| Name | Charles Lindbergh |
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| Caption | Charles Lindbergh, photographed by Harris & Ewing. |
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| Birth date | February 04, 1902 |
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| Birth place | Detroit, Michigan |
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| Death date | August 26, 1974 |
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| Death place | Kipahulu, Maui, Hawaii |
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| Occupation | Aviator, author,inventor, explorer,social activist |
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| Religion | Lutheran |
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| Spouse | Anne Morrow Lindbergh |
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| Parents | Charles August LindberghEvangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh |
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| Children | With Anne Morrow Lindbergh: |
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| Branch | United States Army |
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| Rank | Lieutenant Colonel |
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| Awards | Medal of Honor, Congressional Gold Medal, Pulitzer Prize, Orteig Prize |
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Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974) (nicknamed "Slim," "Lucky Lindy" and "The Lone Eagle") was an American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist.
Lindbergh, then a 25-year old U.S. Air Mail pilot, emerged from virtual obscurity to almost instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo non-stop flight on May 20–21, 1927, from Roosevelt Field located in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly , in the single-seat, single-engine monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh relentlessly used his fame to help promote the rapid development of U.S. commercial aviation. In March 1932, however, his infant son, Charles, Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what was soon dubbed the "Crime of the Century" which eventually led to the Lindbergh family fleeing the United States in December 1935 to live in Europe where they remained until the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Before the United States formally entered World War II by declaring war on Japan on December 8, 1941, Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the U.S. out of the world conflict, as was his Congressman father, Charles August Lindbergh (R-MN), during World War I, and became a leader of the anti-war America First movement. Nonetheless, he supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew many combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant, even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission that he had resigned in April 1941.
In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist.
Early years
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in
Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902, but spent most of his childhood in
Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C.. He was the only child of Swedish native
Charles August Lindbergh (
birth name Carl Månsson) (1859–1924), and Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876–1954), of Detroit. The elder Lindbergh was a
U.S. Congressman (
R-
MN 6th) from 1907 to 1917 who gained notoriety when he opposed the entry of the U.S. into World War I. Mrs. Lindbergh was a teacher at
Cass Technical High School in Detroit and later at Little Falls (MN) High School from which Charles was graduated in 1918. Lindbergh also attended over a dozen other schools from Washington, D.C., to California during his childhood and teenage years (none for more than one full year) including the Force School and
Sidwell Friends School while living in Washington, D.C., with his father, and
Redondo Union High School in
Redondo Beach, California. The Lindberghs separated in 1909.
Early aviation career
From an early age Charles Lindbergh had exhibited an interest in the mechanics of motorized transportation including his family's
Saxon Six automobile, later his
Excelsior motorbike, and by the time he enrolled as a
mechanical engineering student at the
University of Wisconsin in 1920, he had also become fascinated with flying even though he "had never been close enough to a plane to touch it." Lindbergh dropped out of the engineering program in February 1922, and a month later headed to
Lincoln, Nebraska, to enroll as a student at the flying school operated by the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation. Arriving on April 1, 1922, he flew for the first time in his life nine days later when he took to the air as a passenger in a two-seat Lincoln-Standard
"Tourabout" biplane piloted by
Otto Timm.
A few days later Lindbergh took his first formal flying lesson in that same machine with instructor-pilot Ira O. Biffle, although the 20-year old student pilot would never be permitted to "solo" during his time at the school because he could not afford to post a bond which the company President Ray Page, insisted upon in the event the novice flyer were to damage the school's only trainer in the process. Thus in order to both gain some needed experience and earn money for additional instruction, Lindbergh left Lincoln in June to spend the summer and early fall barnstorming across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana as a wing walker and parachutist with E.G. Bahl, and later H.L. Lynch. During this time he also briefly held a job as an airplane mechanic in Billings, Montana, working at the Billings Municipal Airport (later renamed Billings Logan International Airport). When winter came, however, Lindbergh returned to his father's home in Minnesota and did not fly again for over six months.
Lindbergh's first solo flight did not come until May 1923 at Souther Field in Americus, Georgia, a former Army flight training field to which he had come to buy a World War I surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane. Even though Lindbergh had not had a lesson (or even flown) in more than half a year, he had nonetheless already secretly decided that he was ready to take to the air by himself. And so, after just half an hour of dual time with a pilot who was visiting the field to pick up another surplus JN-4, Lindbergh flew on his own for the first time in the Jenny that he had just purchased there for $500. After spending another week or so at the field to "practice" (thereby acquiring five hours of "pilot in command" time), Lindbergh took off from Americus for Montgomery, Alabama, on his first solo cross country flight, and went on to spend much of the rest of 1923 engaged in virtually nonstop barnstorming under the name of "Daredevil Lindbergh". Unlike the previous year, however, this time Lindbergh did so in his "own ship"—and as a pilot. A few weeks after leaving Americus, the young airman achieved another key aviation milestone when he made his first nighttime flight near Lake Village, Arkansas.
Lindbergh damaged his "Jenny" on several occasions over the summer, usually by breaking the prop on landing (which happened on May 18, 1923 outside Maben, Mississippi). His most serious accident came when he ran into a ditch in a farm field in Glencoe, Minnesota, on June 3, 1923, while flying his father (who was then running for the U.S. Senate) to a campaign stop which grounded him for a week until he could repair his plane. In October, Lindbergh flew his Jenny to Iowa where he sold it to a flying student of his. (Found stored in a barn in Iowa almost half a century later, Lindbergh's dismantled Jenny was carefully restored in the early 1970s and is now on display at the Cradle of Aviation Museum located in Garden City, New York, adjacent to the site once occupied by Roosevelt Field from which Lindbergh took off on his flight to Paris in 1927). After selling the Jenny, Lindbergh returned to Lincoln by train where he joined up with Leon Klink and continued to barnstorm through the South for the next few months in Klink's Curtis JN-4C "Canuck" (the Canadian version of the Jenny). Lindbergh also "cracked up" this aircraft once when his engine failed shortly after take off in Pensacola, Florida, but again he managed to repair the damage himself.
Following a few months of barnstorming through the South, the two pilots parted company in San Antonio, Texas, where Lindbergh had been ordered to report to Brooks Field on March 19, 1924, to begin a year of military flight training with the United States Army Air Service both there and later at nearby Kelly Field. Late in his training Lindbergh experienced his worst flying accident on March 5, 1925 when, eight days before graduation, he was involved in a midair collision with another Army S.E.5 while practicing aerial combat maneuvers and was forced to bail out. Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training remained when Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925 thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.
Lindbergh later noted in "WE", his best selling book published in July 1927, just two months after making his historic flight to Paris, that he considered this year of Army flight training to be the critically important one in his development as both a focused, goal oriented individual, as well as a skillful and resourceful aviator.
With the Army not then in need of additional active duty pilots, however, following graduation Lindbergh immediately returned to civilian aviation as a barnstormer and flight instructor, although as a reserve officer he also continued to do some part time military flying by joining the 110th Observation Squadron, 35th Division, Missouri National Guard, in St. Louis in November 1925 and was soon promoted to 1st Lieutenant.
