One Summer: America, 1927 (51 page)

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, Lindbergh was rushed at such speed along the parade route that to most onlookers he was nothing more than an impassive blur. To people who had stood for hours with excited children, this was a matter of bitter disappointment. “No parade at all would
be preferable to one in which the hero is not to be satisfactorily seen,” grumbled the
Minneapolis Tribune
in an editorial.

Newspapers had begun to report that pickpockets and burglars were following Lindbergh around the country to take advantage of the distractions that his visits brought. In Chicago, during the Lindbergh parade armed gunmen strolled into a jewelry store on State Street and casually robbed it of $85,000 in cash and goods. Now came the dismaying news that souvenir hunters had broken into Lindbergh’s family home in Little Falls, unoccupied since C. A. Lindbergh’s death, and taken books, photographs, and other irreplaceable personal items. Perhaps for this reason, Lindbergh wore a look of grim resolve for much of his visit to his hometown, though it may have been simple exhaustion. In any case, he listened politely but without emotion as six long-winded speakers, including the Swedish consul in Minneapolis, heaped praise on him before he returned to his plane and with a look of clear relief took off for Fargo and points west. His trip was barely one-third over. Little wonder he looked dazed.

His tour, however, was having a much greater effect than he probably realized. Papers everywhere lovingly recorded his flying times between cities: Grand Rapids to Chicago, 2 hours 15 minutes; Madison to Minneapolis, 4 hours; St. Louis to Kansas City, 3 hours 45 minutes. For anyone who had ever traveled between any such pairs of places, these were magical times. Moreover, Lindbergh repeated these feats day after day, safely, punctually, routinely, without fuss or sweat, as if dropping in by air were the most natural and sensible way in the world to arrive at a place. The cumulative effect on people’s perceptions was profound. By the end of the summer, America was a nation ready to fly—quite a turnaround from four months earlier, when aviation for most people simply meant barnstormers at county fairs and the like, and the United States seemed unlikely ever to catch up with Europe. Whether Lindbergh knew it or not, his tour of America did far more to transform the future of aviation than his daring dash to Paris ever could.

The great irony is that by the time America was ready to take to the air properly, Charles Lindbergh would no longer be anybody’s hero.

•
SEPTEMBER
•
SUMMER’S END

A few Jews add strength and character to a country. Too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.

—CHARLES LINDBERGH

26

Of all the labels that were applied to the 1920s—the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Ballyhoo, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense—one that wasn’t used but perhaps should have been was the Age of Loathing. There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.

Bigotry was casual, reflexive, and well nigh universal. At
The New Yorker
, Harold Ross forbade the use of the term
toilet paper
on grounds of taste (it made him queasy), but he had nothing at all against
nigger
or
darkie
. In the week before Lindbergh’s flight to Paris,
The New Yorker
ran a cartoon with the immortally dismal line “Niggers all look alike to me.”

George S. Kaufman as a young man lost his job on a newspaper in Washington when the owner came in one night and said, “What’s that Jew doing in my city room?” Bert Williams, a black comedian who was described by W. C. Fields as “the funniest man I ever saw,” was beloved by millions and rich enough to rent a deluxe apartment in Manhattan, but was allowed to live there only if he agreed to confine himself to the service entrance and freight elevator when coming and going. At the Supreme Court, Justice James C. McReynolds was so prejudiced against Jews that he refused to speak or otherwise acknowledge fellow justice
Louis Brandeis and made a point of studying papers or even reading a newspaper when Brandeis was addressing the court. He was similarly rude to President Harding’s assistant attorney general, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, because of her sex.

Nothing better captured the expansive spirit of detestation in the period than the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Until recently moribund, the Klan burst onto the national stage in the 1920s with a vigor and breadth of appeal that it had never had in its antebellum heyday. The Klan hated
everybody
, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere. At its peak, the Klan had five million members (some sources say eight million), and seventy-five members of Congress either belonged to or were openly associated with it. Several cities elected Klan mayors. Oklahoma and Oregon had Klan governors. In Oregon the Klan nearly succeeded in getting Catholic schools outlawed, and in many places Catholics were forbidden membership on school or hospital boards, and Catholic-owned businesses were boycotted.

For many, the Klan became almost as much a social organization as a political one. In Detroit, thousands of happy citizens attended a Christmas rally outside city hall, where a Santa Claus dressed in Klan regalia distributed presents to children by the light of a burning cross. In Indiana, a Klan picnic rally—or Klonklave, as they were numbingly known—featured a jousting tournament with men in Klan robes, and a tightrope walker, also in full regalia, carrying a cross in one hand and an American flag in the other, while doing stunts on a high wire.

