Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  While Lindbergh found the adoring response “quite similar regardless of the state,” the receptions in some cities could not help standing out because of their personal significance. In Detroit, he went to the Ford Airport, where he took Henry Ford, crouched into the cockpit, for his first airplane flight; Ford’s son Edsel got a ten-minute ride as well. After receiving the plaudits of close to five hundred thousand in the Twin Cities, Lindbergh piloted his small plane over Melrose, Minnesota—hovering over the very land where Ola Månsson had built a new life for himself in 1859. He flew on to Little Falls, whose streets had been filling since six o’clock that morning. All businesses were closed that Thursday, and there was even restricted postal delivery. Thousands waited at the large pasture three miles north of town where their local hero was meant to arrive. An estimated fifty thousand people from all parts of Minnesota converged upon the small town for the festivities, highlighted by a long parade that featured a dilapidated old heap on which somebody had painted “Lindbergh’s First Plane.” It was the Saxon Six in which Charles had driven his mother and “Brother” to California and back only ten years prior.

  In southern California, the Pacific Electric Railway offered special rates to downtown Los Angeles to watch the parade and hear Lindbergh’s speech at the Coliseum; almost one hundred thousand people attended. That night, the city threw a banquet in his honor in the Fiesta Ball Room of the Ambassador Hotel, at which Hollywood royalty paid court. The motion-picture community presented Lindbergh with a gold loving cup, engraved with thirty-six facsimile signatures of the most famous film stars in the world. In less than a month, the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, would put even the biggest names on that loving cup out of business.

  Lindbergh’s fame kept spreading, etching itself deeper into the public consciousness. He was, parents explained to their children, “living history”; and a worshipful nation paid homage and tribute. Official gifts and citations were presented wherever he stopped—ornate scrolls as well as medals, keys, badges, cups, and plaques, usually in gold. Hartford presented a cane carved of wood from a tree in the Mark Twain Garden, and Nashville presented another made from a tree planted by Andrew Jackson. A Choctaw Indian of Oklahoma conferred upon Lindbergh the name “Tohbionssi Chitokaka,” meaning the greatest white eagle.

  Lindbergh began to appear in textbooks; schoolchildren wrote essays on him and dedicated their yearbooks to him; and many schools were named for him. The Pennsylvania Railroad rechristened its “St. Louisan” the “The Spirit of St. Louis,” and the Milwaukee Railroad named a parlor car “The Lindbergh.” Reading, Pennsylvania, named its viaduct after him; Los Angeles named the great light at the apex of City Hall “Lindbergh Beacon.” Mountains, lakes, parks, boulevards, islands, bays, and beaches across America and beyond were renamed in his honor.

  Lindbergh returned to Mitchel Field on October 23, 1927, his tour having covered 22,350 miles. He had stopped in eighty-two cities, spending the night in sixty-nine of them, where he had been honored at gala dinners and had sat through countless renditions of “Lucky Lindy”—a song he never liked but which bands felt compelled to play whenever he entered the room. Only once on the entire tour had he arrived late, and that was in Portland, Maine, where the fog was so thick he could not find the airfield. He had flown 260 hours, delivered 147 speeches, and had ridden in 1,285 miles of parade. An estimated thirty million spectators had turned out to see him, one-quarter of the nation.

  And Lindbergh’s popularity kept growing. When the supervisor of schools at Belleville, New Jersey, asked the local boys what living person they wished to emulate, Lindbergh was the runaway winner, garnering more votes than all the other heroes combined, including Coolidge, Ford, Edison, and General Pershing. “Five centuries have been required to make a saint of Joan of Arc,” observed American journalist Marquis Childs, “but in two years Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh has become a demigod.”

