by Dan Hampton
The Memphis had set a new record to get him home fast; holding an average speed of 22.4 knots, she made the 3,337 miles from Cherbourg in only six days. At 5 P.M. on Friday, June 10, 1927, the Memphis and her escorts steamed into Chesapeake Bay past the lighthouses on Cape Henry and Cape Charles. Three weeks to the day after the Spirit slowly climbed out over the Long Island tree line and turned northeast, Charles Lindbergh got his first look at home.
MOTORBOATS, FISHING VESSELS, and yachts swarmed near the coast; whistles and horns blew, sirens wailed, and thousands of Virginians lined the shore. The Cape Henry Weather Bureau Station blinked out “WELCOME HOME” in Morse code and the Memphis ran up a flag in response. Twenty-five aircraft from Langley Field appeared, dropping out of the sky to give the pilot a pilot’s welcome. Navy seaplanes spread into a huge V and made simulated torpedo attacks, passing within one hundred feet of the cruiser as Lindbergh, in a gray suit with a red necktie, stood on the bridge and waved. Two airships, an Army TC-3 out of Langley and a Navy J-3 from Naval Air Station Lakehurst, passed over the warship, then took up stations alongside.*
Clearing the capes, the Memphis turned north into the Chesapeake, passing Hampton Roads and Cape Charles on her sixty-mile trip to the mouth of the Potomac River. The normal run up to the capital was twelve hours, but as they weren’t supposed to arrive until 11 A.M. the following day, the warship traveled slowly. Virginia governor Harry F. Byrd, the older brother of Lindbergh’s competitor Commander Richard Byrd, had graciously deferred his celebration plans in favor of President Coolidge’s desire to give Lindbergh his first official welcome. By 9 P.M. the Memphis dropped anchor off Piney Point, Maryland, fifteen miles into the Potomac and less than sixty from Washington. All through the night preparations continued; 500,000 airmail letters and at least 37,000 telegrams had already been received.
“Blythe tells me everyone in New York wants to see me,” Lindbergh cabled from the cruiser that night. “Well, I will do my best. I am going to bed early to store up lots of pep for tomorrow’s arrival at Washington.”
And what an arrival it was.
The Memphis weighed anchor early and made her way slowly up the winding river. Marines lined the shores at Quantico and Indian Head, waving and cheering when the gray warship passed. As she approached Mount Vernon a patrol boat spotted the cruiser, and an escort of eight Coast Guard vessels formed up around her. Closer to the capital, where the Potomac narrowed, all types of boats put out from the shore. Dozens of aircraft appeared in the blue morning sky, adding their roaring engines to the shouting and waving.
At 10:30 the Memphis steamed past Alexandria with noise rolling over the water from both the Maryland and Virginia shores. Pennants flew from boats and brightly colored flags and buntings festooned the banks. Trains from the Potomac Railroad yard blew till they ran out of steam; fire engine sirens wailed, automobiles honked, and shrill factory whistles split the air. Rooftops, ships, and wharves were packed with cheering, screaming people indifferent to the 92-degree heat. Through it all, Lindbergh stood on the bridge and “viewed it all with an expression of curiosity.”
As the Potomac split below Washington the warship turned east into the Anacostia River. At precisely eleven o’clock a cannon on Hains Point began the national salute, a twenty-one-gun honor normally reserved for the president of the United States. Each minute for seven minutes it fired, then Lindbergh crossed to the starboard side of the bridge as seven more roared their tribute from the Anacostia Naval Air Station. When the cruiser glided slowly into the Washington Navy Yard, fifteen guns thundered out to recognize the arrival of Vice Admiral Guy Burrage and his flagship. She answered, her thirteen-gun salute adding to the deafening noise from shore. At 11:17 the final seven rounds were fired.
