by Susan Hertog
More educated, sophisticated, and ambitious than the small-town wives of the moneyed men whom she befriended for C.A.’s benefit, Evangeline was alienated in a town worlds apart from everyone and everything she had ever known. Furthermore, C.A. had taken a mistress, and Evangeline was left alone in the big pine house with their small son and C.A.’s teenage daughters. Feeling abandoned and betrayed, she became the prisoner of a man who would neither love her nor let her go. Employment was not suitable for a woman of her class, and divorce would have meant public shame and the end of C.A.’s political aspirations. While Evangeline’s behavior may have seemed inexplicable, the asylums were full of women who could not escape the restrictions of marriage or motherhood through employment or divorce. It was in the context of her marriage to a sadistic man and the loneliness of the circumstances she had unwittingly chosen that Evangeline rebelled.15
On August 6, 1905, the charade came to an end. A fire that began on the third floor, in a closet frequented by the maid, burned the house to its foundation. Within twenty minutes, everything Charles had known was consumed in flames. Three-year-old Charles peeked out from behind the backyard barn at the black cloud of smoke funneling through the roof of his home. The next morning, the ashes still smoldering beneath the roof beams, Evangeline plodded through the wreckage to find her pearl-and-diamond engagement ring.16 Afterward, she always saw the fire as a symbol of the rage festering beneath the surface of her marriage; young Charles came to see it as the end of an illusion.
With the destruction of the house, the Lindberghs’ tenuous marriage lost its hold. Evangeline took Charles back to Detroit, and C.A. moved to an apartment in Minneapolis. Maintaining the semblance of family life, Evangeline and her son returned to Little Falls each summer and stayed in a cottage C.A. had built on the wild bluff above the river. It stood on the leveled remains of the old mansion, and they called it their “camp.” But they never really went “home” again.
Although Charles would savor the memories of long summer days, swimming with his friends in a nearby creek and navigating logs down the Mississippi River, in truth, after the age of three, he lived a solitary and fragmented life. Shuttled between his grandparents’ home in Detroit, “camp” in Little Falls, and his father’s apartment in Minneapolis, he attended eleven primary schools, never completing a full year of study.17 Left to fend for themselves, with little money, Charles and his mother lived like pariahs at the edge of a society that had no place for single mothers and little tolerance for separation or divorce.18 While C.A. controlled the purse strings from afar, Evangeline held her only child close. Demanding his companionship and needing his competence, she came to expect more than her son could give, and he, in turn, acted bigger than he was, trying to fill the emptiness of his mother’s life with a heightened sense of his power and achievements.
C.A.’s politics, meanwhile, were becoming radical. When his real estate and credit operations failed in 1905, he turned against the capitalist system and was elected to Congress in 1906 as a champion of farmers’ rights. Representing the Sixth District of Minnesota, he moved to Washington, D.C., with his secretary, reputed to be his long-time mistress. But his Populist fervor quickly turned paranoid, and he labeled Catholics and capitalists the political forces bent on destroying the farmers of America. C.A.’s friends called him a martyr and a saint, his constituents, however, thought him a xenophobe and a Bolshevik. He called for a more direct democracy to reward all the “energies of labor,” and he condemned the unfair distribution of wealth and the commercial and industrial “evil” of the cities. In 1916, when he ran for governor, he was endorsed by the Non-Partisan League, but was plagued by verbal threats and physical abuse, and his campaign ended in defeat. No longer in Congress, C.A. hustled real estate in Florida but barely managed to survive one day at a time. In 1924, he died of a brain tumor in Little Falls, homeless, penniless, broken, and alone.
By way of compensation, Charles was to crave a life of success measured according to objective standards. Disgusted by what he called the “spineless subjectivity” evident in most people’s lives, the young Lindbergh learned to value the clear-cut language of science and the precise methodology of his physician grandfather, Charles H. Land,19 whose laboratory in Detroit provided him a refuge from relations and controversies he could neither control nor understand. He came to believe that “science held the key to the mystery of Life; Science was truth; Science was power.”20 With this key, he would later write that man “could taste the wine of the gods, of which they would know nothing.” Yet, he wondered if flying was too “godlike” and arrogant.
He wanted to be a physician, but fearing he was too “stupid” to complete the necessary course work, Lindbergh enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, aiming for an engineering degree.21 Unprepared for the rigors of college life, and intolerant of authority, he dropped out after his first year, before he was thrown out. In 1922, at the age of twenty, Lindbergh left Madison, Wisconsin, on his motorcycle with nothing more than a vague notion that he wanted to fly.
Quite simply, he wanted “a new life,” one that would rise above the “dusty moss of danger.” Later, he wrote that flying encompassed all he loved: “the air, the sky, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty.”22 It lay beyond the descriptive words of men—where life meets death on an equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.
After rumbling southwest to Nebraska, he became an apprentice pilot, hiring himself out as a stuntman and barnstormer with a “flying circus” in exchange for flying lessons. He walked on the wings of primitive one-engine planes, earning the nickname “Daredevil Lindbergh.” A year later, in 1923, without the skill or license of a solo pilot, Lindbergh bought himself a monoplane, a salvaged World War I Curtiss “Jenny.” As an apprentice at the Nebraska Standard Aircraft Corporation, he earned both his license and his freedom, and by the summer was on his own, barnstorming through Alabama and Mississippi, offering rides for cash along the way.
