by Bryson, Bill
In the normal course of things, the Mississippi flood would not in itself have troubled Charles Lindbergh, but it happened to coincide with a broad band of turbulent weather that lay right across his flight path. A towering storm system that darkened the skies over a huge area of the Midwest and Southwest sent tornadoes spinning like demonic tops across eight states, from Texas to Illinois. In Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 80 people died and 350 were injured when a tornado tore through the business district. Elsewhere in Missouri, tornadoes claimed a dozen more lives, and many other deaths were reported in Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, and Illinois. In St. Louis, high winds caused extensive damage and falling debris killed one man (“a Negro,” the New York Times noted solemnly). In Wyoming, three people caught in a sudden blizzard froze to death. Altogether the storm toll was put at 228 dead and 925 injured in two days.
On the morning of Lindbergh’s arrival in St. Louis the winds eased, but they were replaced by heavy fog. Players at that day’s Browns-Yankees baseball game at Sportsman’s Park complained that they could not see ten feet ahead of them. What the crowds could see was not reported, but as it was the Browns, not many were present anyway.* Babe Ruth in any case saw well enough to hit a double and a home run, his eighth of the young season. No one yet suspected what kind of summer he was about to have. The Yankees won the game 4–2.
While a chill, damp fog lay over eastern Missouri, Chicago was suffering a scorching heat wave, while Colorado and the northern plains states lay buried beneath heavy late snows. Nebraska, bizarrely, experienced snow in several parts of the state while the southwestern corner reported two sultry tornadoes. Never had weather been more unsettled and strange. Lindbergh seemed blissfully oblivious. If he had any trouble finding Lambert Field in the fog he never mentioned it. In fact, he said nothing at all of bad weather in any of his published accounts of those eventful days other than to note that he was glad of the storm system because it kept the other fliers in New York pinned down until he got there. That he was perhaps the only person between the two coasts bold enough to take to the air seems not to have occurred to him then or later.
In St. Louis, Lindbergh showed off the new plane to the men who had paid for it, had a nap, wolfed down a plate of steak and four eggs at Louie’s Cafe by the airfield, then took to the skies again, this time bound for New York. In reaching St. Louis he had already notched up an impressive double achievement: he had become the first person to fly through the Rockies by night, and he had set a record for the longest nonstop flight ever undertaken by an American pilot flying alone. Now with the flight to New York, if all went to plan, he would break the record for the quickest coast-to-coast flight as well. Remarkably, this was just at the time that dense fogs along the East Coast grounded migrating birds and made the hunt for Charles Nungesser and François Coli futile. No airman in the eastern United States was going anywhere. Francesco de Pinedo, wishing to resume his stately progress around America in a replacement plane, tried for three days to fly to Philadelphia from New York, but he was turned back each time by driving rains and low cloud.
Logically, the weather that was keeping aviators grounded in New York ought to have kept Lindbergh from getting through, but the normal rules of life appeared to have been suspended where he was concerned. For the time being at least, young Charles Lindbergh seemed to have acquired a curious immortality.
* * *
* Actually the attendance of 1,500 that afternoon was not all that bad by Browns standards. Several times that season the Browns had attendances of 500 or fewer, and on one notably dismal occasion, on July 12, against the last-place Red Sox they attracted just 300 people. This in a stadium that seated 36,000.
4
To a foreign visitor arriving in America for the first time in 1927, the most striking thing was how staggeringly well-off it was. Americans were the most comfortable people in the world. American homes shone with sleek appliances and consumer durables—refrigerators, radios, telephones, electric fans, electric razors—that would not become standard in other countries for a generation or more. Of the nation’s 26.8 million households, 11 million had a phonograph, 10 million had a car, 17.5 million had a telephone. Every year, America added more new phones (781,000 in 1926) than Britain possessed in total.
Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world’s movies and 85 percent of its cars. Kansas alone had more cars than France. At a time when gold reserves were the basic marker of national wealth, America held half the world’s supply, or as much as all the rest of the world put together. No other country in history had ever been this affluent, and it was getting wealthier daily at a pace that was positively dizzying. The stock market, already booming, would rise by a third in 1927 in what Herbert Hoover would later call “an orgy of mad speculation,” but in the spring and summer of 1927 neither he nor anyone else was worried yet.
The America that Charles Lindbergh crossed by air in May 1927 was, as you would expect, a rather different place from the America we find today. It was, for one thing, more roomy and self-evidently rural. With a population of just under 120 million, the United States had only about four people then for every ten it holds today. Half of those 120 million still lived on farms or in small towns, compared with just 15 percent now, so the balance was much more in favor of the countryside.
Cities were, on the whole, agreeably compact: they had not yet acquired the radiating shock waves of suburban sprawl that we find today. Nor, by and large, did roads of any consequence emerge from them. In 1927, when people traveled or shipped goods, it was still almost exclusively by rail. Paved highways in most places were a rarity. Even the great, newly built Lincoln Highway—which proudly called itself the first transcontinental highway in the world—was continuously paved only from New York City to western Iowa. From there to San Francisco, only about half of it was. In Nevada, it was “largely hypothetical,” in the words of one contemporary, with not even roadside markers to indicate a notional existence. Other, shorter through routes like the Jefferson Highway and the Dixie Highway were beginning to appear here and there, but these were enchanting novelties, not true harbingers. When people imagined the future of long-distance transportation it wasn’t highways they thought of, but rather airplanes and giant dirigibles cruising between city centers.
