Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (6 page)

August, however, had few regrets. Unlike the unforgiving God of James Morrow, August Lindbergh’s God demanded no penance.
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According to Lindbergh’s Lutheran-based theology, sin was inherent in the human condition, and faith in Christ justified salvation. The individual served God through the institutions of the community, but divine will superseded its structures and its laws. Some men were called upon to wear the “mask of God;” sometimes this meant breaking the rules.

Independence and self-reliance were August Lindbergh’s defining principles, and he handed them down as gospel to his son, Charles August. When C.A. was six years old, Lindbergh gave him a gun, permitting him the run of the surrounding woods to shoot game and duck for the family table. But if C.A. learned to love the freedom of the wilderness and the open sky, he also witnessed the vicissitudes of farming. Crop failures, falling prices, and the unregulated growth of railroads nearly disenfranchised the small Midwest farmer. In 1883, determined not to bend to an elitist government controlled by the “Eastern money,” C. A. Lindbergh enrolled in the law school of the University of Michigan.

By the turn of the century, he emerged a gentleman, much as his father had been forty years earlier. Five feet eleven inches tall, he wore elegant three-piece suits, a gold pocket watch, and a hat worn stylishly askew. In the lumber town of Little Falls, Minnesota, northeast of Melrose, he became a commercial and residential landholder and a shareholder in several banks, accruing assets of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. In 1887, he married Mary, the sweet-faced daughter of his landlord, Moses La Fond, a French-Canadian settler who had carved a niche for himself in the state legislature. Pious, unschooled, and dedicated, Mary nonetheless had ambitions of her own. After finishing her domestic chores, she devoted her time to painting and sewing, and won prizes for her needlework. Determined also to learn the art of photography, she took pictures of her three children and developed the film in a laboratory she devised in the hollow behind the front hall staircase.

Soon, Mary and Charles moved to a large brick house close to town and raised their daughters in the Congregational church, straddling the mores of the backwoods settlers and the new and affluent middle class. When Mary died in 1898, during surgery for the removal of a tumor that turned out to be a fetus, C.A. was bereft, yet her death brought the possibility of transforming his life. Still an ambitious young man of forty, he stood at the edge of a booming community that held the promise of wealth and political power. In 1900 he sent his daughters to boarding school and moved to a large hotel in the center of town.

There he met Evangeline Lodge Land, a high school chemistry teacher newly arrived from Detroit, and was immediately taken with her beauty and youth, her rippling Irish laugh, her regal capes and long lacy dresses. His first marriage had the air of an arranged convenience, but his courtship of Evangeline was steeped in romance. It was clear that he had met his match in this fiery, ambitious woman of twenty-four who was determined not to settle for a backwoods life. And it was clear to Evangeline that the handsome widower with the razor wit and the pocketful of cash offered her more than a career in teaching.

Within nine months they were married, and the following year, on February 4, 1902, Charles Augustus, was born. C.A. had purchased a
hundred and twenty acres, two and a half miles southwest of Little Falls, bordered by the Mississippi River and bisected by Pike Creek. Although the Lindberghs called it “the farm,” it was not a farm at all; it was mostly wild land with huge white pines, oaks, lindens, elms, and poplars. The three-story house, with its sweeping porches and oak-paneled walls, towered on a bluff above the trees and the plum orchard in the valley along the river.
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It was equipped with bathrooms, hot-water radiators, and water pumped by gas from a well, and it held four second-floor bedrooms and a third floor with servants’ quarters and a billiard room. It had cost so much, by Little Falls standards—$8000—that C.A. was ashamed to let anyone know. He and his wife gave lavish parties for the Little Falls elite, serving delicacies brought in from Chicago and Minneapolis on imported china and crystal. C.A. hired men to work the farm and the stables, and Evangeline hired a maid, a cook, and a nurse to help care for C.A.’s daughters and the infant son. Now the country squire’s wife, Evangeline wanted to spend her leisure painting flowers on glass and practicing her scales on the piano.

