The Flight

by Dan Hampton

  Despite some success, by 1858 Mansson’s life began to unravel and in January a dalliance with a teenager named Lovisa Carlen produced a son. A maid in Ola’s Stockholm residence discovered a letter from Lovisa disclosing the birth and imploring him to meet his boy; the maid promptly forwarded this to Mansson’s wife, Ingar, who was obviously displeased. Later that year, Ola’s political enemies arranged for a government prosecutor to charge him with embezzlement. It was subsequently revealed that he had violated banking regulations by acting as a loan agent, and pocketing a 1 percent commission, while serving on the board for the Bank of Sweden.

  Just before Christmas 1858, the courts ruled against him, and Ola learned he was to be dismissed from government service. Mansson appealed to the Supreme Court to gain a bit of time, but he also began learning English and planning his exit to North America. Securing a passport in the spring of 1859, Mansson and Lovisa were gone by the time he lost his appeal in June.* With eighteen-month-old Karl August, the couple left for England, then sailed from Liverpool to Quebec. As with many beginning a fresh life in the New World, Mansson decided to change names upon arriving in Canada. In Lindbergh, A. Scott Berg states that “he adopted the surname his older two sons had acquired at the University in Lund.”

  This is certainly possible. In One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson writes that “Lindbergh” means “linden tree mountain,” which it more or less does in several languages, but not in Swedish. If this is what occurred, the name would have likely been “Lindenbergh,” though it could have been shortened with mistranslations. In fact, there are no linden trees in Sweden, though they do grow in parts of Canada. Reeve Lindbergh, Ola’s great-granddaughter, admits she was told the latter version, and it was family lore. But she concedes that the Anglicized etymology was probably granted after the fact and adds, “I doubt that this meaning, lovely as it is, has anything to do with the name change itself, though it certainly is in the family tradition. I understood and repeated this from my childhood onward, wherever it came from.”

  Another explanation for the name that became a household word is a combination of both theories. Adopting “Lund” seems reasonable as it was one of the oldest, most prominent cities in Sweden. Barely fifty miles from Gardlosa where Ola was born, its university is the largest in the country. Borgh is defined as “fortress” or “city” in Old Swedish, and Ola may have been paying homage to his ancestry with the name Lundborgh. Or maybe he simply liked the way it sounded. Given Mansson’s accent, the name could be easily heard as Lindbergh and subsequently written this way on the new Canadian or American documents.

  However they were named, the newly christened Lindberghs traveled west and in July 1859 they crossed by train from Windsor, Ontario, into the United States. Continuing deeper into the frontier, the Manssons, now August and Louisa Lindbergh, passed Chicago headed for Dubuque, Iowa, on the Mississippi River. A steamboat, considerably more comfortable than the trains, brought them three hundred miles north to St. Anthony Falls in the infant state of Minnesota.* Pushing deeper to the very edge of civilization by wagon and cart, August finally stopped some ninety miles northwest of the falls and built a sod home for the winter near Melrose.

  Working hard and expanding his home, August lost his left arm to a saw blade in 1861, yet he survived to sire six more children in addition to Karl August, the boy he’d brought from Sweden. Now known as Charles August, or “C.A.,” the eldest Lindbergh son grew up tall, and was independent, if a bit narrow in his thinking, much like his father. Hunting and roaming the land from a young age, he had no real schooling until early adolescence, when, for six dollars a week, he attended Grove Lake Academy. Two years of studies enabled C.A. to gain entrance to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he matriculated with a law degree in 1883. Extremely handsome, the twenty-four-year-old C.A. had high cheekbones, a dimpled chin, and clear, hard eyes that left little doubt of his determination. For several years he moved around, exploring possibilities and gaining experience, but in 1885, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned home to Minnesota. The young attorney hung up a shingle in a town called Little Falls, about thirty miles northwest of his parents, and went to work.

  While living at the local boardinghouse he met a girl, Mary LaFond, and they were married two years later. Two children soon followed and by 1890, Charles August Lindbergh was the picture of success and the embodiment of the American dream. A son of immigrants, he’d survived life on the frontier, earned a university degree, and was now Morrison County’s attorney. C.A. also began to acquire real estate: substantial holdings throughout the county, including the first creamery and a large brick home for his family.