  People behaved as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it. People sought out patches of cloth from the Spirit of St. Louis; old pistons and any other parts from the Wright engine were preserved as relics; the Vacuum Oil Company sent Lindbergh three ounces of the original oil drained from the reservoir of the plane upon its arrival at Le Bourget, which was marked and sealed in a glass ampule for display. One man who had met Lindbergh camping years earlier spent decades searching for the jug from which he had once drunk. And decades later, in 1990, a man in Maine paid $3,000 for the crate in which the Spirit of St. Louis had been shipped home, so that it could be enshrined. A Lindbergh Birthplace Association was formed to purchase by public subscription the house at 1120 West Forest Avenue in Detroit. The house in Little Falls was looted of practically anything that was not nailed down. With trophies and gifts for Lindbergh flooding into St. Louis, one man volunteered to guard them for no pay—simply because “Col. Lindbergh is a messenger from God … sent here to inspire the people, risking his life every day for the betterment of mankind.” Paul Garber asserted, “After the flight, Charles Lindbergh … literally became all things to all men.”

  So long as Lindbergh remained neutral on controversial topics, that remained true. He served as a blank screen onto which each person projected his own best images of man. Nowhere did that become more apparent than in an artifact that dogged Lindbergh for the rest of his life. Of unknown origin, it was a list of “Lindbergh’s Character Factors,” fifty-nine personality traits in alphabetical order—from Altruism to Unselfishness—which Lindbergh allegedly marked each night with a red cross for those he had fulfilled satisfactorily and a black cross for those he had violated. Constant self-improvement was the obvious purpose, perfection the goal. For fifty years, it circulated around the world reprinted by church groups, boys’ clubs, even in dictionaries. It was, as Lindbergh assured the Religion Editor of the Cleveland Press in 1973, “pure bunk.” While on tour, it was reported that he smoked a cigarette in front of hundreds of people, commenting to Philip Love, “I won’t be played for a tin saint.” Alas, such behavior only exhibited such checklist virtues as Firmness, Modesty, and Sense of Humor. When it turned out that he did not smoke the cigarette, he won more points for Clean Conduct and Self-Control.

  “I feel sure,” Harry Guggenheim wrote Lindbergh in late October, “that nothing has so much contributed to the promotion of aviation in America, with the exception of your own historic flight to Paris, as this tour, which you have just completed.” Statistics already supported the statement. Within weeks of Lindbergh’s flight, Ryan Aircraft had twenty-nine orders for new airplanes—mostly their five-place cabin model—and their workforce had increased from twenty to one hundred twenty. By fall, they were manufacturing three airplanes a week. Airplanes had carried ninety-seven thousand pounds of mail in April and more than one hundred forty-six thousand pounds in September. That year saw a three hundred percent increase in the number of applicants for pilots’ licenses in the United States and an increase of more than four hundred percent in the number of licensed aircraft. America’s one thousand landing fields and airports would practically double within three years, a third of them with lights.

  “It is impossible to predict what the future of aviation will be,” Lindbergh had said during his tour, “but I confidently believe that it will become one of the largest industries in the country. Aviation today is in the same position that the automobile was twenty-five or thirty years ago.” He believed, as he had since he began flying, that St. Louis was destined to become the nation’s “aerial cross-roads”; and within weeks of his tour’s conclusion, the City Administration of St. Louis declared its intention to acquire and develop a municipal airport, incorporating General Lambert’s field. Cities voting on bonds for airports invited Lindbergh to visit just before elections. Lindbergh Fields began cropping up.

  “Lindbergh’s significance to business seems greater than that of any mercantile or financial magnate on either side of the Atlantic,” wrote Forbes that year.

  Progressive bankers, me
rchants, manufacturers and the public generally, already almost have forgotten that recently it was impossible to get letters of inquiry, money orders, or any other commercial papers across the continent in less time than a business week…. After Lindbergh we shall have transocean airmail.

  Lindbergh returned from his tour no closer to having decided on his future. While in New York, he became the “catch” of the social season, with invitations every night. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hoped Lindbergh might “take a family dinner” and meet his five sons—“who, like every other American boy, are very eager to know you.” One small stag dinner put him in the same living room with George Gershwin, who mesmerized Lindbergh with a showy rendition of Rhapsody in Blue, then stopped playing to ask him about the dangers of his epic flight—specifically, why, at the most dangerous moment, he had not turned back.

