The Flight

by Dan Hampton

  With disturbing similarity to Russian groups, the Wobblies’ ultimate goal was forming a separate social class composed of workers. Understandably, the idea of American industrial power at the mercy of a revolutionary working class was anathema to big corporate interests and there was considerable friction. Ordinary people, unnerved and frustrated, often acted on their own accord to combat the situation. One IWW member, Wesley Everest of Washington State, had his genitals cut off by an angry mob, then was hung from a bridge and eventually shot. His death was called a suicide and no one was ever charged with a crime.

  It didn’t help a volatile situation that large numbers of left-wing literati were also rebelling against traditional Americanism. Sinclair Lewis was among the many who rejected cultural attitudes of the time, and his novel Main Street, released in 1920, was an indictment of the very cornerstone of American life, the small town.* That Lewis felt this way was not surprising, but what was surprising was how his fictional nonfiction resonated with the reading public. Nearly 400,000 copies of Main Street were sold, and its satirical sequel, Babbitt, was equally well received, giving Lewis the very fame, fortune, and status that he railed against.

  Like Charles Lindbergh, Lewis was a small-town Minnesota boy who had difficulty making friends or forming long-term relationships. Unhappy with his roots and unable to adapt to the outside world, he was a “homeless intellectual.” As with Carl Sandburg, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and others, this lack of faith in anything, most of all in themselves, was a notable characteristic of those of age in the 1920s.

  As Lewis himself once admitted, “in America most of us—not readers alone, but even writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.” These were people who desperately needed reaffirmation that there was still good in this country. In the wake of Prohibition, the Red Scare, and brewing government scandals, they were rapidly losing confidence in their leaders. Overbearing, vitriolic groups like the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals were similarly eroding their faith in organized religion, and people were looking for someone to believe in. They needed a hero and there wasn’t one in sight.

  Yet.

  BY 1925 THE decade’s social and cultural revolution was well under way. The threat from anarchists, labor unions, and radicals was still there but had diminished somewhat, at least in the public mind. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, had been arrested for the brutal murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company, outside Boston. Their trial was a showpiece of government force arrayed against paranoia and idealism. The pair was suspicious, true, having been arrested with weapons and anarchist literature. Both were Italian, a nationality widely regarded as uneducated and violent thanks in large part to the likes of Alphonse Capone and Luigi Galleani, with their ties to organized crime and anarchism, respectively.

  There was scant, if any, evidence tying Vanzetti or Sacco to the murders, but they were declared guilty by virtue of being in the area, being subversive, and being Italian. The trial garnered a great deal of unfavorable domestic and international attention, but an example had to be made and they were it. Unfortunately, the government’s obtuse handling of the case went a long way to undermine the very values that the average American had been raised to believe.*

  Just as Prohibition was a long-running battle in the cultural proxy war, there was a short, sharp incident in 1925 that undeniably exemplified the struggle for the soul of America. In the wake of several sensationalistic events, a small group of men decided to try to put their town, Dayton, Tennessee, on the national center stage. This would help them all; the local economy would expand, businesses would grow, and everyone would know Dayton. George Rappelyea, a mining engineer, and a state prosecutor somewhat implausibly named Sue Kerr Hicks believed they’d found the perfect venue.

  The 64th General Assembly of the Tennessee legislature had passed Senator George Washington Butler’s House Bill 185 in March 1925. This act prohibited “the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.”

  Hicks was aware that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was seeking a way to constitutionally challenge the bill. He and the others, nicknamed the “drugstore conspirators” because they gathered in Robinson’s Drugstore, figured a way to help defeat the bill and draw a media circus to Dayton. They persuaded John Thomas Scopes, a biology teacher at Dayton’s Central High School, to be caught teaching the evils of evolution. He agreed, later stating, “I do believe in the ethical teachings of Christ, and I believe there is a God. . . . But all biology and most other sciences are basically the story of the evolution of matter and of life. I was hired to teach science, and I went ahead and taught it.”

  A fourteen-year-old student named Howard Morgan was produced to confirm he had been instructed on the theory of evolution, and an arrest warrant was subsequently issued for Johnny Scopes. Hicks and Rappelyea were delighted, and per the agreement with Scopes they wired the ACLU in New York. With the trial set for July, high-powered legal counsel was retained, with Dudley Field Malone, Arthur Garfield Hays, and no less a personage than Clarence Darrow himself making their way to rural Tennessee.

  Darrow was probably the most famous defense lawyer in America in 1925. A committed agnostic, as an ACLU board member he was also a firebrand for civil liberties. The year before he had successfully prevented the execution of Nathan Leopold and Richard Albert Loeb for their cold-blooded, premeditated murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. Darrow was widely regarded as a consummate orator, and a gifted lawyer well versed in bending the law to his own ends.

  Likewise, the prosecution spared no expense and the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association retained William Jennings Bryan. A three-time presidential candidate and evangelical champion, Bryan had become extremely wealthy through speaking engagements and Florida real estate speculation. As secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, Bryan had seen the Great War as the manifestation of European godlessness and had tried to keep the United States out of the conflict.

