Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Everybody rushed outside and looked at the roof, which was in flames. While the house burned from the third floor down, the boy’s nurse hied him to the back of the barn so that he would not be frightened. But she kept screaming, “Charles, you mustn’t watch!”—which terrified him, indelibly etching his first vivid memory. Evangeline tried to gather valuables, while C.A. and the workmen tried to extinguish the fire. After twenty minutes, there was nothing to do but watch as the fire consumed the building. Charles pulled away from his nurse to see the black cloud covering the house, as its pine and cedar crackled.

  The next day, Evangeline walked Charles through the ruins. Hardly a piece of charred wood remained. “Our entire house has sunk into the stone walls of its basement,” he would write fifty years later. “Out of the pit, smoke-smutted but sharp-cut against thick leaves and sky, rises our brick chimney, tall and spindly without a house around it.” The only object to remain completely undamaged was a small Mexican idol, a red-clay figurine Evangeline had purchased in Tijuana on her honeymoon. Some clothes and furniture and the upright piano were salvaged, as were all of the maid’s possessions. (Evangeline suspected her of accidentally starting the fire by knocking over her kerosene lamp; others believed oily rags had been the cause.) “Father will build us a new house,” Evangeline assured her three-and-one-half-year-old. “But my toys, and the big stairs,” he later remembered thinking, “and my room above the river, are gone forever—”

  More than the Lindbergh house went up in smoke. Evangeline never recovered her pearl-and-diamond engagement ring … and, indeed, the Lindbergh marriage seemed to go with it. The solid house could never conceal the fact that the relationship within had been shaky from the start, that while C.A. and Evangeline might have been intellectually compatible, they were two decidely mismatched personalities—in the words of one of his friends, “an entire contrast in tastes, ideals, and ambitions.”

  While the first house Charles ever knew was still smoldering, the family moved fifteen miles south, into a hotel in Uppsala. Within two weeks, C.A. and Evangeline had decided to rebuild on their original site; and so they moved back to Little Falls. C.A. camped out on the farm, while Evangeline and the children checked into the Buckman Hotel in town, Charles bunking with his mother in a plain room, with a bed, simple wooden furniture, and a washstand. “For me it was a dreary place,” Charles would later write. Without the Mississippi rushing outside his window, he spent much of his time hanging over a windowsill and looking down on the rutted, unpaved road below, with its board sidewalks and hitching posts. Whenever cabin fever set in, Evangeline took Charles for extended visits to Detroit. Meantime Lillian and Eva studied hard in the Little Falls schools in hopes of getting into college, for they realized they would be happier there than in what had become a contentious household.

  By the end of the year, C.A. was too far out on a financial limb to allow anyone to proceed with that thought. “We are exceedingly poor in cash and will be for some time to come,” C.A. was forced to reveal to Evangeline in December 1905, “and our future expenses will have to be adjusted to our cash and not to what we want.” He said they had over two hundred thousand dollars worth of property to which he had become a “slave,” because there were debts totaling almost forty thousand dollars against the land with property taxes on top of that. “They both, our little daughters, have got to work,” C.A. insisted, “and it will be better for them.” C.A. began by selling the horses and cattle and discharging the farmhands. Without sacrifice on everyone’s part, he explained, “the future of our dear boy might be less advantageous.”

  All plans that year were suddenly scaled down—starting with the new house. Gradually, Evangeline realized the reasons for rebuilding a structure half the size of its predecessor were not strictly economic. Months before the fire, Lillian and Eva had observed that C.A. had moved out of his wife’s bedroom; now they thought he might be moving out of the house altogether. The new house, built upon the basement of the old one, suggested as much.

  “I have heard it called the queerest house in Minnesota,” Evangeline herself said of the one-and-a-half-story replacement. Only the first floor ever felt finished. The piano was moved into the living room; but the dining room, two bedrooms, sewing room, kitchen, and bathroom were jumbled in such a way as to produce a dark hallway with seven doors leading into it. “We used to laugh and say we had no fear of burglars at night,” Evangeline recalled, “because they would be lost and could not find their way around without making too much noise.”

