Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  His son Charles August grew into the best-looking young man for miles around—almost six feet tall, lithe, smooth-skinned, with a dimpled chin; but he was moody, often brooding. To him, anything easy was hardly worth doing. From the moment he had been old enough to carry a gun, C.A.’s primary obligation was to provide meat for his family. He had a muzzle-loading double-barreled shotgun, and he became a crack shot. He knew he had to account for each kill against the number of homemade bullets he had been given, so if he ever missed, he would sometimes wait for hours until he could line up two birds that he might shoot with the next. Fishing was often done with spears by birch-bark torchlight. For coming home with a deer, all else was forgiven.

  No school for C.A. even existed before he was twelve years old. “I had become so imbued with the grandeur of God’s Creation that, when a school was started,” he remembered years later, “I could not divert my attention from Nature to books.” He considered himself the poorest student in the two-room schoolhouse, which he attended until he was eighteen. But C.A. felt he learned something that could never be taught in a classroom—independence, “not only in thinking,” he later wrote, “but in action as well. I love independence, and I like to see others independent. But most of all I like to work and cooperate with independent people.”

  The circumstances of C.A.’s birth and his father’s reasons for coming to America were barely discussed and certainly never publicly disclosed; but with the arrival of his Swedish half-brothers, he pieced together the details. His illegitimacy seemed to fuel his ambition, as though compelling him to make the Lindbergh name honorable, to succeed in the public eye. Like his father, he was driven—stubborn, earnest, and even a little angry.

  C.A. pursued his studies at the Grove Lake Academy, where, for six dollars a week, Father Daniel J. Cogan, a Catholic priest, and a few other professors taught six dozen young men—mostly enlightened farmers’ sons whose fathers recognized the importance of a formal education enough to release them from farmlife in the winter. As much as possible, the teaching was tutorial, rigorously training each young man to think and speak for himself.

  Two years at Father Cogan’s academy prepared Lindbergh to pursue the study of law. He matriculated at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the closest law school of any merit, which then awarded a degree after but two six-month terms. That left Lindbergh enough of each year to return home and earn money to pay his tuition, which he did by hunting and trapping for muskrats and minks along the river. At school, he kept his nose in his books—avoiding distractions as much as possible, especially girls. He even moved out of a house in which he lodged because he found himself taking too great an interest in a girl rooming there. He graduated in the class of 1883.

  Although rural living would always appeal to him, Lindbergh viewed his sheepskin as insurance against his ever having to rely on a farm for his livelihood. He was admitted to the Minnesota bar that summer; and after two years exploring professional possibilities in St. Cloud and a few towns in South Dakota, he settled in fast-growing Morrison county, in a town called Little Falls, fifty miles northwest of where he had grown up.

  Over the next ten years, the population of Little Falls would increase tenfold, to 5,000. This bustling community was no longer concerned with clearing the land so much as what to put on it. New farms, new homes, and new businesses—to say nothing of such booming industries as the Weyerhaeusers’ lumber mill—all needed lawyers. So did East Coast investors who were loaning considerable sums on Western farmland.

  From the neighboring county, August Lindbergh watched his son’s practice flourish—enough to suggest there might be a political career in his future. To prevent his own past indiscretion from ever affecting his son’s career, on the afternoon of September 15, 1885, August Lindbergh took his common-law wife to Stearns County Courthouse to be formally married. The judge later said he understood that “August Lindbergh was a very conscientious man and believed in being one hundred percent American and that was probably a reason for an American marriage.” Lindberghs unknowingly subscribed to that story for generations. And when August Lindbergh died eight years later at the age of eighty-five, the obituaries described a model American. The papers gilded his reputation as a Swedish legislator, then spoke of his coming to America for religious freedom.

  The old Swede had lived to see, in less than a generation, his son become one of the leading citizens of Little Falls, the most dynamic attorney in town. Over the next twenty years, C.A. Lindbergh alternately practiced with a partner or two (including his younger brother Frank) or on his own. He soon counted such companies as Little Falls Lumber, McCormick Harvester Machine, and Singer Manufacturing among his clients. No longer content closing deals for others, owning real estate became his passion, a means by which he could trade up.