Heaving to at 11:45, the USS Memphis at last came to a stop. Lindbergh descended to the main deck, hat on, composed and calm in a blue suit as the gangplank lowered to the dock. Admiral Burrage, resplendent in his dress whites, went down first to meet a small woman standing between a pair of White House aides. Wearing a black straw hat with a brown dress, Evangeline Lindbergh was then escorted onto the warship’s deck. Minutes later, both mother and son appeared together and the crowd exploded with cheers. Sirens and whistles shrieked, flags waved, and three hundred thousand Americans screamed their heartfelt welcome, wildly proud of their returning son.
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was home.
EPILOGUE
A victory given stands pale beside a victory won.
—CHARLES LINDBERGH
WHEN THE DUST settles, men who have accomplished extraordinary deeds often go on to attempt others, or they retreat to a well-deserved retirement. At age twenty-five, although catapulted into instant wealth and global fame, Lindbergh had no intention of retiring. There was, he fervently believed, a real chance to influence the growth of commercial aviation and give it a rightful place among the land and sea lovers of his day.
“My future is definitely tied up with aviation,” he would write. “I think the United States will inevitably lead the world in aviation, but before that goal is reached there is considerable ground to get over, and we must adapt ourselves to our needs at home.” He was quite correct.
Europe at that time was far ahead of America in both military and commercial aviation. Though the Wrights and Henri Farman both took up riders as early as 1908,* arguably the first true commercial passenger was Abram Pheil who, on January 1, 1914, paid four hundred dollars to take the inaugural flight between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida. Europe’s progression into commercial aviation had been delayed by the Great War, but in October 1919, the Dutch airline Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij, better known as KLM, began operations. Aeromarine West Indies Airways started flights a year later between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba. Others followed, but as Lindbergh noted in 1927, the United States was lagging far behind. This was also becoming a strategic security concern as the Colombo-German Air Transport Society (SCADTA) had initiated commercial operations in Colombia eight years earlier.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this progressive attitude was the fact that Europeans were convinced of the necessity and economic viability of air travel. To this end, there was already a network of air routes and, most revealing to Lindbergh, well-established airports, which America lacked. Tempelhof (serving Berlin), Le Bourget, and Croydon (London) all functioned with the precision of railway stations, “with planes from as many as twenty different cities and seven or eight countries arriving and departing on schedule.”
Lindbergh did not advocate government subsidization, after the European model, nor did he believe airlines should be built for quick conversion to military use in time of war. Lindbergh understood the rationale behind this but felt America, with its lack of hostile borders, was more secure than Europe. And anyway, Lindbergh felt that America might not need government support; with its common language and better weather it was a more favorable environment for commercial flight. Washington agreed and for some time there was talk of creating a cabinet-level secretary of aviation position with Lindbergh as its first appointee.
More realistic, and definitely closer to the young pilot’s liking, was a ninety-day tour through all forty-eight states to promote aviation. The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics arranged the jaunt and a $50,000 fee for Lindbergh. He was always more comfortable around aircraft so this was just the sort of activity that suited him, and he accepted with a proposed July start date. There was one task, however, Lindbergh had to complete before he was free for such a trip: the book.
G. P. Putnam arranged for Carlyle MacDonald, who had returned from Paris, to ghostwrite the New York–Paris account based on his interviews with Lindbergh. Within weeks he had done so, and during the last days of June the pilot had a chance to read the manuscript. It was terrible; a largely first-person work of fiction written by a nonpilot who used shreds of the truth and liberally expanded it into self-aggrandizing drivel. MacDonald apparently believed that the
power of the pen granted him the privilege of rewriting factual events to suit his story line. “Cheaply done,” Lindbergh called it, and utterly unacceptable. But he’d made a contract and wanted to get back in the air as soon as possible, so the only solution was to rewrite the book himself.
And he did.