  For young Charles, the only part of the house that felt like home was the screened-in sleeping porch in the back, overlooking the Mississippi, partially open to the elements. He chose to spend all but the bitterest nights there. “I was in close contact with sun, wind, rain, and stars,” Lindbergh remembered of his “bedroom.” “My bed, a wide, folding-cot affair, was in the northwest corner. On stormy nights rain blown in through the screen would mist it. Some of the valley’s treetops rose slightly above its level.”

  The second floor, a few small rooms under the gables and eaves, never became much more than an attic. Its pine floorboards remained unfinished, and no doors were hung. Although C.A. had ordered the foundation of the house to be raised so that he could build a library for himself in the basement, that room was never finished either.

  Evangeline did everything to make the place her own. She had it painted gray with white trim; and she replanted the two large oval flower beds in front with irises and nasturtium and tiger lilies. Lilac and honeysuckle bushes lined the road in front of the house. Between Little Falls and whichever house in Detroit her parents were living, C.A. was happy to know there was always a place to “park” Evangeline and their son, for he was developing a new passion outside the home—politics.

  THE UNITED STATES experienced an awkward adolescence as it entered the twentieth century. By its thirteenth decade as a nation it found itself caught between its agrarian youth and its industrial manhood. Nowhere were the growing pains felt more than in the Upper Mississippi Valley. The sound of an automobile down one of the roads in those parts was still enough to make a field hand lean against his hoe and marvel; but the nation’s breadbasket knew that a new kind of wealth was being created in the cities “out East.” A new generation of heartlanders began to fear they might be the next victims of the urban money interests.

  Minnesota—a farm state with rapidly growing cities vibrant with factories and mills—was especially mindful. By 1905, more than half its residents lived in urban areas. But in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, the state’s centermost twelve counties, two-thirds of the population were still rural dwellers and the chief source of their income was agriculture; the largest city in the district, St. Cloud, claimed only ten thousand residents. Such districts began looking for new representatives, men who had grown up on farms, been educated at Midwestern colleges, and were willing to leave their small-town law practices for capital cities.

  The incumbent congressman of Minnesota’s sixth district—two-term Republican Clarence B. Buckman—had evidently used his office to secure timber tracts for his own lumber interests; and many civic leaders in Little Falls, the district’s centermost town, felt C.A. Lindbergh was just the man to replace him. Nobody in the district was more concerned about financial abuses of power; and nobody had been more outspoken, regularly firing off letters to the editors of local newspapers. In fact, Lindbergh had just established an experimental farmers’ cooperative and a political quarterly of his own, in which he warned against the “favored class” in America, which he said “grabs the profits and leaves the industrious workers only a bare subsistence.” Farmers and small businessmen gathered in support.

  Lindbergh asked his most important New York real-estate client, Howard P. Bell—who had just lost shore rights at a dam site because of a Buckman political deal—to help him decide whether or not to run. Bell thought it boiled down to personal considerations—“how much is it worth to … have the n
ame and general repute of being a Congressman.” He granted that it would certainly enhance a law practice, but at “the cost of the thing in time, money, loss of opportunity at home.” Unwittingly, Bell had hit upon the final reason to support C.A.’s running: a scandal-free method of separating from his wife. In September 1906, Lindbergh won the Republican nomination by almost seven percent.

  Although never at a loss for opinions, Lindbergh was no silver-tongued orator. Recordings of his voice do not exist, but C.A.’s informal writings suggest a trace of a Scandinavian accent and the fact that he never fully mastered English—“Every think running ok”; “Hinclosed are some notes”; “Spected you down soon.” But he was, by most reports, compelling—his passion compensating for his lapses in rhetoric. He repeatedly spoke of labor as the provider of “the main wealth of the world,” as “the most important factor in our civilization.”

  Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District elected C.A. Lindbergh to the United States House of Representatives by a comfortable margin over his Democratic opponent, 16,762 to 13,115. The Sixtieth Congress would not convene until December 1907, but C.A. wasted no time in leaving town. While he familiarized himself with Washington, the rest of his family spent most of that year in Detroit with Dr. and Mrs. Land in a house they rented on Cass Avenue. Lillian graduated from Detroit Central High School and was permitted to start college at Ann Arbor, taking her fourteen-year-old sister along with her and seeing her through her third year of high school. Charles understood that his father’s election meant “certain changes in life”—many of them, such as attending church, “disagreeable.” Above all, it meant the loss of another home.

  This period proved so upsetting that most of Lindbergh’s childhood became a blurry memory to him. Over the next sixty-five years he would write six autobiographical volumes, much of which dwell on his youth. One began as a letter and swelled into a fifty-page book solely on the subject, which he titled Boyhood on the Upper Mississippi. But the title itself bespeaks a sad irony—for Charles Lindbergh spent only a fraction of his youth on the upper Mississippi. Although the images of his time there would forever be the most colorful in his mind’s eye, most of his childhood was spent away from the farm.

  From 1906 to 1917, he was there but two, sometimes three, months a year. The farther he traveled from Minnesota, the dimmer his recollections. And the most painful memories of his first eighteen years were subjected to selective amnesia, thus yielding but a few sentences in all his writing. Amazingly, when this stickler for accuracy compiled calendars of events in his childhood, they were riddled with errors, with major events forgotten and entire years mixed up. Later in life, Lindbergh would spend hours scrutinizing these formative years without ever analyzing them, averting his glance from that which was most personal—about his ancestors, his parents, or himself. “I have no recollection whatever of my daily routine during the early years of my life,” he would admit in his mid-thirties.

  Lindbergh never realized that his many pages of Tom Sawyer—like reminiscences—sunny days along the river, skinny-dipping, tree-climbing, watching “river-pigs” break log jams, running over the log jams himself—were, in fact, the exceptional days of his childhood. He was not consciously trying to varnish his youth. He simply learned at an early age to see and hear only that which he wanted to. By five years old he was already, in the words of his half-sister, “painfully shy”—hardly ever having played with another child and almost never having left his mother’s sight.

  He learned to make much out of little, indulging in solitary pursuits. He became an ardent collector of stones, arrowheads, cigar bands, coins, stamps, guns, lead soldiers, marbles, cigarette cards—almost anything he could find and stash under one of the attic eaves. And he became an inveterate maker of lists, constantly updating accounts of his possessions, as though taking inventory of himself through his things. He was happiest alone, outside, at one with nature. “That farm was one of the most important things in my life,” he would write his mother in his mid-forties. “It taught me the value of water, trees, and sky—and solitude. Anyone who has not known these elements has not really lived.” Indeed, he later realized, “I am not happy living away from water or where I cannot see the sky on a clear night.”

  One day, while playing alone on the upper floor of the house, he heard the distant noise of an engine. As it approached he realized it was louder than that of an automobile. He rushed to the window and climbed onto the roof. About two hundred yards away and barely higher than the treetops, he saw an airplane. It had two sets of wings, one above the other, with a man wearing a visored cap backwards sandwiched between. “Except in photographs, I had never seen an airplane before,” Charles later wrote. “The aviator, my mother told me, had come to Little Falls to give exhibitions and carry up into the air anyone who dared to ride with him.” She explained that it was both a dangerous and expensive proposition.

  In the fall of 1907, C.A. Lindbergh gathered his family in the nation’s capital for the inauguration of his career as a Congressman. Lillian left college and took her sister, Eva, to join Evangeline and Charles in C.A.’s furnished apartment in the Romaine, at 1831 V Street N.W., near Rock Creek Park. Although the flat was spacious, the walls closed in on them. By Christmas, Lillian and Eva had been dispatched to relatives in St. Cloud. Charles spent as much time as possible playing alone in vacant lots, having imaginary adventures.

