The Last Empire (18 page)

Meanwhile, just who was the hero? In 1932 the rococo English journalist Beverly Nichols met Lindbergh. “What is all this fuss about flying the Atlantic?” Nichols later marveled. “Isn’t that just the sort of thing a bore like that
would
do? Now if Noel or I had flown, you would have a real story!” So one would. But Slim did fly, alone, and thereby hangs a century’s great story, The Lone Eagle.

Lindbergh’s daughter, Reeve, has now written a charming memoir of her father and mother,
Under a Wing
. She sets out to place her father in his native country, specifically, at Little Falls, above the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. For reasons that have to do with the nature of the sky in the upper Midwest, a great many of the early—I almost wrote
real
—fliers came from that part of the world: from the Ohio Wright brothers, who pretty much started it all at the turn of the century, to Minnesota Lindbergh and Kansas Earhart to my South Dakota father, an army flier since 1917 and from 1927 to 1930 general manager of Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, later TWA), for which Lindbergh acted as consultant and general publicist.

On my one visit to South Dakota, as I drove from Madison to Sioux Falls, I was conscious of an all-enveloping bowl of light, as if one were at the bottom of a vast goldfish bowl; odder still, the light also seemed to be coming as much from below as from above. Then I noticed how flat the plain was that I was crossing, how tall sky and low horizon made a luminous globe. In such a landscape, aerial flight seems, somehow, inevitable. So Lindbergh must have felt of his native country over which he was to fly for much of his youth as one of the first airmail carriers.

Earthly geography aimed him for the sky. Family, too. A paternal grandfather left Sweden during a political-financial scandal that Berg handles the best of anyone I’ve read. Ola Mansson was a farmer with a large family. Elected to the Swedish Parliament in 1847, he had an illegitimate child by a Stockholm waitress. Thanks to a scandal that involved the king, he fled Sweden, leaving behind his first family but taking with him the mother of his young son, Karl August. By 1859 he had changed his name to August Lindbergh; he had also become a farmer near Sauk Center, Minnesota, where Sinclair Lewis would be born in 1895. A politician in the old country, August became something of one in the new, but it was his eldest son, now called Charles August, who was to rise in that line of work. C.A. became a lawyer, married and had two children. After the death of his wife, he married a doctor’s daughter. Evangeline Land was twenty-four; C.A. was forty. They were considered the best-looking couple in the heart of
the heart of the country.

Enter American literature. Evangeline was a schoolteacher, well educated for the time, with fanciful artistic leanings. She loved amateur theatricals. Beauty, too. She wanted to “be an inspiration. I suppose I’d better become a teacher then . . . I’ll make ’em put in a village green, and darling cottages. . . .” Thus speaks Carol Kennicott, heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
. Thus spake, it would appear, Evangeline Lindbergh, on whom Carol appears to be based. Most intriguingly, Lewis wrote his novel seven years before Carol-Evangeline’s son became world-famous.

Although Lindbergh (born 1902) was to remain as close to his mother as two cool Scandinavians could ever be (or so she termed them when they refused to embrace for the press as he left for Paris), she was never to be the influence that his father was. In 1906, C.A. was elected to the House of Representatives as a Progressive on the Republican ticket, very much in the Robert La Follette populist isolationist tradition.

To understand the son’s politics—or, perhaps, tropisms, reflexes to the public business—one must understand C.A. and his world.

Although Berg’s book is well assembled and full of new detail,
Loss of Eden
by Joyce Milton is still, perhaps, the liveliest biography in the sense that she manages to bring alive her cast in a way not usual in contemporary biographies. But finally, it is Lindbergh himself, particularly in his posthumous
Autobiography of Values
, who bears the most interesting witness to a life so extraordinary that it becomes, paradoxically, emblematic of the American character at its most fulfilled.