Slim’s new friend Harry Guggenheim gave him use of Falaise, his Sands Point estate, and some much-needed privacy. No doubt enjoying the solitude, Lindbergh wrote every day, in blue ink on plain white paper, and three weeks later delivered his handwritten, forty-thousand-word first draft. There was no time for a second. “I had little experience in writing,” he would later admit, “limited facilities for research, and no extra hours to work on shading or balance.” It was direct and unassuming, much like the man himself, though because of the loss of his logbook, it lacked some detail. Years later Lindbergh would explain: “Being young, and easily embarrassed, I was hesitant to dwell on my personal errors and sensations.” Nevertheless, “We,” as it was titled, arrived in bookstores within a few weeks and sold two hundred thousand copies in the first month.*
During this time, bids for his attention, viable and otherwise, rolled in, as did money. It is estimated that within his first month of returning home, Lindbergh received offers in excess of $5 million, with as much again in potential royalties. Many of these enticements were real: $25,000 from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and another $25,000 for the Orteig Prize. He was also offered $1 million from four prominent businessmen so he would be free to reject other cash offers!
Lindbergh passed on this as he also did on other, more legitimate offers. Media magnate William Randolph Hearst proposed a $500,000 fee, plus 10 percent of the gross, for an aviation motion picture starring the man himself, but Lindbergh politely refused. Other suggestions were just silly: “Lucky Lindy Bread,” or a ridiculous lady’s hat with wings and a gray felt propeller called the “Lucky Lindy Lid.” A production company even offered to make a film during which Lindbergh actually got married.
Slim was not scornful or contemptuous of money, and he was certainly not a “tin saint,” as he put it. Contrary to myth, he was not raised poor, but neither was his family so comfortably off that they could ignore money. Lindbergh was, in the beginning, as startled by his newfound affluence as he had been by the worldwide publicity the flight had generated. He came to appreciate financial independence for the freedom it provided, and the chance to escape a public life he never desired, and in which he was never truly at ease.
It was with genuine relief then, on July 20, 1927, that he lifted off in the Spirit of St. Louis from Mitchel Field in Long Island and headed out for his three-month American tour. Landing in eighty-two cities and visiting all forty-eight states, Lindbergh delivered 147 speeches and covered 1,287 parade miles. In Richmond, Virginia, on October 16, he took Governor Harry F. Byrd and Harry Guggenheim up flying for ten minutes each. Adding 260 flight hours to the Spirit’s log, Slim flew 22,350 air miles before returning to Mitchel Field on October 23.
Later that year, Lindbergh was also awarded two U.S. military decorations. The Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) had been created in 1926, and was given for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight.” Certainly the first New York to Paris solo flight qualified as such, though by executive order civilians were now prohibited from receiving the cross. It is commonly stated that Lindbergh received the first DFC, but this is incorrect. He was presented with the first medal, but the ten aviators who participated in the U.S. Army Pan American Flight were awarded the original Distinguished Flying Crosses (without actual medals) on May 2, 1927.*
Then Slim received the highest award America can give for valor. On December 14, 1927, Congress authorized the Medal of Honor which Lindbergh, by virtue of his military status, could receive. The citation read: “For displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator, at the risk of his life, by his nonstop flight in his airplane, the ‘Spirit of St. Louis,’ from New York City to Paris, France, 20–21 May 1927, by which Capt. Lindbergh not only achieved the greatest individual triumph of any American citizen but demonstrated that travel across the ocean by aircraft was possible.”
Additionally, he was presented with an honorary doctorate of laws from Northwestern University and from the University of Wisconsin, where he had failed as a student five years earlier. Princeton awarded him an honorary master’s of science, as did Washington University in St. Louis. Both St. Joseph’s College and New York University also conferred honorary masters of aeronautics degrees on the young pilot.
But he always wished to escape the public and the bewildering avalanche of accolades, and so had been planning an extended, international flight to promote aviation and American goodwill. “I wanted to make another long distance non-stop flight before retiring the plane from use,” he explained. When his friend and mentor Dwight Morrow resigned from J. P. Morgan to become the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Lindbergh offered to assist in any way he could. Since relations between the two countries had long been strained, Morrow saw a chance to improve the situation and immediately capitalized on the pilot’s offer.
