Charles Augustus Lindbergh

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974), American aviator, made the historic first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

Charles A. Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit, Michigan. His father was a congressman from Minnesota (1907-1917). After attending schools in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., Lindbergh enrolled in a mechanical engineering program at the University of Wisconsin. He left to study flying in Lincoln, Nebraska (1920-1922). He made his first solo flight in 1923 and thereafter made exhibition flights and short hops in the Midwest. He enrolled in the U.S. Air Service Reserve as a cadet in 1924 and graduated the next year. In 1926 he made his first flight as an airmail pilot between Chicago and St. Louis.

Lindbergh wanted to compete for the $25, 000 prize that Raymond Orteig had posted for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. With financial backing from St. Louis businessmen, Lindbergh had the Spirit of St. Louis built. On the first lap of his flight to New York, he traveled nonstop to St. Louis in 14 hours and 25 minutes—record-breaking time from the West Coast.

On May 20, 1927, Lindbergh took off in his silverwinged monoplane from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, bound for Le Bourget Airport outside Paris. Better-equipped and better-known aviators had failed; some had even crashed to their death. But Lindbergh succeeded. He arrived on May 21, having traveled 2, 610 miles in 33 1/2 hours. He was immediately acclaimed a hero and received numerous honors and decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor, the French Chevalier Legion of Honor, the Royal Air Cross (British), and the Order of Leopold (Belgium). During a 75-city American tour sponsored by the Daniel Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics, he was greeted by wild demonstrations.

In December 1927 Lindbergh flew nonstop between Washington and Mexico City and went on a goodwill trip to the Caribbean and Central America. During one tour he met Anne Spencer Morrow, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and married her in 1929. The Lindberghs made many flights together. In 1931 they flew to Asia, mapping air routes to China, and two years later in a 30, 000-mile flight they explored possible trans-oceanic air routes.

In March 1932 tragedy struck the Lindbergh family when their infant son was kidnapped. A $50, 000 ransom was paid, but the baby was found dead. The nation's concern and horror resulted in legislation expanding the role of Federal government law-enforcement agencies in dealing with such crimes, specifically empowering the government to demand the death penalty for kidnapers taking victims across state lines. After the execution of the convicted murderer in 1935, the Lindberghs moved to Europe. While in France, Lindbergh worked with Alexis Carrel, an American surgeon and experimental biologist who in 1912 had won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The two men perfected an "artificial heart and lungs, " a perfusion pump to keep organs alive outside the body by supplying blood and air to them.

In the late 1930s Lindbergh conducted various air-power surveys in Europe. He toured German aviation centers at the invitation of Nazi leader Hermann Göring and became convinced of Nazi military invincibility. Also in the 1930s he was on the Board of Directors of Pan-American World Airways. In 1939 he surveyed American airplane production as special adviser on technical matters. He performed noteworthy promotional work for aviation during this period.

Just prior to World War II, as a member of the America First Organization, Lindbergh warned that United States involvement could not prevent a German victory. He was criticized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt for radio broadcasts urging America to refrain from fighting in "other people's wars." As a result, Lindbergh resigned his commission in the U.S. Air Force. After the Japanese attack in 1941, he supported the American effort, serving as a civilian technician for aircraft companies in several theaters of war. After the war he once again became a technical adviser for the U.S. Air Force and eventually was recommissioned a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve.

The great aviator's Nazi sympathies severely damaged his reputation in the public eye. But the popularity of his and his wife's books helped restore some of the esteem he had lost due to his infatuation with Hitler. Lindbergh wrote several accounts of his epic-making 1927 flight. We (1927) and The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for biography, are interesting and modest summaries of his early life and accomplishments. With Carrel he coauthored Culture of Organs (1938), and in 1948 he wrote Of Flight and Life His later works included The Wartime Journals of Charles A, Lindbergh (1970) and Boyhood on the Upper Mississippi: A Reminiscent Letter (1972). An Autobiography of Values (1977) was published posthumously. Toward the end of his life he grew increasingly interested in the spiritual realm. He also spoke out on environmental issues. He spent his final years with his wife in a house they had built on a remote portion of the island of Maui. He died there on August 26, 1974.