That was why the Orteig Prize was for an epic flight and not a road race. It was also why skyscrapers of the period began to sport pointed masts—so that airships could tie up to them. That this was patently inadvisable—imagine the Hindenburg crashing in flames on Times Square—seems not to have occurred to any architect. Even in routine dockings, airships often had to discharge quantities of ballast water for purposes of stability, and it is unlikely that passersby below would have welcomed a regular downpour of aquatic bilge.
An alternative possibility for getting passengers into cities was the skyscraper aerodrome, with runways cantilevered outward from lofty rooftops or shared between buildings. One visionary architect came up with a plan to build a kind of giant table, with skyscrapers for the four legs and a four-acre landing platform perched across them. The New York Times for its part imagined a more personal approach. “The helicopter and gyroscope will enable a man to land and start from a shelf outside his dwelling window,” it stated with hopeful conviction in an editorial on the coming future.
That none of this was in any respect achievable—in terms of engineering, architecture, aeronautics, financing, safety, building codes, or any other consideration—seemed hardly to matter. This was an age that didn’t like practical concerns to get in the way of its musings. A writer in the popular Science and Invention magazine confidently forecast that people of all ages would soon be traveling—and briskly—on motorized roller skates, while Harvey W. Corbett, a prominent architect, predicted that skyscrapers would rise hundreds of stories into the clouds and that people living on the upper levels would get their meals by radio, without explainin
g exactly how he imagined that would work. Rodman Wanamaker, the department store magnate and financier of Richard Byrd’s flight, sponsored an exhibition in New York called the Titan City, which depicted a future world in which magnificent urban towers were connected by sleek aerial expressways while citizens were shot through glass tubes in pneumatic trains or glided regally from place to place on moving sidewalks. Whatever the future held, everyone agreed that it would be technologically advanced, American-led, and thrilling.
Curiously, it was the present that people weren’t so certain about. The First World War had left in its wake a world that nearly everyone thought shallow, corrupt, and depraved—even those who were enjoying it for those very reasons. Prohibition was in its eighth year and was a spectacular failure. It had turned ordinary citizens into criminals and created a world of gangsters and rattling tommy guns. New York had more saloons in 1927 than it had had before Prohibition, and drinking remained so transparently prevalent that the mayor of Berlin on a visit reportedly asked Mayor Jimmy Walker when Prohibition was to begin. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Corporation reported in 1927 that more people were dying of alcohol-related causes now than at any time before Prohibition was introduced.
Moral decline was evident everywhere, even on the dance floor. The tango, shimmy, and Charleston, with their insistent beats and flapping of limbs, had a hint of sexual frenzy that many an anxious elder found alarming. Worse was a popular dance called the black bottom, which involved hopping forward and backward and slapping the rump—an act of scandalous abandon focused on a body part that many would rather didn’t exist at all. Even the hesitation waltz was deemed to contain some element of sultriness that made it tantamount to musical foreplay. Worst of all by far was jazz, which was widely held to be a springboard for drug taking and promiscuity. “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” asked an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal. You bet it did, was the answer. An editorial in the New York American called jazz “a pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music.” Many were dismayed to realize that America now had the highest divorce rate in the world after the Soviet Union. (To cash in on this, Nevada in 1927 slashed the residency requirement for divorce in the state to three months, and in so doing became home of the quickie divorce.)
Concern was greatest for young women, who seemed everywhere to have abandoned themselves to sordid habits. They smoked, drank, rouged their shining faces, bobbed their hair (which is to say cut it short and even all the way around), and clad themselves in silken dresses of breathtaking skimpiness. The amount of fabric in the average dress, it was calculated, fell from almost twenty yards before the war to a wispy seven after. The generic term of the day for women of lively and liberal disposition was flapper—a word that originated in England in the late nineteenth century and originally signified a prostitute. (It was an offshoot of that other avian term for females, still in use in England today: bird.)
The movies deftly caught, and often actively inflamed, the spirit of abandon that characterized the times. One movie, according to its poster, offered its slavering audiences “beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp.” Another had “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation craving mothers.” It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to discern a direct-line connection between the wanton behavior of the modern woman and the murderous instincts of a Ruth Snyder. It was often noted in newspaper accounts that the wicked Mrs. Snyder before her downfall had been a great one for going to hot movies.
In desperation, lawmakers tried to legislate probity. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offense for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes. In Utah, the state legislature considered sending women to prison—not fining them, but imprisoning them—if their skirts showed more than three inches of leg above the ankle. In Seattle, a group called the Clean Books League even tried to get banned the travel books of the adventurer Richard Halliburton on the grounds that they “excited to wanderlust.” Regulations of a moral nature were introduced all over the nation—and nearly everywhere were, like Prohibition itself, ignored. Among people of a conservative temperament, it was a time of despair.
