Tribute: "Lucky Lindy"

He was a phenomenon of the 1920's, like bathtub gin and Gershwin. And in lots of ways he was just like the heroes of old. He was brave and handsome. Like David facing Goliath, he went forth alone. Like Daniel Boone or Lewis and Clark, he was an authentic American pathfinder. Charles Lindbergh was born this date in 1902.

But Lindbergh was something else, too, a new kind of hero. Airplanes were the future and Lindbergh not only flew the Atlantic alone, but with his wife as co-pilot, he opened new routes to Asia, Africa and Latin America, flying longer and farther than anyone. Lindbergh's life itself is the story of one of the most celebrated figures of the century and of a man more complicated and contradictory than often portrayed: a crowd-pleaser who craved seclusion, the man who made the Atlantic Ocean seem small in 1927 and who so wrongly thought we could hide behind it in 1941.

"He was only a pilot," some say, yet he wrote beautifully, won the Pulitzer Prize. He was so glamorous, so modest, so Midwestern American. And yet, he seemed to admire the Nazis and in some of the things he said, he sounded very un-American, indeed. In his last crusade, ahead of the crowd, he pleaded for reason and sanity in how we treat the natural world. For Lindbergh, machines were the future no longer.

And for all that has been written and said about him, he remains, in many ways, a mystery.

Roosevelt Field, Long Island, May 20, 1927. A 25-year old airmail pilot decides to take off for Paris, 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Six men have already died in the attempt. He is determined to do it alone.

He was America's greatest hero, the most honored private citizen on earth. He lived a life of absolutes, never doubting his own abilities or the certainty of his own opinions. He was a private man forced to endure agonizing personal tragedy in the full glare of a relentless press. In the air, he seemed to represent what was best about America, but back on the ground, his stubborn prejudice led many of those who had worshipped him to see him as a traitor. And yet, more than half a century after his flight, most people remember only the hero.

He was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902, and was raised on the family farm near Little Falls, Minnesota, on the West bank of the Mississippi. His father was a Swedish immigrant's son, a taciturn Minnesota lawyer and congressman so stoical that he once endured an operation on his stomach without anesthetic. He taught his son to be stoical, too. When young Charles fell into the Mississippi, his father refused to jump in after him, confident the boy would teach himself to swim.

His mother Evangeline, was a high school teacher overprotective of her only child, but distant. To the end of her life, she and her son shook hands before she went to bed.

His parents' marriage fell apart when he was five and he spent a restless boyhood divided between them. Charles attended 11 schools, but did well at none, made few friends, showed no interest in girls, was subdued and serious and unfailingly solicitous of each of his parents. "I seem to be more of a kid than he does sometimes," his father told a friend.

In 1918, he served as his father's driver during his race for governor of Minnesota. The campaign was a disaster. His father opposed America's entry into World War I and was denounced as a traitor, pelted with eggs and rocks, shot at, hanged in effigy. His son never forgot the crowds and clamor and the danger they had posed or the proud silence his father displayed.

Young Charles loved speed and danger and testing his own courage. He enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Wisconsin, but ignored his studies and was asked to leave in his sophomore year. By then, he was determined to escape. "When I was a child," Lindbergh remembered, "I spent hours lying on my back, watching white cumulus clouds drift overhead. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if I had an airplane. Then I would ride on the wind and be part of the sky."

He signed up for lessons with a Nebraska aircraft manufacturer and never forgot his first airplane ride. "Trees became bushes, barns toys. Cows turned into rabbits as we climbed. I lose all conscious connection with the past," he wrote. "I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger."

Lindbergh began as a barnstormer's assistant. He was billed as "Daredevil Lindbergh," but his fellow barnstormers called him "Slim." In 1923, even before he had received his pilot's license, he sold his motorcycle and borrowed the rest of the $500 he needed to buy his first plane, a World War I surplus Jenny. Lindbergh flew all over the West with a Brownie camera, his friend Leon Klink and a dog named Booster. Spirals, barrel-rolls, tailspins, figure eights: Lindbergh learned to do them all. He flew anything he could get his hands on, was graduated as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Reserve and in 1926, took a job flying the mail. Thirty- one of the first 40 airmail pilots would be killed. Lindbergh pioneered the route between St. Louis and Chicago. He landed in farmers' fields by flashlight, survived two crashes and soon grew bored. "There's nothing to match yourself against," he said.

For seven years, aviators had dreamed of flying nonstop from New York to Paris and winning the $25,000 Orteig prize. In September of 1926, French ace, Rene Fonck crashed with a crew of three. Two men burned to death. A few days later, flying the mail from Peoria to Chicago, Lindbergh convinced himself that a lone flyer in a far lighter single-engine plane might succeed where Fonck and his crew had failed.

