by Bryson, Bill
Back at the Game Lodge, waiting on Coolidge’s desk on his return from Mount Rushmore was an appeal for clemency for Sacco and Vanzetti. He ignored it.
Charles Lindbergh’s tour continued. On August 10 he flew into Detroit, where Henry and Edsel Ford took time off from designing and testing the new Model A to go up for short spins in the Spirit of St. Louis—an honor accorded few others. Although the Ford Company manufactured planes, neither Henry nor Edsel had ever been up in an airplane before. Because there wasn’t a passenger seat, Henry Ford, like all other passengers, had to sit on the armrest, more or less doubled up. Back on the ground, Henry boasted that he had “handled the stick” for a while, and looked awfully pleased with himself. Asked by newsmen about progress on the secret new car, Edsel said that things were going so well that it was ready to go into production. It isn’t clear if he was being optimistic or deluded, but in either case he was quite wrong. Production was still some months off.
After a day off in Detroit spent mostly with his mother, Lindbergh continued west across Michigan and onward to Illinois on August 13. Among those who may well have turned out to watch him pass over, and possibly even joined the crowds at Benton Harbor, where Lindbergh made a brief stop, were the Anti-Saloon League’s Wayne B. Wheeler and his wife and her father, who were vacationing together at the Wheelers’ lakeside cottage at Little Sable Point on Lake Michigan.
What is known is that while Mrs. Wheeler was preparing to cook dinner at the cottage that evening, her oil stove exploded as she lit it and she was drenched from head to toe in flaming oil. Mrs. Wheeler’s eighty-one-year-old father rushed in from a neighboring room and suffered a fatal heart attack at the sight of his daughter in flames. Wayne Wheeler, who had been resting upstairs, arrived a moment later. He stifled the blaze with a blanket and summoned an ambulance, but his wife’s burns were too severe and she died that night in the hospital. The shock of the incident was more than Wheeler could bear. Three weeks later, he suffered a heart attack of his own and died.
With Wheeler dead, Prohibition lost its spirit and momentum, as well as its chief fund-raiser. Within three years, the Anti-Saloon League would be so hard up that it would have to cancel the newspaper subscription at its Washington office. Within six years, Prohibition was dead.
On August 18, an act more important than anyone at the time appreciated, both in symbolic terms and practical ones, took place in Cleveland, Ohio, when the last piece of steel framework was hoisted into place on the massive new Union Terminal construction project. There had never been anything quite like it. As well as a spanking new railroad station, the complex incorporated a hotel, post office, department store, shops, restaurants, and a fifty-two-story office building, the tallest building built in America that year (and second tallest anywhere until the Chrysler Building went up). All the component parts of the project were physically interlinked, something that had never been done before.
Union Terminal was as notable for who built it as for what it was. The developers were brothers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen. Of all the business titans America produced in the 1910s and 1920s, none were more extraordinary or are now more forgotten. Born into modest but respectable circumstances in Cleveland—their father was a bookkeeper—they started off as small-time property developers, but they plugged away and branched out into other areas until by the 1920s they were two of the richest men in America. They were also by a long shot two of the strangest.
No one knew where their odd first names came from. Their parents had evidently just liked the sounds and made names out of them. The brothers were pale and small and inseparable. In the words of their biographer, they were “almost wholly dependent on each other.” They lived in a fifty-four-room mansion but slept side by side in twin beds in the master bedroom. They didn’t smoke, drink, or stay up late. They were pathologically shy. They took no part in public life and avoided having their pictures taken. They never named any of their projects after themselves. They didn’t attend the topping-out ceremony for the Union Terminal on August 18 or the dinner afterward.
Oris was three years older than Mantis but was very much the junior partner of the relationship. Mantis essentially ran his life for him—packed his bags, looked after his pocket money, kept track of his appointments. Oris slept a great deal; twelve hours a night was usual. Mantis sometimes rode horses, but otherwise neither man had any known interests. They never took vacations.
Their estate, called Daisy Hill, spread over 477 acres. The house had eighty telephone lines to keep them in touch with their business empire. Among the other rooms were two dining rooms where no guest was ever entertained, a gym that was forever undisturbed, and twenty-three bedrooms that never received a visitor. They had no friendships, though Mantis did eventually fall for a widow named Mary Snow and enjoyed a relationship with her, which he somehow kept secret from Oris. A field on the property was used sometimes for polo matches and more occasionally as an airstrip. According to the brothers’ biographer, Herbert H. Harwood Jr., Charles Lindbergh landed there once and gave Mantis a ride while Oris remained on the ground and fretted, but Harwood didn’t say when this was. It wasn’t the summer of 1927.
