by Bryson, Bill
The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn’t actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in 115 of those cases no one was arrested. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent. Nationally, according to a survey made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—and it is notable that the best records were kept by insurers, not police authorities—two-thirds of America’s murders were unsolved in 1927. Some localities couldn’t even achieve that grimly unsatisfactory proportion. Chicago in a typical year experienced between 450 and 500 murders and managed to solve much less than a quarter of them. Altogether, nine-tenths of all serious crime in America went unpunished, according to the survey. Only about one murder in a hundred resulted in an execution. So for Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray to be accused, convicted, and ultimately executed, they had to be truly, outstandingly inept. They were.
Late in the afternoon of May 9, the lawyers concluded their closing arguments in the case and the twelve men of the jury—it was all male because women were not allowed to hear murder cases in New York State in 1927—were sent to deliberate. One hour and forty minutes later the jurors shuffled back in with their verdicts: both defendants were guilty of murder in the first degree. Ruth Snyder wept bitterly in her seat. Judd Gray, face flushed, stared hard at the jury but without animosity. Justice Scudder set sentencing for the following Monday, though that was really just a formality. The penalty for murder in the first degree was death by electrocution.
Coincidentally and conveniently, just as the Snyder-Gray case wound to its inevitable conclusion, an even bigger story began to unfold. Three days after the trial ended and just a short distance away, a silvery plane called the Spirit of St. Louis swooped down on Long Island from the west and landed at Curtiss Field, adjacent to Roosevelt Field. From it stepped a grinning young man from Minnesota about whom almost nothing was known.
Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five years old but looked eighteen. He was six feet two and weighed 128 pounds. He was almost preposterously wholesome. He didn’t smoke or drink—not even coffee or Coca-Cola—and had never been on a date. He had a curiously stunted sense of humor and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend’s water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as the friend took a mighty swig. The friend ended up in the hospital. His principal claim to fame was that he had successfully parachuted out of more crashing planes than anyone else alive, as far as could be told. He had made four emergency parachute jumps—one from just 350 feet—and had crash-landed a fifth plane in a Minnesota bog but clambered out unhurt. He had only just reached the fourth anniversary of his first solo flight. Among the flying community on Long Island his chances of successfully crossing the Atlantic were generally presumed to be about zero.
With Snyder and Gray off the front pages, demand arose now for a new story, and this confident, rather mysterious young midwesterner looked like he could be it. A single question swept through the reporting fraternity: Who is this kid?
2
The family name was really Månsson. Charles Lindbergh’s grandfather, a dour Swede with a luxuriant beard and fire-and-brimstone countenance, changed it to Lindbergh when he came to America in 1859 in circumstances that were both abrupt and dubious.
Until shortly before that time, Ola Månsson had been a respectable citizen and, by all appearances, a contentedly married man with a wife and eight children in a village near Ystad on the southernmost, Baltic edge of Sweden. In 1847, at the age of forty, he was elected to the Riksdag, the national parliament, and began to spend a good deal of time in Stockholm, six hundred kilometers to the north. There his life grew uncharacteristically complicated. He took up with a waitress twenty years his junior, and with her produced a child out of wedlock: Charles Lindbergh’s father. At the same time Månsson was implicated in a financial scandal for improperly guaranteeing bank loans to some cronies. It is not clear how serious the charges were; the Lindberghs in America always maintained that they were trumped up by Månsson’s political enemies. What is certain is that in 1859 Ola Månsson left Sweden in a hurry, failed to answer the accusations against him, abandoned his original family, settled in rural Minnesota with his mistress and new child, and changed his name to August Lindbergh—all matters that Charles Lindbergh overlooked or lightly glossed over in his various autobiographical writings.
The Lindberghs (the name means “linden tree mountain”) settled near Sauk Centre, Minnesota, future hometown of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, but then on the very edge of civilization. It was in Sauk Centre, two years after their arrival, that the elder Lindbergh suffered a famously horrific injury. While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed—one witness claimed he could see the poor man’s beating heart—and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew. The millworkers bound the injuries as best they could and carried Lindbergh home, where he lay in silent agony for three days awaiting the arrival of a doctor from St. Cloud, forty miles away. When the doctor at last reached him, he took off the arm and sewed up the gaping cavity. It was said that Lindbergh made almost no sound. Remarkably, August Lindbergh recovered and lived another thirty years. Stoicism became the Lindbergh family’s most cultivated trait.
Lindbergh’s father, who had arrived in America as a Swedish-speaking toddler named Karl August Månsson, grew up into a strapping but cheerless young man named Charles August Lindbergh. Friends and colleagues called him C.A. As a youth, C.A. became adroit at trapping muskrats, whose pelts furriers made into jackets and stoles that they marketed under the more appealing name of “Hudson seal.” C.A. made enough from the trade to put himself through the University of Michigan law school. Upon qualifying, he opened a law office in Little Falls, Minnesota, married, produced three daughters, and prospered sufficiently to build a large wooden house on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about a mile and a half outside town. All was eminently well with his life until the spring of 1898, when his wife died suddenly from surgery to remove an abdominal growth.