But there was a dark side to this romantic idyll. Shortly after Charles was born, Evangeline grew bitter, angry, sometimes violent, making a mockery of the family’s status and their home, shaming C.A. in front of family and friends. His daughters thought she was “crazy” and accused her of child abuse; others construed her behavior as “schizophrenia,” a turn-of-the-century label for any inexplicable female disturbance. But there was a psychological reality that went unnoticed by those too willing to cast her as a gold-digger and madwoman.
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Evangeline’s postpartum mood swings may well have been extreme, reflecting a family tendency toward mania and depression, but she was also reacting to relations and circumstances.

More educated, sophisticated, and ambitious than the small-town wives of the moneyed men whom she befriended for C.A.’s benefit, Evangeline was alienated in a town worlds apart from everyone and everything she had ever known. Furthermore, C.A. had taken a mistress, and Evangeline was left alone in the big pine house with their small son and C.A.’s teenage daughters. Feeling abandoned and betrayed,
she became the prisoner of a man who would neither love her nor let her go. Employment was not suitable for a woman of her class, and divorce would have meant public shame and the end of C.A.’s political aspirations. While Evangeline’s behavior may have seemed inexplicable, the asylums were full of women who could not escape the restrictions of marriage or motherhood through employment or divorce. It was in the context of her marriage to a sadistic man and the loneliness of the circumstances she had unwittingly chosen that Evangeline rebelled.
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On August 6, 1905, the charade came to an end. A fire that began on the third floor, in a closet frequented by the maid, burned the house to its foundation. Within twenty minutes, everything Charles had known was consumed in flames. Three-year-old Charles peeked out from behind the backyard barn at the black cloud of smoke funneling through the roof of his home. The next morning, the ashes still smoldering beneath the roof beams, Evangeline plodded through the wreckage to find her pearl-and-diamond engagement ring.
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Afterward, she always saw the fire as a symbol of the rage festering beneath the surface of her marriage; young Charles came to see it as the end of an illusion.

With the destruction of the house, the Lindberghs’ tenuous marriage lost its hold. Evangeline took Charles back to Detroit, and C.A. moved to an apartment in Minneapolis. Maintaining the semblance of family life, Evangeline and her son returned to Little Falls each summer and stayed in a cottage C.A. had built on the wild bluff above the river. It stood on the leveled remains of the old mansion, and they called it their “camp.” But they never really went “home” again.

Although Charles would savor the memories of long summer days, swimming with his friends in a nearby creek and navigating logs down the Mississippi River, in truth, after the age of three, he lived a solitary and fragmented life. Shuttled between his grandparents’ home in Detroit, “camp” in Little Falls, and his father’s apartment in Minneapolis, he attended eleven primary schools, never completing a full year of study.
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Left to fend for themselves, with little money, Charles and his mother lived like pariahs at the edge of a society that had no place for single mothers
and little tolerance for separation or divorce.
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While C.A. controlled the purse strings from afar, Evangeline held her only child close. Demanding his companionship and needing his competence, she came to expect more than her son could give, and he, in turn, acted bigger than he was, trying to fill the emptiness of his mother’s life with a heightened sense of his power and achievements.

C.A.’s politics, meanwhile, were becoming radical. When his real estate and credit operations failed in 1905, he turned against the capitalist system and was elected to Congress in 1906 as a champion of farmers’ rights. Representing the Sixth District of Minnesota, he moved to Washington, D.C., with his secretary, reputed to be his long-time mistress. But his Populist fervor quickly turned paranoid, and he labeled Catholics and capitalists the political forces bent on destroying the farmers of America. C.A.’s friends called him a martyr and a saint, his constituents, however, thought him a xenophobe and a Bolshevik. He called for a more direct democracy to reward all the “energies of labor,” and he condemned the unfair distribution of wealth and the commercial and industrial “evil” of the cities. In 1916, when he ran for governor, he was endorsed by the Non-Partisan League, but was plagued by verbal threats and physical abuse, and his campaign ended in defeat. No longer in Congress, C.A. hustled real estate in Florida but barely managed to survive one day at a time. In 1924, he died of a brain tumor in Little Falls, homeless, penniless, broken, and alone.

By way of compensation, Charles was to crave a life of success measured according to objective standards. Disgusted by what he called the “spineless subjectivity” evident in most people’s lives, the young Lindbergh learned to value the clear-cut language of science and the precise methodology of his physician grandfather, Charles H. Land,
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whose laboratory in Detroit provided him a refuge from relations and controversies he could neither control nor understand. He came to believe that “science held the key to the mystery of Life; Science was truth; Science was power.”
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With this key, he would later write that man “could taste the wine of the gods, of which they would know nothing.” Yet, he wondered if flying was too “godlike” and arrogant.

