Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  On Monday, June thirteenth, Lindbergh appeared at a 6:45 breakfast reception in the ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel, where the National Aeronautic Association conferred a lifetime membership upon him, an honor held by the Wrights, Chanute, Langley, and Edison. The most magnanimous speech of the morning came from Commander Richard E. Byrd, Lindbergh’s former rival on the runway of Roosevelt Field. “When we built the America for a transatlantic flight,” he said, “it was our object to attempt to help the spirit of good fellowship and the progress of aviation. Colonel Lindbergh has done these two things in a far better way than we ever hoped. We think it very fortunate for the world that Lindbergh got there before we did, and we are glad of it.”

  Lindbergh went to Bolling Field, where he climbed into the wicker chair of the Spirit of St. Louis. The plane had been tuned and given a fresh coat of silver paint; but when Lindbergh heard the engine, it did not sound right. Reluctantly, he borrowed a Curtiss P-1 biplane. He put the crowd at the airfield at ease by offering them a breathtaking display of stunts, showing off with an Immelmann turn, soaring almost straight up and over until he was flying upside down. Flipping into a few barrel rolls, he set off for New York with an escort of the First Pursuit Group of Selfridge Field, Michigan, commanded by Major Thomas G. Lanphier. Commander Byrd rode in one of the planes.

  Lindbergh flew at three thousand feet, above his escort, probably too high to see the demonstrations below. In every city along his route—Balti-more, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton—tens of thousands of people filled the streets and the rooftops, waving to him. He landed at Mitchel Field on Long Island, where he was rushed into a waiting car and taken across the field to another plane, the amphibian San Francisco, a deep-blue plane with golden wings. The captain volplaned Lindbergh down to the water near Quarantine, the station on Staten Island, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Narrows.

  More than four hundred boats waited in the water, a Marine Parade representing every type of boat in the harbor. One of them, a police launch, pulled over to the San Francisco to receive its passenger. Upon the realization that it was Lindbergh, every boat whistled and tooted. The fanfare was loud enough for the twenty thousand people standing along the Palisades of the Hudson River—ten miles away—to hear without straining. Lindbergh was shuttled to the Macom, the yacht of the Mayor of the City of New York. A committee welcomed him aboard, but it was too noisy for anybody to hear much, even at the press conference below deck. When one journalist asked if he was wearying of all the receptions, Lindbergh replied, “That’s hardly a query I could answer now.” For much of the hour it took to reach the Battery, Lindbergh stood on the bridge of the Macom, while twenty-two planes flew over in battle formation, dropping fifty thousand blossoms.

  When the Macom reached Pier A at 12:40 that afternoon, Lindbergh found three hundred thousand people waiting in the Battery. New York City’s offices, schools, stock exchanges, and most of the nation’s principal financial markets were closed for “Lindbergh Day,” as “a mark of respect”; and, at first glance, it seemed that Manhattan’s entire population had forced its way to its southern tip. In fact, another four million people were waiting farther uptown, lining the route that lay ahead. Lindbergh’s mother met him at the pier, and they entered separate cars. One overpowering roar sustained the entire hour in which Lindbergh rode the mile up Broadway from Battery Park to City Hall, people filling every inch of sidewalk and every window along the way. Through the canyon of buildings, past Wall Street, the ticker tape and other shredded paper was so thick that few could even see Lindbergh or the skyline through the “snowstorm.”

  More than ten thousand soldiers and sailors led the parade, up to the Mayor’s two grandstands, which were filled with three thousand city officials and special guests. Gloria Trumpeters—three women in white robes—sounded the arrival of Lindbergh’s car, setting off the vociferation of the one hundred thousand standing outside City Hall. Lindbergh stepped up to the platform, where Grover A. Whalen, Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Reception, introduced him to Mayor James J. Walker.

  “Let me dispense with any unnecessary official side of function, Colonel,” said “Gentleman Jimmy” to the young man in the blue suit, “by telling you that if you have prepared yourself with any letters of introduction to New York City they are not necessary.” He praised Lindbergh for being a “great grammarian,” for introducing to the English language the world’s first “flying pronoun”—the “aeronautical ‘we.’”

