One Summer: America, 1927 (61 page)

It would probably have done no good to remind Lindbergh that he had just spent the summer meeting presidents and kings, addressing crowds so large that they filled whole landscapes, receiving tributes on a scale never before accorded a human being. At the end of it all the most famous man in the world was, it seems, still just a kid.

A reasonable question to ask, if not such an easy one to answer, is what was it about Charles Lindbergh and his 1927 flight to Paris that so transfixed the world? In good measure, clearly, it was Lindbergh himself—the fact that he was boyish and wholesome, that he did it alone, that he behaved with such modesty and aplomb in the immediate aftermath of the flight. To this could be added the pure enchantment of knowing that an ocean could now be crossed. The thought that an airplane could leave New York and reappear hours later in Paris or Los Angeles or Havana, as if rematerializing from thin air, seemed almost the stuff of science fiction.

For Americans, there was also the gratifying novelty of coming first at something. It is a little hard to imagine now, but Americans in the 1920s
had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in nearly every field—in popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology. The center of gravity for the planet was moving to the other side of the world, and Charles Lindbergh’s flight somehow became the culminating expression of that.

None of this, of course, explains a hundred thousand Parisians streaming across the grass at Le Bourget to greet the taxiing
Spirit of St. Louis
, or four million turning out in New York, or all the renamed mountains and beacons and boulevards. All that can be said is that for some unknowable reason Lindbergh’s flight brought the world a moment of sublime, spontaneous, unifying joy on a scale never before seen. Charles Lindbergh would forevermore be the touchstone for that feeling. It was of course an impossible obligation.

Nearly nine decades have passed since the summer of 1927, and not a great deal survives. The airfields of Long Island are long gone. Roosevelt Field closed in 1951. Today it is a 110-acre shopping center, the biggest in New York State. The spot where Lindbergh and the others took off is marked by a plaque underneath an escalator near the Disney store. A statue called
Spirit
commemorating Lindbergh’s flight stands, forlornly, on a traffic island in the parking lot.

Not even much survives as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer—Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh—are rarely encountered now, and most of the others are never heard at all. So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence.
The Jazz Singer
was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed
forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.

Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.

EPILOGUE

The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.

—CALVIN COOLIDGE
in his last State of the Union address, December 1928

On April 30, 1928, almost exactly one year after his first test flight in the
Spirit of St. Louis
, Charles Lindbergh delivered his treasured plane—his
ship
, as he always called it—to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. In its year’s career, it had made 175 flights and been in the air for 489 hours and 28 minutes. It went on display in the Arts and Industries Building on the Mall on May 13, one week before the first anniversary of the historic flight. Lindbergh insisted that the
Spirit of St. Louis
never be exhibited elsewhere. It has never left the Smithsonian’s care.

“I don’t know why he was so insistent about that,” Dr. Alex M. Spencer, a cheerful senior curator, tells me one day in 2011 when I visit. “I don’t imagine anybody asked him.”

Spencer and I are standing on a mezzanine overlooking the spacious entrance hall of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Directly before us, frozen forever in imagined flight, the
Spirit of St. Louis
hangs from the ceiling on thin wires. It looks small and unnervingly insubstantial. The absence of forward visibility is striking. It is hard to imagine Lindbergh folding himself into such a cramped space—even harder to imagine him squeezing in passengers like Henry Ford. It would have been an extremely snug experience. At close range, it is also clear that the plane is covered in thin fabric, adding to its air of frailty. It is
little wonder that Lindbergh fretted over people touching his beloved machine.

I have come to the museum to ask Spencer what difference, if any, Lindbergh’s flight made to the history of aviation. “Oh, lots!” he responds emphatically, and guides me to a neighboring gallery, “America in the Air,” a vast cube of a room filled to a point just shy of crowdedness with gleaming vintage airplanes. To the uninstructed eye, the planes don’t seem to have a great deal in common, but in fact they have been chosen for display with care. “If you consider them in the order in which they were built, they tell quite a remarkable story,” says Spencer.

He points first to a Ford Tri-Motor dating from 1928. Gray and boxy, made of sheets of corrugated aluminum, it looks almost as if it might have been built in a home workshop by someone who didn’t entirely understand aerodynamics. It is perhaps telling that Henry Ford declined ever to go up in one of his own machines.

“Now compare that with this plane,” Spencer says, and moves us along to a Boeing 247-D. The Boeing is larger and strikingly sleeker. Every surface is attractively streamlined. The cantilevered wings are free of wires and struts, the engine cylinder heads are hidden beneath shiny cowlings, the engines themselves are built into the wings rather than just bolted on. This is clearly a plane from a new, more stylish era.

“And then came this,” says Spencer proudly, presenting his pièce de résistance, the Douglas DC-3. Created in 1935, launched in 1936, the DC-3 was the first truly modern airliner. It had 21 seats, could fly almost 1,500 miles, and cruise at nearly 200 miles an hour. A passenger could board a DC-3 at 4:00 p.m. in New York and arrive in Los Angeles for breakfast the next morning. The age of modern air travel had truly begun.

“And this all happened in less than a decade,” Spencer says, indicating the full range of marvels around us. “That’s what Lindbergh’s flight achieved.”

“But wouldn’t it have happened anyway?” I ask.

