One Summer: America, 1927 (8 page)

The
Spirit of St. Louis
was based on an existing model, the Ryan M-2, but many adjustments were necessary to make a plane suitable for an ocean flight. The inordinately heavy fuel load meant Hall had to redesign the wing, fuselage, landing gear, and ailerons, all major jobs. Of necessity, much of what the Ryan workers did was based on improvisation and
guesswork—sometimes to a startling degree. Realizing they had no clear notion of how far it was from New York to Paris by the great circle route, they went to a public library and measured the distance on a globe with a piece of string. By such means was one of history’s greatest planes built.

Lindbergh didn’t want to be sandwiched between the engine and the fuel tank—too many pilots had been crushed in forced landings that way—so the main tank was put at the front of the plane, where the cockpit normally was, and the cockpit moved farther back. This meant he had no forward visibility, but that troubled him less than you might expect. He couldn’t see the ground ahead during takeoff anyway because of the backward slope of a taxiing plane, and once airborne he would be flying over an empty ocean with nothing to crash into. He could get a fix ahead by “crabbing,” a maneuver in which the plane is turned slightly sideways while still flying forward, allowing one of the side windows to become temporarily a front window. Even so, one of the mechanics, a former submariner named Charlie Randolph, installed a simple periscope that Lindbergh could use if he needed to, though he never did.

The finished plane was anything but state of the art. Lindbergh flew with two foot pedals and a stick between his legs. The instrument panel had just ten fairly rudimentary gauges—eleven if you counted the clock. One conspicuous absence was a fuel gauge. Lindbergh didn’t feel such gauges were reliable enough. He would compute his fuel use manually, though that was essentially an academic exercise: either he would have enough fuel or he wouldn’t. The plane also had no brakes. Planes in 1927 almost never did. That would not matter in most circumstances, but it would prove an unnerving absence when, later, crowds streamed onto runways wherever Lindbergh landed.

The plane’s frame was covered in pima cotton painted over with six coats of aluminum-pigmented dope—a kind of aromatic varnish that made the cotton shrink to fit tight around its wood-and-tubular-steel skeleton. Although the
Spirit of St. Louis
looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot and the outside world, the
Spirit of St. Louis
was deafeningly noisy and unnervingly
insubstantial. It would have been rather like crossing the ocean in a tent. Lindbergh and the other Atlantic competitors were slightly too early for a great unsung invention of the age—Alclad, a new type of noncorrosive aluminum invented by Alcoa and unveiled later that year. For the next eighty years (until the introduction of carbon fibers) virtually every plane built on earth would have an Alclad skin—but not in the summer of 1927. Lindbergh did at least have a metal propeller, which was much more reliable and resistant to cracking than the wooden propellers used until quite recently. The American fliers also had an advantage over their European competitors that nobody yet understood: they all used aviation fuel from California, which burned more cleanly and gave better mileage. No one knew what made it superior because no one yet understood octane ratings—that would not come until the 1930s—but it was what got most American planes across the ocean while others were lost at sea.

The completed
Spirit of St. Louis
, as has often been said, was little more than a flying gas tank. Though it was vastly more sleek than planes of a few years earlier, it still had a lot of drag built into it: the jutting cylinders on its engine, its many struts and guy wires, above all its fixed landing gear with its two dangling wheels dragging through the wind—all acted like an arm thrust out a car window. To maximize mileage, every ounce of unnecessary weight was discarded. Lindbergh took nothing he didn’t need. He reportedly even trimmed the white margins off his maps.

Because of its many design compromises, the plane was not nearly as stable as it ought to have been—a fact that troubled Hall greatly—but there wasn’t time to make it better. In any case Lindbergh was convinced, probably rightly, that having to work harder would help him stay awake. “Lindbergh didn’t want an innovative plane,” says Alex Spencer of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “He wanted nothing but tried and tested technology.”

