Daniel Boone offered the folks around him a role model, the men and women back east a native hero. His story gave the country a fresh lore to go with its expanding frontier.
Frederick Jackson Turner was the first writer to recognize the power of the frontier in the American mind. “Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man’s struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghenies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being . . . and . . . the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance.”
Charles Lindbergh
On Friday, May 20, 1927, at 7:52 in the morning, a young man took off in the monoplane The Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island, New York. Thirty-three hours later, he landed at Le Bourget airport in Paris. As he began to descend he could see a long line of traffic headed for the field to see the first man ever to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
From the moment he touched down, Charles A. Lindbergh became a greater figure than merely a daring solo pilot who made people look to the clouds. “He is no longer permitted to be himself,” commented The New Republic. “He is US personified. He is the United States.”
“Captain Lindbergh personifies the daring of youth,” declared Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s son and namesake, to reporters at his home in Oyster Bay. “Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and men of that type played a lone hand and made America. Lindbergh is their lineal descendant.”
A writer for Outlook magazine agreed. “Charles Lindbergh is the heir of all that we like to think is best in America. He is of the stuff out of which have been made the pioneers that opened up the wilderness, first on the Atlantic coast, and then in our great West. His are the qualities which we, as a people, must nourish.”
But what is evident to those who look up today at the tiny Spirit of St. Louis in Washington’s vast Air and Space Museum is how personal was this one American’s feat. As he flew alone across the Atlantic, needing to use a periscope because his front view was blocked entirely by added fuel tanks, there was something mystical about his ordeal and his achievement. He had torn pages from his notebook to lighten the load, had trimmed the margins from his maps to save more weight.
In shot, he was playing for keeps.
(“I don’t think I got any more sleep than Lindbergh,” recalled James Stewart who three decades later played him in the movies. “Lindbergh’s problem was staying awake; mine was staying asleep that Friday night while he was unreported over the Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland.” This is simply one of those fascinating juxtapositions—the hero and the actor who would play him. But was there an American who was not rooting for the daring young Lindbergh that night?)
Of course Lindbergh had to navigate the tiny plane as well as fly it. With the chart sitting on his lap he had to make forty adjustments to keep on course from New York to Paris. After eleven hours in the air—only a third of the time he would take to reach Paris—Lindbergh began to feel tired.
Because of the weather he had been forced to postpone the flight the day before. He had stayed awake the entire night. Thirty-six hours without sleep, and now he was riding into nightfall over the lonely Atlantic. If he were to doze off, he would die, given his constant need to control the rudder with his feet.
Three hours later, Lindbergh was flying at ten thousand feet when he realized that sleet was covering his wings. He could feel it pelt on his hand when he reached outside the cockpit. Storm clouds hung above him but it was impossible to judge if he could go around them. He had no radio connection with anyone else on earth to help him figure it out.
“To plunge into these mountains would be like stepping into quicksand. They enmesh intruders. They’re barbaric in their methods. They toss you in their inner turbulence, lash you with their hailstones, poison you with freezing mist. It would be a slow death, a death one would have long minutes to struggle against, trying blindly to regain control of an ice-crippled airplane, climbing, stalling, diving, whipping, always downwards towards the sea.”
Then the moon rose. He could now clearly make out the dark hazards ahead. For Lindbergh it was the most moving moment of the flight, a kind of divine blessing on his effort. He no longer had to wonder whether he was awake or asleep, alive or dead.
In Paris—a city he identified from the air by spotting the Eiffel Tower—he was met by a cheering mob of supporters who exuberantly carried him off the landing field. Around the world, people devoured news accounts of his daring flight. Lindbergh had made history, and he had done it alone.
“To millions of simple people he was no longer flying for himself but for humanity,” wrote his biographer Leonard Mosley, “he was not simply flying to Paris but blazing the trail to a better life.”
Amelia Earhart
On May 20, 1932, exactly five years after the date of Lindbergh’s historic New York-to-Paris flight, Amelia Earhart set out for Paris from Newfoundland. Because of the wind and ice, she wound up setting down in an Irish cow pasture.