Air Mail pioneer and advocate
In October 1925, Lindbergh was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation (RAC) in St. Louis (where he had been working as a flight instructor) to first lay out, and then serve as chief pilot for the newly designated
Contract Air Mail Route #2 (CAM-2) to provide service between
St. Louis and
Chicago (Maywood Field) with two intermediate stops in
Springfield and
Peoria, Illinois. Operating from Robertson's home base at the
Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field in Anglum, Missouri, Lindbergh and three other RAC pilots, Philip R. Love, Thomas P. Nelson, and Harlan A. "Bud" Gurney, flew the mail over CAM-2 in a fleet of four modified war surplus
de Havilland DH-4 biplanes. Two days before he opened service on the route on April 15, 1926, with its first early morning southbound flight from Chicago to St. Louis, Lindbergh officially became authorized to be entrusted with the "care, custody, and conveyance" of U.S. Mails by formally subscribing and swearing to the Post Office Department's 1874
Oath of Mail Messengers. It would not take long for him to be presented with the circumstances to prove how seriously he took this obligation.
Twice during the 10 months that he flew CAM-2, Lindbergh temporarily lost "custody and control" of mails that he was transporting when he was forced to bail out of his mail plane owing to bad weather, equipment problems, and/or fuel exhaustion. In the two incidents, which both occurred while he was approaching Chicago at night, Lindbergh landed by parachute near small farming communities in northeastern Illinois. On September 16, 1926, he came down about southwest of Chicago near the town of
Wedron, while six weeks later on November 3, 1926, Lindbergh bailed out again about further south hitting the ground in another farm field located just west of the city of
Bloomington near the town of Covell. After landing without serious injury on both occasions, Lindbergh's first concern was to immediately locate the wreckage of his crashed mail planes, make sure that the bags of mail were promptly secured and salvaged, and then to see that they were entrained or trucked on to Chicago with as little further delay as possible. Lindbergh continued on as chief pilot of CAM-2 until mid-February 1927, when he left for
San Diego,
California, to oversee the design and construction of the
Spirit of St. Louis.
Although Lindbergh never returned to service as a regular U.S. Air Mail pilot, for many years after making his historic nonstop flight to Paris he used the immense fame that his exploits had brought him to help promote the use of the U.S. Air Mail Service. He did this by giving many speeches on its behalf, and by carrying souvenir mail on both special promotional domestic flights as well as on a number of international flights over routes in Latin America and the Caribbean which he had laid out as a consultant to Pan American Airways to be then flown under contract to the Post Office Department as Foreign Air Mail (FAM) routes. At the request of Capt. Basil L. Rowe, the owner and Chief Pilot of West Indian Aerial Express and a fellow Air Mail pioneer and advocate, in February 1928, Lindbergh also carried a small amount of special souvenir mail between Santo Domingo, R.D., Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Havana, Cuba in the Spirit of St. Louis.
Those cities were the last three stops that he and the Spirit made during their "Good Will Tour" of Latin America and the Caribbean between December 13, 1927 and February 8, 1928, during which he flew to Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba, spending 125 hours in the air. The final two legs of the 48-day tour were also the only flights on which officially sanctioned, postally franked mail was ever carried in the Spirit of St. Louis. Exactly two weeks later, Lindbergh also "returned" to flying CAM-2 for two days so that he could pilot a series of special flights (northbound on February 20; southbound on February 21) on which many tens of thousands of self-addressed souvenir covers sent in from all over the nation and the world were cacheted, flown, backstamped, and then returned to their senders as a further means to promote awareness and the use of the Air Mail Service. Souvenir covers and other artifacts associated with or carried on flights piloted by Lindbergh are still actively collected under the general designation of "Lindberghiana."
Pursuing the Orteig Prize
Designated to be awarded to the pilot of the first successful nonstop flight made in either direction between
New York City and
Paris within five years after its establishment, the $25,000
Orteig Prize was first offered by the French-born New York hotelier (Lafayette Hotel)
Raymond Orteig on May 19, 1919. Although that initial time limit lapsed without a serious challenger, the state of aviation technology had advanced sufficiently by 1924 to prompt Orteig to extend his offer for another five years, and this time it began to attract an impressive grouping of well known, highly experienced, and well financed contenders. Ironically, the one exception among these competitors was the still boyish Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year-old relative latecomer to the race, who, in relation to the others, was virtually anonymous to the public as an aviation figure, who had considerably less overall flying experience, and was being primarily financed by just a $15,000 bank loan and his own modest savings.
The first of the well-known challengers to actually attempt a flight was famed World War I French flying ace René Fonck who on September 21, 1926, planned to fly eastbound from Roosevelt Airfield in New York in a three-engine Sikorsky S-35. Fonck never got off the ground, however, as his grossly overloaded (by 10,000 lbs) transport biplane crashed and burned on takeoff when its landing gear collapsed. (While Fonck escaped the flames, his two crew members, Charles N. Clavier and Jacob Islaroff, died in the fire.) U.S. Naval aviators LCDR Noel Davis and LT Stanton H. Wooster were also killed in a takeoff accident at Langley Field, Virginia, on April 26, 1927, while testing the three-engine Keystone Pathfinder biplane, American Legion, that they intended to use for the flight. Less than two weeks later, the first contenders to actually get airborne were French war heroes Captain Charles Nungesser and his navigator, François Coli, who departed from Paris - Le Bourget Airport on May 8, 1927, on a westbound flight in the Levasseur PL 8, The White Bird (L'Oiseau Blanc), although contact was lost with them after crossing the coast of Ireland and they were never seen nor heard from again.
American air racer Clarence D. Chamberlin and Arctic explorer CDR (later RADM) Richard E. Byrd were also in the race. Although he did not win, Chamberlin and his passenger, Charles A. Levine, made the far less well remembered second successful nonstop flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean between New York and Europe in the single engine Wright-Bellanca WB-2 Miss Columbia (N-X-237), leaving Roosevelt Field on June 4, 1927, two weeks after Lindbergh's flight and landing in Eisleben, Germany near Berlin 43 hours and 31 minutes later on June 6, 1927. (Ironically, the Chamberlin monoplane was the same one that the Lindbergh group had originally intended to purchase for his attempt but passed on when the manufacturer insisted on selecting the pilot.) Byrd followed suit in the Fokker F.VII tri-motor, America, flying with three others from Roosevelt Field on June 29, 1927. Although they reached Paris on July 1, 1927, Byrd was unable to land there because of weather and was forced to return to the Normandy coast where he ditched the tri-motor high wing monoplane near the French village of Ver-sur-Mer.