So when the Spirit of St. Louis landed on Long Island and from it stepped a young man who seemed to represent everything that was modest and virtuous and good, a very large part of the nation stirred hopefully and took notice.
Up to this point Lindbergh had seemed “a far-away and vague rival,” as Clarence Chamberlin recalled later. Most people outside aviation had not even heard of him. But he now rapidly became the public favorite. As a New York Times reporter observed just twenty-four hours after his arrival: “Lindbergh has won the hearts of New Yorkers by his bashful smile, his indomitable pluck and his impetuous flight here from the Pacific.” Large crowds came to the airfields to see the person the papers were calling (to his extreme irritation) “Lucky Lindy.” On the Sunday after his arrival, thirty thousand people—as many as would go to a Yankees game—turned up at Curtiss Field just in the hope of catching sight of the young aviator as he talked with his mechanics and worked on his plane. So many climbed onto the roof of a small paint shop next to the Spirit of St. Louis hangar that the building collapsed under their weight. Luckily, no one was inside at the time and none of those who fell were seriously injured.
The two main airfields of Long Island, Roosevelt and its more diminutive neighbor Curtiss, didn’t offer much in the way of romance. They stood in a dreary, semi-industrialized landscape of warehouses and low factories interspersed with truck farms and characterless housing developments. The airfields themselves were strictly utilitarian. Their hangars and service buildings were rough and unpainted. The parking areas were potholed and overspread with brown puddles. After weeks of rain, the paths around the buildings were a shiny slick of mud.
Roosevelt was much the better of the two airfields, thanks to money spent by Rodman Wanamaker on rolling and grading the runway since René Fonck’s terrible crash there eight months earlier.* It was the only runway in New York long enough for an Atlantic flight, which could have been a problem since it was now leased exclusively to Wanamaker for Byrd’s use, but Byrd insisted that the other competitors be allowed to use it, too. To his immense credit, Byrd did everything he could to help his rivals. He freely shared his private weather reports, for instance. He was also one of the first to call on Lindbergh at his hangar at Curtiss Field and to wish him good luck. Then again, Byrd was by such a wide margin the front-runner and Lindbergh so obviously outclassed that Byrd could afford to be generous.
Despite the attention Lindbergh now received, most of the other aviators and crews didn’t rate his chances high. Bernt Balchen, one of the members of the Byrd team, recalled in his memoirs that Lindbergh was generally assumed to be out of his class. The president of the American Society for the Promotion of Aviation stated frankly that he didn’t think Lindbergh, or indeed any of the pilots, stood a chance.
Compared with Byrd’s operation, Lindbergh’s was indeed arrestingly low-key. Byrd had a team of forty people—mechanics, telegraph operators, even kitchen staff to run a private mess hall. Lindbergh had no help at all lined up in New York. His backers in St. Louis sent out a young man named George Stumpf, who had no relevant experience, in the vague hope that he might run errands or otherwise make himself useful. The Wright Corporation provided two mechanics to assist him with preparations (it did this for all the teams using its engines, in its own interests) and also sent a PR man named Richard Blythe to help manage the press, but the company considered Lindbergh such a dark horse that it made the two of them share a room in the Garden City Hotel. Apart from this, Lindbergh was entirely on his own. Byrd’s preparations were conservatively estimated to have cost $500,000.† Lindbergh’s total expenses—plane, fuel, food, lodging, everything—came to just $13,500.
Though Byrd was too well bred to betray h
is thoughts, he must have been appalled by what he saw when he called on Lindbergh. He was clearly just a boy. He had no relevant experience. His plane had no radio and a single engine—Byrd insisted on having three—and had been built by a company no one had ever heard of. Lindbergh planned to carry no lifeboat and almost no backup supplies. Above all, he proposed to go alone, which meant flying a difficult and unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth. Taken together, these were jobs that would test a crew of three. Anyone who knew flying knew that this was more than any one person could do. It was madness.
Several newspapermen tried to talk Lindbergh out of his suicidal ambition, but to no avail.
“He won’t listen to reason,” one complained to Balchen. “He’s just a stubborn squarehead.”
The atmosphere at the airfields, Lindbergh recalled years later in his autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis, was decidedly tense. It was just over two weeks since Davis and Wooster had crashed fatally in Virginia and less than one week since Nungesser and Coli had gone missing. Myron Herrick, the American ambassador in Paris, had publicly announced that it would not be a good idea for any American airmen to fly to France for the time being. Now everyone was pinned down by bad weather anyway. It was all very frustrating.
Adding to Lindbergh’s personal strain was a growing uneasiness with the press. Reporters persisted in asking him personal questions that had nothing to do with flying—did he have a sweetheart? did he like dancing?—which he found embarrassing and intrusive, and photographers couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let them take pictures of him relaxing or horsing around with the other fliers or mechanics. They were just trying to make him look normal, after all. At one point, two of them burst into his room at the Garden City Hotel, hoping to catch him shaving or reading or doing something that would suggest a kind of likable boyish normality.