  He took advantage of the boom years by turning property around and by building in Little Falls. Four second-floor rooms in one of his buildings in town served as his office. Throughout these early years of land transactions, something more than C.A.’s success attracted other clients. “What first drew my attention to the man,” said his friend Thomas Pederson, “was the very evident respect with which his name was mentioned and the confidence and trust everyone seemed to have in him.”

  Morrison County thought so as well, electing him county attorney in 1890. He chose not to run for reelection but did not lose his taste for public service. Even in private practice, which included a great deal of corporation work, “a poor man was never turned down because he had no money,” noted his brother Frank. “His sympathies were for the ‘under dog.’” Lindbergh lived modestly at first—in the boondocks, in the only Little Falls house on the west side of the Mississippi. Then he moved into the boardinghouse of Harriet and Moses LaFond, original town settlers, and met their daughter.

  Mary LaFond was sweet and pretty, uncommonly refined for having been raised on the frontier; and he, with his career underway, paid serious attention to a woman for the first time. They married in April 1887 and moved into a substantial brick house he had built in town, where they settled into a kind of civilized domesticity most people thought impossible in still untamed territory. Mary was often talked about for the “fine home” she kept; and over the next five years she brought three daughters into the world—Lillian, Evangeline, and Edith, the last dying in infancy.

  “He was a great home lover,” Mary’s sister later remarked; but C.A. was equally enamored of his twin careers of real estate and law. Indeed, Frank Lindbergh noted, he “worked hard always beginning early in the morning and he seldom failed to work after supper and into the night.” He began buying farms, which he rented out, offering the tenants the privilege of buying them on easy terms; he erected the first creamery in Little Falls; he bought the mortgages of settlers and sold them to Easterners who had money to invest in the community. He was an original shareholder of the First National Bank, and after but five years in town was asked to sit on its board of directors. The town’s other large financial institution, the German-American National Bank, offered him a large block of stock for the privilege of using his name as one of their directors. The transaction fascinated Lindbergh, leading him to question who had actually paid for his shares and to study banking practices.

  In April 1898, C.A.’s prosperous life all but completely crashed. His wife began suffering from stomach pains, and a doctor in Minneapolis diagnosed an abdominal tumor. Not until Mrs. Lindbergh was under chloroform did the doctor realize that his patient was also several months pregnant. He said the only way to save the mother was to sacrifice the child; but two hours later, Mary LaFond Lindbergh—only thirty—died as well.

  At first, C.A. found comfort in his family. His mother moved into the big brick house; and he hired a kindergarten teacher to tend to his children—ten-year-old Lillian and six-year-old Eva. But after eighteen months of grieving, he craved solitude. With the start of the school term, in September 1900, he sent his children to a boarding school in Minneapol
is and threw himself into his work. He moved out of his house and into a room on the second floor of the large Antlers Hotel.

  He had hardly unpacked when he noticed another recent arrival at the Antlers. She was the new science teacher at Little Falls High School—twenty-four years old and beautiful. It was not just her enormous blue eyes, fair skin, and shapely figure that made her so striking; it was the confidence she exuded, a worldly air hardly known in those parts. College-educated, she had also been born and raised in what many people considered the most sophisticated city west of the Atlantic seaboard. She was, in fact, the daughter of two of its best-known families—the Lodges and the Lands of Detroit, Michigan.

  WITH ITS ADVANTAGEOUS SITUATION for boats and trains, and an abundance of natural resources, Detroit’s flowering had been inevitable. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some of its roads, notably Woodward Avenue, could be counted among the most beautiful residential streets in the country. In the rise of post-Civil War industrialism, the city came of age.