  Speaking on behalf of his six million constituents, Mayor Walker said that Lindbergh had “inscribed on the heavens themselves a beautiful rainbow of hope and courage and confidence in mankind.” With that, he added, “Colonel Lindbergh, New York City is yours—I don’t give it to you; you won it.” He pinned the specially made Medal of New York City on Lindbergh’s lapel. It was an elaborate decoration, with Lindbergh’s plane and the word “We” struck in platinum and set into the gold medal.

  Lindbergh approached the microphones and spoke of his receptions in Europe and the mounting pressure for him to return to America. “The Ambassador in London said that it was not an order to go back home,” Lindbergh said, “but there would be a battleship waiting in a few days.” He paused for the great wave of laughter to subside, then added that while he had departed with regrets, coming up the Potomac had made him not so sorry that he had taken the Ambassador’s advice. “After spending about an hour in New York,” Lindbergh added, “I know I am not.” His trademark “I thank you” triggered applause that could be stopped only by the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  The parade continued uptown on Fifth Avenue, Lindbergh in the first car with the Mayor and Grover Whalen. They paused at the “Eternal Light” at Twenty-fourth Street so that Lindbergh could place a wreath of roses in memory of New York’s fighting men who had made “the supreme sacrifice” in the War. Big American flags billowed along both sides of the avenue, above the steadily thickening crowd. Only children—ten thousand of them, most waving small flags—were given access to the great steps, windows, and front lawn of the Public Library between Fortieth and Forty-second streets. At Fiftieth Street the parade paused again, so that Lindbergh could step out of his automobile to greet Cardinal Hayes of New York, who was seated in a special chair placed in front of the center door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Upon seeing Lindbergh exit from his car, the Prince of the Church descended the steps to welcome him. “I greet you as the first and finest American boy of the day,” said the elderly Cardinal. “God bless you and God bless your mother.” Lindbergh bowed slightly and returned to the parade.

  At times, Lindbergh and his escorts had to bail confetti out of their car. “I guess when I leave here,” Lindbergh yelled to Mayor Walker, “they’ll have to print another edition of the telephone book.”

  “Well, before you leave,” the Mayor replied, “you’ll have to provide us with another Street Cleaning Department.” In fact, two thousand street cleaners were called up to remove what amounted to close to two thousand tons of paper that were tossed that day, the most that had ever rained on the city.

  Four hours after arriving in the Battery, Lindbergh faced the three hundred thousand people who had emptied into Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for the official honors of New York State. Overhead a skywriter sprayed the words “Hail Lindy.” Mayor Walker introduced Lindbergh to Governor Alfred E. Smith, who draped a blue ribbon around Lindbergh’s neck, from which hung the Medal of Valor from the State of New York. The medal, created by Tiffany and Company and presented for “intrepidity and courage of the highest order,” had never before been awarded to a nonresident of the state. “You are hailed in the Empire State,” said Governor Smith, “as an ideal and an example for the youth of America.” After a thirty-minute review of the tail end of the parade, Lindbergh and his mother were taken to an apartment at 270 Park Avenue, which had been loaned to them by a friend of the Mayor for the duration of their stay in the city. At the apartment, Lindbergh ate his first fo
od since leaving Washington early that morning. It was also his first quiet moment in ten hours.

  Hundreds in New York City had collapsed that day. Many were trampled by the crowd and the mounted police, and one twenty-three-year-old woman suffered a fatal heart attack watching the parade from the roof of the Hotel Seville. By 8:15 that night, a revived Lindbergh was driven to the Long Island estate of Clarence Mackay—head of the Postal Telegraph Company, one of the city’s most prominent social leaders, and the disapproving father-in-law of Irving Berlin. At Harbor Hill, his fifty-room mansion in Roslyn, Mackay hosted a dinner for eighty in Lindbergh’s honor with several hundred more guests arriving later for dancing. Lindbergh did not return to Park Avenue until after midnight.