If Mantis didn’t invent the leveraged buyout, he became one of its first great masters. Essentially the brothers borrowed heavily to acquire a business, then used existing businesses as collateral to borrow and acquire still more. Their business was a tangled network of interconnected holdings, which by the late 1920s consisted of 275 separate subsidiaries. They had so many companies that they struggled to come up with original names for them all, so that, for instance, they owned a Cleveland Terminals Building Company, a Terminal Building Company, and a Terminal Hotels Company. They bought the Nickel Plate Railroad for $8.5 million, but put up just $355,000 of their own money—and all of that was borrowed from the Guardian Bank of Cleveland (which eventually went out of business without being repaid a penny). They had built this colossus with a personal investment of less than $20 million, nearly all of it borrowed. Nobody did leveraged buyouts better than the Van Sweringens.
Mantis’s real passion, however, was railroads. The industry was incredibly fragmented: in 1920, America had almost 1,100 different railroad companies. Many lines went from nowhere much to nowhere much, either because the towns or industries along the way never developed as expected or because the original builders never managed to extend the lines to the main metropolises. The Lake Erie & Western ran from Sandusky, Ohio, to Peoria, Illinois; the Pere Marquette wandered confusedly around the upper Midwest, as if looking for a lost item. These forlorn lines—“orphans” as they were known in the trade—were generally pretty easy to acquire, and the Van Sweringens did so with enthusiasm. They loved to acquire railroads. When Oris was asked who his favorite authors were, he replied brightly, “Rand and McNally.”
Within eight years the Van Sweringens had built up the third-largest railway empire in the country. By 1927, they controlled almost thirty thousand miles of rail line, about 11 percent of the national total, with routes stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Salt Lake City. Along the way they also scooped up warehouses, ferries, and the Greenbrier resort hotel in West Virginia. At their peak, they had one hundred thousand employees and assets of between $2 billion and $3 billion. Their personal wealth was put at something over $100 million—from almost nothing ten years earlier.
While building their empire, they also quietly but significantly changed the world. At a place called Turkey Ridge outside Cleveland they built a new town from scratch and called it Shaker Heights. Shaker Heights was the first planned dormitory community in America, and as such it became the model on which nearly all other suburbs were built. In like manner, the Union Terminal complex neatly anticipated the modern American shopping mall.
Unfortunately, their empire was essentially an inverted triangle. If any part of it at the bottom failed, the whole mighty edifice would come tumbling down, and that is just what happened. Though they could have had no idea of it at the
time, the topping out of the Union Terminal complex on August 18 was in every sense the high point of their careers.
When the Great Depression came they were inescapably exposed. Their money was nearly all in railroads and real estate—two of the most vulnerable places to put it—and they were grossly overextended in any case. They had bought Missouri Pacific stock at $101, but by the early 1930s it was trading at $1.50. They were unable to pay off bonds that came due or interest on loans. The Missouri Pacific and the Chicago & Eastern Illinois failed and brought the whole precarious enterprise down with them.
In the end, nobody better personified the giddy recklessness and folie de grandeur of the 1920s than the Van Sweringens. The stress and disappointment proved too much for Mantis, who died of heart failure at fifty-four in 1935. Oris sat with him for the last ninety minutes of his life. Mantis was conscious, but they didn’t exchange a word. Mantis’s estate was valued at $3,067.85, half of which consisted of seven horses. Lost without his brother, Oris died eleven months and ten days later of heart failure of his own. His estate was worth even less than his brother’s.
They were buried in a shared grave in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. The gravestone records their names and their dates of birth and death beneath a single word: “Brothers.”
22
The successful flights across the ocean of the America, Columbia, and Spirit of St. Louis had a galvanizing, if not always entirely realistic, effect on expectations for the future of aviation.
Almost at once people began to dream of ways of converting the summer’s heroics into practical actions. In Paris, Charles Levine briefly attracted the attention of reporters by announcing that he would launch a regular passenger airline service between America and Europe, and would invest $2 million of his own money in the venture. How he would safely convey passengers in both directions when no plane was yet capable of a successful westward crossing was a matter he failed to explain. As with so many Levine schemes, it was quickly forgotten.
Edward R. Armstrong, a Canadian-born engineer, approached the problem from the opposite direction. Rather than try to increase the range and load-carrying capacity of planes, his idea was to cut the distances they needed to fly by arraying floating landing fields—eight in all—at 350-mile intervals across the Atlantic. These “seadromes” would each be 1,100 feet long, weigh 50,000 tons, and be anchored to the ocean floor by steel cables. All would have restaurants, gift shops, lounges, and viewing decks. Some would have hotels. The cost of each platform would be $6 million. A trip from New York to London, Armstrong calculated, could be done in about thirty hours.
Armstrong formed the Armstrong Seadrome Development Company in 1927 and gradually secured financial backing. On October 22, 1929, he announced plans to begin work in sixty days. Unfortunately, that was the week of the stock market crash and his financing fell apart. Armstrong continued for years to try to get his plan launched, reducing the number of proposed platforms to five and then three as planes became more powerful. Eventually, of course, they were not needed at all and his dream was never realized, but his seadromes did form the basis of modern offshore oil platforms. Armstrong died in 1955.
