9781400069743 excerpt Olson / THOSE ANGRY DAYS Chapter 1 "A Modern Galahad" The cab stopped in front of the Smithsonian''s Arts and Industries Building and Charles Lindbergh stepped out. He stared for a moment at the Victorian-­era museum, with its turrets and multicolored brick facade, then strolled around its perimeter, hoping to find a side door. Seeing none, he returned to the front entrance, considering how to slip past the tourists outside without being recognized. By now, avoiding public attention was as natural to Lindbergh as breathing. He put his head down, covered his nose with a handkerchief, blew into it--­and walked into the museum unnoticed. Once inside, he ducked into the first room on the right, which featured a display of dresses worn by the nation''s First Ladies, and stationed himself by the salmon-­pink silk gown that once belonged to Martha Washington. From there he had a perfect view of the Spirit of St. Louis, hanging from the ceiling in the main hall.

It was March 1940, and Europe was at war. Lindbergh was at the epicenter of the struggle over America''s role in the conflict. But for almost an hour that day, he took time out from the frenzy of the present to find refuge in the past. Lost in reverie, the lanky blond aviator gazed at the Spirit of St. Louis, suspended by cables above the tourists staring up at it. He had long felt a mystical closeness to this tiny silver plane. When he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, at the end of the first solo transatlantic flight in history, his first thought had been how to protect it from the hordes of frenzied Frenchmen racing across the field to greet him. To Lindbergh, the Spirit was "a living creature," with whom he had shared a transcendent experience and whose loyalty to him was unquestioned.

In his mind, they were inseparably linked: he always referred to the plane and himself as "we." (Indeed, We was the title of the first of two books he wrote about the flight.) More than once in recent years, he dreamed he had crept into the Smithsonian at night, cut the Spirit down, transported it to an airstrip, and taken off. Once aloft--­away from his troubled, complicated life--­he experienced nothing but joy. He could ride the sky "like a god . I could dive at a peak; I could touch a cloud; I could climb far above them all. This hour was mine, free of the earth." A supremely rational, practical man by nature, he was unex- pectedly lyrical, even fanciful, when he later described his visit to the Smithsonian in his journal.

He noted the kinship he felt with the mannequin representing Martha Washington as they studied the Spirit together: "I rather envied her the constant intimacy with the plane that I once had." But then, he wrote, he suddenly noticed two young women staring at him. He was well acquainted with that look. Not quite certain it was him, they soon would come closer to find out. Up to that point, it had been a wonderful visit: just him, Martha, and the Spirit of St. Louis. Determined to preserve the enchantment of the moment, he spun around and walked out. when the twenty-­five-­year-­old Lindbergh touched down at Paris''s Le Bourget airfield on that late spring evening in 1927, there was so much awaiting him, his wife later observed: "Fame--­Opportunity--­Wealth, and also tragedy & loneliness & frustration.

And he so innocent & unaware." Several decades after the flight, the Lindberghs'' daughter Reeve mused: "Sometimes . I wonder whether he would have turned back if he''d known the life he was headed for." Although his flight had attracted considerable attention even before he''d taken off, Lindbergh was convinced that any fame that followed would swiftly vanish. Soon after he arrived in France, he presented letters of introduction to Myron Herrick, the U.S. ambassador, unsure whether Herrick even knew who he was. He had no inkling of the remarkable international response to what had been, in essence, a stunt flight--­a stunt that the press and public, especially in America, had transformed into something infinitely more.