He withdrew his savings, convinced a band of St. Louis citizens that sponsoring the flight would be good for business and persuaded the president of Ryan Airlines of San Diego to build him a plane for $6,000, engine and instruments extra.

To Lindbergh, the weight of his plane was critical. Everything unnecessary was to be left out: a radio, sextant, nightflying equipment, even a parachute. The cockpit was to be placed behind the huge gas tanks because it was safest there in case of a crash, but it also meant unless he peered through a periscope or stuck his head out the side, Lindbergh would be flying blind.

On April 28, right on schedule, his plane was finished. To please his backers, he had named it "The Spirit of St. Louis." On May 10th, Lindbergh left San Diego and headed for New York, the first stop on his way to Paris, navigating with a 50-cent Rand-McNally railroad map spread across his lap. Meanwhile, the race to Paris had continued to take its toll. A team led by the ace Clarence Chamberlain ran into trouble. Richard Byrd, the first man to fly over the North Pole, crashed his tri-motor on a test flight. On the other side of the Atlantic, two Frenchmen, Charles Nungesser and Francois Colli, took off from Paris for New York and were never seen again.

When Lindbergh finally landed on Long Island, he was a sensation. He wanted publicity for the flight, he remembered, but he was put off by the reporters who rushed across the field even before the propellers stopped turning. The odds were so stacked against his lone flight to Paris, the newspapers called him, "The Flying Fool."

His mother came to New York to see her son. "We refused to take the maudlin positions some of the photographers had asked for," he wrote. "The next day, I was startled to see newspaper photographs showing us in exactly those positions. I thought it cheaply sentimental and dishonest."

For eight days, Lindbergh and his rivals were grounded by rain. Then news of a break in the weather sent Lindbergh rushing to the field. He had not slept for 23 hours on the morning he decided to take off. Tension and a newspaperman's noisy poker game had kept him awake all night. And all he packed to keep up his strength during the flight was a quart of water and five sandwiches. "If I get to Paris, I won't need any more," he explained, "and if I don't get to Paris, I won't need any more, either."

Shortly after dawn on May 20th, he pushed down on the throttle and the plane began to move. "The Spirit of St.Louis" had never taken off with a full load of gasoline. It now weighed 2-1/2 tons. He cleared the telephone wires at the end of the field by less than 20 feet and disappeared into the fog. Newspapers reported Lindbergh over New England, then Nova Scotia. Then, he vanished.

Alone, Lindbergh flew on. After 17 hours, 40 without sleep, he had to hold his eyes open with his fingers. Ghosts, he recalled - transparent, mistlike, with semi-human form - seemed to drift in and out of the fabric walls. One thought kept repeating itself: no alternative but death and failure. At last, in his 26th hour. Ireland appeared through the clouds. "It is like rain after a drought," he wrote, "spring after a Northern winter. I know how the dead would feel to live again." He flew on toward Paris, pleased that everything had gone just as he had planned, but he could never have foreseen what was waiting below.

At 10:22 p.m. on May 21, 1927, after 33-1/2 hours in the air, his wheels finally touched the earth. "Never in my life have I seen anything like that human sea," Lindbergh remembered. "Dozens of hands took hold of me, my legs, my arms, my body. I found myself on top of the crowd, in the center of an ocean of heads that extended as far out into the darkness as I could see."

Two French pilots finally rescued him and he spent the rest of the night in the American embassy, wearing pajamas borrowed from the ambassador. Overnight, Lindbergh had become the world's hero, but Americans had other ideas.

Lindbergh later recalled: "When I landed at Le Bourget, I landed with the expectancy of being able to see Europe, but I found that it didn't make much difference whether I wanted to stay over there or not, as I was informed that while it wasn't an order to come back home, that there would be a battleship waiting for me next week."

President Calvin Coolidge dispatched a warship to bring America's hero home. "The Flying Fool," had become "The Lone Eagle." Four and a half million New Yorkers turned out for a glimpse of him as he arrived in New York Harbor and rode up Broadway.

Lindbergh was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the French Legion of Honor and the British Air Force Cross. Four thousand poets composed verse in his honor. He received 100,000 telegrams and cables, 14,000 packages and 3-1/2 million letters: requests for funds, proposals of marriage, the award of the Silver Buffalo from the Boy Scouts, a German shepherd, an airplane, a lifetime pass from the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. And there were job offers that would make him a wealthy man.

In the air, he still enjoyed the independence and total control he loved, but on the ground, they were increasingly denied to him. The crowds believed he belonged to them. He wished to belong to no one. At Kansas City, admirers rushed onto the airstrip as he came in, forcing him to crash-land in a cornfield. In St. Louis, women fought over a corncob he had gnawed. When he sent his shirts to the laundry, they were kept as mementos. In Little Falls, Minnesota, where the water tower was proudly painted "Hometown of Charles A. Lindbergh," souvenir hunters tore the doorknobs off his boyhood home.