Three years later, C.A. married again—this time a pretty, rather intense young chemistry teacher from Detroit who had recently taken a position at Little Falls High School. Evangeline Lodge Land was unusually well educated for a woman, for the time, and for Little Falls. She, too, had graduated from Michigan but was even more academic than her husband and would later do graduate work at Columbia. Beyond physical attraction—they were both extremely good-looking—the new Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh had little in common. C. A. Lindbergh was handsome but severe and measured; his wife was brittle and demanding. On February 4, 1902, they produced another C. A. Lindbergh—this one named Charles Augustus, with an extra, more classically refined syllable on the second name.
From his father Charles inherited a dimpled chin and perpetually tousled hair, from his mother dreaminess, and from both a tendency to be headstrong. He was the only child they would have together. Young Charles—he was never Charlie or anything more relaxed and familiar—grew up in a household that was comfortable and well looked after (the family kept three servants) but lacking in warmth. Both his parents were almost wholly incapable of showing affection. Lindbergh and his mother never hugged. At bedtime, they shook hands. As both boy and man, Charles signed letters to his father, “Sincerely, C. A. Lindbergh,” as if corresponding with his bank manager.
Charles was a shy, rather dreamy boy. He made so little impression on Little Falls that when journalists descended on the town in 1927 looking for anecdotes from his boyhood, none of his ex-schoolmates could think of any. Lindbergh himself in adulthood said that he had no memories at all of his daily life as a youngster. In his first autobiographical effort, called We, he gave just eighteen lines to his childhood.
In 1906, when Charles was not quite f
ive, his father was elected to Congress as a Republican, which meant that young Charles divided his time between Little Falls, which he loved, and Washington, which he did not. This gave Charles an eventful but disrupted childhood. He enjoyed experiences that other children could only dream of—he played on the grounds of the White House and in the halls of the Capitol, visited the Panama Canal at the age of eleven, went to school with the sons of Theodore Roosevelt—but he moved around so much that he never really became part of anything.
As the years passed, his parents grew increasingly estranged. At least once, according to Lindbergh’s biographer A. Scott Berg, she held a gun to his head (after learning that he was sleeping with his stenographer), and at least once in fury he struck her. By the time Charles was ten years old, they were living permanently apart, though they kept it secret for the sake of his father’s political career. Charles attended eleven different schools before graduating from high school, and he distinguished himself at each by his mediocrity. In the autumn of 1920, he entered the University of Wisconsin, hoping to become an engineer. Charles survived in large part by having his mother write his papers for him, but ultimately even that wasn’t enough. Halfway through his sophomore year he flunked out and abruptly announced his intention to become an aviator. From his parents’ perspective, this was a mortifying ambition. Flying was poorly paid, wildly unsafe, and unreliable as a career—and nowhere were those three unhappy qualities more evident than in the United States.
In no important area of technology has America ever fallen further behind the rest of the world than it did with aviation in the 1920s. Europe had its first airline in KLM as early as 1919, and others quickly followed. Before the year was out, daily flights were introduced between London and Paris, and soon more than a thousand people a week were flying that route alone. By the mid-1920s it was possible to fly almost anywhere in Europe—from Berlin to Leipzig, from Amsterdam to Brussels, from Paris to distant Constantinople (by way of Prague and Bucharest). By 1927, France had nine airlines operating, British airlines were flying almost a million miles a year, and Germany was safely delivering 151,000 passengers to their destinations. In America as the spring of 1927 dawned, the number of scheduled passenger air services was … none.
Aviation in America was almost wholly unregulated. The country had no system of licensing and no requirements for training. Anyone could buy a plane, in any condition, and legally take up paying passengers. The United States was so slack about flying that it didn’t even keep track of the number of airplane crashes and fatalities. The most authoritative source, the Aircraft Year Book, compiled its figures from newspaper clippings. The anonymous authors of that annual tome were in no doubt that the absence of regulations was holding back progress and causing needless deaths. They wrote: “Since the Armistice, when airplanes were first made generally available and came into hands skilled and unskilled, responsible and irresponsible, it may be conservatively estimated that more than 300 persons have been killed and 500 injured—many of them fatally—in flying accidents which could have been prevented had there been in existence and enforced a statute regulating the operation of commercial aircraft.”
Without airlines to employ them, American aviators had to turn a hand to whatever work they could find—dusting crops, giving rides at county fairs, thrilling spectators with stunts and acrobatics, dragging advertising banners across the skies, taking aerial photographs, and above all carrying mail—the one area in which America was preeminent. Of all the aerial employments, delivering mail was the most economically secure but also the most dangerous: thirty-one of the first forty airmail pilots were killed in crashes, and accidents remained common through the 1920s. Airmail pilots flew in all weather and often at night, but with almost no support in the way of navigational aids. In March 1927, an article in Scientific American, under the heading “Invisible Beams Guide Birdmen in Flights Between European Cities,” noted admiringly how pilots in Europe could fix their locations instantly via radio beacons. Lost American pilots, by contrast, had to search for a town and hope that someone had written its name on the roof of a building. In the absence of that—and it was generally absent—pilots had to swoop low to try to read the signs on the local railroad station, often a risky maneuver. For weather reports, they mostly called ahead to railroad agents along the route and asked them to put their head out the door and tell them what they saw.
