The Flight

by Dan Hampton

  Blossoming intellectually, though regrettably not emotionally, C.A. found his niche in Washington within the movements for American social and economic change. Outspoken and uncompromising, he was either respected or reviled, depending on one’s point of view. Rivals back in Minnesota dug up his numerous land transactions and insinuated that the champion of the common man, the antitrust warrior and bank hater, had profited from farm foreclosures. Lindbergh responded by selling off his property, and within a few years his net worth was half of what it had been when he left Little Falls. Fearing perceptions of hypocrisy, C.A. dissociated himself from lucrative corporate clients, neglecting his law practice and generating a cash flow crisis that would last the rest of his life.

  Like his father in the Swedish Riksdag, Congressman Lindbergh seemed to cast himself as a contemporary Don Quixote, charging against the windmills of the powerful and wealthy. He may have gloried in the fight, but Evangeline certainly did not. She was not willing to sacrifice herself, or her son, on the altar of politics and this irreparably widened the schism between them. By now C.A. and his wife were maintaining separate residences in Washington, which meant a string of boardinghouses for Charles and Evangeline. When they were together, civility eroded quickly. Enraged during one violent confrontation, Evangeline held a gun to C.A.’s head. He merely shrugged and said, “If you must do it, do it.”

  She’d also discovered that her husband was having a long-term affair with his stenographer, who’d joined his D.C. staff from Little Falls. Isolated and lonely, Evangeline transferred her energies and affections to Charles. Lindbergh’s reserve, loathing of politics, and overdeveloped introspection all had their roots in the decade he spent as a congressman’s son. Nonetheless, Evangeline and Charles immersed themselves in the capital’s culture: the memorials, art galleries, and, of course, the Smithsonian Institution.* At age eleven, he was enrolled in the Friends School, an exclusive Washington, D.C., Quaker academy, his first encounter with rigorous academics.†

  Then, in June 1912, C.A. arranged for Charles (with Evangeline) to attend the yearly Army Aeronautical Trials to evaluate new aircraft. This one, like the first such event in 1908, was being held just across the Potomac River at Fort Myer, Virginia. Lindbergh would recount, “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—pant’s legs flapping, and cap visor pointed backward to streamline in the wind.”‡ Electrified, the boy later admitted it was there he realized that he wanted to be a pilot himself. “I used to imagine myself with wings,” he wrote more than forty years later, “on which I could swoop down off our roof into the valley, soaring through the air from one river bank to the other.”

  TWO SUMMERS FOLLOWING Lindbergh’s epiphany, a motorcade carrying a beribboned, middle-aged man and his portly wife threaded its way through the warm streets of Sarajevo. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was smiling and waving when a young Bosnian Serb stepped from the crowd and drew a pistol. Gavrilo Princip calmly fired several shots, mortally wounding both the archduke and his consort, Princess Sophie.

  Dominoes began falling around the world a month later.

  Austria-Hungary, a member of the Triple Alliance with Italy and Germany, declared war on Serbia. Russia, seeking to bolster a battered national image and distract its people from internal misery, mobilized to protect her Slavic “brethren.” Germany immediately responded by gearing up for war, all the while demanding that France remain passively neutral. Allied with Britain under the Entente Cordiale, Paris rejected the ultimatum, and the Kaiser now had a pretext for picking a fight with everyone. Russia was first, followed by Luxembourg, and on August 3, 1914, Germany declared war on France then promptly invaded Belgium. What was to be called the “Great War” began in earnest when British troops landed on French soil in fulfillment of the Entente Cordiale. Four bloody years later, with some thirty million dead, wounded, or missing from the industrialized slaughter of the western front, an armistice was signed in Compiègne, France. Hostilities were over, at least temporarily, but there would be no lasting peace.