Lindbergh's flight to Paris
Six well known aviators had thus already lost their lives in pursuit of the Orteig Prize when Lindbergh took off on his successful attempt in the early morning of Friday, May 20, 1927. Dubbed the
Spirit of St. Louis, his "partner" was a fabric covered, single-seat, single-engine "Ryan NYP" high wing monoplane (
CAB registration: N-X-211) designed by Donald Hall and custom built by
Ryan Aeronautical Company of San Diego, California. The primary source of funding for the purchase of the
Spirit and other expenses related to the overall New York to Paris effort came from a $15,000 State National Bank of St. Louis loan made on February 18, 1927, to St. Louis businessmen Harry H. Knight and Harold M. Bixby, the project's two principal
trustees, and another $1,000 donated by Frank Robertson of RAC on the same day. Lindbergh himself also personally contributed $2,000 of his own money from both his savings and his earnings from the 10 months that he flew the U.S. Air Mail for RAC.
Burdened by its heavy load of 450 U.S. gallons of gasoline (approximately 2,710 lbs) and hampered by a muddy, rain soaked runway, Lindbergh's Wright Whirlwind powered monoplane gained speed very slowly as it made its 7:52 AM takeoff run from Roosevelt Field, but its J-5C radial engine still proved powerful enough to allow the Spirit to clear the telephone lines at the far end of the field "by about twenty feet with a fair reserve of flying speed." Over the next 33.5 hours he and the "Spirit"—which Lindbergh always jointly referred to simply as "WE"—faced many challenges including skimming over both storm clouds at and wave tops at as low at , fighting icing, flying blind through fog for several hours, and navigating only by the stars (whenever visible) and "dead reckoning" before landing at Le Bourget Airport at 10:22 PM on that Saturday, May 21. A crowd estimated at 150,000 spectators stormed the field, dragged Lindbergh out of the cockpit, and literally carried him around above their heads for "nearly half an hour." While some damage was done to the Spirit (especially to the fabric covering on the fuselage) by souvenir hunters, both Lindbergh and the Spirit were eventually "rescued" from the mob by a group of French military fliers, soldiers, and police who took them both to safety in a nearby hangar. From that moment on, however, life would never again be the same for the previously little known former U.S. Air Mail pilot who, by his successful flight, had just achieved virtually instantaneous—and lifelong—world fame.
Although Lindbergh was the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, he was not the first aviator to complete a transatlantic flight in a heavier-than-air aircraft. That had been done first in stages between May 8 and May 31, 1919, by the crew of the Navy-Curtiss NC-4 flying boat which took 24 days to complete its journey from Jamaica Bay at Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, to Plymouth, England, via Halifax, Nova Scotia, Trepassey Bay (Newfoundland), Horta (Azores) and Lisbon, Portugal. The lighter-than-air (LTA) U.S. Navy airship made a non-stop crossing from the Zeppelin Company works in Friedrichshafen, Germany to the U.S. Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey from October 12 to 15, 1924.
The world's first non-stop transatlantic flight (albeit over a route far shorter than Lindbergh's, vs. ) was achieved nearly eight years earlier on June 14–15, 1919. Two British aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, flew a modified Vickers Vimy IV bomber from Lester's Field near St. John's, Newfoundland on June 14 and arrived at Clifden, Ireland, the following day. Both men were knighted at Buckingham Palace by King George V, in recognition of their pioneering achievement.
Aftermath of the flight
The French Foreign Office flew the American flag, the first time it had saluted someone not a head of state. Lindbergh made a series of flights in Europe using the
Spirit before returning to the United States.
Gaston Doumergue, the
President of France, bestowed the French
Légion d'honneur on the young Capt. Lindbergh, and on his arrival back in the United States aboard the United States Navy
cruiser on June 11, 1927, a fleet of warships and multiple flights of military aircraft including pursuit planes, bombers and the rigid airship , escorted him up the
Potomac River to
Washington, D.C. where President
Calvin Coolidge awarded him the
Distinguished Flying Cross.
" Stamp (C-10) issued June 11, 1927]]
On that same day that Lindbergh and the Spirit arrived in Washington, the U.S. Post Office Department issued a 10-Cent Air Mail stamp (Scott C-10) depicting the Spirit of St. Louis and a map of the flight. On June 13, 1927, a ticker-tape parade was held for him down 5th Avenue in New York City. The following night the City of New York further honored Capt. Lindbergh with a grand banquet at the Hotel Commodore attended by some 3,600 people.
After the flight, Lindbergh became an important voice on behalf of aviation activities, including the central committee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in the United States. He embarked on a three-month cross country tour on behalf of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. The 1927 "Lindbergh Tour" culminated with visits to 48 states and 92 cities, where he delivered 147 speeches, and rode in parades. Lindbergh is recognized in aviation for demonstrating and charting polar air routes, high altitude flying techniques, and increasing flying range by decreasing fuel consumption. These innovations are the basis of modern intercontinental air travel.
The winner of the 1930 Best Woman Aviator of the Year Award, Elinor Smith Sullivan, said that before Lindbergh's flight, "people seemed to think we [aviators] were from outer space or something. But after Charles Lindbergh's flight, we could do no wrong. It's hard to describe the impact Lindbergh had on people. Even the first walk on the moon doesn't come close. The twenties was such an innocent time, and people were still so religious—I think they felt like this man was sent by God to do this. And it changed aviation forever because all of a sudden the Wall Streeters were banging on doors looking for airplanes to invest in. We'd been standing on our heads trying to get them to notice us but after Lindbergh, suddenly everyone wanted to fly, and there weren't enough planes to carry them."
Marriage and children
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) was the daughter of diplomat
Dwight Morrow whom he met in Mexico City in December 1927, where her father was serving as the U.S. Ambassador. According to a
Biography Channel profile on Lindbergh, she was the only woman that he had ever asked out on a date. In Lindbergh's autobiography, he derides womanizing pilots he met as a "barnstormer" and Army cadet, for their "facile" approach to relationships. For Lindbergh, the ideal romance was stable and long term, with a woman with keen intellect, good health and strong genes. Lindbergh said his "experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me the importance of good heredity."
The couple was married on May 27, 1929, and eventually had six children: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. (1930–1932); Jon Morrow Lindbergh (b. August 16, 1932); Land Morrow Lindbergh (b. 1937), who studied anthropology at Stanford University and married Susan Miller in San Diego; Anne Lindbergh (1940–1993); Scott Lindbergh (b. 1942); and Reeve Lindbergh (b. 1945), a writer. Lindbergh also taught his wife how to fly and did much of his exploring and charting of air routes with her.
"The Crime of the Century"
In what came to be referred to sensationally by the press of the time as "The Crime of the Century", on the evening of March 1, 1932, 20-month old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was abducted by an intruder from his crib in the second story nursery of his family's rural home in
East Amwell, New Jersey near the town of
Hopewell. While a 10-week nationwide search for the child was being undertaken,
ransom negotiations were also conducted simultaneously with a self-identified kidnapper by a volunteer intermediary, Dr. John F. Condon (aka "Jafsie"). These resulted in the payment on April 2 of $50,000 in cash, part of which was made in soon-to-be withdrawn (and thus more easily traceable)
Gold certificates, in exchange for information—which proved to be false—about the child's whereabouts. The search finally ended on May 12 when the remains of an infant were serendipitously discovered by truck driver William Allen about two miles (3 km) from the Lindberghs' home in the woods near a road just north of the small village of Mount Rose, NJ. The child's body was soon identified by Lindbergh as being that of his kidnapped son. A month later the Congress passed the so-called
"Lindbergh Law" ((a)(1)) on June 13, 1932, which made kidnapping a
federal offense if the victim is taken across state lines or "uses the mail or any means, facility, or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce in committing or in furtherance of the commission of the offense" including as a means to demand a ransom.