After her husband's death, Anne Morrow Lindbergh continued to publish books of her diaries and letters. She retired to Darien, Connecticut, where a series of strokes sapped her of her faculties. In 1992, she was the victim of an embezzlement scam devised by a woman whom her children had hired to manage her adily affairs. The state of Connecticut joined with the Lindbergh children in pressing charges against the perpetrator.

Further Reading

The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh was published in 1970. An early account of Lindbergh is George B. Fife, Lindbergh: The Lone Eagle (1927). Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (1959), is informative and provocative and also excellent for Lindbergh's association with the America First Organization. Walter S. Ross, The Last Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh (1968), is a well-documented book, especially informative about the mysterious postkidnaping period of Lindbergh's life in the 1930s. A comprehensive biography, published soon after the famed aviator's death, is Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh: A Biography (1976). A more recent study of the famed aviator is Walter L. Hixson, Charles A. Lindbergh: Lone Eagle (1996). □

LINDBERGH, CHARLES A. 1902-1974

Pioneer aviator

"Lucky Lindy."

The greatest aeronautic feat of the 1920s, and indeed one of the greatest and most-publicized events of the decade in any sense, was Charles Augustus Lindbergh's solo, non-stop crossing of the Atlantic in 1927. More important than the personal fame the flight brought Lindbergh was its impact on the history of aviation. It proved that it was possible to build planes capable of flying long distances safely, paving the way for the development of commercial airlines and specialized military aircraft.

The Orteig Prize

Lindbergh's flight was not the first Atlantic crossing by air. Eight years earlier five navy men in a seaplane, the NC-4, had flown from Newfoundland to the Azores to Portugal and then to England. Still, nobody had ever flown solo directly from an American city to a European capital, and the Orteig prize of $25,000 was offered for the first individual to accomplish such a feat.

Richard Byrd

Navy Comdr. Richard E. Byrd had flown over the North Pole in 1926 and was keen to win the honor of being the first to cross the Atlantic solo. He had had the runway at Roosevelt Field on Long Island lengthened to enable a plane laden with extra gasoline tanks to take off. Unfortunately for Byrd, a minor crash delayed his departure, and he approved the request of a long and lean midwestern mail pilot, Charles Lindbergh, to use the field.

Backing

Lindbergh, who was backed by Saint Louis civic boosters and aviation buffs, named his plane The Spirit of St. Louis. (It is now hanging in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) He wanted a specially constructed plane for the flight and finally signed a contract with Ryan Airlines of San Diego, California, to build the aircraft for $10,580. It had a nine-cylinder, air-cooled CurtisWright engine with redundancies—back-up parts. It had two ignition systems, a double carburetor, and no radiator to spring a leak. Lindbergh not only supervised but assisted in the construction, which was accomplished in only sixty days.

In the Air

Lindbergh left San Diego for New York on 10 May 1927, stopping only for a brief layover in Saint Louis. On 12 May the bleary-eyed, twenty-five-year-old aviator taxied to a stop on at Roosevelt Field. After a week of last-minute preparations, interviews, and weather watching—during which Lindbergh is said to have gotten little sleep—the U.S. Weather Bureau finally issued a guardedly optimistic forecast for the North Atlantic on 20 May 1927. It was pouring rain on Long Island, but Lindbergh ordered his plane pushed out of the hanger and into takeoff position. With agonizing slowness the plane bumped across the muddy airstrip, barely getting up enough speed to clear a parked tractor and some overhead wires at the end of the runway. Finally at 7:52 A.M. The Spirit of St. Louis went airborne carrying 425 gallons of gasoline—its biggest load ever. The stripped-down cockpit contained no radio and no parachute. To save even more weight the cockpit seat was made out of wicker, and the only food Lindbergh carried was five sandwiches. The airplane had no windshield, only side windows, and to see ahead Lindbergh had to use a movable periscope.