  During the next month, Lindbergh remained in a tailspin. He put his money in the hands of J. P. Morgan & Co., just as his adviser there, Dwight Morrow, officially terminated his highly lucrative banking career to accept the ambassadorship to Mexico. In thanking Morrow for his past assistance, Lindbergh wrote, “if, by any chance, an opportunity should arise where I might be of any aid to you, please call on me.” Almost immediately, Morrow did.

  Before assuming his post, Morrow considered ways in which he could lessen the severe tensions between Mexico and the United States. With heavy American investment in Mexican land and petroleum plus a considerable Mexican debt, one newspaper wrote, “After Morrow, come the marines.” Instead, Morrow invited Lindbergh to his apartment in New York and asked if he would be willing to fly the Spirit of St. Louis south of the border at the end of the year. “I think it would be an excellent thing for Mexico, for aviation, and for the Foundation,” Morrow wrote Harry Guggenheim, “and for him.”

  “I wanted to make another long distance non-stop flight before retiring the plane from use and placing it in [a] museum,” Lindbergh recalled. “The plane and engine were practically new and in a number of ways the Spirit of St. Louis was better equipped than any other plane for long flights.” Such a high-minded mission would also allow him to postpone any of the more mundane possibilities before him. Morrow had expected Lindbergh to tour the Caribbean in stages, making Mexico his “central point,” but the thrill for Lindbergh was in attempting another giant leap.

  Upon arriving in Mexico, Ambassador Morrow immediately began mending fences between the two countries, proving himself both fair and friendly. His casual air and informal meetings contributed to an unexpected easiness between him and President Plutarco Elías Calles, which the press in both countries happily referred to as “Ham and Eggs Diplomacy.” But nothing enhanced America’s reputation there more than the announcement that Charles Lindbergh was coming to visit. Lindbergh had grown savvy in diplomatic matters and suggested that his flight would be more symbolic if he flew nonstop between the capitals of the two nations. The cautious Ambassador balked at anything so dangerous until Lindbergh said, “You get me the invitation, and I’ll take care of the flying.”

  He spent the second week of December in Washington, where Chief Justice Taft presented him with the Langley Medal from the Smithsonian Institution and Congress voted to award him the Congressional Medal, previously reserved for military heroes. On December 13, 1927, the Spirit of St. Louis was rolled onto Bolling Field, across the Anacostia River from Washington. The flight to Mexico was two-thirds the distance of the New York-to-Paris run, but that still meant twenty-four hours in the air.

  Lindbergh lifted the heavily laden plane off a soggy field at 12:25 that Tuesday afternoon, flying down the east coast of Texas then doglegging toward Mexico City. Upon entering the Valley of Mexico, he realized that he had lost his way while flying over a sea of fog. Navigating from a rudimentary map, he could not get his bearings. Hoping to match railroad lines on the ground with those on the map, he roamed the skies for hours. He finally chose to follow some tracks, flying low enough to read the sign at each station. Tired, he could not make sense of town after town being called “Caballeros.” He was already late in arriving when he realized that he was reading the signs for the mens’ rooms. At last he flew over a city with a wall marked “Hotel Toluca.” He located Toluca on his map, thirty miles to the west of his target.

  Under a July-like sun, 150,000 people waited at Valbuena Airport that afternoon. Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow had been there since mid-morning; and much of the crowd had slept overnight on the field. Lindbergh had been sighted over Tampico and Toluca, but as the aviator was more than two hours late, Morrow and much of the crowd grew anxious. At 3:16, according to Mrs. Morrow’s watch, he arrived, and it was “perfectly thrilling when that plane came to earth.” Morrow presented him to President Calles, who handed him the keys of the city. His flight had taken twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes; and tardy though he was, Lindbergh noted that it had taken the Morrows almost a week to make the same trip.