Assiduous tracing of many $10 and $20 Gold certificates passed in the New York City area over the next year-and-a-half eventually led police to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 34-year old German immigrant carpenter, who was arrested near his home in The Bronx, New York, on September 19, 1934. A stash containing $13,760 of the ransom money was subsequently found hidden in his garage. Charged with kidnapping, extortion, and first degree murder, Hauptmann went on trial in a circus-like atmosphere in Flemington, New Jersey on January 2, 1935. Six weeks later he was convicted on all counts when, following just eleven hours of deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict late on the night of February 13 after which trial judge Thomas Trenchard immediately sentenced Hauptmann to death. Although he continued to adamantly maintain his innocence, all of Hauptmann's appeals and petitions for clemency were rejected by early December 1935. Despite a last minute attempt by New Jersey Governor Harold G. Hoffman (who believed Hauptmann was guilty but also had always expressed doubts that he could have acted alone) to convince him to confess to the crimes in exchange for getting his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, the by then 36-year old Hauptmann refused and was electrocuted at Trenton State Prison on April 3, 1936.
The Lindberghs eventually grew tired of the never-ending spotlight on the family and came to fear for the safety of their then three-year old second son, Jon. Deciding, therefore, to seek seclusion in Europe, the family sailed from New York under a veil of secrecy on board the SS American Importer in the pre-dawn hours of December 22, 1935. The family rented "Long Barn" in the village of Sevenoaks Weald, Kent, England. One newspaper wrote that Lindbergh "won immediate popularity by announcing he intended to purchase his supplies 'right in the village, from local tradesmen.' The reserve of the villagers, most of whom had decided in advance he would be a blustering, boastful young American, is melting." At the time of Hauptmann's execution, local police almost sealed off the area surrounding Long Barn with "orders to regard as suspects anyone except residents who approached within a mile of the home." Lindbergh later described his three years in the Kent village as "among the happiest days of my life."
Pre-war activities
Lindbergh became interested in the work of rocket pioneer
Robert H. Goddard in 1929. By helping Goddard secure an
endowment from
Daniel Guggenheim in 1930, Lindbergh allowed Goddard to expand his research and development. Throughout his life, Lindbergh remained a key advocate of Goddard's work.
In 1930, Lindbergh's sister-in-law developed a fatal heart condition. Lindbergh began to wonder why hearts could not be repaired with surgery. Starting in early 1931 at the Rockeffer Institute and continuing during his time living in France, Lindbergh studied the perfusion of organs outside the body with Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel. Although perfused organs were said to have survived surprisingly well, all showed progressive degenerative changes within a few days. Lindbergh's invention, a glass perfusion pump, named the "Model T" pump, is credited with making future heart surgeries possible. However, in this early stage, the pump was far from perfected. In 1938, Lindbergh and Carrel summarized their work in their book, The Culture of Organs describing an artificial heart but it was decades before one was built. In later years, Lindbergh's pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.
At the behest of the U.S. military, Lindbergh traveled several times to Germany to report on German aviation and the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) from 1936 through 1938.
Lindbergh toured German aviation facilities, where the commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring convinced Lindbergh the Luftwaffe was far more powerful than it was. With the approval of Göring and Ernst Udet, Lindbergh was the first American permitted to examine the Luftwaffe's newest bomber, the Junkers Ju 88 and Germany's front line fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Lindbergh received the unprecedented opportunity to pilot the Bf 109. Lindbergh said of the fighter that he knew "of no other pursuit plane which combines simplicity of construction with such excellent performance characteristics." Colonel Lindbergh inspected all the types of military aircraft Germany was to use in 1939 and 1940.
Lindbergh reported to the U.S. military that Germany was leading in metal construction, low-wing designs, dirigibles and diesel engines. Lindbergh also undertook a survey of aviation in the Soviet Union in 1938. Lindbergh's findings found their way into air intelligence reports to Washington long before the European war began."
The American ambassador to Germany, Hugh Wilson, invited Lindbergh to dinner with Göring at the American embassy in Berlin in 1938. The dinner included diplomats and three of the greatest minds of German aviation, Ernst Heinkel, Adolf Baeumaker and Dr. Willy Messerschmitt. For Lindbergh's 1927 flight and services to aviation, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, Göring presented him with the Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle. (Henry Ford received the same award earlier in July.) However, Lindbergh's acceptance of the medal caused controversy after Kristallnacht. Lindbergh declined to return the medal, later writing (according to A. Scott Berg): "It seems to me that the returning of decorations, which were given in times of peace and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins."
During this period, Lindbergh was back on temporary duty as a colonel in the Army Air Corps assigned to the task of recruitment, finding a site for a new air force research institute and other potential air bases. Another role that he undertook was in evaluating new aircraft types in development. Assigned a Curtiss P-36 fighter, he toured various facilities, reporting back to Wright Field.
In a controversial 1939 Reader's Digest article, Lindbergh said, "Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations... and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection." Lindbergh deplored the rivalry between Germany and Britain but favored a war between Germany and Russia. There is some controversy as to how accurate his reports concerning the Luftwaffe were, but Cole reports the consensus among British and American officials was that they were slightly exaggerated but badly needed.
"America First" Involvement
In late 1940, he became spokesman of the antiwar
America First Committee. He soon became its most prominent public spokesman, speaking to overflowing crowds in
Madison Square Garden in New York City and
Soldier Field in Chicago. His speeches were heard by millions. During this time, Lindbergh lived in
Lloyd Neck, on
Long Island, New York.
Lindbergh argued that America did not have any business attacking Germany and believed in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, which his interventionist rivals felt was outdated. Before World War II, according to Lindbergh historian A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh characterized that:
“the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization.”
In his January 23, 1941, testimony in opposition to the Lend-Lease Bill before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lindbergh proposed that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany. President Roosevelt publicly criticized Lindbergh's views on neutrality three months later during a White House press conference on April 25, 1941, as being those of a "defeatist and appeaser" and compared him to U.S. Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham (D-OH), the leader of the "Copperhead" movement that had opposed the American Civil War. Three days later the famed aviator resigned his commission as a Colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps in an April 28 letter to the President in which Lindbergh said that he could find "no honorable alternative" to his taking such an action after Roosevelt had publicly questioned his loyalty.
In a speech at an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, "Who Are the War Agitators?" Lindbergh claimed the three groups, "pressing this country toward war [are] the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration" and said of Jewish groups,
"Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation."
