Lindy Hot Then Not Then Hot Again

Slower, now— slow enough to ground loop safely—left rudder—reverse it—stick over the other way—The Spirit of St. Louis swings around and stops rolling, resting on the solidness of the earth, in the center of Le Bourget. I start to taxi back toward the floodlights and hangars—But the entire field ahead is covered with running figures!

    —Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) occupied some of the most fantastic headlines of the twentieth century. First, of course, he flew solo in his Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic. Later, tragically, his son was kidnapped and murdered. Later still, damaging his golden reputation, Lindbergh was the loudest of those who denounced the United States’s involvement in the conflict that would become World War II.

After his transatlantic flight of May 20–21, 1927, Lindbergh was celebrated everywhere. The postwar generation, like every American generation, had its own celebrities, but Lindbergh was different. His accomplishment was unlike anything in history. In Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen writes:

His picture hung in hundreds of schoolrooms and in thousands of houses. No living American—no dead American, one might say, save perhaps Abraham Lincoln—commanded such unswerving fealty. You might criticize Coolidge or Hoover or Ford or Edison or Bobby Jones or any other headline hero; but if you decried anything that Lindbergh did, you knew that you had wounded your auditors. For Lindbergh was a god.

Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were unable to escape the press on their joyful wedding day in May 1929 and this would set the precedent for some of the horrible years to follow. In February 1932 their twenty-month-old son Charles was kidnapped and murdered. The ordeal of the Lindberghs’ search for their baby played out like a Greek tragedy, with hope and terror alternating places on the stage for months after the kidnapping. Ultimately, the deceased child’s body was found, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted, and executed for the crime.

Lindbergh spent the late 1930s observing the conditions of the various air corps of France, England, and Germany. He also encouraged bolstering American air power, as he had a keen grasp of the Luftwaffe’s potential. As world war again approached, Lindbergh preached nonintervention in European matters and was at loggerheads with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt believed in coming to the aid of France and England, and his entire political machine was geared in that direction.

Lindbergh halted his noninterventionist efforts after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Throughout the remainder of the war, Lindbergh worked with the American military to research and to develop more efficient fighter craft. He also flew on multiple combat missions as a civilian and at least one time confronted a Japanese plane in dogfight conditions, winning the day.

Charles Lindbergh died on August 26, 1974.

Cited:

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s. New York: Harper and Row, 1931.

Lindbergh, Charles. The Spirit of St. Louis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.