Over the Waves

Lindbergh's plane, a monoplane in an era of biplanes, was the finest available, and the chances of its failing him were not great. The primary difficulty was in the takeoff, in which a crackup would almost certainly have created a blazing inferno. In a time before automatic pilots—and with thirty-seven course changes to make in thirty-three hours—Lindbergh was aware that his greatest enemy was sleep. He had prepared for the flight by deliberately depriving himself of sleep for long periods, but it is doubtful that such "training" was of any real benefit. His youth and stamina were his real strengths. Lindbergh had not even reached Nova Scotia when he first fell asleep, waking up with a jolt. When he opened a window to blow cold air on his face, his Mercator chart, on which he had plotted his great-circle course, almost got sucked out of the plane. He buzzed Saint John's, Newfoundland, to let people know he had made it to the extreme tip of North America, and then he headed out over the vastness of the open Atlantic.

No Deicers

Flying blind in dense clouds, Lindbergh rose to more than ten thousand feet, trying to get above them. He could not, and the wings began to ice up. By descending and maneuvering, he finally escaped the clouds and the ice, but sleepiness continued to dog him. He hallucinated, saw mirages, and sometimes snapped awake just as the plane was on the verge of setting down in the sea. Finally he saw the coast of Ireland, got a fix on his position, and steadied his course for Paris. At Le Bourget Airport on 21 May a tumultuous crowd of 100,000 excited Frenchmen surged onto the runway as he taxied to a stop. Lindbergh's epic flight of 3,610 miles had taken thirty-three and a half hours. The American was borne off the field in triumph on their shoulders, as souvenir seekers ripped off parts of the plane. President Calvin Coolidge had the national hero brought home on the navy cruiser Memphis. In his younger days Lindbergh had been a reserve second lieutenant in the U. S. Army Air Service. Now he was made a colonel. His safe landing on 21 May 1927 in France put American aviation on the high level it had been seeking for some time. A new era in aviation had dawned.

Sources:

Charles A, Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life (New York: Scribners, 1948);

Lindbergh, "We" (New York & London: Putnam, 1927).

CHARLES LINDBERGH

Young and handsome, modest and daring, Charles Lindbergh was probably the first mass-media celebrity. After performing the amazing feat of flying solo from New York to Paris, France, in his small airplane in 1927, Lindbergh became an international hero, adored by millions and hounded by the press. Lindbergh gained fame not only for his flight, but because he represented qualities of adventurous boldness that were highly valued during the 1920s. It was a time of new achievements and modern inventions, and, by flying across the Atlantic Ocean, Lindbergh had opened up a new world of possibilities.

Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1902. His father, a lawyer, and his mother, a science teacher, raised him in the small farm community of Little Falls, Minnesota, where young Charles learned independence very early. He began driving an automobile at the age of eleven and later dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to learn to fly airplanes. He loved flying and soon had a job flying mail from St. Louis, Missouri, to Chicago, Illinois. In 1927, when a New York hotel owner offered $25,000 to the first pilot to fly alone across the Atlantic, Lindbergh was determined at once to try. On May 21, 1927, he took five sandwiches and a bottle of water in his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, and took off from New York's Roosevelt Field.

Lindbergh had sought to win money and fame for his accomplishment, but he had no idea what awaited him. When he landed, thirty-three hours later, in Le Bourget field in Paris, over 150,000 people had gathered to greet him. From that moment on he was a public figure, and newly created forms of mass media gave Lindbergh a kind of fame that no public figure had seen before. When Lindbergh returned to the United States, President Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) presented him with medals. Millionaire Harry Guggenheim (1890–1971) paid for Lindbergh to fly his plane on a three-month tour of the United States, where he visited 48 states and gave 149 speeches in 92 cities. He was the hero of dozens of parades. Crowds followed him wherever he went. Admirers copied his clothes; his flight started a fad of wearing leather jackets and loose aviator pants. A popular new fast dance was called the "Lindy hop," because it made the dancers feel like they were flying. Several U.S. toymakers made "Lucky Lindy" dolls that looked like Lindbergh. When he married Anne Morrow (1906–2001) in 1929, reporters in motorboats followed them on their honeymoon cruise. A shy person, Lindbergh tried to avoid media attention when he could. He refused many offers that could have led to more fame, such as an offer from American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) of $500,000 to star in movies.