  Back on the farm and too young to fight, Charles Lindbergh had listened to the distant war with rapt attention. His interests in aviation had been growing steadily and, like many young men, he was enamored with tales of the Red Baron or Eddie Rickenbacker and could see himself in a fighter cockpit over a far-off battlefield. By necessity, the war had taken flying to new levels through astounding advances in technology, training, and tactics. The first Royal Flying Corps aircraft to arrive in France were a mismatched collection of mechanized canvas kites held together by varnish and wire. Used for scouting and artillery spotting, they had temperamental, underpowered engines barely capable of 75 miles per hour under ideal conditions.

  Four years later everything had changed. In 1914 it was not uncommon for pilots to enter combat with five hours of flight time and no tactical training at all. The resulting casualty rate—sometimes 100 percent—resulted in drastic changes to pilot selection, academic instruction, and flight training. Optical, hermetically sealed gunsights employed with metallic belt-link ammunition transformed aerial gunnery into a deadly reality.

  Through the practical and unforgiving laboratory of war, the science of aerodynamics leapt forward. Aircraft became more maneuverable as ailerons were added and designs streamlined. Structural and material innovations led to lighter, more efficient wings, which, when combined with better engines, exponentially improved aircraft range, flight endurance, and possibilities.

  Engine technology radically advanced. The 80-horsepower rotary motors of 1914 were outclassed by stationary radial engines with bigger pistons and higher compression ratios. Mercedes, Hispano-Suiza, and Bentley were among those capable of 200 horsepower or better, and airspeeds greater than 135 miles per hour. Through its use in war, aviation could no longer be dismissed as a fad, so it rapidly entered mainstream life and fired the imaginations of young Americans.

  While attending a farm auction on November 11, 1918, young Charles Lindbergh heard the news that a treaty had been signed, and discovered he now lacked a direction in life. Excused from his final two periods of high school to raise food for the war effort, Charles was ambivalent about life as a farmer. It was backbreaking and monotonous, risky work that could be wiped out by the vagaries of weather or disease. He could be injured, even killed, by a sudden storm, an animal, or a piece of equipment.

  “As I grew older,” Lindbergh later recalled, “I learned that danger was a part of life not always to be shunned. It often surrounded the things you liked most to do.” Charles wasn’t afraid of risks, but there was no excitement, no adventure, in a farmer’s life. His high school grades seemed to indicate a path, or at least a general direction, that would capitalize on his abilities. At six feet three inches, Charles was strong and slender, with a natural aptitude for mechanics and science. He earned high marks in physics and chemistry, in particular.

  Nineteen eighteen was a traumatic and unsettling time for Americans in general and the sixteen-year-old specifically. Bombs and bullets aside, the war continued killing for another two years through the spread of a deadly new virus that the medical community identified as H1N1: known today as influenza. Inaccurately termed “Spanish flu,” the pandemic most likely began through infected pigs kept in the squalor of the western front trenches.* Troops transiting through a huge British Expeditionary Force depot at Étaples-sur-Mer spread the virus within the enormous hospitals, the railheads of northern France, and then across the English Channel. Ships returning to the United States from Europe brought the virus with them, and through the nation’s expanding rail network soldiers heading home quickly spread the disease.

  “It was explained at the Department of Health,” the New York Times reported, “that New York City could not be charged with these cases, as there were men in the army and navy service who contracted the disease at camp, cantonment or on board ship.”
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br />   Cheap entertainment was now plentiful—some eight hundred movies were opened in 1918 alone—and crowded theaters helped spread the disease. Dockworkers also retransmitted the flu to vessels from every nation and it rapidly traversed the globe. In the end, more than 500 million people were infected and at least 50 million died.* Life expectancy for an American adult dropped by twelve years in a single twelve-month period.†

  Inevitably, social upheaval accompanied the health disaster. To begin with, Congress poorly handled the deflation of a wartime economy so production fell and America plunged into a pronounced recession, inflamed by hyperinflation in Europe. Jobs disappeared and those that remained were now at a premium. This was exacerbated by millions of young men who had enlisted to fight and whose jobs were taken by women and 500,000 black males. Tensions were further inflamed by D. W. Griffith’s popular film The Clansman (later renamed The Birth of a Nation), which resurrected a nearly defunct Ku Klux Klan.‡ When soldiers returned home they wanted their jobs back and, unprotected by unions who didn’t accept them, mobs of young black men were now unemployed or in direct competition with white males for scarce jobs. Race riots broke out in thirty-eight cities during 1918.