And he came to resent the newspapers' insatiable, intrusive curiosity about him and to do all he could to thwart it. "What is your destination, Colonel Lindbergh?" a reporter asked as he walked to his plane. "Indefinite, as always." "What general direction are you headed?" "up." Some editors wearied of the chase. "No more Lindbergh stories," one told his staff, "unless he crashes."

On December 13, 1927, Lindbergh set off on a goodwill tour of Latin America. In Mexico City, 150,000 people cheered him as he landed, but the person he noticed most was the American ambassador's daughter, Anne Morrow. She was a quiet, gifted poet, on Christmas vacation from Smith College and determined not to make a fool of herself over the most celebrated young man on earth.

Looking back many years later, Lindbergh saw his courtship in genetic terms. "From the standpoint of both individual and species," he wrote, "mating involves the most important choice of life. One mates not only with an individual, but also with that individual's environment and ancestry."

Back in the United States, he began to teach Anne to fly a plane. On May 27, 1929, they managed to be married quietly at the Morrows' home. But reporters followed them on their secret honeymoon cruise, circling 'round and 'round their motor launch for eight hours, hurling bottles in the hope that they could force the couple out on deck for photographs. The newlyweds had no private life, Anne recalled, only public life. "We had no home."

In the quiet countryside near Hopewell, New Jersey, the Lindberghs built themselves a secluded house. Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Junior was born on June 22, 1930. Anne called him, "My fat lamb." On March 1, 1932, Anne and Charles were spending a quiet evening at their new house in Hopewell. Shortly after 10:00 p.m., the nurse went up to check on their son. The baby was gone. Rushing to the nursery, Charles found nothing but the warm blankets in which the baby had been sleeping.

Lindbergh insisted on directing the investigation himself and ransom money was duly delivered at night to a man in a Bronx cemetery, but the child was not returned. Thirty-eight thousand letters arrived in five weeks. Five thousand were from lunatics. Another 12,000 described dreams about the kidnapping. Several letter writers offered the Lindberghs their own children as substitutes. Then, 72 days after the kidnapping, a baby's corpse was found in a shallow grave not far from the house. He had been dead since the night he was taken. Reporters tried to break into the mortuary to snap a photograph. Lindbergh was able to identify his son's decomposed body by examining its teeth.

Three months after the baby's body was found, Anne Lindbergh gave birth to a second son named Jon. Her husband implored the press to allow his new child to grow up normally. Then, on January 2, 1935, a German-born carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptman went on trial for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Ransom money had been found hidden in his garage. He denied everything.

After three years of ceaseless harassment, Lindbergh could no longer bear to live in his own country. In December 1935, after receiving kidnap threats against his surviving son, he took his family and sailed for England.

They found sanctuary in the English countryside. "I do think we did the right thing," Anne wrote home. "We have been bothered very little and seem to be left quietly alone here." His family was safe, but nothing in Charles Lindbergh's life as an aviator had prepared him for the role he would soon choose to play.

Berlin, 1936 - While Nazi Germany played host to the summer Olympics, Adolf Hitler was building a mighty air force. He already claimed to command more warplanes than Britain, but no one knew precisely how large or how powerful his "Luftwaffe" really was. To find out, Lindbergh was invited to visit Germany by the American military attaché at Berlin. The United States government hoped that the presence of the best-known aviator in the world would persuade Air Marshal Hermann Goering to show off German air power.

Lindbergh visited Germany three more times during the next two years. He was given unprecedented access to factories, took the controls of brand-new bombers and took note of fast-multiplying military airfields.

Lindbergh's visits pleased his hosts. "The Germans are a great people," he wrote. He admired their technological skill, their virility, efficiency and emphasis on order. And he made tentative plans to move his family to Berlin where the press could be kept away and he could be near the latest developments in aviation.

Lindbergh was still America's greatest hero in spite of his frequent visits to Germany. Now, he set out to stop the president. Asked by a congressman who he hoped would win the war, Lindbergh answered, "I want neither side to win."

Two days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh volunteered to serve in the war he had so vehemently opposed, but FDR refused to have him. "You can't have an officer leading men who thinks we're licked before we start," an aide explained, "and that's that." It was a humiliating insult. Lindbergh found work as a civilian aviation consultant instead and in 1944, convinced United Aircraft to send him to the Pacific as an observer. There, he convinced his superiors to let him fly combat missions against the Japanese. The 42-year-old Lindbergh showed the younger pilots how to save enough gas to extend their effective range by 500 miles, made strafing runs, flew 50 combat missions and shot down at least one enemy fighter in a dogfight.