Lindbergh and Anne continued to fly and to speak in favor of aviation all over the world. People were enchanted by the beautiful young couple and followed their adventures closely. However, the Lindberghs' celebrity had tragic results. In March 1932 their twenty-month-old son, Charles III, was kidnapped, and his dead body was found ten days later. Lindbergh always blamed the constant focus of the press for drawing the kidnapper's attention to his family. The kidnapping and the trial that followed it in 1934 were huge media events, followed closely by people all over the world.

Trying to escape his own fame, Lindbergh spent several years in Europe. He visited Germany frequently, and Hermann Göring (1893–1946), a high Nazi official, presented him with a German medal of honor. When he came back he spoke out against the United States's involvement in World War II (1939–45). Many people thought his speeches were pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish, and Lindbergh's popularity fell dramatically. He did join in the war effort, in the Pacific, where he went as a civilian, or non-military, adviser and managed to fly fifty combat missions.

Lindbergh spent most of the rest of his life quietly with his family, though he continued to fly and to promote air travel. A lifelong inventor, he also helped a doctor friend invent a special pump for use in organ transplants. Lindbergh died of cancer on the island of Maui in Hawaii in 1974.

Lindbergh, Charles (1902–1974), aviator.Lindbergh burst upon the world stage on 20–21 May 1927 when he piloted his single‐engine Ryan monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, solo across the Atlantic. Although this was the signature achievement of his life, Lindbergh's impact went well beyond his epic flight. Reared on a farm in Little Falls, Minnesota, the son of a farm‐bloc congressman, Lindbergh in 1920 enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Wisconsin. He dropped out after two years, learned to fly, and spent the summer of 1923 barnstorming through the West. Seeking more experience and training, Lindbergh enlisted as a U.S. Army flying cadet; trained in San Antonio, Texas; and graduated first in his class in 1925. After the military, he found employment as an airmail pilot, the most demanding and dangerous type of flying in this period.

Learning of a $25,000 prize to fly from New York to Paris, Lindbergh saw an unmatched aviator's challenge. But he also sought to further the cause of aviation and to demonstrate the capabilities and reliability of the airplane. His successful 33½ hour, nonstop flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget Field just outside Paris not only vaulted Lindbergh to instant fame but also contributed to renewed enthusiasm and investment in the nascent U.S. aviation industry and commercial air transport. Other crucial building blocks in the 1920s contributed to later American preeminence in aerospace, such as the Air Commerce Act of 1926 and the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, but Lindbergh's achievement provided an important catalyst.

Lindbergh's impact on aeronautics continued in the 1930s as he made several pioneering transoceanic flights with his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for Pan American Airways and other emerging airlines. He was an early and ardent supporter of the research of the rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard. During World War II, Lindbergh served as a consultant to several aircraft manufacturers and as a civilian adviser to the U.S. military. In 1944, as a civilian, he flew fifty combat missions in the Pacific theater and shot down one Japanese fighter. After the war he served as a special consultant for research and development to the U.S. Air Force.

The 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindberghs’ infant son, and the ensuing trial and execution of Bruno Hauptmann in 1935, stirred nearly as much public and media attention as Lindbergh's Atlantic crossing. On the eve of World War II, as a leading spokesman for the noninterventionist pressure group the America First Committee, Lindbergh drew widespread criticism for highly publicized statements regarding the superiority of German airpower, for his consistent failure to denounce German atrocities, and for anti–Semitic utterances made in a speech delivered in Des Moines, Iowa, on 11 September 1941. Lindbergh later restored his reputation somewhat as an activist in the environmentalist movement. A talented and prolific writer, he wrote seven books and numerous articles.
See also Airplanes and Air Transport; Anti‐Semitism; Environmentalism; Popular Culture; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Kenneth S. Davis , The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream, 1959.
Charles A. Lindbergh , Autobiography of Values, 1976.
Tom D. Crouch, ed., Charles A. Lindbergh: An American Life, 1977.