“Where am I?” she asked a surprised local man as she climbed out of her plane. “In Gallagher’s pasture,” he answered. “Have you come far?”
Earhart, the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress, embodied the American trailblazing spirit. Once, accepting an honor, she described how a French newspaper had speculated on whether she could bake a cake. “So I accept these awards on behalf of the cake bakers and all of those other women who can do some things quite as important, if not more important, than flying, as well as in the name of women flying today.”
Though she enrolled as a medical student at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Earhart found herself unable to shake the belief that she’d been born to the cockpit and not the operating theater. “Aviation had come close to me” is how she describes the effects of meeting a group of dashing young military pilots when she was a nurse’s aide during the First World War.
She’d seen an airplane for the first time when she was ten, visiting the Iowa State Fair with her parents. But the urge to fly on her own seized her a decade later, and she soon began to frequent the dusty airfields of the era, where pilot’s licenses were as yet unheard of. The guts to go up was all it took.
In 1928, A.E., as she was known, won her earliest international renown when she was recruited to be the token woman aboard a three-person transatlantic flight. Quickly christened “Lady Lindy” by adoring headline writers, she was aware that she hadn’t really earned the comparison—at least, not yet.
Her nearly fifteen-hour flight in 1932, when she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone, was beset by technical difficulties, a gas leak among them. It was a true test of skills aloft.
Her spirit and good humor kept pace with her courage. “I’m from America,” she told the Irish country folk who were the first to see her after she’d landed in Gallagher’s field.
Here is Earhart soloing above the Pacific three years later, in 1935:
At no time during the flight did the outside temperature register below forty degrees Fahrenheit. However, I had the cockpit window open a bit and the cold rain beat in on me until I became thoroughly chilled. I thought it would be pleasant to have a cup of hot chocolate. So I did and it was. Indeed that was the most interesting cup of chocolate I have ever had, sitting up 8,000 feet over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, quite alone.
In 1937, Earhart, who had both set and broken records with dashing flair and courage, determined to circle the globe. “Why are you attempting this around the world flight?” she asked herself, her posthumously published autobiography tells us. “Because I want to. Here was shining adventure, beckoning with new exper
iences, added knowledge of flying, of peoples, of myself.”
Somewhere in the vast stretches of the South Pacific, hopping from one island to the next, Earhart’s plane disappeared. What survived is indelible, however—the romance of her achievements.
In the nearly seven decades since her disappearance Amelia Earhart has haunted the American imagination.
The Space Race
“An eerie, intermittent croak—it sounded like a cricket with a cold—was picked up by radio receivers around the world last week,” Life magazine reported in its October 14, 1957, issue. “It came from beyond the stratosphere and signaled an epochal breakthrough into the new age of space exploration. It was being emitted—to the delight of Communists and chagrin of U.S. military men—by a Soviet device which had been shot from the earth as a manmade moon, the first official satellite in history. The Russians had hurled a 23-inch metal sphere into an orbit around the earth some 560 miles up, and at a speed of 18,000 mph it was completing one circuit every hour and 36 minutes. It weighed 184 pounds, eight times as much as the Vanguard satellite the U.S. was still struggling to launch. Inside it were batteries and a radio transmitter broadcasting on 20 and 40 mega-cycles.”
When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Americans were left stunned and demoralized. We were supposed to be the first in space. The country became suddenly uneasy about the grandfatherlike leadership of Dwight Eisenhower.
Perhaps we had been too complacent. It was a thought hard to absorb. An ugly shiver down the spines of Americans long convinced of their country’s superiority in the face of the Soviet menace. “Artificial satellites will pave the way for space travel,” the Soviet news agency Tass condescendingly explained to the humiliated West.
Moscow was for the moment, one would have to admit, justified in its self-assurance. If Communism could beat us in the technology of the future, it could also defeat us ideologically as well. The emerging “third world” might decide to look to the Russians for money and advice as they began coming into their own. And where would that leave us?