  Commencing in July 1925, the trial was front-page news across the country. Almost immediately the actual matter of John Scopes was eclipsed by larger issues: creationism versus evolution, and to an equal degree, the allowable interference of government into the lives of its citizens. Reporters were numerous, but none was more influential than H. L. Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore.” Ruthless, but eccentric in his beliefs, he thought very little of Negros, Jews, or America’s white middle class; the “Booboisie,” he called them. A brilliant satirist nonetheless, it was Mencken who coined the “Monkey Trial” moniker.

  Darrow was brilliant. He turned the issue into a First Amendment challenge against the establishment of religion and free speech. He argued that any infringement struck at the foundation of our basic American rights, and that it was intellectually stifling to not be taught all that science can offer. The state of Tennessee, he claimed, was violating its own constitution by forcing one explanation for life on its schoolchildren. “The modern world,” he eloquently phrased it, “is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.” In a single sentence he summarized the principal misgivings that Americans felt during the 1920s.

  Fluently persuasive, Bryan’s rebuttal argued for the right of the people to decide, however ridiculously, what would be taught in public schools funded by their tax money. A literalist, in a state whose legislature was dominated by fundamentalists, he framed the crux of his prosecution as simply, “The one beauty about the Word of God is, it does not take an expert to understand it.” This, and the fact that Scopes had indeed broken the law, won the case for him. Judge John T. Raulston, no doubt wearied with postur
ing that had nothing to do with the law, expunged most of the peripheral arguments from the record.

  Scopes was fined one hundred dollars according to the statute and released. He went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago, then became a geologist for the United Gas Corporation. Bryan returned to Dayton five days after the trial and passed away there in his sleep. Clarence Darrow continued to litigate, including in the racially charged Sweet Trial, and died in Chicago thirteen years later. On the face of it, fundamentalism had triumphed, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. On a technicality, Scopes’s conviction was eventually overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court and grassroots fundamentalism had been shown for what it was. Not the benevolent teachings of a gentle God, or a group of sincere practitioners dedicated to helping their fellow man, but rather an intolerant attempt to force a single, narrow-minded interpretation on everyone.

  America, it seemed, was drifting more than ever.

  THOUGH THE TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Charles Lindbergh undoubtedly followed the trial, as did everyone else, it was likely with more amusement than genuine concern. Of much greater interest to the young aviator was the second big event of 1925: the crash of the airship USS Shenandoah and the subsequent court-martial of Colonel William Lendrum Mitchell. A courageous tactical officer who had proven both his bravery and the potential of aircraft in combat, Mitchell was a visionary proponent of airpower. In 1923 he predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in great detail, and though primarily concerned with the fighting capabilities of aircraft he could see a time when commercial airliners would fly passengers to Europe in hours.* Lindbergh, who could also envision the vast potential of aircraft, agreed. But the similarity ended there.

  A few months after the Scopes Monkey Trial, on September 2, 1925, the airship USS Shenandoah slipped away from her mooring mast and slowly eased upward above Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. She was to proceed over the Allegheny Mountains, stopping in at events and fairs during a twenty-seven-city publicity tour. Fall weather over the Ohio Valley was notoriously unpredictable; thunderstorms were sudden and common, as they were over the plains farther west into Iowa.

  But her captain, Navy lieutenant commander Zachary Lansdowne, had little choice but to follow the plan. The Army and Navy were in a desperate competition for scarce funding, and this trip had been directed by Rear Admiral William Moffett, chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. Commander Lansdowne, a Naval Academy graduate who had earned the Navy Cross during R34’s transatlantic flight six years earlier, was arguably the most experienced airship captain in the service. He’d actually jumped from the British ship while it floated over Long Island and landed by parachute in order to moor the craft, since no one on Roosevelt Field knew the procedure.

  Shenandoah and her forty-one crew members flew west all night, making good headway at 55 miles per hour. Running into a squall line approximately seventy-five miles east of Columbus, Ohio, the 682-foot long airship pitched up from 2,100 feet to 6,300 feet. Gas was vented, ballast was dumped, and she plunged back to 3,200 feet. Just two years old, Shenandoah was a rigid airship, not a bag of gas, and she had a keel with interior wire supports for strength and stability.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Though Shenandoah was filled with helium, an inert gas that would not explode like hydrogen, the real danger was in the tremendous asymmetrical stresses on her support structure. Lansdowne tried to clear the storm but was caught in another violent updraft that pitched the airship up above 6,000 feet again. The hull broke in two pieces initially and the control car tore loose. Disappearing into the storm below, thirty-seven-year-old Lansdowne would die less than two hundred miles from his birthplace in Greenville, Ohio. Seven others went in with him, while the remaining thirty-three crew members clung to girders inside the shattered airship. Seven more would perish, bringing the total to fourteen deaths.

