as one historian observes, even more impressive than his flight.
After a week of official engagements and adulation, Lindbergh left Paris for England, spending a night in Belgium en route. In London he met the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and was personally congratulated by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. George V presented him with Britain’s highest peacetime honor, the Air Force Cross, but a more private matter was of greater interest to him: “Now tell me, Captain Lindbergh. There is one thing I long to know. How did you pee?”
At the beginning of June, Lindbergh returned to the United States aboard the USS Memphis. As the gunship cruised up the Potomac towards Washington, Lindbergh was given a twenty-one-gun salute—a tribute previously reserved for heads of state. Over the next three months Lindbergh toured the country attending parades, receptions and benefits in his honor, promoting and “stimulating popular interest in the use of air transport.” Countless reams of ticker tape filled the air as an estimated thirty million people turned out to see him in eighty-two cities. During his tour he was only late for one appointment.
Hoping to tempt Lindbergh into starring in a biopic opposite Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst hosted a dinner for him in New York at which the bashful young aviator sat between Davies and Mary Pickford. Halfway through, Pickford slipped Davies a note: “He won’t talk.” Davies wrote back, “Talk about airplanes.” In Detroit, Lindbergh took Henry Ford up for his first flight. Al Capone was on Chicago’s official welcoming committee when Lindbergh landed on Lake Michigan in a seaplane.
Lindbergh’s solo flight created an extraordinary level of interest in aviation. Harry Crosby was not the only man inspired by Lindbergh to take to the skies (“I do know how to fly in the final and real sense of the word that is in the soul Flights to the Sun but now I want to learn also in the Lindbergian sense of the word,” he wrote). As Gloria Swanson put it, after Lindbergh’s flight, “everybody wanted wings.”
Applications for pilots’ licenses went up by 300 percent in 1927. New airfields were laid; the manufacture of aircraft soared. Ryan Aircraft, who had made the Spirit, received twenty-nine orders for new aircraft within weeks of Lindbergh’s flight and were soon manufacturing three planes a week. In 1928 Wright Aeronautical stock soared from 69 points to 289.
The companies that would become United Airlines, American Airlines, Eastern Airlines and Trans-World Airlines were founded, carrying twelve or fifteen passengers rather than the one or two whom mail pilots had occasionally transported. In 1928, the same year that the Havana Air Convention established the first rules for air traffic in the Americas, Pan American Airways used Lindbergh to publicize their international mail routes between the US, the Caribbean and South and Central America. By the spring of 1929 there were sixty-one U.S. passenger airlines and forty-seven air-mail companies.
The popularity of flying mirrored the advent of the motorcar at the start of the century, which had brought with it a host of new industries and infrastructures, from a network of roads to soaring steel, rubber and petroleum production. People began speaking of transatlantic passenger and mail routes as certainties, rather than as science fiction. In an era transformed by technological developments from the telephone to nylon to typewriters to electricity, a new airborne world had arrived. Lindbergh, who had loved “the sky’s unbroken solitude,” feared what the spread of aviation might lead to. “I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fences encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.”
In the rush towards the future, the negative aspects of progress and technological advancement were ignored. Nature was seen not as a treasure to be conserved and husbanded, but as a resource to be used up. In Middletown even before Lindbergh’s flight, people no longer walked or rode their bicycles, they scorned home-grown and home-made food in favor of shop-bought and were unable to fish the town’s polluted river, stinking with industrial run-off. But as the Lynds observed, people themselves had changed far less than the objects they dealt with every day: “Bathrooms and electricity have pervaded the homes of the city more rapidly than innovations in the personal adjustments between husbands and wives or between parents and children.” Those would come later.
Another fundamental social change revealed by Lindbergh’s flight and his extraordinary personal popularity was the introduction of the idea of modern celebrity. Americans made Lindbergh into a symbol of all that was best and purest about their country. He was modest, idealistic, a prophet of the future and yet untainted by modernity, radiantly handsome, virtuous, disciplined, selfreliant—in short everything that Americans aspired to be, as well as a blank canvas on to which people could project their dreams and fantasies. Former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes declared that Lindbergh had “displaced everything that is petty, that is sordid, that is vulgar”; a journalist said that Lindbergh had “shown us that we are not rotten at the core but morally sound and sweet and good.” He was, wrote Frederick Allen, a “Galahad for a generation which had forsworn Galahads.”
Lindbergh’s achievement brought him fame, riches and a wife (Anne, the daughter of Dwight Morrow, a J. P. Morgan banker and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico; as a modern 1920s woman, she learned to navigate so that she could work alongside her husband), but it also brought him tragedy. On 1 March 1932, Charles and Anne’s baby son was kidnapped. After ten agonizing weeks his corpse was found nearby. The publicity surrounding the disappearance of the “Lindbergh baby” and the trial of his abductor was too much to bear. In 1935 the Lindberghs left the United States and spent the next few years in Europe. They returned home in 1939 when war broke out, but Lindbergh’s association with the Third Reich (he received the same award as Henry Ford, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in 1938) and his arguments for non-intervention in the Second World War tarnished his public image. In the years before his death in 1974 he was an ardent conservationist, seeking the balance between nature and technology he had meditated upon during his epic transatlantic flight.
In 1927, only the worldly-wise writers at the New Yorker, while expending as many column inches on Lindbergh as any other publication of the day, expressed the hope that he would be able to readjust to being a man after becoming a god. Detailing his potential earnings, they advised him to be restrained about capitalizing on his achievements and congratulated him rather backhandedly. Simple admiration for the old-fashioned values of courage, strength and modesty that Lindbergh represented seemed to sit uneasily with their hard-won metropolitan sophistication.
Jack Dempsey being given a massage by his trainer, 1925. Although he had been World Heavyweight Champion in six years, at this point he was more focused on his Hollywood career than on defending his title.