Such deficiencies marked almost every area of American civil aviation. Until 1924, Detroit, the fourth-largest city in the country, didn’t have an airfield at all. In 1927, San Francisco and Baltimore still didn’t. Lambert Field in St. Louis, one of the most important in the country because of its position at the heart of the continent, existed only because Major Albert B. Lambert, a flying enthusiast, was willing to support it out of his own pocket. Metropolitan New York had four airfields—three on Long Island and one on Staten Island—but all were privately owned or run by the military, and offered only the most basic facilities. None of them even had a control tower. No American airfield did.
Not until 1925 did America begin at last to address even peripherally its aeronautical shortcomings. The person chiefly responsible for rectifying these deficiencies was Dwight Morrow, a New York banker who knew nothing whatever about flying but was put in charge of the President’s Aircraft Board—a panel charged with investigating the safety and efficiency of American aviation—because he was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. By a rather extraordinary coincidence Morrow would in 1929 become Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law. Had Morrow been told that before the decade was out his shy, intellectual daughter at Smith College, in Massachusetts, would be marrying an airmail pilot and former stunt flier, we may assume he would have been flabbergasted. Had he been further informed that this pilot would also by then be the world’s most celebrated individual his astonishment would presumably have been immeasurable. In any case, thanks to Morrow’s efforts, the Air Commerce Act was signed into law by President Coolidge on May 20, 1926—coincidentally one year to the day before Lindbergh’s flight. The act brought in some minimal training requirements for pilots and inspection of planes used in interstate commerce, and required the Commerce Department to keep track of fatalities. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
This was the casual and high-risk world in which Charles Lindbergh learned to fly. His first flight—indeed, his first experience of an airplane at close range—was at a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 9, 1922, two months after his twentieth birthday. He was instantly smitten. Almost at once he embarked on a brief but perilous career as a stunt performer. Within a week he was wing-walking, and within a month he was—without any prior training—parachuting from giddy heights to the delight of watching crowds. In the course of these duties he also learned, in an entirely informal way, to fly. He proved to be unusually good at it. Like other young men, Lindbergh was capable of the most riveting foolishness. Part of the job of barnstormers was to impress the locals with their flying skills, and on a visit to Camp Wood, Texas, Lindbergh decided to do so by taking off from the town’s Main Street—an ambitious challenge since the street’s telephone poles were just forty-six feet apart and his wingspan was forty-four feet. As he sped down the street he hit a bump, which caused a wingtip to clip a pole, spinning him sideways and through the front window of a hardware store. That neither he nor any of the spectators were injured was a miracle.
Barnstorming gave Lindbergh a great deal of practical experience—he made over seven hundred flights in two years—but no technical training. In 1924, he corrected that deficiency by enrolling in a one-year course in the army air reserve, which provided the most advanced and challenging training then available. He finished at the top of his class—the first time in his life he had done well at anything academic—and emerged with the rank of captain. The achievement was muted somewhat by the fact that it coincided with the death of his father, from a neurological disorder, in May 1924. After his father’s funeral, and because no military posts
were available, he took a job as an airmail pilot on the St. Louis–Chicago route, where he acquired the sort of resourcefulness that comes with flying cheap and temperamental planes through every possible type of adversity. Thanks to this varied apprenticeship, Lindbergh in the spring of 1927 was a more experienced and proficient flier—and a vastly more gifted one—than his competitors realized. As events would show, you couldn’t be a better pilot and still be just twenty-five.
In many ways Charles Lindbergh’s greatest achievement in 1927 was not flying the Atlantic but getting a plane built with which to fly the Atlantic. Somehow he managed to persuade nine flinty businessmen in St. Louis, among them the aforementioned Albert B. Lambert, to back him, convincing them that a plane with “St. Louis” in its title could do nothing but good for the city’s business prospects. It was an exceedingly dubious proposition. The greater likelihood for his backers was that they would be indelibly associated with the needless death of a young, idealistic flier, but that thought, if it occurred to them at all, seems not to have troubled them. By late autumn 1926, Lindbergh had a promise of $13,000 of funding from his backers, plus $2,000 of his own—not a lavish bankroll by any means, but with luck, he hoped, enough to get him a single-engine plane capable of crossing an ocean.
In early February 1927, Lindbergh took a train to New York for a meeting with Charles A. Levine, owner of the airplane Columbia. This was the same plane that would, two months later, set the world endurance record with Chamberlin and Acosta. Chamberlin was present at the February meeting, as was the plane’s brilliant, sweet-tempered designer, Giuseppe Bellanca, though neither said much.