“Sure,” Spencer agrees. “But it wouldn’t have happened so fast, and it wouldn’t have been so overwhelmingly American.”

Lindbergh’s flight, it has been calculated, spurred as much as $100 million in aviation investments in America. In the mid-1920s, Boeing, a small manufacturer of airplanes in Seattle, had so little work that it sometimes built furniture just to keep going. Within a year of Lindbergh’s flight it employed a thousand people. Aviation became to the 1930s what radio was to the 1920s. Lindbergh himself was tireless in his promotion of the industry. Barely had he finished his national tour than Dwight Morrow, newly installed as American ambassador in Mexico, asked him if he would make a goodwill visit to the country. It was an audacious request. Mexico was on the edge of revolution. Bandits had recently attacked a train traveling from Mexico City to Los Angeles and killed several passengers, including a young American schoolteacher named Florence Anderson. Morrow and his wife traveled in armored vehicles. This was no place in which to have a lost airman come down.

Lindbergh accepted the invitation without hesitation, however, and immediately laid plans for a tour of Central America and the Caribbean that was nearly as ambitious, and often would prove even more hair-raising, than his trip around America. Remarkably, he would fund the trip himself.

On December 13, just six weeks after finishing the U.S. tour, Lindbergh took off from Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., bound for Mexico City. The flight, though only two-thirds the distance of his Paris trip, was nonetheless epic. Unable to find a good map of Mexico, he flew with one that was little better than a page torn from a high school geography book. So long as he kept to the Gulf Coast, he could hold his bearings, but once he turned inland at Tampico he had nothing to guide him but instinct. The only town he passed was not shown on his map, and the scattered rail lines he encountered didn’t lead him anywhere productive. Eventually, he happened on a lonely eminence that he took to be Mount Toluca, and realized that he had gone considerably past his target. By the time he turned around and found his way to Valbuena Airfield, he had been in the air for 27 hours and 15 minutes and was hours late.

When Lindbergh’s plane touched down at 2:30 p.m., a crowd of 150,000 rushed forward in such jubilation that it picked up the plane
and
carried
it to the hangar. Dwight Morrow, who had been waiting on a dais with President Plutarco Calles and an assortment of dignitaries since eight in the morning, was the most relieved man in the Western Hemisphere.

For the next two months, Lindbergh toured the region, often flying through wild weather or landing at dangerously inadequate airfields. Everywhere he was greeted by throngs and hailed as a hero. Roads and schools and rivers and cocktails and vast numbers of children were named after him. He visited Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone, but he spent Christmas in Mexico City with the Morrows. Also there for the holidays was the Morrows’ daughter Anne. She was a senior at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts—coincidentally, Calvin Coolidge’s hometown. Anne was shy, attractive, smart, and wonderfully self-contained. Lindbergh was smitten. He had his first girlfriend. Soon they would be engaged. In sixteen months they would be married.

Upon his return to America, Lindbergh almost at once was summoned to heroic action again. An airplane flown from Ireland by two Germans and an Irishman had crash-landed in eastern Canada on a remote dot of land called Greenly Island off the coast of Labrador. It was the first successful east–west crossing of the Atlantic by plane, but now the airmen were stranded. To their aid flew Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen. Bennett, it may be remembered, was the flier who had nearly been killed in the crash of Richard Byrd’s
America
on its maiden flight almost exactly a year earlier. Bennett was either extraordinarily unlucky or not fully recovered, because upon reaching Canada he collapsed with pneumonia. At news of this, Lindbergh rushed to the Rockefeller Institute to fetch a vial of serum, and flew with it through blizzard and gale to bring it to Bennett’s bedside. Alas, it turned out that the serum was the wrong kind, and Bennett died. He was thirty-seven years old.

Through his exposure to the Rockefeller Institute, Lindbergh met Alexis Carrel, who would provide him with an enduring friendship and
years of bad advice. “Nobody in Charles Lindbergh’s adulthood affected his thinking more deeply than Alexis Carrel,” wrote A. Scott Berg in his acclaimed 1998 biography of Lindbergh. A native of Lyon, Carrel was one of the most gifted surgeons of his day. As a medical student in France, he became celebrated for extraordinary feats of dexterity—tying two pieces of catgut together with the use of just two fingers or sewing five hundred stitches into a single sheet of cigarette paper. These were more than just amusing stunts, for his abilities with needle and thread led Carrel to devise helpful new methods for suturing. He invented a way of splicing arteries that kept the interior surface smooth and therefore clot-free, and in so doing saved countless lives. In 1906, he took up a position at the Rockefeller Institute, and six years later was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine—the first person in America to be so honored. In the course of a long career, Carrel also performed the first coronary bypass operation (on a dog) and did pioneering work that helped pave the way for organ transplants and tissue grafts later.

He proved, however, to be a bundle of odd notions. He was convinced that sunlight was a bad thing, and maintained that the world’s most backward civilizations were always where the tropical glare was brightest. He insisted that everything in his operating theaters, from gowns to dressings, be black. He flatly refused to engage with anyone who didn’t please him at first glance. Carrel became especially noted for his chilling views on eugenics. He believed that people who were defective or backward should be “euthenistically disposed of in gas chambers.” Such people, in his view, should be prepared to give up their lives for the greater good of humanity. “The concept of sacrifice, of its absolute social necessity, must be introduced into the mind of modern man,” Carrel maintained.