  By then, Charles Lindbergh had become the most photographed man in the world. Impossibly photogenic, there was not a bad picture to be taken of him. When he smiled, he radiated the endearing innocence of an American farmboy; if caught frowning, his countenance assumed the strength of a Nordic god. Hollywood screenwriter and producer Lamar Trotti said, “Women saw in him the perfection of man, what they conceived their husbands to be and what still constitutes their dream. The men, in turn, experienced quick pulses of the heart and thought wistfully of the things they might have done, things they would like to do, things they wish they had the nerve to do.” Although he was barely known but three weeks prior, after the first day of his reception in New York, an estimated 7,430,000 feet of newsreel film had recorded his movements, already two million more feet than existed of the Prince of Wales, previously considered the subject of more frames of documentary film than anybody in history. Where Lindbergh’s flight had filled the first five pages of The New York Times, his reception accounted for every article for the first sixteen pages. Newspaper stands and tobacconists offered his picture for a quarter. “Welcome Home, Lindy” signs with his picture appeared on the window of practically every taxi. Army recruiting posters had his face pasted on, with the words “Lindbergh the Bold—He was Army trained.” Lindbergh kept his head from being turned. As Paul Garber, the Smithsonian’s aviation historian noted, “Even more impressive than Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic was the way in which he comported himself afterwards.”

  Over the next four days, the residents of Gotham and the rest of the globe would concur. Speeches dwelled as much on his character as on his achievement. With little more than the most measured thanks, Lindbergh faced screaming fans and laudatory remarks at one reception after another—including the official dinner of the City of New York, which the Hotel Commodore bragged was “the largest ever tendered to an individual in modern history”—thirty-seven hundred guests feasting on six thousand pounds of chicken, two thousand heads of lettuce, one hundred twenty-five gallons of peas, and eight hundred quarts of ice cream. Only the nation’s most stately Charles Evans Hughes could do justice to the grandeur of the evening: “We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement,” he explained. “Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything.”

  Wednesday night, after a full day of receptions and a midnight benefit performance of Rio Rita—the Ziegfeld musical he had missed weeks earlier, when the weather over the Atlantic had suddenly cleared—Lindbergh took the wheel of a car himself and sped out to Mitchel Field on Long Island. The colonel in charge of the field was apprehensive, but at three o’clock in the morning, he gave Lindbergh an Army pursuit plane with enough gasoline to get him to Bolling Field. He made the trip in a little more than two hours; and within a half hour he was returning to Long Island in his own repaired plane. At 7:40 A.M., Lindbergh flew toward Roosevelt Field, grazing over the runway from which he had made history one month earlier, then landed at Mitchel Field. A car took him to Park Avenue, where he showered and changed from his evening clothes into a blue suit to attend Charles Lindbergh Day in Brooklyn.

  The entire borough was closed for the holiday, so that Lindbergh could ride in a parade twenty-two miles long. He was greeted by seven hundred thousand people, one-third of its residents. There were ceremonies at Prospect Park—for two hundred thousand people—and a luncheon, before another ceremony at Roosevelt Field—for twenty-five thousand—where he parked his plane. He was rushed to the Bronx, where the Yankee fans had been promised a visit, but Lindbergh had time only to drive up to the stadium before heading downtown for the six o’clock presentation of the Orteig Prize at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue at Eighth Street. There he received a magnificent scroll, a medal, and his check for $25,000. He noted that Orteig’s offer had been his impetus to enter the race, for it was “nothing more nor less than a challenge to pilots and engineers in aeronautics to see whether they could build and fly a plane from New York to Paris. I do not believe any such challenge, within reason, will ever go unanswered.”

  Back at his apartment he changed into evening clothes for a reception of University of Wisconsin alumni and a dinner of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce. Later, he dropped in on a party given by William Randolph Hearst, which was also attended by the Mayor and Charlie Chaplin. He returned to the apartment at midnight. At 8:17 the next morning, the wheels of the Spirit of St. Louis left the turf of Roosevelt Field for the city that had launched him to fame.

  It was a showery nine-hour flight over the Midwest, but that did not dampen the enthusiasm of those below. He circled the cities of Columbus, Dayton, and Indianapolis, where he was joined by aerial escorts, before reaching St. Louis. Five thousand people stood in the drizzle at Lambert Field to welcome him—including his former flying buddies, most of whom could not get past the guards to greet him. He and his mother, who had taken the train to St. Louis, spent the night at the home of backer Harry Knight.

  The next day, the sun broke through just as a seven-mile parade through the streets of St. Louis began. Five hundred thousand people lined the way. American flags and pennants with Lindbergh’s picture hung everywhere; “Slim did it” was the slogan of the day on lapel pins and hatbands. Although Lindbergh was visibly tired, with dark bags under his eyes, St. Louis kept him awake with the most cacophonous parade he had yet experienced. At the official dinner for thirteen hundred, Lindbergh was presented a scroll and the keys to the city inside a gold jewel box with a raised representation of a map showing the route from St. Louis to Paris. The next day Lindbergh performed aerial acrobatics for one hundred thousand in Forest Park and placed a wreath at the statue of St. Louis.