In June 1945, Lindbergh flew into defeated Germany, saw the damage Allied bombing had done and visited part of the Belsen concentration camp. He was led to the crematorium by a skeleton of a boy still dressed in his camp stripes. He looked down on a row of large pits filled with ashes. "Twenty-five thousand in a year and a half," the boy told him, "and from each, there is only so much." He cupped his hands together to show the measure.

But Lindbergh could see no difference between victims of Nazi extermination and soldiers who died in combat. "What the German has done to the Jew in Europe," he wrote, "we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific." He still believed he had been right about the war.

The role that Lindbergh had played before the war was soon forgotten. It was Lindbergh, the hero, not the admirer of Hitler's Germany; Lindbergh the aviator, not the believer in racial superiority whom most Americans wanted to remember. President Dwight Eisenhower restored him to the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a brigadier general and he won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Spirit of St. Louis," a book about the flight that had made him famous.

But aviation alone no longer held his interest. He was soon in flight again from the everyday world of ordinary people, seeking in Nature this time, the order and solitude that had eluded him ever since his troubled boyhood.

Toward the end of his life, Lindbergh fell uncharacteristically ill, lost weight, could not stop coughing. Doctors diagnosed cancer. He asked to be flown home to Maui. Lindbergh prepared for his own death as carefully as he had planned his flight to Paris, even saw that his physician filled out and signed his death certificate in advance, leaving only the date blank.

He died early in the morning of August 26, 1974. His funeral was held within three hours so that no reporter could intrude upon his family's private grief. At his request, he was buried in khaki work clothes and wrapped in an old Hudson's Bay blanket within a plain wooden coffin, as if he wanted to return as quickly as possible to the earth he had so often sought to flee.

"Night already shadows the Eastern sky. To my left, low on the horizon, a thin line of cloud is drawing on its evening sheath of black. A moment ago, it was burning red and gold. Trees and buildings and stacks of grain stand shadowless in the diffuse light of evening. In a few moments, it will be dark and I am still south of Peoria." - Charles Linbergh "The Spirit of St. Louis"

Learn more about Charles Lindbergh:
Lindbergh foundation
Charles Lindbergh at Find a Grave.
Charles Lindbergh at the Internet Movie Database.
Listen to the story of Charles Lindbergh online - The American Storyteller Radio Journal
Lindbergh's first solo flight
Yesterday's News: 1927 newspaper article on world reaction to flight
CharlesLindbergh.com Pat Ranfranz
Lindbergh exhibit at the Missouri Historical Society
The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich

Bibliography, credits and sources:
- Berg, A. Scott. Lindbergh. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1998. ISBN 0-399-14449-8.
- Charles, Douglas M. "Informing FDR: FBI Political Surveillance and the Isolationist-Interventionist Foreign Policy Debate, 1939–1945", Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, Issue 2, Spring 2000.
- Cassagneres, Ev. The Untold Story of the Spirit of St. Louis: From the Drawing Board to the Smithsonian. New Brighton, Minnesota: Flying Book International, 2002. ISBN 0-911139-32-X.
- Cole, Wayne S. Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. ISBN 0-15-118168-3.
- Collier, Peter and David Horowitz. The Fords, An American Epic. New York: Summit Books, 1987. ISBN 1-89355-432-5.
- Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations With Europe, 1919–1933. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, First edition 1984. ISBN 0-80141-679-5.
- Davis, Kenneth S. The Hero Charles A. Lindbergh: The Man and the Legend. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959.
- Friedman, David M. The Immortalists. New York: Ecco, 2007. ISBN 0-06052-815-X.
- Gill, Brendan. Lindbergh Alone. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ISBN 0-15-152401-7.
- Larson, Bruce L. Lindbergh of Minnesota: A Political Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973. ISBN 0-15-152400-9.
- Lindbergh, Charles A. Charles A. Lindbergh: Autobiography of Values. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ISBN 0-15-110202-3.
- Lindbergh, Charles A. Spirit of St. Louis. New York: Scribners, 1953.
- Lindbergh, Charles A. "WE" (with an appendix entitled "A Little of what the World thought of Lindbergh" by Fitzhugh Green, pp. 233–318). New York & London: G.P. Putnam's Sons (The Knickerbocker Press), July 1927.
- Milton, Joyce. Loss of Eden: A Biography of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. ISBN 0-06-016503-0.
- Mosley, Leonard. Lindbergh: A Biography. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976. ISBN 0-395-09578-3.
- Schroeck, Rudolph. Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh). München, Germany/ New York: Heyne Verlag/Random House, 2005. ISBN 3-453-12010-8.
- Wallace, Max. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 978-031233531-1.
- Wohl, Robert. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-30010-692-0.

For 360 Degrees:
David Moore - Research
Cindy Owen - Research
Donner, Prancer, Olive, Comet, Cupid - Writers
Blitzen - Editor