Of his childhood, Lindbergh wrote:

My father grew up on the frontier. His parents had brought him there from Sweden when he was six years old. They staked out a homestead and from it axed a clearing and plowed a field. His early boyhood had been spent in constant fear of Indians and reliance upon soldiers. On one occasion when the Sioux had taken the warpath, my grandfather abandoned his homestead and with his family fled by ox-cart to the fort at St. Cloud. A massacre of settlers took place in a village to the south and reasonable security was not regained until soldiers came with their rifles. . . . During the early years of my life, I lived under the influence of three environments: our farm and town, my grandfather’s Detroit laboratory (Dr. Land invented the porcelain tooth), and the city of Washington, D.C., where my father served for ten years in Congress and where I attended school. My interests were divided between the farm and the laboratory, for I disliked school and had little curiosity about the politics of Washington.

It is hard to think of the boy Lindbergh serving two years at Friends School, where so many of us were to do time in later years, including Mrs. Ronald Reagan.

In Congress, C.A. was the people’s man or, as Milton puts it:

If there was a single event that symbolized for the Progressives all that was wrong with unfettered capitalism, it was a meeting held in the library of the Madison Avenue home of New York financier J. P. Morgan in December 1890. At that conference Morgan had convinced the presidents of seven major railroads to call a halt to their cutthroat competition and form a cartel. The meeting marked the beginning of the era of the trusts, and during the next fifteen years Morgan would personally preside over the organization of more than a half-dozen mega-corporations—among them United States Steel, the Guggenheim copper trust, etc.

Most Progressives glumly accepted things as they were, but C.A. declared war on what he called the Money Trust, centered on the house of Morgan. Needless to say, the Money Trust survived his attacks but his marriage did not. C.A. and Evangeline separated. By 1907, she and Charles were in Detroit with her parents. Dr. Land was, like so many of the livelier figures of that age, an inventor. Charles would also become an inventor, a natural sort of activity at the dawn of the age of technology, whose presiding genius was Henry Ford.

In the end, Evangeline agreed to live in Washington, but not with C.A. At the age of eleven, Charles mastered Ford’s invention and drove C.A. about his Minnesota district. Although more interested in the combustion engine than C.A.’s attacks on the Money Trust, Charles was bound to absorb a good deal of the populist faith. C.A. blasted the gold standard, the “subsidized press,” the “anglophiles” who, by 1914, were eager for us to enter the European war, aided and abetted by J. P. Morgan, who supported the British and French currencies while supplying the Allies with arms. During all this, President Wilson was quietly maneuvering the United States into the war while running for reelection in 1916, using Senator T. P. Gore’s slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Representative Lindbergh and Senator Gore were not only allies in this, but each admired LaFollette, who also opposed, along with a majority of the American people, foreign entanglements and adventures. But
the bankers’ war, as the isolationists thought of it, was inevitable. The subsidized press that would later so damage Charles’s reputation beat the drums for war, and, according to C.A.’s hyperbole, “at no period in the world’s history has deceit been so bold and aggressive as now [
sic
] attempting to engulf all humanity in a maelstrom of hell.” Little did the apolitical, science-loving Charles suspect that a generation later he would be making the same sort of speeches in the face of a conspiracy that neither he, nor anyone else much, understood at the time.

Berg is at his best with the two great news stories of Lindbergh’s life—the 1927 flight to Paris and subsequent fame; and the 1932 kidnapping and killing of his two-year-old son and the chaotic search for the murderer, a German immigrant called Bruno Richard Hauptmann. (These sections read most excitingly, and despite the work of the inevitable revisionists, it seems more than ever clear that Hauptmann was indeed the kidnapper.) Berg dutifully notes that the first question King George V asked Lindbergh after his Atlantic flight was, “How did you pee?” Lindbergh was already used to the question. He had used paper cups. My father, Gene Vidal, his colleague, was more probing. “How did you . . . ?” Lindbergh laughed. “Well,” he said, “I sort of felt sorry for those Frenchmen who were carrying me on their shoulders.”

Neither Berg nor Milton is particularly good on the early days of aviation, a period awaiting its historian. By 1928, Lindbergh and Gene were involved in the first transcontinental airline, which took two days to cross the country (no night flying) by rail and air, landing at Glendale. The company’s name, TAT, was an acronym, according to cynics, for Take A Train. Since Lindbergh virtuously refused to capitalize on his name (he rejected the fortune that William Randolph Hearst offered him to appear in a movie about his life), he settled for being a publicist for commercial aviation in general and TAT in particular.