In the speech, he warned of the Jewish People's "large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government", and went on to say of Germany's antisemitism, "No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany." Lindbergh declared,
"I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."
The speech was heavily criticized as being anti-Jewish. In response Lindbergh noted again he was not anti-Semitic, but he did not back away from his statements.
Interventionists created pamphlets pointing out his efforts were praised in Nazi Germany and included quotations such as "Racial strength is vital; politics, a luxury". They included pictures of him and other America Firsters using the stiff-armed Bellamy salute (a hand gesture described by Francis Bellamy to accompany his Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States); the photos were taken from an angle not showing the American flag, so to observers it was indistinguishable from the Hitler salute.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt disliked Lindbergh's outspoken opposition to intervention and Roosevelt's policies such as the Lend-Lease Act. Roosevelt said to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in May 1940, "if I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi." To satisfy FDR's political interest in discrediting his prominent foreign policy critics, FBI Director Hoover, on his own authority, began to investigate Lindbergh's personal life. Hoover had his FBI agents look for anything that might discredit Lindbergh's reputation as a decent, moral man, such as information purporting that during Prohibition, Lindbergh had bootlegged whiskey in Montana and had consorted with pimps and prostitutes. While not ordering the FBI to look into Lindbergh, given his prejudices against the famous aviator, President Roosevelt all the same did not complain about the FBI director's efforts.
Thoughts on race and racism
Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs about the
white race in an article he published in
Reader's Digest in 1939:
"We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races."
Because of his trips to Nazi Germany, combined with a belief in eugenics, Lindbergh was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer.
Lindbergh's reaction to Kristallnacht was entrusted to his diary: "I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans," he wrote. "It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult 'Jewish problem,' but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?"
In his diaries, he wrote: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence...Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.”
Lindbergh's anti-communism resonated deeply with many Americans while eugenics and Nordicism enjoyed social acceptance. he clearly stated elsewhere that he believed the survival of the white race was more important than the survival of democracy in Europe: "Our bond with Europe is one of race and not of political ideology," he declared. He had, however, a relatively positive attitude toward blacks (something that was scheduled to be fully revealed in an undelivered speech interrupted by the events that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor). Critics have noticed an apparent influence of German philosopher Oswald Spengler on Lindbergh. Spengler was a conservative authoritarian and during the interwar era, was widely read throughout Western World, though by this point he had fallen out of favor with the Nazis because he had not wholly subscribed to their theories of racial purity.
(left) and Henry Ford in the Ford hangar. Photo: August 1927.]]
Lindbergh developed a long-term friendship with the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who was well-known for his anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent. In a famous comment about Lindbergh to Detroit's former FBI field office special agent in charge in July 1940, Ford said: "When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews."
Lindbergh considered Russia to be a "semi-Asiatic" country compared to Germany, and he found Communism to be an ideology that would destroy the West's "racial strength" and replace everyone of European descent with "a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown." He openly stated that if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia. He preferred Nordics, but he believed, after Soviet Communism was defeated, Russia would be a valuable ally against potential aggression from East Asia.
Lindbergh said certain races have "demonstrated superior ability in the design, manufacture, and operation of machines." He further said, "The growth of our western civilization has been closely related to this superiority." Lindbergh admired "the German genius for science and organization, the English genius for government and commerce, the French genius for living and the understanding of life." He believed that "in America they can be blended to form the greatest genius of all." His message was popular throughout many Northern communities and especially well-received in the Midwest, while the American South was Anglophilic and supported a pro-British foreign policy.
Holocaust researcher and investigative journalist Max Wallace agrees with Franklin Roosevelt's assessment that Lindbergh was "pro-Nazi" in his book, . However, Wallace finds the Roosevelt Administration's accusations of dual loyalty or treason as unsubstantiated. Wallace considers Lindbergh a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people.
Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, A. Scott Berg, contends Lindbergh was not so much a supporter of the Nazi regime as someone so stubborn in his convictions and relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering that he easily allowed rivals to portray him as one. Lindbergh's receipt of the German medal was approved without objection by the American embassy; the war had not yet begun in Europe. Indeed, the award did not cause controversy until the war began and Lindbergh returned to the United States in 1939 to spread his message of non-intervention. Berg contends Lindbergh's views were commonplace in the United States in the pre-World War II era. Lindbergh's support for the America First Committee was representative of the sentiments of a number of American people.
Yet Berg also notes that "As late as April 1939—after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia—Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Hitler. "Much as I disapprove of many things Hitler had done," he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, "I believe she [Germany] has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations...in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history." Berg also explains that leading up to the war, in Lindbergh's mind, the great battle would be between the Soviet Union and Germany, not fascism and democracy. In this war, he believed that a German victory was preferable because of Stalin's horrific acts, which, at the time, he believed were far worse than Hitler's.
Berg finds Lindbergh believed in a voluntary rather than compulsory eugenics program. In Pat Buchanan's book entitled A Republic, Not An Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, he portrays Lindbergh and other pre-war isolationists as American patriots who were smeared by interventionists during the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. Buchanan suggests the backlash against Lindbergh highlights "the explosiveness of mixing ethnic politics with foreign policy."
Lindbergh always preached military strength and alertness. He believed that a strong defensive war machine would make America an impenetrable fortress and defend the Western Hemisphere from an attack by foreign powers, and that this was the U.S. military's sole purpose.
Many people acknowledge that Lindbergh helped keep American public opinion isolationist until 1941 by advancing the movement to keep America out of the war for as long as possible. Berg reveals that while the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a shock to Lindbergh, he did predict that America's "wavering policy in the Philippines" would invite a bloody war there, and, in one speech, he warned that "we should either fortify these islands adequately, or get out of them entirely."
World War II
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh sought to be recommissioned in the United States Army Air Corps. The Secretary of War,
Henry L. Stimson, declined the request on instructions from the White House.
Unable to take on an active military role, Lindbergh approached a number of aviation companies, offering his services as a consultant. As a technical adviser with Ford in 1942, he was heavily involved in troubleshooting early problems encountered at the Willow Run B-24 Liberator bomber production line. As B-24 production smoothed out, he joined United Aircraft in 1943 as an engineering consultant, devoting most of his time to its Chance-Vought Division. The following year, he persuaded United Aircraft to designate him a technical representative in the Pacific War to study aircraft performances under combat conditions. He showed Marine F4U Corsair pilots how to take off with twice the bomb load that the fighter-bomber was rated for and on May 21, 1944, he flew his first combat mission: a strafing run with VMF-222 near the Japanese garrison of Rabaul, in the Australian Territory of New Guinea. Lindbergh introduced engine-leaning techniques to P-38 pilots, greatly improving fuel usage at cruise speeds, enabling the long-range fighter aircraft to fly longer range missions. The U.S. Marine and Army Air Force pilots who served with Lindbergh praised his courage and defended his patriotism.
After the war, while touring the Nazi concentration camps, Lindbergh wrote in his autobiography that he was disgusted and angered.