  On Monday, June twentieth, Lindbergh partook in absolutely no public program or ceremony in his honor. For the first time in the month since his departure for France, nothing Lindbergh did that day was especially news-worthy. In fact, when he drove downtown St. Louis in a new car which he had been given, few people even recognized him without all the trappings of ceremony surrounding him. It was only when somebody pointed him out that he found himself running from a crowd intent on grabbing at his clothes and his body.

  Evangeline Lindbergh traveled by train to Detroit, so that she could return to her classroom. Her son remained in St. Louis, sifting through some of the congratulations, gifts, and offers among the 3,500,000 letters, one hundred thousand telegrams, and fourteen thousand parcels which had been addressed to him since his return. Western Union had a selection of prepared messages which customers could order—“America’s heart goes out to you” or “Time will not dim the splendor of your achievement,” for example. Among the thousands of requests for autographs and photographs came scores of marriage proposals and hundreds of thousands of “welcome home” messages from professional organizations, chambers of commerce, and boys’ clubs. Cities—such as Boston, Nashville, Sacramento, and Seattle—printed pre-addressed invitations to visit, which required only the sender’s signature and a ten-cent airmail stamp.

  To honor Lindbergh, thousands rendered his and his plane’s likeness in oil paints, watercolors, pencil, charcoal, crayon, and gold as well as tapestries, needlepointed pillows, woven mats, and hooked rugs; one woman crocheted a model of the plane. His bust was sculpted in silver, bronze,
ivory, plaster, and soap. He received rolls of Swedish wallpaper with his image repeated, an ivory inlaid billiard cue, a Persian manuscript of the Koran, a Gutenberg Bible, and a stickpin with the Spirit of St. Louis cut from a single diamond. Aviation clubs in the Netherlands, Turkey, and Czechoslovakia all conferred lifetime memberships upon him—with a gold medal, a diamond brooch, and a bronze plaque, respectively; and the Masonic Lodge, whose initiation ceremonies Lindbergh had never completed, issued him a Gold Life membership card. The Licensed Newsboys of Springfield, Illinois, chipped in and bought a fountain pen for their hero, a small token for the extra newspapers he helped sell. The Shubert Theatre Corporation issued him a gold and diamond Lifetime Pass to all their theaters throughout Europe and America; the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs sent a gold Lifetime Pass to any of their games.

  Then came the wave of requests for his endorsement of products—not just from cigarette and cereal companies but from: Thomas D. Murphy Company of Red Oak, Iowa, which manufactured calendars and offered him two cents on every one of its fifteen-cent items; the Chicago company that was selling $200 busts of the aviator for schools, libraries, and museums; the German firm selling Lindbergh Razor Blades in Turkey; the New York outfit producing bronze Spirit of St. Louis letter openers; the Hookless Fastener Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which wanted to boast that Lindbergh’s new flying suits would use their zippers.

  Countless manufacturers did not wait for his approval. Clothiers could outfit men and women from head to toe in Lindbergh fashions: The Bruck-Weiss Company, for example, manufactured the “Lucky Lindy Lid”—a lady’s hat of gray felt trimmed with black felt, with flaps on the side simulating plane wings and a gray felt propeller appliquéd in the front; a company in Haverhill produced the “Lucky Lindbergh” shoe for women, which featured the design of the Spirit of St. Louis sewn in patent leather with a propeller on the toe and a photograph of Lindy inserted in a leather horseshoe on the side. One of the salesmen of the Thompson Manufacturing Company in Belfast, Maine, realized they could move their boys’ breeches faster if they started calling it the “Lindy” pant. A baker in Elkhart, Indiana, renamed his product “Lucky Lindy Bread.” Toys and games, watches and clocks, pencils and rulers, and almost any paper product could be adapted to include a Lindbergh theme; anything packaged—from cigars to canned fruit—became fair game for a logo of a single-engined monoplane. Major businesses and institutions advertised in newspapers, welcoming Lindbergh home as a way of drawing attention to themselves. Lucrative proposals came from the deepest pockets in aviation, businessmen who wanted to build an airline around Lindbergh.