Four years later, the Soviets sent the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space. This was almost more than our American ego—so twinned with its pioneer heart—could bear.
The new president, John F. Kennedy, had been reared to reject second place. The Soviets may have been up there first, but America’s leader stood ready to overtake them.
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. . . . It is a most important decision that we must make as a nation.
I believe we should go to the Moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.
Speaking at Rice University in September of 1962, Kennedy asked “But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic?”
We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.” Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the Moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
In July 1969, a year ahead of Kennedy’s schedule, the United States—its pioneer honor on the line—landed men on the moon. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, I listened to the shortwave as one of my fellow Americans descended the stairs of the lunar module. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said. I can remember my pride.
However, just as there had been great losses as America pushed westward across the continent, so would there be failures and broken dreams within the U.S. space program. In 1967, the astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in a fatal fire inside their command module. They were testing the vehicle’s equipment in preparation for a launch the following month. In 1971, the moon landing of Apollo 13 had to be aborted.
But January 1986 would bring the greatest horror.
Seven astronauts aboard the Challenger space shuttle died as the craft exploded hardly a minute from the launch pad. The crew included Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher who had joined as a way to link the nation’s children to the conquest of space.
That afternoon, President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation, capturing in a moment of tragedy the spirit of the American space program. He also summed up a great deal about the country itself:
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we’re thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, “Give me a challenge and I’ll meet it with joy.” They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.
We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
A former star of westerns, President Ronald Reagan had a sure grasp for American sentiment. He understood, perhaps more brilliantly than anyone else, the pride the country takes in its pioneer past. We settled the frontier, championed aviation, and entered the vastness of space. If we were ever to give up being pioneers, we would, in an important way, stop being American.
CHAPTER 9
Optimism
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN SONG
LYRICS, 1932
The Founding Fathers were certified optimists. When they signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, they were literally betting their lives that we would win. Rebellion in those thirteen colonies belonging to England was a hanging offense. Yet they sprang into action, guided by a set of principles that included the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.”
It is impossible, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century to imagine the audacity of such a guarantee. On July 3, 1776, we were subjects of a European sovereign. When we awoke on July 5, we were free men and women with the right to set our own course—not just as a country, but as individual souls.
A Capital for a Continent
Picture once more that scene of Washington and L’Enfant
on horseback on Jenkin’s Hill, gazing before them and seeing not a Maryland swampland but a magnificent capital worthy of the society they envisioned.
On July 12, 1790, Washington made the following entry in his diary: “. . . and about noon had two bills presented to me by the joint committee of Congress. The one, ‘An Act for Establishing the Temporary & permanent Seat of the Government of the United States.’ ”
But the first president would not be satisfied with a city the size of Philadelphia, then the largest in the country and the young nation’s temporary capital. He was thinking big, and in the days ahead began to take personal charge of the project.
“Philadelphia stood upon an area of three by two miles,” he wrote in May 1791, complaining to those on the planning commission when local landowners tried to limit the new capital’s size, “and that, if the metropolis of one state occupied so much ground, what ought that of the United States to occupy?”
Pierre L’Enfant, the architect hired to design the capital at Washington, had dreams that matched Washington’s. He wanted a city of broad avenues and a capitol building commanding the city’s heights: “No nation perhaps had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their Capital city should be fixed. The plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for the aggrandizement & embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period how ever remote.”
At his first meeting with Washington, L’Enfant called for an impressive carriageway connecting the Capitol to the Executive Mansion “proportioned to the Greatnes which a City the Capitale of a powerful Empire ought to manifest.” L’Enfant designed radiating avenues that would serve as grand tributaries. As for the buildings themselves, his patron personally approved the layout. “Whilst the Commissioners were engaged in preparing the Deeds to be signed by the Subscribers this afternoon,” Washington wrote in his diary on June 28, 1791, “I went out with Major L’Enfant . . . to take a more perfect view of the ground in order to decide finally on the spots on which to place the public buildings.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 174