Later life
After World War II, he lived in
Darien, Connecticut and served as a consultant to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force and to Pan American World Airways. With most of Eastern Europe having fallen under Communist control, Lindbergh believed most of his pre-war assessments were correct all along. But Berg reports after witnessing the defeat of Germany and the
Holocaust firsthand shortly after his service in the Pacific, "he knew the American public no longer gave a hoot about his opinions." His 1953 book
The Spirit of St. Louis, recounting his nonstop transatlantic flight, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954, and his literary agent,
George T. Bye, sold the film rights to Hollywood for more than a million dollars.
Dwight D. Eisenhower restored Lindbergh's assignment with the U.S. Army Air Corps and made him a
Brigadier General in 1954. In that year, he served on the Congressional advisory panel set up to establish the site of the
United States Air Force Academy. In December 1968, he visited the crew of
Apollo 8 on the eve of the first manned spaceflight to leave Earth orbit. On July 16, 1969, Lindbergh and the "Spirit of St. Louis" constructor,
Tubal Claude Ryan were present at
Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of
Apollo 11.
Children from other relationships
From 1957 until his death in 1974, Lindbergh had an affair with German hat maker Brigitte Hesshaimer (1926–2003) who lived in a small
Bavarian town called
Geretsried (35 km south of
Munich). On November 23, 2003,
DNA tests proved that he fathered her three children: Dyrk (1958), Astrid (1960) and David (1967). The two managed to keep the affair secret; even the children did not know the true identity of their father, whom they saw when he came to visit once or twice per year using the alias "Careu Kent." Astrid later read a magazine article about Lindbergh and found snapshots and more than a hundred letters written from him to her mother. She disclosed the affair after both Brigitte and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had died. At the same time as Lindbergh was involved with Brigitte Hesshaimer, he also had a relationship with her sister, Marietta (born 1924), who bore him two more sons: Vago (1960) and Christoph (1966). Lindbergh had a house of his own design built for Marietta in a vineyard in Grimisuat in the Swiss canton Valais.
A 2005 book by German author Rudolf Schroeck, Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh), claims seven secret children existed in Germany. It says Lindbergh "came and went as he pleased" during the last 17 years of his life, spending between three to five days with his Munich family about four to five times each year. "Ten days before he died in August 1974, Lindbergh wrote three letters from his hospital bed to his three mistresses and requested 'utmost secrecy'", Schroeck writes, whose book includes a copy of that letter to Brigitte Hesshaimer.
Two of the seven children were from his relationship with the East Prussian aristocrat Valeska, who was Lindbergh's private secretary in Europe. They had a son in 1959 and a daughter in 1961. She had been friends with the Hesshaimer sisters and was the one who introduced them to Charles Lindbergh. In the beginning, they lived all together in his apartment in Rome. However, the friendship ended when Brigitte Hesshaimer became pregnant by him as well. Valeska lives in Baden-Baden and wants to keep her privacy, as mentioned in many German and International Reuter's newspaper articles, in Rudolf Schroek's book and a TV documentary by Danuta Harrich-Zandberg and Walter Harrich.
In April 2008, Reeve Lindbergh, his youngest daughter with wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures, a book of essays that includes her discovery in 2003, of the truth about her father's three secret European families and her journeys to meet them and understand an expanded meaning of family.
Environmental causes
From the 1960s on, Lindbergh campaigned to protect
endangered species like
humpback and
blue whales, was instrumental in establishing protections for the controversial Filipino group, the
Tasaday, and African tribes, and supporting the establishment of a national park. While studying the native flora and fauna of the Philippines, he became involved in an effort to protect the
Philippine Eagle. In his final years, Lindbergh stressed the need to regain the balance between the world and the natural environment, and spoke against the introduction of supersonic airliners.
Lindbergh's speeches and writings later in life emphasized his love of both technology and nature, and a lifelong belief that "all the achievements of mankind have value only to the extent that they preserve and improve the quality of life." In a 1967 Life magazine article, he said, "The human future depends on our ability to combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness."
In honor of Charles and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh's vision of achieving balance between the technological advancements they helped pioneer, and the preservation of the human and natural environments, the Lindbergh Award was established in 1978. Each year since 1978, the Lindbergh Foundation has given the award to recipients whose work has made a significant contribution toward the concept of "balance."
Lindbergh's final book, Autobiography of Values, based on an unfinished manuscript was published posthumously. While on his death bed, he had contacted his friend, William Jovanovich, head of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, to edit the lengthy memoirs.
Death
Lindbergh spent his final years on the
Hawaiian island of
Maui, where he died of
lymphoma on August 26, 1974 at age 72. He was buried on the grounds of the Palapala Ho'omau Church in
Kipahulu,
Maui. His
epitaph on a simple stone which quotes
Psalms 139:9, reads: "Charles A. Lindbergh Born Michigan 1902 Died Maui 1974". The inscription further reads: "...If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea... C.A.L."
Honors and tributes
in Washington, D.C.]]
The Lindbergh Terminal at
Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport was named after him, and a replica of
The Spirit of St. Louis hangs there. Another such replica hangs in the great hall at the recently rebuilt Jefferson Memorial at Forest Park in St. Louis. The definitive oil painting of Charles Lindbergh by St. Louisan Richard Krause entitled "The Spirit Soars" has been displayed there. San Diego's Lindbergh Field, which is also known as
San Diego International Airport, was named after him and also displays a replica of the San Diego-built Ryan NYP
Spirit of St. Louis. The airport in
Winslow, Arizona has also been renamed Winslow-Lindbergh Regional. Lindbergh himself designed the airport in 1929 when it was built as a refueling point for the first coast-to-coast air service. Among the many airports and air facilities that bear his name, the airport in Little Falls, Minnesota, where he grew up, has been named Little Falls/Morrison County-Lindbergh Field.
The original The Spirit of St. Louis currently resides in the National Air and Space Museum as part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
and Coli at Paris - Le Bourget Airport]]
In 1952, Grandview High School in St. Louis County was renamed Lindbergh High School. The school newspaper is the Pilot, the yearbook is the Spirit, the students are known as the Flyers, and the school's marching band holds the title of the Spirit of St. Louis Marching Band. The school district was also later named after Lindbergh. The stretch of US 67 that runs through most of the St. Louis metro area is called "Lindbergh Blvd." Lindbergh also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
In Lindbergh's hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, one of the district's elementary schools is named Charles Lindbergh Elementary. The district's sports teams are named the Flyers and Lindbergh Drive is a major road on the west side of town, leading to Charles A. Lindbergh State Park. The Lindberghs donated their farmstead to the state to be used as a park in memory of Lindbergh's father. The original Lindbergh residence is maintained as a museum, the Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site, and is listed as a National Historic Landmark.
Lindbergh is a recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America.
On May 2, 2002, Lindbergh's grandson, Erik Lindbergh, celebrated the 75th anniversary of the pioneering 1927 flight of the Spirit of Ft. Louis by duplicating the journey in a single engine, two seat Lancair Columbia 200. The younger Lindbergh's solo flight from Republic Airport on Long Island, to Le Bourget Airport in Paris was completed in 17 hours and 7 minutes, or just a little more than half the time of his grandfather's 33.5 hour original hop..
