Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh: Thirty-Three Hours and a Ruined Name

Before he left Roosevelt Field he cut up his maps, keeping only the reference points he expected to need. He left behind the radio, the parachute, the fuel gauges and the navigation lights. He sat in a wicker chair because leather was heavy. And because the main fuel tank sat directly in front of him — placed there so it would not crush him in a crash — he flew three and a half thousand miles across the Atlantic without being able to see straight ahead.

Little Falls to the Air Mail

Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in Detroit in 1902, the son of a United States congressman of the same name, and grew up largely in Little Falls, Minnesota, with stretches in Washington. He left college in 1922 to learn to fly, barnstormed for a living doing aerobatic stunts, joined the U.S. Army Air Service in 1924, and from 1925 flew the air mail run between St. Louis and Chicago — night flying, bad weather, and a very thin margin, which was the best possible training for what he did next.

Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars

Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, and by 1927 the prize had already killed people. The French ace René Fonck crashed his silver biplane before it even left the ground in September 1926, two of his crew dying in the wreck. Charles Nungesser and François Coli left Paris for New York two days before Lindbergh was due to depart, and were never found.

Lindbergh's backing was modest and local: Harry Knight of the St. Louis Flying Club introduced him to Harold Bixby of the city's Chamber of Commerce, who funded the attempt on a $15,000 budget. Ryan Airlines of San Diego — Frank Mahoney presiding, Donald Hall as chief engineer — built the aeroplane for $6,000 excluding the engine, finishing it on 28 April 1927. It weighed 2,150 pounds empty, ran 27 feet 8 inches long with a 46-foot wingspan, carried a 220-horsepower Wright J-5C Whirlwind, and had a maximum range of 4,000 miles.

Every decision about it was an argument about weight, and Lindbergh won all of them. The most consequential was to fly alone. A second man meant a navigator's expertise and a hundred and seventy pounds of fuel he would rather burn.

The Crossing

He lifted off from Roosevelt Field on 20 May 1927, aged twenty-five. What followed was thirty-three and a half hours and 3,600 miles of fog, icing and sleep deprivation, navigated by dead reckoning and a periscope mounted on the left side of the fuselage. He flew with the windows open to keep himself awake and later described hallucinations. On the evening of 21 May he put down at Le Bourget in front of a crowd of some 150,000 people who had simply come out to see whether he would arrive.

New York gave him a ticker-tape parade estimated at four million people. Honours arrived from the United States, France and elsewhere, and he flew goodwill tours around America and Mexico. He was, for a while, the most admired man alive.

The Crime of the Century

On 1 March 1932 his twenty-month-old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., was taken from the family's New Jersey home. The ransom demand was $50,000, then $70,000. The child's body was found on 12 May about four miles away; he had been dead roughly two months. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter, was convicted in 1935 and executed in 1936. The press siege that followed drove the Lindberghs out of the country.

Berlin, and Des Moines

In 1936 Lindbergh toured German military facilities at the American embassy's request and reported that Germany could build military aircraft faster than any country in Europe and possibly faster than the United States. On 18 October 1938, Hermann Göring presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star, for services to world aviation, accompanied by a proclamation signed by Hitler.

He formally joined the America First Committee in April 1941 and gave fourteen speeches for it. On 11 September 1941, at the Des Moines Coliseum, he delivered "Who Are the War Agitators?" and named three groups he said were pushing America into war: the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jewish people. The "greatest danger" from Jews, he said, lay in "their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government." He acknowledged their persecution in Europe and made the argument anyway.

The reaction was near-universal condemnation, including from newspapers that opposed the war. Cartoonists — Dr. Seuss among them — drew him as a conduit for Nazi propaganda; one magazine ran an article calling him the most dangerous man in America. America First stopped putting him on stage. Secretary of War Henry Stimson questioned his loyalty and denied him a command, so Henry Ford hired him as a technical adviser instead. He eventually reached the war anyway: between April and September 1944 he flew fifty combat missions in the South Pacific as a civilian, credited with at least one kill.

Why Charles Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the claim rests on craft and nerve rather than intellect, and it is worth being precise about what the craft was. Lindbergh did not design the Spirit of St. Louis — Donald Hall did. What Lindbergh contributed was a ruthless and correct systems argument: that the binding constraint was weight, that every ounce should be spent on fuel, and that he should therefore fly alone, without radio, parachute, gauges or lights, accepting a fuel tank where his forward vision should have been. Trimming the maps to only the reference points he would use is the whole method in miniature. Add to that dead-reckoning navigation across an ocean with no instruments to correct him, and thirty-three hours of physiological endurance through icing and hallucination. That is airmanship of a very high order. It is not conceptual originality, and the men who vanished attempting the same crossing were not obviously less skilled — his margin included luck.

The counter-case is not confined to his aviation. Lindbergh accepted a decoration from Göring in 1938 and kept it. He lent the most trusted name in America to an isolationist campaign, and then, in Des Moines, to the conspiracy theory that Jews controlled the press, the studios and the government and were manoeuvring the country into war. That was not a slip; it was a prepared speech, and he did not retract it. Any account of Lindbergh that stops at 1927 is an account of a man who did not exist for another forty-seven years.

Legacy

He spent his later decades arguing that technology had cost the world too much, campaigning for the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, working to protect whales, tortoises and eagles, and helping to establish Haleakala National Park in Hawaii. He died of cancer in 1974, aged seventy-two, and is buried at Kipahulu on Maui.

The Spirit of St. Louis hangs in the Smithsonian, still stripped, still without a forward window. It remains the cleanest evidence of what he was good at — and, by its silence about everything after, of how much a single famous act can be asked to carry.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Wisconsin–Madison, Redondo Union High School and Sidwell Friends School
• Worked as air force officer, inventor and aviation writer