  Drastically empowered during the war, the government seemed analogous to a teenager who, discovering his muscles for the first time, runs amok. Five years earlier a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House permitted the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, which in turn led to the Revenue Act of 1913 and a reinstatement of federal income tax.§ The same administration enacted the Espionage Act, granting itself broad powers to contain any sort of domestic support for Germany or Italy. A 1918 amendment often erroneously termed the Sedition Act expanded this to also prohibit “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” concerning the flag, the military and, of course, the U.S. government itself. Thousands were jailed and held indefinitely. On December 21, 1919, the U.S. Army transport ship Buford steamed out of New York Harbor with 249 “undesirables” aboard. Nearly a month later the ship anchored in Hanko, Finland, and the deportees were escorted onto Russian Bolshevik soil. The news media heralded the government’s action, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer writing, “It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake.”

  Closer to home Congressman Lindbergh’s life gradually disintegrated. Deciding to run for the Senate after a decade in the House, he placed fourth out of four candidates. C.A.’s vitriolic diatribes left him increasingly isolated and he made powerful enemies among the members of the Federal Reserve Board who were resolved to end his career. He had vehemently opposed America’s entry into the war, a stance that was perceived as unpatriotic and his oldest daughter, Lillian, died of tuberculosis in California. After recovering from a hernia operation, C.A. then chose to run in the 1918 Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary. Supported by the Nonpartisan League, founded by A. C. Townley, organizer of the American Socialist Party, Lindbergh lost the election by a humiliating margin.

  Because of his opposition to America’s entry into World War I and his attacks on the Federal Reserve Board, C.A. was hanged in effigy in Red Wing, Minnesota, with talk of tarring and feathering. Printing plates for his two books were destroyed at Washington’s National Capital Press and his next attempt at publishing, Lindbergh’s National Farmer, was a failure. Uncompromising, controversial, and evidently unlikable, C. A. Lindbergh was sliding into the twilight of his life.

  YET AMID GLOBAL and national turmoil, aviation had the power to give hope and inspire, particularly to a youthful Charles Lindbergh.

  On May 8, 1919, three U.S. Navy Curtiss Flying Boats, NC-1, NC-3, and NC-4, lifted off from Naval Air Station Rockaway in Queens, New York, bound for Newfoundland, to attempt the first powered aircraft flight across the Atlantic. Leaving very little to chance, the Navy arranged for warships to be spread out between the American East Coast and Plymouth, England, the ultimate destination.

  The planes departed from Trepassey, on the southern edge of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, on May 16, 1919, bound for the Azores. American warships were positioned at fifty-mile intervals, spotlights illuminated and star shells blazing, to guide the aviators through the night. NC-1, flown by Lieutenant Commander Marc Mitscher, went down but the five-man crew was rescued.* NC-3 managed a water landing and Commander John Henry “Jack” Towers taxied across the waves for two hundred miles toward the Azores before being towed into harbor. Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read, flying NC-4, made it safely to Horta, in the Azores, on May 17, and within days departed for Lisbon, Portugal; then Ferrol, Spain; finally landing in Plymouth on May 31, 1919.

  LONDON GIVES READ AND CREW OF NC-4 A GREAT RECEPTION, ran the New York Times headline on June 2. The London Chronicle added, “The congratulations of all Britain will go out to these plucky representatives of the United States.”

  After returning to the States, Commander Read stated, “It soon will be possible to drive an airplane around the world at a height of 60,000 feet and 1,000 miles per hour.” Truly prophetic, this extraordinary vision was ridiculed by an editorial in the Times, which stated, “It is one thing to be a qualified aviator, and quite another to be a qualified prophet.”