After his transatlantic flight, Lindbergh wrote a letter to the director of Longines, describing in detail a watch which would make navigation easier for pilots. The watch was manufactured to his design and is still produced today.
In February 2002 the Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston, within the celebrations for the Lindbergh 100th birthday established the Lindbergh-Carrel Prize, given to major contributors to "development of perfusion and bioreactor technologies for organ preservation and growth". M. E. DeBakey and 9 other scientists received the prize, a bronze statuette espressly created for the event by the Italian artist C. Zoli and named "Elisabeth" after Elisabeth Morrow, sister of Lindbergh's wife Anne Morrow, died as a result of heart disease. Lindbergh in fact was disappointed that contemporary medical technology could not provide an artificial heart pump which would allow for heart surgery on her and that gave the occasion for the first contact between Carrel and Lindbergh.
Awards and decorations
Lindbergh received many awards, medals and decorations, most of which were later donated to the Missouri Historical Society and are on display at the Jefferson Memorial, now part of the
Missouri History Museum in
Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri.
United States awards
authorized by the Congress on May 4, 1928, and presented on August 15, 1930 to Col. C.A. Lindbergh by President
Calvin Coolidge at The White House, Washington, D.C.]]
Medal of Honor (1927)
Distinguished Flying Cross (1927)
Congressional Gold Medal (1928)
Hubbard Medal (1927)
Honorary Scout (USA, 1927)
Silver Buffalo Award (USA)
Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy (1949)
Daniel Guggenheim Medal (1953)
Pulitzer Prize (1954)
Non-US awards
Legion of Honor (France, 1927)
Royal Air Force Cross (UK)
Service Cross of the German Eagle (Verdienstorden vom Deutschen Adler') (Germany Deutsches Reich, 1938)
Official Royal Air Force Museum Medal (UK)
Fédération Aéronautique Internationale FAI Gold Medal (1927)
(
International Civil Aviation Organization - ICAO, 1975)
Medal of Honor
Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve. Place and date: From New York City to Paris, France, May 20–21, 1927. Entered service at: Little Falls, Minn. Born: February 4, 1902, Detroit, Mich. G.O. No.: 5, W.D., 1928; Act of Congress December 14, 1927.
Citation:
:For displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator, at the risk of his life, by his nonstop flight in his airplane, the "Spirit of St. Louis", from New York City to Paris, France, 20–21 May 1927, by which Capt. Lindbergh not only achieved the greatest individual triumph of any American citizen but demonstrated that travel across the ocean by aircraft was possible.
Until World War II, the Medal of Honor was also authorized to be awarded for extraordinarily heroic actions by active or reserve service members made during peacetime as well as in combat.
Legacy
The controversy surrounding his involvement in politics (and to a lesser extent, his personal life) sometimes overshadows the fact that he was an important pioneer in aviation from the 1920s to the 1950s. His 1927 flight made him the first international celebrity in the age of mass media. One U.S. Air Force general remembers Lindbergh's critical view of his own legacy. In the late 1940s, Lindbergh visited U.S. Air Force bases to evaluate American air power (of which he was a staunch supporter) in relation to the emerging
Cold War. During this trip, he remarked "I think my flight to Paris came too soon for the civilizations of the world. They were suddenly thrown together by air travel and they weren't quite ready for it."
Popular culture
in the World Showcase pavilion of
Walt Disney World's
Epcot]]
Lindbergh's life has spurred the imaginations of many writers and others; the following list provides a summary of notable popular cultural references:
Charles Lindbergh was selected as
Time Magazine's
Man of the Year in 1927, becoming the first holder of that title. As of 2010, Lindbergh remains the youngest individual (age 25) to be named Person of the Year.
A song called "
Lindbergh (The Eagle of the U.S.A.)" was released soon after the 1927 flight. A multitude of songs with "Lucky Lindy" in the title were released in the aftermath of the Atlantic crossing.
Tony Randall revived the song "Lucky Lindy" in an album of
Jazz Age and
Depression-era songs that he recorded entitled
Vo Vo De Oh Doe (1967).
The dance craze the "Lindy Hop" became popular after his flight, and was named after him.
In 1929, Bertold Brecht wrote a musical called Der Lindberghflug (Lindbergh's Flight) with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. In 1950 because of Lindbergh's apparent Nazi sympathies Brecht removed all direct references to Lindbergh, and renamed the piece Der Ozeanflug (The Ocean Flight).
Woody Guthrie wrote a song called "Lindbergh" on The Asch Recordings Vol. 1 recorded in the 1940s. The song was anti-Lindbergh, and included the line "they say America First but they mean America Next."
Books
Charles Lindbergh wrote two best-selling books about the
Spirit of St. Louis and his flight from New York to Paris. The first of these,
"WE", was published by
G.P. Putnam's Sons in July 1927—a little more than two months after the historic flight—as both an "instant" autobiography of the suddenly world famous young aviator, and to provide his detailed first-person account of the Ryan monoplane's conception, design, construction and transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. (Originally ghostwritten by
New York Times reporter Carlyle MacDonald, Lindbergh was so dissatisfied with the manuscript's "fawning tone" that he completely rewrote it himself in a period of three weeks in late June and early July 1927.) The book's simple one-word "flying pronoun" title refers to Lindbergh's view of a deep "spiritual" partnership that had developed "between himself and his airplane during the dark hours of his flight." Twenty-six years after writing
"WE", Lindbergh penned a second, far more detailed account of the project. Published in 1953 and entitled
The Spirit of St. Louis, the book won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction (autobiography).
In addition to aviation, Lindbergh also wrote prolifically over the years on other topics of interest to him including science, technology, nationalism, war, materialism, and values. Included among those writings were five other books: The Culture of Organs (with Dr. Alexis Carrel) (1938), Of Flight and Life (1948), The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (1970), Boyhood on the Upper Mississippi (1972), and his final book, Autobiography of Values, which was published posthumously in 1978.
Lindbergh also influenced or was the model for characters in a variety of works of fiction. Shortly after he made his famous flight, the Stratemeyer Syndicate began publishing a series of books for juvenile readers called the Ted Scott Flying Stories (1927–1943) which were written by a number of authors all using the nom de plume of "Franklin W. Dixon", in which the pilot hero was closely modeled after Lindbergh. (Ted Scott duplicated the solo flight to Paris in the series' first volume, entitled Over the Ocean to Paris published in 1927.) Another fictional literary reference to Lindbergh appears in the Agatha Christie book (1934) and movie Murder on the Orient Express (1974) which begins with a fictionalized depiction of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
In Eric Norden's alternate history novel The Ultimate Solution (1973), Norden speculates that Lindbergh would have been president of a Nazi-occupied American puppet state. The Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America (2004) is a speculative fiction novel which explores an alternate history where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by Charles Lindbergh, who allies the United States with Nazi Germany.