  One of its renowned citizens was Edwin Albert Lodge, born in London in 1822. Traumatized by an alcoholic father, he left home in his teens for America. After several years of wandering, he found himself in St. Thomas, Ontario—halfway between Buffalo and Detroit—where he married a spirited beauty named Emma Kissane. By then Lodge had developed an interest in medicine, particularly the unconventional practice of homeopathy. Over the next ten years the Lodges traveled through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where he became a graduate of (as he later advertised) “one Allopathic, two Eclectic and four Homeopathic Colleges.” In 1859 they moved with their six children to Detroit, which had become a center of homeopathic medicine. There, according to one history of homeopathy, he established “one of the [city’s] largest and most lucrative practices ever enjoyed by any physician.” A formidable figure—tall, dark, and spare, with a scraggly beard—it was said “half the babies in Detroit were named after him.”

  Lodge also found religion there. A member of the Church of the Disciples, Dr. Lodge became a fanatic, opposing most earthly pleasures. He forbade anyone in his family from dancing or playing cards; and on the Sabbath he further restricted reading newspapers or eating warm meals, because the cooking of them “prevents those preparing them from going to church.” Although he was not an ordained minister, he was frequently asked to preach. In preparing his sermons he would underscore the words of Christ in the New Testament in red ink, those of the Disciples in blue; he practiced writing the Lord’s Prayer in a space the size of a dime. Never far from controversy, he incurred the scorn of the orthodox medical community.

  In time Edwin A. Lodge, M.D., became a cottage industry—as the subtitle on his stationery indicated: “Homoeopathic Chemist, Importer and Publisher.” His practice and Homeopathic Dispensary moved every few years. From one location, on Wayne Street, he published the American Homoeopathic Observer, which offered as many as twenty different pamphlets on homeopathic subjects in its advertisements. Thus, he administered doses of homilies and Scripture alongside such remedies as “Lodge’s Indian Tonix Elixir” and “Lodge’s Chinese Dye-Powder for the Hair.” He also delivered public addresses on nutrition, marriage, and midwifery to the good people of Detroit. These speeches pestled some common sense about healthy bodies with some slightly loony “scientific theories,” with a pinch of fire and brimstone thrown in. His “Private Lecture to Young Men,” for example, prepared “men at eighteen” for puberty—which he claimed was largely induced by “the hot-bed rearing of city life”—

  by its unnatural excitements, by reading love romances, and the foul trash which is weekly retailed in sensual papers, by waltzes and other dances, by witnessing theatrical representations of love-plays, by operatic entertainments, by love-songs and lascivious poetry from the pens of Byron and other sensual poets….

  A devout anti-abortionist, he urged young men to search for “true wealth” in a partner—“intelligence, affection, and health”—before replenishing the earth.

  Had Dr. Lodge spent more time examining the health of his own wife, Emma, he would have observed that she was mentally ill—subject to extreme mood swings that culminated in rages. Within a few years of their marriage, he filed a bill of divorcement, which he withdrew when she promised to put an end to her “bad treatment, violent acts, threats and imprudences.” She proved unable to “reform,” however, stricken with what the next century would probably recognize as a chemical imbalance. Even after she died a few years later, Lodge wrote his mother, “No mention is ever made of that Xantippe who worried me of old,” and that “dead or alive I am not willing to have her spoken of by any member of my family in my house or out of it.”

  Dr. Lodge lost no time in taking a second wife, one Christiana Hanson, a Norwegian widow of a sea captain. She entered the marriage with a son, who assumed the name Lodge; and they had four more children of their own. Three of the Lodge boys became doctors, and one of the sons from his second marriage, John Christian Lodge, became mayor of Detroit and one of its longest-serving councilmen. But for most of his life, Dr. Lodge criticized his children far more than he ever praised them, engaging in constant arguments, sometimes verbally violent behavior. He seemed to find peace only after he retired from the practice of medicine to run a farm on Pine Lake, about five miles from Pontiac, where he could soak up the beauty of God’s country.

  The most compliant of the eleven Lodge children was Evangeline, from his first marriage. She learned to deal with her father’s tempestuous personality by quietly submitting. She worked long hours in the offices and the pharmacy and never engaged in the family quarrels. At twenty-five she married a man who was in many ways like her father.