  Yet Read’s feat fired the imaginations of others, including a seventeen-year-old Charles Lindbergh. He had never forgotten the experience at the 1908 Army Aeronautical Trials and was seriously considering an engineering career. In any event, the Navy wasn’t interested in publicity or fame; the flight was a challenge to be met. Though a spectacular achievement for the time, using fifty-three warships and multiple aircraft certainly wasn’t feasible for anyone other than the U.S. government.

  The Navy event was quickly eclipsed, for two weeks later, during the week of June 14, two Englishmen lifted off from Lester’s Field near St. John’s, Newfoundland, and headed east toward Great Britain. Former Royal Flying Corps pilots Captain John “Jack” Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten-Brown set out across the Atlantic in a modified Vickers Vimy long-range bomber.

  The June 15 Times headline read: GIANT BIPLANE IN ATTEMPTING TO RISE FOR THE START BARELY CLEARS TREES AND FENCES IN FIGHTING THE WIND. NO MESSAGE FROM VIMY AFTER ELEVEN HOURS.

  Flying through the night in fog so heavy they couldn’t see their propellers, the men lost all heating and hit turbulence so severe they dropped from 4,000 feet to the wavetops in seconds. A snowstorm caused such severe icing that “Teddy” Brown had to crawl out on the wings to chip away at the stuff before it brought the plane down.

  Fifteen hours after leaving Newfoundland the pair found themselves over Ireland’s Galway coast near Clifden and decided to land. Alcock chose a fertile green pasture south of town that unfortunately happened to be the soft ground of Derrygimla Moor. The Vimy ended up on its nose in the bog, but both men were uninjured and the first nonstop, non-airship crossing of the Atlantic had just been successfully accomplished.* Their landing hardly mattered, though, as both men became instant international celebrities, claimed the Daily Mail prize of £10,000, and were knighted by King George V.

  THE DAWN OF the 1920s offered some hope to a weary world. There was a sense that the millions who had died in the carnage of the Great War had proven the “old” world order was wrong, and that everything it stood for could be discarded. All over the world people were shaking off the figurative dust of irrelevant beliefs, discarded morality, and, perhaps most of all, past limitations. As Ronald W. Hull would later write:

  The war to end all wars was over,

  and so was the deadly flu.

  It was time to think of life and living,

  a time for me and you.

  Anything seemed possible.

  This was especially true in the United States, which prized independence, change, and innovation. Throughout the next few years more than 40 percent of global manufactured goods would be made in the United States. Half of the planet’s recovered gold reserves were in American banks, and 85 percent of the world’s
automobiles were made in U.S. factories. Technological advances of all types were invented, designed, and manufactured into reality in America: iceboxes, the washing machine, electric fans, the vacuum cleaner, and that marvel of modern communications, the radio. As Charles Lindbergh headed off to college, one in five hundred families owned a radio set. Just a few years later it would be one in twenty.

  In this spirit, eighteen-year-old Charles Lindbergh rode his Excelsior motorcycle 365 miles southeast to the University of Wisconsin in Madison to study mechanical engineering. He would later write, “I don’t want to go to college very much. Both Father and Mother went to the University of Michigan, and they think I ought to be a college graduate too. Everyone says it’s important to have a diploma. It helps you get along in later life.”

  Arriving late, he failed to impress his instructors and seemed to find the classroom atmosphere stifling. Like his parents, Charles was a rebel in a quiet, stubborn sort of way. He chafed against the constraints placed on fledgling university students, such as nonsensical traditions like wearing a green freshman beanie and the arcane, at least to him, rules of formal education. In a satirical English essay penned by Lindbergh, St. Peter refuses admission to a man due to a missing comma in his passport: “[a] pity, to permit so many mechanical errors to bar good material from eternal commendation.”