Film
Verdensberømtheder i København (1939) was a Danish
short subject produced by the Dansk Film Co. in which Charles Lindbergh as well as Hollywood actors
Robert Taylor,
Myrna Loy, and
Edward G. Robinson all appeared as themselves. The 1938
Paramount film
Men with Wings (
Fred MacMurray,
Ray Milland) featured a replica of the
Spirit of St. Louis fashioned from a Ryan B-1 "Brougham" similar to one presented to Lindbergh by the manufacturer, the Mahoney Aircraft Corporation, shortly after the
Spirit was retired in April 1928. The 1942
MGM picture
Keeper of the Flame (
Katharine Hepburn,
Spencer Tracy) features Hepburn as the widow of Robert V. Forrest, a "Lindbergh-like" national hero, who was exposed after his death as a secret fascist intending to use his influence—especially over America's youth—to turn the country into a fascist state and eliminate those he deemed as inferior races.
Four years after its 1953 publication, Lindbergh's second book about his flying "partner" served as the basis for the namesake major Hollywood Cinemascope motion picture The Spirit of St. Louis, directed by Billy Wilder and released on April 20, 1957, one month short of the 30th anniversary of the flight to Paris. The Spirit was "portrayed" in the film by three flyable replicas of the Ryan NYP, while Lindbergh was playedby veteran American actor and fellow Army aviator<James Stewart.
Lindbergh has also been the subject of numerous screen, television, and other documentary films over the years, including Charles A. Lindbergh (1927), a UK documentary by De Forest Phonofilm based on Lindbergh's milestone flight, 40,000 Miles with Lindbergh (1928) featuring Charles A. Lindbergh, and The American Experience—Lindbergh: The Shocking, Turbulent Life of America's Lone Eagle (1988) PBS documentary directed by Stephen Ives.
Postage stamps
Charles Lindbergh and the
Spirit have been honored by a variety of world postage stamps over the last eight decades including two issued by the United States. Less than three weeks after the flight the
U.S. Post Office Department issued a 10-cent "Lindbergh Air Mail" stamp (Scott C-10) on June 11, 1927 with engraved illustrations of both the
Spirit of St. Louis and a map of its route from New York to Paris. (This was also the first U.S. stamp to bear the name of a living person.) A half-century later, a 13-Cent commemorative stamp (Scott #1710) depicting the
Spirit flying low over the Atlantic Ocean was issued on May 20, 1977, the 50th anniversary of the flight from
Roosevelt Field.
See also
Amelia Earhart
Douglas Corrigan
Alcock and Brown – The first nonstop flight across the Atlantic in a heavier-than-air aircraft.
Lindy Hop – The original swing dance named after "Lindy hopped the Atlantic".
List of people on stamps of Ireland
Dwight Morrow
List of Medal of Honor recipients during Peacetime
Third Man phenomenon
References
;Notes
;Citations
;Bibliography
Berg, A. Scott. Lindbergh. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1998. ISBN 0-399-14449-8.
Charles, Douglas M. "Informing FDR: FBI Political Surveillance and the Isolationist-Interventionist Foreign Policy Debate, 1939–1945", Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, Issue 2, Spring 2000.
Cassagneres, Ev. The Untold Story of the Spirit of St. Louis: From the Drawing Board to the Smithsonian. New Brighton, Minnesota: Flying Book International, 2002. ISBN 0-911139-32-X.
Charles, Douglas M. J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-45. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0814210611.
Cole, Wayne S. Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. ISBN 0-15-118168-3.
Collier, Peter and David Horowitz. The Fords, An American Epic. New York: Summit Books, 1987. ISBN 1-893554-32-5.
Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations With Europe, 1919–1933. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, First edition 1984. ISBN 0-8014-1679-5.
Davis, Kenneth S. The Hero Charles A. Lindbergh: The Man and the Legend. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959.
Friedman, David M. The Immortalists. New York: Ecco, 2007. ISBN 0-06-052815-X.
Gill, Brendan. Lindbergh Alone. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ISBN 0-15-152401-7.
Kessner, Thomas. The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0195320190.
Larson, Bruce L. Lindbergh of Minnesota: A Political Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973. ISBN 0-15-152400-9.
Mersky, Peter B. U.S. Marine Corps Aviation - 1912 to the Present. Annapolis, Maryland: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1983. ISBN 0-933852-39-8.
Milton, Joyce. Loss of Eden: A Biography of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. ISBN 0-06-016503-0.
Mosley, Leonard. Lindbergh: A Biography. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976. ISBN 0-395-09578-3.
Schroeck, Rudolph. Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh). München, Germany/ New York: Heyne Verlag/Random House, 2005. ISBN 3-453-12010-8.
Smith, Larry and Eddie Adams. Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Heroes in Their Own Words. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. ISBN 0-393-05134-X.
Winters, Kathleen. Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 1-4039-6932-9.
Wallace, Max. . New York: Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 978-0-312-33531-1.
Ward, John William. "The Mythic Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight". In Myth America: A Historical Anthology, Volume II. 1997. Gerster, Patrick, and Cords, Nicholas. (editors.) Brandywine Press, St. James, NY. ISBN 1-881-089-97-5
Wohl, Robert. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-300-10692-0.
Primary sources
Lindbergh, Charles A. Charles A. Lindbergh: Autobiography of Values. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ISBN 0-15-110202-3.
Lindbergh, Charles A. Spirit of St. Louis. New York: Scribners, 1953.
Lindbergh, Charles A. "WE" (with an appendix entitled "A Little of what the World thought of Lindbergh" by Fitzhugh Green, pp. 233–318). New York & London: G.P. Putnam's Sons (The Knickerbocker Press), July 1927.
External links
Lindbergh foundation
Retrieved: June 17, 2009.
The Lindbergh Family Papers, including some materials of the famous aviator, are available for research use at the Minnesota Historical Society
Minnesota Historical Society
Listen to the story of Charles Lindbergh online - The American Storyteller Radio Journal
Lindbergh's first solo flight
Yesterday's News: 1927 newspaper article on world reaction to flight
Popular Mechanics, November 1930">"Lindbergh Picks A Plane", Popular Mechanics, November 1930
CharlesLindbergh.com Pat Ranfranz
Woody Guthrie">on Lindbergh Woody Guthrie
FBI History - Famous cases: The Lindbergh kidnapping
PBS companion site to The American Experience program on Charles Lindbergh
Lindbergh's Public Statements Were More Troubling Than His Private Affairs
The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich
PBS Article: Charles Lindbergh in the 1940s
St. Louis Walk of Fame
America First: the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War, 1940–1941 presentation to The New York Military Affairs Symposium in 2003
New York Times, March 7, 1993">Chesler, Ellen. Better Above than Below. New York Times, March 7, 1993
Charles Lindbergh: September 11, 1941 speech at Des Moines, Iowa, transcript via PBS
Lindbergh exhibit at the Missouri Historical Society
Lindbergh's Deranged Quest for Immortality
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