  There was no holding the Mexicans back in their admiration. Guiding Lindbergh from the grandstand to their waiting car, Mrs. Morrow felt the screaming throng was going to rip off his clothes. All the way into the city, the masses threw flowers at him and shouted, “Viva Lindbergh!” Over the next several days—at receptions, dinners, parades, bullfights, folkdancing exhibitions, and rodeos—the Mexicans displayed more exuberance than Lindbergh had seen anywhere. But the Ambassador deliberately blocked out most of the calendar so that Lindbergh could vacation.

  He settled into the Embassy for the yuletide. Evangeline Lindbergh accepted the Morrows’ invitation to spend the holiday with them and flew down from Detroit. The Morrows, who had been living there with their fourteen-year-old daughter, Constance, and their nineteen-year-old son, Dwight Jr., were joined by their two older daughters, Elisabeth and Anne. For the first time since he had become famous, Lindbergh had a few days at a time in which to relax; for the first time since he was a small child, he enjoyed an old-fashioned family Christmas, surrounded by a large loving family; and for the first time in his life, he spent hours in the quiet company of female contemporaries. Although he often lowered his head in their presence, he could not help noticing how each of the Morrow daughters stood in contrast to the others—Elisabeth, the eldest, beautiful and elegant, socially at ease; Constance, the youngest, vivacious and witty, not afraid of teasing their famous guest; and Anne, twenty-one years old and self-conscious. Sometimes he caught her averting her glance so as not to embarrass him. She felt more comfortable watching from afar, then running upstairs to confide in her diary.

  “I saw standing against the great stone pillar … a tall, slim boy in evening dress—so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I expected,” she wrote after laying eyes on him for the first time. “A very refined face, not at all like those grinning ‘Lindy’ pictures—a firm mouth, clear, straight blue eyes, fair hair, and nice color.” Over the next week, she marveled at his extreme youth and lack of affectation. For Christmas, Mrs. Lindbergh gave Anne and Elisabeth antique Spanish fans, accompanied by cards with her son’s signature.

  During the week, Anne seldom came out from behind her present long enough to learn much about their special visitor. And once Christmas had passed, Lindbergh became consumed with the next portion of his journey. During his stay in Mexico, Ambassador Morrow and the State Department had arranged for Lindbergh to continue touring around Central America and the Caribbean Sea.

  The Morrows saw him off at 5:30 on the morning of December twenty-eighth, as he left for Guatemela City, seven hours away. By the middle of February, he had flown 9,390 miles in 116 and a half hours in and around Latin America—traveling from Guatemala to British Honduras, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Canal Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. The crowds in most places proved too unmanageable for the police; the receptions were usually the greatest those nations had ever seen. The press consistently applied the term “good will” to these Gulf-and
-Caribbean flights; but Lindbergh would later insist, “good will was a very welcome result, but it was not even a major element” in planning the flights. His interest lay primarily in “the adventure of flying, in demonstrating the airplane’s capabilities, and in the development of aviation in general.” He financed the trip himself.

  Lindbergh became the world’s first Ambassador of the Air and his nation’s youngest emissary. In each of the sixteen countries he visited that winter, he was decorated with their highest honors and presented with extraordinary gifts—a gold watch from Guatemala, a gold Indian idol from the Canal Zone, a gold brooch from the Dominican Republic, a gold chest of native gold nuggets from Honduras, and a paperweight set with a piece of iron from the anchor of Columbus’s flagship Santa Maria from Haiti, where they also named a street Lindbergh Avenue. More than anywhere he had ever been, donkey-paced Central America reaffirmed for Lindbergh how indispensable aviation was to the progress of mankind.

  Lindbergh himself wrote up his Latin American tour for The New York Times. The internationally syndicated pieces, each with a different dateline, had something to interest everybody. As spellbinding as tales of Aladdin on his magic carpet, Lindbergh’s dispatches combined adventure with high society, history lessons with visions of the future. One minute he was flying over tropical mountains, the next he was at a Presidential palace—all told with modesty and awe. This real-life action hero had become a regular feature in people’s lives.