Two million people a year sailed between Europe and America in the 1920s, so the potential market for air passengers was considerable. From our modern time-harried perspective, ocean crossings look glamorous and romantic, but they were also time-consuming, uncomfortable in bad weather, and sometimes seriously perilous. Fog was a frequent and dreaded danger in the days before radar. Most ships had a long record of unnerving near misses. “There were many more close calls on the Western Ocean than passengers ever heard about,” writes John Maxtone-Graham in The Only Way to Cross. Collisions were not uncommon. On July 15 of this summer, just as the Leviathan carrying Byrd and his team was sailing nearby, the Holland America liner Veendam struck—essentially plowed through—a Norwegian freighter, the Sagaland, near Nantucket at 4:40 in the morning. The Sagaland sank quickly, with the loss of one life. The Veendam escaped serious damage, and no one aboard was reported injured. It was nonetheless a sobering reminder of how dangerous ocean travel could be, for the ships collided in clear weather.
For all these reasons, knocking even a day off the crossing was an appealing proposition, which explains how it was that Clarence Chamberlin accepted an invitation from the United States Lines and on August 1 reboarded the mighty Leviathan with the intention of trying to take off from its upper deck in an airplane. A rickety 114-foot-long runway had been erected to facilitate the launch, but whether that would be enough was anybody’s guess. No plane had ever taken off from a ship at sea, and Chamberlin himself thought his chances of success were only slightly better than even. Shortly before his takeoff someone asked him if he knew how to swim. Chamberlin grinned and admitted that he did not.
Happily, swimming proved unnecessary. In a lull between rainstorms, Chamberlin climbed into a Fokker biplane and shot down the creaking runway and into the void beyond with just enough speed and lift to stay airborne. He circled the ship, gave a casual wave, and headed for Teterboro, New Jersey, where he delivered nine hundred pieces of airmail and posed bashfully for pictures. Inspired by Chamberlin’s example, the owners of the new passenger liner Île de France, launched that year, installed a catapult that could fling a six-passenger plane down a shorter runway and into the air, and for a few years passengers who were daring, wealthy, and in a hurry could reach shore a day or so sooner than their fellow passengers.
As August opened, Charles Lindbergh was coming to the end of the second week of his long tour of America. So far he had had just one hitch, but it was quite a serious one. After Boston he had flown on to Portland, Maine, but had been unable to land because of fog. He circled for nearly two hours but then, running low on fuel, he had to look for somewhere safe to land. He grew separated from an escort plane and came down on Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Luckily, a man named Harry Jones offered pleasure flights for tourists from the beach—it is just possible that someone had told Lindbergh about this before he took off, in case he did run into trouble—and Jones had a hangar there with tools, which he was happy to let Lindbergh use.
Almost at once a crowd collected as word got around that Lindy had landed on the beach. People crept up to the hangar and watched him working. “He never looked at the crowd, nor did he betray the slightest consciousness of an audience,” wrote a young woman named Elise White, who was present. By the time Lindbergh finished tinkering with his plane, the crowd had grown so large that he needed a megaphone to address it. He asked the people to clear a space so that he could depart, but instead they pressed forward to look at the plane more closely “and he threw the megaphone down in disgust,” related a slightly startled White. This was not the Charles Lindbergh that they had read about.
It’s easy to understand Lindbergh’s frustration. His plane was a sensitive instrument and the possibility of some witless gawker damaging it was a real and constant concern. The sight of people pawing his plane or leaning on it or waggling its moving parts was naturally horrifying to Lindbergh. He now essentially fled. Within moments of people coming forward, he was in the plane and proceeding with it onto the beach, trusting that people would scatter as he advanced. Luckily, they did. Lindbergh taxied to the far end of the beach, turned the plane into the wind, and raced forward. “It moved smoothly over the sand and in no distance at all—hardly more than a hundred yards—it was in the air,” wrote White. “He tipped and banked and turned swooping low over the beach then rose like a silver winged bird against the blue sky.” Thirty minutes later he was in Portland and facing new hordes of people whose most earnest desire was to crowd in on him and his beloved craft.
It is impossible to imagine what it must have been like to be Charles Lindbergh in that summer. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Every person on earth who could get near enough wanted to grasp his hand or clap him on the back. He had no private life anymore. Shirts
he sent to the laundry never came back. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. He could not go for a walk or pop into a bank or drugstore. If he went into a men’s room, people followed. Checks he wrote were rarely cashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. No part of his life was normal, and there was no prospect that it ever would be again. As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
His tour consisted of sixty-nine overnight stops and thirteen “touch” stops, where Lindbergh landed long enough to greet officials and say a few words, but not otherwise linger. Lindbergh also flew by request over scores of small towns, but only if they agreed to paint their town name on a rooftop for the benefit of other aviators. In communities where he could not land he dropped leaflets that read:
Greetings. Because of the limited time and the extensive tour of the United States now in progress to encourage popular interest in aeronautics, it is impossible for the Spirit of St. Louis to land in your city. This message from the air, however, is sent you to express our sincere appreciation of your interest in the tour and in the promotion and extension of commercial aeronautics in the United States.