The New York Evening World, for example, had made the aston- ishing declaration that Lindbergh had performed "the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race." The day after the flight, the usually staid New York Times, under the banner headline lindbergh does it!, devoted its entire front page and four more pages inside to stories about the young airman and his triumph. In hindsight, the reason for the extraordinary reaction was clear: America, nearing the end of a decade marked by cynicism, disillusionment, and political apathy, badly needed a hero. As one historian put it, Lindbergh became "a modern Galahad for a generation which had forsworn Galahads." The 1920s in America had been a feverish time, noted for government corruption and graft, a spectacular boom in the stock market, organized crime on an unprecedented scale, a widespread rebellion against convention, the loss of idealism, and an emphasis on enjoying oneself. All this was fodder for the country''s booming mass-­circulation tabloid newspapers, which specialized in prodigious coverage of the latest national sensation, be it a murder trial, a heavyweight boxing match, or a dramatic but failed attempt to rescue a man lost in a Kentucky cave. Under heavy competitive pressure, the other, more respectable newspapers more often than not followed the tabloids'' lead, as did the national magazines and a mass media newcomer called radio. In early 1927, the media, insatiable as ever, had shifted their focus to the $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, a wealthy French-­born businessman living in Manhattan, to whoever made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris (or vice versa).

Although several airmen had already failed--­and died--­in the attempt, a new crop of aviators had recently announced plans to enter the competition. Most were well known, with expensive, technologically advanced planes, considerable outside financial backing, and armies of assistants, including staffers whose sole job was to publicize their bosses'' participation. And then there was Charles Lindbergh, an unknown, virtually penniless airmail pilot from Minnesota who managed to scrounge just enough funds from a group of St. Louis businessmen to finance the construction of a stripped-­down little plane he named Spirit of St. Louis, in honor of his benefactors. To aviation experts, Lindbergh''s plan appeared more than quixotic; it seemed suicidal. Never having flown over any large body of water before, he would now try to cross the Atlantic, steering by the stars, a method of navigation relatively unfamiliar to him. He would carry neither parachute nor radio.

Even more foolhardy, he planned to make the thirty-­three-­plus-­hour flight alone. No one had ever attempted such a hazardous journey solo; as one wit noted, not even Columbus had sailed by himself. Lloyd''s of London, which issued odds on virtually any enterprise, regardless of its danger, refused to do so for Lindbergh''s venture. "The underwriters believe the risk is too great," a Lloyd''s spokesman declared. America has always loved an underdog, especially one as polite, unassuming, self-­disciplined, and boyishly handsome as Lindbergh--­ a stark contrast to the bootleggers, gangsters, playboys, arrogant bankers, dizzy flappers, and corrupt government officials who made up a sizable percentage of the era''s top newsmakers. It was not surprising, then, that when he took off from Long Island''s rain-­slick Roosevelt Field in the early morning of May 20, 1927, the entire nation anxiously followed his progress. Newspapers throughout the country printed extra editions, and radio broadcasts issued frequent flash bulletins. During a prizefight at Yankee Stadium, forty thousand people, at the urging of the announcer, rose as one and prayed silently for the young flier.

In his May 21 newspaper column, the humorist Will Rogers wrote: "No attempt at jokes today. A slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before." When word came that Lindbergh had made it, America went mad. "We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement," said Charles Evans Hughes, soon to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. "Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything." President Coolidge dispatched an admiral''s flagship to Europe to bring Lindbergh and the Spirit home.

In Washington, the president presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Flying Cross. In New York, more than four million people--­75 percent of the city''s population--­lined its streets to honor Lindbergh in the biggest ticker-­tape parade in New York''s history. A few months later, Time magazine named him its first "Man of the Year." After his tumultuous homecoming, Lindbergh spent three months touring all forty-­eight states in the Spirit. An estimated thirty million people flocked to see this new national idol, labeled a "demigod" by one newspaperman; wherever he appeared, huge crowds fought to get near him. Intensely uncomfortable with the adulation, Lindbergh sought to use his fame to increase public interest in commercial aviation. Instead of accepting the millions of dollars he was offered to endorse products or appear in movies, he became a technical adviser to two start-­up airlines--­Pan American Airways and TAT, which eventually became Transcontinental and Western Air and ultimately Trans World Airlines (TWA). Working with both to help establish passenger service, he flew all over the country and later the world, surveying possible air routes, testing planes, and playing.