  On December 2, 1907, Congressman Lindbergh joined his colleagues for the opening of the Sixtieth Congress. It was largely a day of ceremony, the swearing in of members followed by the re-election of the House Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois. Republicans had controlled the House in all but sixteen years since the Civil War; and, coercive as he was coarse, cigar-chomping “Uncle Joe” Cannon controlled a powerful legislative machine. As was customary, a photograph of the new Congress was taken, remarkable on this occasion because there, in one of the back rows, among the assembly of hoary heads, sat the vigorous forty-nine-year-old C.A. Lindbergh. Standing out even more glaringly in the photograph, in the aisle to his right, is a towheaded boy in a white sailor suit: his son, Charles.

  The first two votes to come before this body were over leadership, in which Speaker Cannon and his rules from the Fifty-ninth Congress both received big majorities—Lindbergh’s votes among them. Only years later did Lindbergh impart to close friends that he had often asked himself why he had voted as he did. “I had come to Washington to do something, so I voted with the herd”; but, he just as quickly resolved, “I am going to wipe out that stigma if I can.” Over the next ten years in office, he would make good on his vow, hardly considering what new stigma such insurgency might bring upon him.

  When Lindbergh took office, the Capitol walls were still shaking from a panic that October on Wall Street, a run on the banks that J. P. Morgan helped control. The solution scared Lindbergh more than the problem. Back home in Minnesota, C.A. had been warning people about the inequities in the American economy for years, how each wreck of the economy and rescue by a few powerful bankers only strengthened the Money Trust—“financial combinations in restraint of trade”—at the nation’s expense. He could not have arrived on the House floor at a timelier moment, as the crux of the national debate for the next few years would be the economy and the extension of new powers to the people.

  During that decade of progressive reform, Lindbergh would prove no stranger in the House well; and there was never any doubt as to where he stood on any issue. He always sided with the hardworking farmer in his district and opposed the high-rolling “speculative parasites.”

  The “insurgent” Republicans in the Senate—such men as Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, William Borah of Idaho, Albert Beveridge of Indiana, Albert Cummins of Iowa, and Moses Clapp of Minnesota—were debating many of the same issues with somewhat greater success. And so, when William Howard Taft assumed the Presidency from Roosevelt in 1909, many of the defiant House members challenged Speaker Cannon’s leadership of their
house. Lindbergh claimed credit for being the first to call for Cannon’s ouster; and Rep. John Nelson of Wisconsin helped organize a group of rebel Republicans to fight for their cause. Nelson found that Lindbergh was “perhaps the most radical and independent of the group.” A sampling of eighteen roll calls between 1906 and 1912, which “reflect deviation from party leadership on the part of certain intransigent Republicans in the House of Representatives,” showed nobody scoring higher than C.A. Lindbergh. His strong support of Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 helped his own re-election to a fourth term; but Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the beneficiary of the schism in the Republican party, got elected President.

  By then much of America—not just the progressive representatives—had been awakened to the dangers of the nation’s powerful bankers. Wrote muckraker Ida Tarbell in the May 1913 issue of The American Magazine, “It was a Swede from Minnesota who first raised in Congress the hue-and-cry of the MONEY TRUST HUNT—’a Swede who dreams,’ a fellow member describes him—Charles A. Lindbergh.” His colleagues never fully embraced his conspiracy theories nor endorsed his legislative proposals, but in 1912 the House did approve of a Money Trust investigation to be conducted by its Committee on Banking and Currency under the direction of Congressman Arsene Pujo. As Congressman Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota later said, it was Congressman Lindbergh whose “resolutions and speeches resulted in this monumental work. There had been much talk in the country about interlocking directorates, but the Pujo investigation proved their existence.

  It gave the facts, statistics, and data. It called Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, and all the rest of the financial powers in America to Washington and placed them on the witness stand.