He wanted to be a physician, but fearing he was too “stupid” to complete the necessary course work, Lindbergh enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, aiming for an engineering degree.
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Unprepared for the rigors of college life, and intolerant of authority, he dropped out after his first year, before he was thrown out. In 1922, at the age of twenty, Lindbergh left Madison, Wisconsin, on his motorcycle with nothing more than a vague notion that he wanted to fly.

Quite simply, he wanted “a new life,” one that would rise above the “dusty moss of danger.” Later, he wrote that flying encompassed all he loved: “the air, the sky, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty.”
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It lay beyond the descriptive words of men—where life meets death on an equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.

After rumbling southwest to Nebraska, he became an apprentice pilot, hiring himself out as a stuntman and barnstormer with a “flying circus” in exchange for flying lessons. He walked on the wings of primitive one-engine planes, earning the nickname “Daredevil Lindbergh.” A year later, in 1923, without the skill or license of a solo pilot, Lindbergh bought himself a monoplane, a salvaged World War I Curtiss “Jenny.” As an apprentice at the Nebraska Standard Aircraft Corporation, he earned both his license and his freedom, and by the summer was on his own, barnstorming through Alabama and Mississippi, offering rides for cash along the way.

By the turn of the year, Lindbergh was committed to a career as a professional pilot. He joined the Army Flight School in San Antonio, Texas, and graduated first in his class. Within a few months, at the age of twenty-three, he became chief pilot for the Robinson Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, laying out routes for the U.S. mail. It was on one of those long-distance night flights that he suddenly thought of competing for the prize offered by Raymond Orteig to a pilot for a nonstop transatlantic flight. His mind held only one question: “Why not?”
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Charles would later call it “a vision born of night, altitude, and moonlight;” now he was quick to convert the desire into an efficient
plan. In a sharp reversal of his father’s ideology, Lindbergh courted industrial capitalists, hoping to raise money for the experimental flight. He felt “uncomfortable” on the “posh” upholstery of bank offices, he later wrote, but he clearly understood the influence of “a felt hat and a silk scarf” and the power of well-conceived “propaganda.” Confident of his commitment and skill, he accelerated the course of his operation, and within weeks had backers, a plane, and a public following.
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Other flyers from England, France, and Italy—famous, experienced, and with unlimited funds—had been thwarted by accident, poor judgment, and craft design. But Lindbergh conceived of a single-man, single-engine plane, built to his specifications by the Ryan Company, with 220 horsepower and a flying range of 4000 miles. On May 21, 1927, he took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, New York, and, at the speed of a hundred and seven miles per hour, arrived in Paris 33½ hours later, to the cheers of a hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen. Charles was stunned by the magnitude of his welcome; the government of France treated him like a monarch. He was paraded through the streets of Paris, asked to address the French assembly, and awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

A week later, Charles went to London, where the crowds once again were nearly out of control. He had hoped to fly around the world, stopping to see his grandfather’s native Sweden, but President Coolidge called him home to be honored by the American people. Ground had been gained; much had been conquered. His flight symbolized the hope of the future, but it also captured a nostalgia for the past. His spartan simplicity mirrored an aspect of the collective psyche that Americans feared they were losing. The sandy-haired boy with the modest grin and borrowed suits too tight in the chest confirmed some notion of heartland integrity. Lindbergh was both firm and implacable, humble and shy, and when he spoke, he used the language of the farm laborer and the workingman—direct, concise, and down-home practical. The technology that had grown out of the exigencies of World War I had extended the perimeters of ordinary consumers with the crank of a motor and the turn of a dial. The prism of radio and the motion picture screen
had brought them the power to see themselves and to measure their lives according to new standards of wealth, beauty, and glamour. These standards were the very stuff of Hollywood fantasy, creating, in turn, new expectations. Americans knew what they had gained even as they feared the price they were paying. Lindbergh told them that nothing had been lost. They could keep all the freedom that technology promised without selling their lusty souls to the devil.