  Eight years later Mary succumbed to a cancerous abdominal tumor, leaving C.A. with two young daughters: ten-year-old Lillian and six-year-old Eva. In the fall of 1900, after eighteen months of quiet grief for his wife, he sent the girls to Stanley Hall, a Minneapolis boarding school, rented out his house, and moved into Little Falls’ Antlers Hotel. He threw himself into the real estate business and his law practice, and with characteristic toughness C. A. Lindbergh persevered with his lonely life. Yet a poet once said “solitude is fine but you need someone to tell you solitude is fine,” and certainly this was about to happen for the forty-one-year-old widower.

  C.A. had a younger brother, Frank, and two sisters, Juno and Linda, all living in the area. Little Falls was now a county seat with a growing school system to meet the needs of its five thousand strong population, and the school superintendent was his brother-in-law, Joseph Seal, Linda’s husband. One afternoon in September 1900, Superintendent Seal was in the Antlers Hotel to meet a teacher newly arrived from Detroit, and he introduced the young lady to C. A. Lindbergh.

  A blue-eyed, twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan, Evangeline Lodge Land had come to Minnesota looking for adventure. Accepting a position to teach chemistry, she found herself instructing a total of five courses, including botany and physics. Feisty and confrontational, Evangeline was soon at odds with the school officials and she was not particularly enamored with Minnesota. She had been born and raised in Detroit, a positive metropolis compared to Little Falls, and certainly a great deal more cosmopolitan.

  Dr. Edwin Albert Lodge, Evangeline’s maternal grandfather, was the nation’s foremost proponent of homeopathic medicine. Undoubtedly quite intelligent, he was also opinionated, stubborn, and a minor religious fanatic. After joining the Church of the Disciples of Christ, a fundamentalist movement dedicated to restoring Christian unity, Lodge prohibited dancing within his family, hot meals on Sunday, and generally fun of any sort. Hardly a loving man at any time, Dr. Lodge was also quarrelsome and frequently verbally abusive. The only one of his eleven children with whom he had a workable relationship was his daughter Evangeline, who married Dr. Charles Henry Land in 1875.

  Regarded as one of the most progressive dentists of his time, Charles Land, though eccentric, had several dozen patents granted in his name and pioneered the use of porcelain in dentistry.* Outspoken, he encouraged diversity in thought, independence in attitude and, above all, education. It was no surprise then that his daughter, also named Evangeline, would earn a degree in a time when many women were barely literate and expected to devote themselves to bearing children. Nor was it surprising that she inherited his self-confidence, disdain for authority, and considerable fearlessness. It was surprising that such a girl would become smitten with a widowed lawyer seventeen years her senior in a place like Little Falls, Minnesota. Yet she did just that.

  When C. A. Lindbergh, rising attorney, wealthy landowner, and Morrison County’s most eligible bachelor, proposed in December 1900, Evangeline Lodge Land did not refuse him outright. However, she did resign from her fifty-five-dollars-per-month teaching job and return to her parents in Detroit to consider his offer, which she accepted.

  At the time of his second marriage on March 27, 1901, C.A. was doing quite well. He practiced a bit of criminal law, but made most of his money by
managing business affairs for large corporations with local interests. These included the Singer Manufacturing Company, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and the Weyerhaeuser Syndicate’s vast timber holdings. Though most of his wealth was in land, C. A. Lindbergh was worth approximately $200,000, a considerable fortune in 1901.* On 110 acres south of town he built one of the finest homes in Morrison County for his bride, which featured five bedrooms, a billiard room, indoor plumbing, and hot water radiators against the brutal Minnesota winters. After returning from their ten-week honeymoon through Colorado, Oregon, and California, the couple camped out on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi while their home was finished. That summer Evangeline announced she was pregnant, and at 1:30 a.m. on February 2, 1902, at her parents’ Detroit home, she gave birth to a nine-pound, eight-ounce infant named Charles Augustus Lindbergh.†