TWELVE DAYS BEFORE Christmas the Spirit of St. Louis departed from Bolling Field in Washington, D.C. Twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes later it landed at Mexico City’s Valbuena Airport. The reception was magnificent, and the Mexicans were gracious hosts, flattered that the world-famous American would choose their country as a destination.* Two significant events occurred there, both to Lindbergh’s liking. First, his mother, Evangeline, flew in from Detroit for the holidays, pleased to be a guest of the ambassador and to see her son. Second, for the first time in his life, Charles showed visible interest in a girl.
Ambassador Morrow’s daughter Anne was a self-contained, quiet young woman of twenty-one. Not as cosmopolitan as her lovely older sister, Elisabeth, or as exuberantly vivacious as fourteen-year-old Constance, Anne was nevertheless winsome, thoughtful, and poised. She was, in fact, a perfect match for the shy, introspective pilot—and he knew it. For the next seventeen months they wrote, cabled, and telephoned whenever possible. Despite their differences—few but significant—the couple was married at Next Day Hill, the Morrow estate in Englewood, New Jersey, on May 27, 1929.
In many ways this was a turning point, an event that would, as Lindbergh put it, “bend the trends of life and history.” He purchased 425 acres north of Princeton, New Jersey, and built a home, which he named “Highfields.” On June 22, 1930, Anne gave birth to Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., a healthy baby they called Charlie who grew into a happy, blond-headed toddler. In the meantime Charles Sr. wrote for magazines, continued to promote commercial aviation, and worked as a technical advisor for Transcontinental Air Transport and Pan American Airways.* He was no less famous than before, yet some of the hysteria was dissipating after nearly two years and for the first time Lindbergh was able to live as a family man.
Unfortunately tragedy, which so often seems to follow good fortune, was looming just ahead for the young couple. On March 1, 1932, twenty-month-old Charlie was kidnapped from his nursery at Highfields and for the second time in five years Lindbergh was front-page news. Ransom was demanded, theories abounded, and for seventy-two days the boy’s fate was unknown.† Then on May 12 his tiny body was discovered in the woods just four miles from Highfields.
Lindbergh had always been at odds with the press, and their behavior following the kidnapping cemented his loathing. He was constantly pursued, and never allowed the privacy needed to grieve for his lost child. A photographer broke into the morgue in Trenton, New Jersey, and snapped a picture of the dead toddler, then sold copies for five dollars each. Slim hired an armed guard to protect his infant son Jon, but photographers still followed the boy to school and took pictures. The Lindbergh estate became an attraction; vendors sold food near Highfields for sightseers, and one carload of tourists ran over Lindbergh’s dog. These deplorable incidents, and many others, convinced him that taking his family abroad wa
s the only way to obtain some measure of security and peace. Everything, it seems, was beyond his control except the ability to control himself.
On December 22, 1935, after three tumultuous years, Charles, Anne, and three-year-old Jon quietly sailed from Pier 60 in New York, bound for Liverpool on the SS American Importer. They took up residence at Long Barn house, in Kent. Among the English, who valued privacy, they succeeded in living quietly.
During this time, Lufthansa, the German state airline, invited Lindbergh to tour airfields and factories, no doubt hoping the most famous aviator in the world would propagate stories of German aviation might. After privately conferring with Major Truman Smith, the U.S. military attaché in Berlin, Lindbergh agreed to accept the invitation and use the trip to gather intelligence for the United States.
He did this, and was even permitted to tour the top-secret test base at Rechlin, as well as fly the Bf-109, the Luftwaffe’s most advanced fighter. While there was much negative publicity about his visit and his reputation suffered, Lindbergh revealed nothing of his true mission. The information he obtained was valuable; a unique look inside German factories at last convinced Washington of Germany’s rearmament. Smith would write, “I don’t believe anybody else in the world could have succeeded in doing what you did.”