  Controversial and contumacious, Dr. Charles Henry Land was the most progressive dentist in town, often to the consternation of his colleagues. Like the Lodges, the Lands came to the United States from Great Britain by way of Canada. Some of the family had fought as Loyalist soldiers during the American Revolution, and one member had married into the family of General Winfield Scott, the hero of three wars and Supreme Commander of the Union Army. Abandoned as a teenager by his father, Dr. Land had sold newspapers on the streets of New York and worked as a meat packer in Des Moines before he found himself at age twenty-one in Chicago, apprenticing to a dentist. With all the zeal of an autodidact, Charles Land immersed himself in the science of oral medicine. Just when he had built his own successful practice, the great Chicago fire stormed through the city, taking Land’s office and home with it. He fled with little more than the clothes on his back, spending that night in October 1871 under a viaduct, where he covered himself in sand for protection. The next day, he persuaded the captain of a lake boat to take him up Lake Michigan and down Lake Huron to the eastern shore of Michigan—on credit.

  Land arrived in Detroit practically penniless. As soon as possible, the twenty-four-year-old dentist hung out his shingle, which he literally painted himself. He met with immediate success; and over the next twenty years he revolutionized his profession. Inventing the porcelain jacket crown, as well as two dozen other patented devices and procedures, earned him his appellation, the “Father of Porcelain Dentistry.” In 1875, Charles Henry Land married Dr. Lodge’s daughter Evangeline. They moved into a brick house just below Grand Circus Park on Woodward Avenue; and over the next four years they produced a daughter and a son, whom they named after themselves.

  Dr. Land proved to be as much of a firebrand in Detroit as Dr. Lodge was. The “gold work” dentists vociferously opposed Land’s experiments with porcelain and called him a “quack.” And when Land began to advertise his practice, publicly announcing his new techniques, he hit a nerve. The Michigan Dental Association expelled Land from their organization over the issue. “That suits me,” he told The Evening News. “I want to be removed from any institution which can be so intolerant and nearsighted as this one is proving.”

  To make matters worse, he formed a company to sell the Land System of Dental Practice,
complete with the rights to practice his methods and a guarantee against patent infringers. Many in the profession objected to such patents and raised money to fight Land in court. At one point, he offered to grant his patents to the dental profession, if it would adopt his methods of dentistry; but he was refused. One against many, he spent most of his resources on lawsuits and went bankrupt.

  Young Evangeline and young Charles had to grow up with other embarrassments. Mildly eccentric, Dr. Land busied himself with peculiar activities. An amateur lepidopterist, entomologist, ornithologist, taxidermist, and fungiphile, he surrounded himself with his collections, growing the wild mushrooms in his cellar. In his spare time he made porcelain flowers and pottery, which he threw on a wheel he had fashioned from an old dental foot-engine.

  It was difficult for the Land children to keep friends, because they moved almost every other year, the size of their house reflecting the state of their finances. Isolated, the Land children grew up appreciating solitude. Evangeline attended Miss Liggett’s private school and practiced piano as much as four hours a day. Furthermore, in an age when most fathers discouraged their daughters from becoming too educated, Dr. Land urged his daughter to pursue an additional year of high school at Detroit Central High School and—even more unusual—to continue her studies at the University of Michigan. She graduated in 1899 with a Bachelor of Science degree, having majored in Chemistry. She was by her own admission “a practical & matter of fact young woman.”

  Evangeline was also engaging, lively, and utterly unpredictable. Long after her first cousin Emory Scott Land—a midshipman at the Naval Academy who would rise to the rank of Admiral—had invited Evangeline to be his prom date in Annapolis, he referred to her as “the most beautiful girl at Ann Arbor.” One of her Lodge cousins thought he was paying an even higher compliment when he recollected years later that Evangeline was, in fact, “a perfect picture of her grandmother, Emma Kissane.” The similarity was more than skin-deep: Evangeline Lodge Land was beginning to exhibit symptoms of her grandmother’s mental instability as well.