  THE WORLD CHARLES A. Lindbergh entered on that cold midwestern morning was changing rapidly. During the month of Charles’s birth, Robert Falcon Scott, together with Ernest Shackleton and the rest of the Discovery Expedition, arrived in the Antarctic and would reach a record 82 degrees latitude south by the end of the year. The Nile, then considered the world’s longest river, was dammed at Aswan. King Edward VII was crowned in August, following the reign of England’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Victoria. In Nice, France, an automobile driven by Léon Serpollet would reach 74 miles per hour, a new land speed record, and the world’s first movie theater opened in Los Angeles. In Vietnam the Paul Doumer Bridge was completed, connecting Hanoi on both sides of the Red River, and Denmark sold the Virgin Islands to the United States. Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House following the assassination of William McKinley the previous September, and the Philippine-American War would end.* A pair of South Carolina congressmen had a fistfight in the Senate, and Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Company in New York, died.

  New technologies were beginning to capture the American imagination and transform daily life. Just twenty-five years earlier a scant 7,500 telegraph offices existed in the entire country, but now there were more than 23,000. American Telephone & Telegraph routed nearly 2.5 billion calls per year for the 2,525,606 telephones in the United States. And in a satisfying twist of fate, just months after Charles Lindbergh was born, Wilbur Wright made the final flights in his 1902 glider over Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. With the addition of a steerable rudder, the aircraft could now truly maneuver and would be ready for the first historic, powered flight the following year.

  Young Charles, of course, was blissfully unconcerned with all this, recalling later in life only the carriages, dinner parties, and his mother playing the piano. C.A. was briefly happy, caught up with his pretty wife, his young children, and apparently successful career. He seemed to truly love Evangeline, yet historians agree the elder Lindbergh had a profoundly difficult time demonstrating his feelings, not just for his wife, but also for the girls—and Charles. However, given his own father’s temperament, his upbringing in rural Minnesota, and a natural stoicism, this was understandable. However, for a young, passionate woman like Evangeline it was difficult, especially when the honeymoon glitz had worn away and life in Little Falls with a man old enough to be her father loomed ahead.

  Life for the Lindberghs began to unravel in 1905. Scrupulously honest, C.A. lacked a businessman’s killer instinct and often held promissory notes in lieu of cash for property transactions. Habitually buying too high and selling too low tends to make one popular with those on the other end of the deals, but it was a sure way to bleed assets dry. Nor did C.A.’s idealism mix well with financial realities. He launched a quarterly magazine of sorts, The Law of Rights, Realized and Unrealized, Individual and Public, and as the title would suggest, the publication was not successful.

  Like his father before him, C. A. Lindbergh was a genuine supporter of the working class. Somewhat ironically, given his own business dealings with large corporations, he was rabidly opposed to big business. Why, he asked, should a handful of corporate entities be permitted to dominate entire markets like railroads, oil, and telephones, and through them manipulate the economy? Banks especially earned C.A.’s enmity and he created the Industrial Adjustment Company in 1905, basically a rural cooperative, to fight them. The company would buy local animals, butcher them in Little Falls, and ship directly to merchants, thereby eliminating the middleman.

  Businesses in the area were encouraged to join together and this would, it was hoped, eliminate unnecessary competition while presenting a unified front against big corporate encroachment. This essentially socialist approach was not well received among the fiercely independent local merchants, nor were they willing to go bankrupt in the name of Lindbergh’s “masses against the classes” philosophy. The company predictably went bust by early 1907, costing C.A. $20,000, which represented most of his liquid assets. Dr. Charles Land, Evangeline’s father, and Frank Lindbergh, C.A.’s younger brother, lost their investments as well.

  Adding to the year’s misery, the Lindbergh home burned to the ground. An exact cause was never determined, but the maid’s oil lamp was suspected as the house burned from the top down. Neighbors managed to save the piano and quite a few downstairs furnishings, including Evangeline’s prized blue willowware, but the structure would have to be entirely rebuilt. Bundling his family—six Lindberghs, two dogs, and a nursemaid for little Charles—around to several locations, they eventually settled into a suite at the Buckman Hotel in Little Falls. Pressing her husband to immediately rebuild the home, Evangeline soon realized the extent of C.A.’s financial troubles. By the end of the year, he himself admitted, “We are exceedingly poor in cash, and will be for some time to come.”