Under the leadership of a flabby junior high school dropout named David C. Stephenson, the Klan especially thrived in Indiana. The state boasted 350,000 members; in some communities up to half the white men were fee-paying Klansmen. Fired up by Stephenson and his minions, Hoosiers became peculiarly receptive to wild anti-Catholic rumors. Many in the state believed that Catholics had poisoned President Harding and that priests at Notre Dame University in South Bend were
stockpiling armaments in preparation for a Catholic uprising. In 1923 the most surreally improbable rumor of all emerged—that the pope planned to move his base of operations from the Vatican City to Indiana. According to several accounts, when residents of the town of North Manchester heard that the pope was on a particular train, 1,500 of them boarded it with a view to seizing the pontiff and breaking up his conspiracy. Finding no one recognizably papal, the mob turned its attentions to a traveling corset salesman, who was nearly dragged off to an unhappy fate until he managed to convince his tormentors that it was unlikely that he would try to stage a coup armed with nothing but a case of reinforced undergarments.

The Klan’s downfall was unexpectedly sudden, and it was the plump and unlovely Stephenson who brought it about. In March 1925, he took out on a date a young woman of good character named Madge Oberholtzer. To the extreme distress of her parents, Madge didn’t come home that night or the following night. When eventually Stephenson returned her, the young woman was in a dreadful condition. She had been beaten and savagely abused. Skin had been torn from her breasts and genitals. Her doctor and family learned that Stephenson had grown drunk and violent after collecting her, had forced her to go to a hotel, and there brutally and repeatedly raped her. In shame and desperation, Oberholtzer had swallowed a fatal dose of mercuric chloride. By the time she reached home doctors could do nothing for her. She took two weeks to die.

Stephenson was confident that his position as Klan head in Indiana would protect him from prosecution, and was astonished when he was convicted of kidnap, rape, and second-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. In revenge he released documents that exposed corruption at the highest levels in Indiana. The mayor of Indianapolis and the head of the Republican Party in the state were both jailed for taking payoffs. The governor should have been but escaped on a technicality. The entire Indianapolis City Council was dismissed and fined, and a prominent judge was impeached. The whole affair was so squalid and disgusting that Klan membership everywhere collapsed, and the Klan retreated into the shadows of American life. It was never a national force again.

Remarkably, the Ku Klux Klan was not the most dangerous outpost of bigotry in America in the period. That distinction belonged, extraordinary though it is to state, to a coalition of academics and scientists. Since early in the century, a large number of prominent and learned Americans had been preoccupied, often to the point of obsessiveness, with the belief that the country was filling up with dangerously inferior people and that something urgent must be done about it.

Dr. William Robinson, a leading New York physician, spoke for a vociferous minority when he declared that people of an inferior nature “have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.” W. Duncan McKim, also a physician and author of a book titled
Heredity and Human Progress
, proposed that “the surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege, is a gentle, painless death.”

The problem, as most saw it, was twofold. America was producing far too many defectives through careless and unrestricted breeding, while at the same time introducing almost limitless volumes of additional inferiority through unrestricted immigration from backward nations.

Nearly everyone had an especially dreaded race. The writer Madison Grant disdained Jews because of their “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest.” Frank J. Loesch, a member of a presidential commission on crime reform, thought the problem was Jews and Italians together, “with the Jews furnishing the brains and the Italians the brawn.” Charles B. Davenport, one of the most eminent scientists of his day, was more expansively dubious and listed Poles, Irish, Italians, Serbians, Greeks, and “Hebrews” as less intelligent and reliable, and more susceptible to depravity and crimes of violence, than people of sound Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic stock. These were not people, in Davenport’s view, who could be lifted out of their bad habits but were immutably condemned by their genes to be troublesome, destructive, and dull. They were creating an America that was “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex immorality.” Madison Grant forthrightly described what was happening to America as “race suicide.”

All these views were bundled together into the smart new science of eugenics, which may be simply defined as the scientific cultivation of superior beings. In most of the world, eugenics was an innocuous goal—a well-intentioned wish to produce healthier, stronger, smarter people—but in America eugenics took on a harsher cast. It led to the sinister belief that procreation should somehow be regulated and directed. As an official of the American Eugenics Society observed: “Americans take more care over the breeding of cattle and horses than of their own children.” Eugenics was used to justify enforced deportations, the introduction of restrictive covenants on where people could live, the suspension of civil liberties, and the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of innocent people. It resulted in the severe curtailment of immigration and its virtual elimination from certain parts of the world. It even led eventually, but more or less directly, to the downfall of Charles Lindbergh, the pilot who once could do no wrong.

The bible of negative eugenics was the fearsome and popular
The Passing of the Great Race
, by Madison Grant, a New York lawyer (by training, though he never practiced) and naturalist (by practice, but without training), which was first published in 1916. Grant took it as read that the only really good group of humans was what he called the “Nordic race,” by which he meant essentially all northern Europeans except the Irish. Europe divided into three tiers of being—Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean—which grew progressively degenerate as one moved south.

One obvious problem with Grant’s theory was that he had to explain how such wretched people had managed to produce the Athens of Plato and Socrates, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and so many other marvels of antiquity. Grant’s explanation was that in ancient Greece and Rome the ruling class was composed of Nordic Achaeans, who weren’t really Mediterranean at all, but were northern Europeans who had drifted south. All the great Renaissance artists, Grant maintained, were “of Nordic type … largely of Gothic and Lombard blood.” All others—the real Italians—were dull, stunted, and shifty, and were genetically condemned to remain forever so.