  When Billy Mitchell heard about the disaster, he was based at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. He considered the post the end of the earth, a betrayal by the Army, and he was bitterly, fundamentally unhappy. Born in Nice, France, in December 1879 to a wealthy midwestern family, Mitchell had a paternal grandfather, a banker, who had made an enormous fortune in railroads and was known as the “Rothschild of Milwaukee.” Mitchell’s father, though no businessman, was a Civil War veteran and U.S. senator. Young William, or “Billy,” as he was called, dropped out of college to enlist in the army at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. His father saw to it that he was commissioned an officer and the young lieutenant was sent to Cuba. Technically minded and adept at solving problems in the field, Mitchell laid the first telegraph cables between Havana and Santiago de Cuba. He did it so well that he was sent to Alaska, where he laid nearly 1,500 miles of the Washington–Alaska Cable & Telegraph lines.

  Fascinated with aircraft, at his own expense Major Mitchell learned to fly in 1916 and managed an appointment to the western front as the War Department’s aeronautical observer. Seeing combat at St.-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, he was widely regarded, especially by himself, as the most experienced American air combat leader in Europe. Despite his vanity, there was no denying his command prowess. It’s one thing to be a superb fighter pilot, but another to be able to command such men, especially a combination of French, British, Italian, and American squadrons totaling 1,481 planes—yet he did just that.

  At age thirty-nine, eighteen months after arriving in Europe, Billy Mitchell was a brigadier general, receiving the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Legion of Honor, among others. Yet despite his battlefield skills and unquestioned personal courage, he was also abrasive, dismissive of lesser intellects (everyone else in France), vain to the point of silliness, and insubordinate past the point expected of a thinking, experienced officer. It was this last trait that would land him before a court-martial and eventually cost him his career.

  Upon learning of the Shenandoah’s crash, Mitchell penned a scathing 6,080-word, seventeen-page indictment of Army and Navy senior leadership. He wrote that the recent spate of accidents, including the airship, “are a direct result of incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration by the War and Navy Departments. As far as aviation is concerned, the conduct by these departments has been so disgusting in the last few years as to make any self-respecting person ashamed of the clothes he wears. I doubt,” he added, “if a real man would remain with the colors under existing conditions.”

  Four years earlier Mitchell had embarrassed a battleship-centric U.S. Navy by bending the rules during a joint exercise and sinking the German battleship Ostfriesland. By revealing the weaknesses of a seemingly impregnable battleship to air attack, he threatened the Navy’s future, at least as far as the battleship admirals saw it. They never forgave him, which is one reason Mitchell found himself in the relative oblivion of San Antonio. Now, in the wake of the Shenandoah disaster, Mitchell was at it again. Only this time it was not just the Navy; he basically accused the entire War Department of treason and incompetence, embarrassing them and the president.

  Mitchell made his first court appearance on October 28, 1925, and held the nation’s attention for more than seven weeks. Ninety-nine witnesses were called and the drama from both sides was intense. At 6:35 P.M. on December 17, 1925, at least two-thirds of the ten court members hearing his case sentenced him to “be suspended from rank, command and duty with the forfeiture of all pay and allowances for five years.” Mitchell could remain in the Army if he wished, but with no responsibilities, no command or rank, and no pay. It was, as Douglas Waller wrote in A Question of Loyalty, “five years of peonage.” Understandably, and very likely as hoped by the military, he resigned.

  As with Scopes, which was a proxy fight between science and organized religion, the court-martial of Billy Mitchell was more than a simple trial. It was the establishment versus the next generation; the resistance of old standards to new tactics and technology; the essential military need for discipline weighed against the tim
eless, reciprocal need for common sense among senior commanders.

  Was it a decorated, gifted combat hero fighting the hidebound, politicized inertia of the government, or was Mitchell a discontented, passed-over prophet who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut? Or worse, one who didn’t realize no one was listening because they couldn’t separate his brilliance from his vitriol? The frustration from both sides was evident and, as in the Monkey Trial, captured the 1920s in microcosm: idealism, reality, truth, lies, and, most of all, many who could not tell the difference. The decade, in many ways, was one big gray area, a contest between laws and lawlessness, conservatism and daring, morals and independence. As historian Frederick Lewis Allen succinctly phrased it, “They could not endure a life without values, and the only values they had been trained to understand were being undermined. If morality was dethroned, what was to take its place? Honor? Their saints were sinners and there were no icons.”

  So that Friday in May 1927, still eighteen months in the future, took on an importance far beyond expectation, because as Slim lifted off alone, seemingly unafraid, and turned the Spirit of St. Louis toward the vast, empty ocean, people saw, at last, something real. Here there was no duplicity, corruption, or shades of the truth. This flight, and the young man’s spirit in accepting the challenge, were beyond doubt or question. At last there was a way to reconcile older values of courage, determination, and skill with an unequivocal symbol of a promising future. In Lindbergh, America and the age got its hero.

  SIX

  THE EMPIRE OF THE NIGHT

  THE LAST GATE is closing behind me.

  I’ve reached the point where real navigation must begin.