  Whether money was the culprit or not, the original grand home on the banks of the Mississippi was never truly resurrected. A one-and-a-half-story house did eventually go up, but there was neither central heat or indoor plumbing. Then in June a bit of hope appeared. Local Progressives were not happy with Clarence Bennett Buckman, the incumbent Republican congressman from Minnesota’s Sixth District.* Among other things, he was apparently using his congressional position to secure timber contracts on land he happened to own. Such perfidy infuriated the Progressives who soon enlisted C. A. Lindbergh, champion of the common man, to fight corruption. Whether motivated by idealism, ambition, or a desire to distance himself from rural Minnesota, C.A. announced his intention to run for Congress and won the September Republican primary by seven percentage points. He was then victorious in November’s general election by a narrow margin.*

  Eager to escape Little Falls, C.A. moved his family to Washington, D.C., well in advance of the Sixtieth Congress’s December 2, 1907, opening. Located at 1831 Vernon Street, between Kalorama and Lanier Heights, the newly built Romaine Hotel seemed an ideal location. Close to parks, shopping, and Dupont Circle, perhaps C.A. hoped his family would enjoy the impressive surroundings and their new situation would dispel past unhappiness.

  It did not.

  The elder Lindbergh immersed himself in the job, as he had always done, eating breakfast in his office and sometimes working from dawn till midnight. Had Evangeline been able to join the D.C. cocktail circuit and partake in the glittering public life open to congressmen, perhaps their relationship would have improved. But C.A.’s terse, stoic façade was hardly conducive to friendships, nor did he drink, gamble, or otherwise socialize. Even if he had, nothing would have likely improved between his daughters and their stepmother. Willful and independent teenagers, Lillian and Eva had borne the brunt of C.A.’s tumultuous life and apparently resented their step-mother Evangeline, who was closer to their ages than to her husband. Both returned west and Lillian met Dr. Loren Roberts while attending the University of Michigan, eventually marrying him. Eva attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, then rejoined C.A. as an intern in Washington before her own marriage to George W. Christie, a journalist.

  At five years old Charles was oblivious to most of this and what he did recall, he us
ually suppressed. This denial, this mental shutdown of painful emotional situations, would develop into a lifelong habit that sometimes worked to his advantage, but often did not. Berg agrees, writing in Lindbergh that Charles “simply learned at a young age to see and hear only that which he wanted to.” Yet the boy hunted Easter eggs on the White House lawn and was appointed as a special Senate page so he could have a front-row seat for Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. There were trips to Philadelphia, New York, and even the Panama Canal. Summers were spent with his grandparents in Detroit or back in Little Falls, where Charles relished his outdoor life of camping, skinny-dipping, fishing, and hunting. He was growing up physically tough, mentally introspective, and emotionally reclusive. Charles also developed the habit of internalizing his conversations, quite possibly since there was no one but himself and his dog Wahgoosh in whom to confide. The fox terrier slept with the boy and often shared his breakfast.

  Proud of his father, Lindbergh wrote that C.A. always called him “Boss.” Despite the public persona, there was quiet humor in the man and whenever possible C.A. would take his son on “expeditions to rivers, creeks and lakes.” A solitary man, separated from his wife and increasingly isolated by his politics, C.A. reached out to his son in the only way he knew. Charles recognized this and recalled that “I became his partner.”

  The situation between his parents remained publicly polite. They attended White House receptions and occasionally dined in the congressional dining room, yet privately the marriage was finished. Evangeline had asked C.A. for a divorce in 1909 but agreed to keep up pretenses for the sake of “the boy” and her husband’s flourishing political career. A man of complexities and contradictions, C.A. refused to be buttonholed as a Republican, even though that party elected him. He would not attend caucuses, nor subject himself to party discipline. Congressman Lindbergh voted his conscience; he opposed the establishment of the Federal Reserve and supported women’s suffrage. Though he unequivocally favored an individual’s right to consume alcohol, C.A. fervently believed in Prohibition, stating that the sale of liquor was “attended with practices that are extremely detrimental to good government.”