Only the engine, a 223-horsepower Wright J-5 Whirlwind, was of a new design. It was the one thing on the plane that was unquestionably of the latest technology. The J-5 was air-cooled, which made it simpler, lighter, and more reliable than conventional water-cooled engines, and
it had two additional benefits. It was the first machine in the world to incorporate Samuel Heron’s sodium-cooled valves, which eliminated the serious problem of burned exhaust valves, and it had self-lubricating rocker arms, which could putter along contentedly for hours without attention. The J-5 was first used on Richard Byrd’s North Pole flight in 1926 and did its job admirably. The irony, as we shall see, is that Byrd probably never got anywhere near the North Pole.

Lindbergh made his first test flight on April 28, two months to the day after placing the order. The plane performed better than he had dared to hope. It was agile and fast—it got up to 128 miles an hour on its first flight—and it positively leaped into the air from the ground, at least when lightly loaded. Over the next ten days, Lindbergh took the plane up another twenty-two times, mostly in short test flights of between five and ten minutes. In a series of trials on May 4, he gradually increased the fuel load from 38 gallons to 300, but that was still 150 gallons short of what he would carry at takeoff in New York. He dared not push the plane further because of the danger of landing with full tanks. The only test of the plane’s full capabilities would come with the flight to Paris itself.

Lindbergh was now desperately eager to go. From New York came word that Byrd’s
America
and Levine’s
Columbia
were both ready to depart. Only bad weather was holding them back. Then came the news that Charles Nungesser and François Coli had left Paris and were en route to America. Lindbergh, quietly despairing, considered changing his plans completely and trying to become the first pilot across the Pacific, flying to Australia via Hawaii—a very much greater challenge and one that in all likelihood would have killed him. He abandoned that thought immediately, however, when the news broke that Nungesser and Coli were missing and presumed dead. If he could get to New York before the storms across much of the continent cleared, he still stood a chance.

On the afternoon of May 10, shortly before four o’clock California time, Charles Lindbergh climbed into the cockpit of his sleek new plane and took off. Once comfortably airborne, he pointed the nose east and, with the supreme confidence of youth, headed toward St. Louis and some of the worst weather America had seen in years.

3

Most people couldn’t recall a time like it. For months on end, across much of the country, it rained steadily, sometimes in volumes not before seen. Southern Illinois received over two feet of rain in three months; parts of Arkansas had well over three. Rivers almost beyond counting—the San Jacinto in California, the Klamath, Willamette, and Umpqua in Oregon, the Snake, Payette, and Boise in Idaho, the Colorado in Colorado, the Neosho and Verdigris in Kansas, the Ouachita and St. Francis in Arkansas, the Tennessee and Cumberland in the South, the Connecticut in New England—overran their banks. Between the late summer of 1926 and the following spring, enough precipitation fell on the forty-eight United States, by one calculation, to make a cube of water 250 miles across on each side. That is a lot of water, and it was only just the beginning.

On Good Friday, April 15, 1927, a mighty storm system pounded the middle third of America with rain of a duration and intensity that those who experienced it would not forget in a hurry. From western Montana to West Virginia and from Canada to the Gulf, rain fell in what can only be described as a Noachian deluge. Most places received six to eight inches, and some recorded more than a foot. Now nearly all that water raced into swollen creeks and rivers and headed, with unwonted intensity, for the great central artery of the continent, the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi and its tributaries drain 40 percent of America, almost a million square miles spread across thirty-one states (and two Canadian provinces), and never in recorded history had the entirety of it been this strained.

A river approaching flood stage is an ominously fearsome thing, and the Mississippi now took on an aspect of brutal, swift-flowing anger that unnerved even hardened observers. All along the upper Mississippi people stood on the banks and mutely watched as the river paraded objects—trees, dead cows, barn roofs—that hinted at the carnage farther north. At St. Louis the volume of passing water reached two million cubic feet per second—a phenomenal rate, double the volume recorded sixty-six years later during the great flood of 1993. All along the river armies of men with shovels and sandbags shored up flood defenses, but the pressures were too overwhelming. On April 16, on a great bend of the river in southeastern Missouri at a place called Dorena, the first levee gave way. Some 1,200 feet of earthen bank burst open and a volume of water equal to that at Niagara Falls poured through the chasm. The roar could be heard miles away.

Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. In some places, the water rushed across the landscape so swiftly that people had no means of escape. At Winterville, Mississippi, twenty-three women and children perished when the house in which they were sheltering was swept away.

By the first week of May, the flood stretched for five hundred miles from southern Illinois to New Orleans. Altogether an area almost the size of Scotland was underwater. From the air, the Mississippi valley looked like—indeed, for the time being was—a new Great Lake. The statistics of the Great Flood were recorded with chilling precision: 16,570,627 acres flooded; 203,504 buildings lost or ruined; 637,476 people made homeless. The quantities of livestock lost were logged with similar exactitude: 50,490 cattle, 25,325 horses and mules, 148,110 hogs, 1,276,570 chickens
and other poultry. The one thing that wasn’t carefully recorded, oddly, was the number of human lives lost, but it was certainly more than a thousand and perhaps several times that. The tallies weren’t more scrupulous because, alas, so many of the victims were poor and black. It is a shocking fact that a closer count was kept of livestock losses than of human ones. It is perhaps only slightly less shocking to note that outside the affected areas the flood received less coverage on most days than the murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray.

The nation’s inattentiveness notwithstanding, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was the most epic natural disaster in American history in extent, duration, and number of lives affected. The scale of economic loss was so large as to be essentially incalculable. Estimates ranged from $250 million to $1 billion. It wasn’t the most lethal catastrophe in American history, but it ruined more livelihoods and property than any other, and it lasted far longer. Altogether the Mississippi would be at flood stage for 153 consecutive days.

Fortunately America had a figure of rocklike calm—a kind of superman, a term that he was not embarrassed to apply to himself in private correspondence—to whom it could turn in times of crisis such as this. His name was Herbert Hoover. Soon he would be the most derided president of his time—quite an achievement for someone elected in the same decade as Warren G. Harding—but in the spring of 1927 he was, and by a very wide margin, the world’s most trusted man. He was also, curiously, perhaps the least likable hero America has ever produced. The summer of 1927 would make him a little more of both.

Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 thirty miles west of the Mississippi (he would be the first president from west of that symbolically weighty boundary) in the hamlet of West Branch, Iowa, in a tiny white cottage, which still stands. His parents, devout Quakers, died tragically early—his father of rheumatic fever when little Bert was just six, his mother of typhoid fever three years later—and he was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Oregon. These dour relatives, themselves ardent
Quakers, had just lost a much-loved son, ensuring that Bert would feel the gloomy weight of death on his shoulders during every moment of his formative years. Whatever high spirits he was born with—and it is by no means certain that there were any—were thoroughly extinguished by the experiences of his youth. Herbert Hoover lived to be ninety, and never in the whole of that time, so far as can be told, experienced anything approaching a moment’s real joy.

Though he never finished high school—his uncle, disregarding his brightness, sent him to work as an office boy in Salem, Oregon, instead—Hoover nurtured a fierce ambition to better himself. In 1891, at age seventeen, he passed the entrance examinations for the brand-new Leland Stanford Junior University (or just Stanford as we now know it), which then was a free school. As a member of Stanford’s first-ever class, he studied geology and also met there his future wife, Lou Henry, who by chance was also from Iowa. (They would marry in 1899.) Upon graduating, Hoover took the only job he could find, in a gold mine in Nevada City, California, loading and pushing an ore cart ten hours a day seven days a week for 20 cents an hour—a meager salary even then. That this was the permanent lot for his fellow miners seems never to have troubled him. Hoover was a great believer in—and a living embodiment of—the notion of personal responsibility.