“But what did he do?” I once asked my father. “He let us use his name. The Lindbergh line we called ourselves. Then he visited all around the country, sometimes checking out sites for landing fields. But then we all . . . those of us who were pilots . . . did that. We’d also taken on Amelia Earhart. We called her Assistant Traffic Manager. But, basically, it was all public relations. Everyone in the world wanted to look at those two. Amelia’s main function for us was to convince women that it was safe to fly.” “You mean you wanted more women pilots?” Gene was amused. “No. We were trying to get the women to let the men—their husbands, relatives, friends—fly. Amelia had such a cool and serene disposition that she really put people at ease, and so made the whole thing look a lot safer than it really was.”

Milton is amusing about the somewhat edgy relations between the god of flight and, as of 1928, the goddess of flight. Much was made of the physical resemblance between Charles and Amelia. Milton seems to think that publisher-publicist George Palmer Putman had “plucked her from obscurity . . . impressed by her striking resemblance to the hero of 1927 and promoted her as ‘Lady Lindy.’ ” It was always my impression that she had plucked herself from obscurity by becoming a flier and that Putman proceeded to commercialize her. Amelia was very much a proto-feminist whose Bible was Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
. Anne Morrow, Lindbergh’s new wife, was also an enthusiast of Woolf, but Anne disappointed Amelia by insisting that she was not “a modern career woman but rather the wife of a modern man.”

According to Milton, while the two women were first bonding at a kitchen table, the practical joker Slim sneaked up behind his wife and began to dribble water on her silk dress. Amelia was delighted when Anne turned around and threw a glass of buttermilk in his face. But there was always a certain edginess between the Yin and Yang of flight. As Gene once said, tactfully, “Amelia was not a natural seat-of-the-pants flier like Slim.” While Berg tells a joke that I’d not heard before. After Amelia soloed to Ireland in 1932, Lindbergh is supposed to have said, “I hear that Amelia made a good landing—once.”

Berg gives almost equal space to Anne Morrow, as does Milton. Anne was born into the enemy camp. She was the daughter of a wealthy Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow, who was serving as his friend President Coolidge’s ambassador to Mexico, where she first got to know her husband from the sky. Anne had graduated from Smith; published poetry; despite shyness, she enjoyed social life. Farm boy and society girl ought not to have got on at all, and, in a sense, the marriage was unbalanced, but she had wanted to marry a hero, and that meant accommodating herself to a hero’s personality, Swedish division. As it was, she never ceased to admire him, something of a record in any marriage. They were to have six children.

In many ways, the marriage was a successful partnership; he taught her to fly, to be a navigator, while she encouraged him to become a serious writer. It is hard now to realize that, for years, each was one of the most popular writers in the world, a world that they saw from so far above that they were a bit like observant gods, hovering over all our seas and lands and noticing what the earthbound do not, the unity of things. They also raised a family, which their youngest daughter, Reeve, now describes in
Under a Wing
. The ethereal but tough Anne needed someone perhaps more sensitive to her moods—not to mention, more often at home; Slim was forever in motion. Later, Anne seems to have found a soulmate, first, briefly and intensely, in another poet-flier, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and, later, in her doctor. Interestingly, the twenty-seven-year-old Charles and the twenty-three-year-old Anne appear to have been virgins at the time of their wedding. We learn from Milton that, before the Paris flight,
Slim had never attended a dinner party, never learned to dance, never gone out with a girl—because he’d had no time to learn what he regarded as the separate language of women. From the photographs, his love life seems to have involved a series of dogs, by no means an affective deprivation.

In 1933, Gene Vidal became Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce, and for four years he systematized commercial aviation, issuing the first pilot’s licenses (thoughtfully giving himself number one); he standardized the national system of airports. He also worked closely with his former colleague at TAT, now a consultant to Juan Trippe’s Pan American Airways. During this period, the Lindberghs moved to Europe—but not before the opening gun in what would prove to be the most significant
mano a mano
duel of the hero’s life.