Peter L. Jakab

Charles Augustus Lindbergh 1902–74, American aviator who made the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight, b. Detroit; son of Charles A. Lindbergh (1859–1924). He left the Univ. of Wisconsin (1922) to study flying. After service as a flying cadet, he was commissioned (1925) in the air force reserve and later became an airmail pilot. On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh astounded the world by landing in Paris after a solo flight from New York across the Atlantic in The Spirit of St. Louis. Upon his return to the United States he received an unprecedented welcome, was promoted to colonel, and made a nationwide tour to foster popular interest in aviation.

Lindbergh married (1929) Anne Morrow (see below), the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico Dwight W. Morrow , and with her made several long flights. After the kidnapping and death of their son (see Hauptmann, Bruno Richard ) in 1932, the Lindberghs moved (1935) to England. In 1936, Lindbergh collaborated with Alexis Carrel on the invention of a perfusion pump that could maintain organs outside the body.

After inspecting (1938) European air forces, Lindbergh became convinced of German air superiority; he favored a U.S. policy of isolationism with respect to the struggle threatening in Europe. He returned (1939) to the United States and made antiwar speeches for the America First Committee. When these were branded pro-Nazi, he resigned his reserve commission and quit the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Upon U.S. entry into the war Lindbergh offered his services to the air force; he subsequently flew combat missions in the Pacific. In his later years he emerged as a spokesman on conservation issues.

Bibliography: See his We (1927), Of Flight and Life (1948), The Spirit of St. Louis (1953; Pulitzer Prize), and The Wartime Journals (1970); memoir by his daughter, R. Lindbergh (1998); biographies by W. S. Ross (1968) and A. S. Berg (1998); T. Kesssner, The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation (2010).

His wife, Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh, 1906–2001, b. Englewood, N.J., grad. Smith College, 1927, was a writer and aviator. Her more than two dozen works include North to the Orient (1935) and Listen! the Wind (1938), both accounts of flights she made with her husband; The Wave of the Future (1940), a tract advocating isolationism; Gift from the Sea (1955), a poetic, highly personal, and bestselling study of the problems of women; The Unicorn and Other Poems (1956); a novel, Dearly Beloved (1962); and a volume of essays, Earth Shine (1969).

Bibliography: See her diaries and letters, Bring Me a Unicorn (1972), Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1973), Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974), The Flower and the Nettle (1976), and War Within and Without (1980); biographies by S. Hertog (1999) and K. C. Winters (2007).

Lindbergh, Charles Augustus (1902–74) the most acclaimed aviator in American history, born in Detroit, Michigan. Lindbergh was glorified as a national hero and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor after being the first person to fly solo nonstop from New York to Paris (1927). Lindbergh actively opposed U.S. involvement in World War II, becoming the leading spokesman for the noninterventionist America First Committee. Once the United States did enter the war, he ceased these activities and supported the war effort as a civilian by testing and developing military aircraft and by flying combat missions in the South Pacific (1944). But his reputation never recovered from allegations that he was pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic. After the war Lindbergh performed a variety of services for the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Department. In 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower restored his commission in the Air Force Reserve.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh , 1859–1924, American Congressman (1907–17), b. Sweden; father of American aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh . He was brought to Minnesota as an infant, and later practiced law in Little Falls, Minn. As a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, he consistently attacked the methods of large industrial trusts and sponsored various reforms but incurred vilification by his denunciation of war propaganda and war profiteering. His outspoken book Why Is Your Country at War? (1917, repr. 1934) was suppressed and contributed to his defeat (1918) as candidate of the Nonpartisan League for the post of governor of Minnesota.

Lindbergh, Charles A[ugustus] (1902–74), on May 20–21, 1927, flew his monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, in a nonstop flight of 3,610 miles from New York to Paris in 331/2 hours. Lindbergh's accounts of this first solo flight across the Atlantic, which made him an international hero, are “We” (1927) and The Spirit of St. Louis (1953, Pulitzer Prize). His Wartime Journals was published in 1970. Autobiography of Values (1978) was edited from a lengthy manuscript.

Lindbergh, Charles Augustus (1902–74) US aviator. He became an international hero when, in The Spirit of St Louis, he made the first non-stop transatlantic solo flight, from New York to Paris (1927) in 33 hours 30 minutes. In 1932, his baby son was kidnapped and murdered.