By the turn of the year, Lindbergh was committed to a career as a professional pilot. He joined the Army Flight School in San Antonio, Texas, and graduated first in his class. Within a few months, at the age of twenty-three, he became chief pilot for the Robinson Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, laying out routes for the U.S. mail. It was on one of those long-distance night flights that he suddenly thought of competing for the prize offered by Raymond Orteig to a pilot for a nonstop transatlantic flight. His mind held only one question: “Why not?”23
Charles would later call it “a vision born of night, altitude, and moonlight;” now he was quick to convert the desire into an efficient plan. In a sharp reversal of his father’s ideology, Lindbergh courted industrial capitalists, hoping to raise money for the experimental flight. He felt “uncomfortable” on the “posh” upholstery of bank offices, he later wrote, but he clearly understood the influence of “a felt hat and a silk scarf” and the power of well-conceived “propaganda.” Confident of his commitment and skill, he accelerated the course of his operation, and within weeks had backers, a plane, and a public following.24
Other flyers from England, France, and Italy—famous, experienced, and with unlimited funds—had been thwarted by accident, poor judgment, and craft design. But Lindbergh conceived of a single-man, single-engine plane, built to his specifications by the Ryan Company, with 220 horsepower and a flying range of 4000 miles. On May 21, 1927, he took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, New York, and, at the speed of a hundred and seven miles per hour, arrived in Paris 33½ hours later, to the cheers of a hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen. Charles was stunned by the magnitude of his welcome; the government of France treated him like a monarch. He was paraded through the streets of Paris, asked to address the French assembly, and awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
A week later, Charles went to London, where the crowds once again were nearly out of control. He had hoped to fly around the world, stopping to see hi
s grandfather’s native Sweden, but President Coolidge called him home to be honored by the American people. Ground had been gained; much had been conquered. His flight symbolized the hope of the future, but it also captured a nostalgia for the past. His spartan simplicity mirrored an aspect of the collective psyche that Americans feared they were losing. The sandy-haired boy with the modest grin and borrowed suits too tight in the chest confirmed some notion of heartland integrity. Lindbergh was both firm and implacable, humble and shy, and when he spoke, he used the language of the farm laborer and the workingman—direct, concise, and down-home practical. The technology that had grown out of the exigencies of World War I had extended the perimeters of ordinary consumers with the crank of a motor and the turn of a dial. The prism of radio and the motion picture screen had brought them the power to see themselves and to measure their lives according to new standards of wealth, beauty, and glamour. These standards were the very stuff of Hollywood fantasy, creating, in turn, new expectations. Americans knew what they had gained even as they feared the price they were paying. Lindbergh told them that nothing had been lost. They could keep all the freedom that technology promised without selling their lusty souls to the devil.
Within the first week after his flight, Lindbergh had received $5 million of commercial offers—books, records, cosmetics, clothing, cigarettes, furniture, movies. Scores of popular songs and hundreds of poems had been written about his flight. And while Lindbergh would soon grow tired of the sound and touch of the crowd, it was clear that, in spite of his sincere humility, he enjoyed the public adulation.
Dwight Morrow had met Lindbergh by chance on the day of his arrival home from England. When Lindbergh’s ship, the Memphis, sailed into port in Virginia, Morrow, head of the newly formed Aircraft Board, was having lunch with President Coolidge.25 Lindbergh arrived at the presidential mansion, and the magnetism between the two men was immediate. Standing six feet two inches tall, the lean, beautiful flyer was everything Morrow had wanted to be—the dragon-slaying man of action, courage, and moral rectitude. The small, Bible-quoting philosopher with his pants too long would see Lindbergh as a conquering prince whose confidence came from a place so deep that it seemed to redefine the meaning of virtue.
Seeing, as well, the naïveté of his own youth in this ambitious young man, Morrow had a paternal desire to embrace him. He recruited twenty-two of his J. P. Morgan associates to raise $10,500 to pay Lindbergh’s St. Louis debts, and offered his services as financial adviser to invest the young man’s rapidly accumulating wealth. For all Lindbergh’s courage and extraordinary competence, he struck Morrow as a bit of a waif. He was certain that Lindbergh, despite his well-honed political instincts, did not have the street knowledge to match his new fast-paced, media-hounded life.
Lindbergh was grateful. Unlike the other men who were riding his coattails, Morrow was warm, genuine, and protective. As self-appointed liaison between Charles and the financial community, Morrow shielded him from the strain of public demand. When Morrow was appointed ambassador to Mexico, Lindbergh asked him if he could be of help. Morrow quickly replied, “A little flying in Latin-America … would be a fine adventure.”26
Once again, Morrow’s political instincts were sharp; Lindbergh’s flight was exactly what he needed to assuage American dissension with the Calles regime. It was the perfect confluence of three men and their causes, wrapped and sealed in one glorious metaphor. For President Calles, Lindbergh’s flight was a seductive distraction, a grand illusion of peace and reconciliation. For Morrow, Lindbergh’s presence offered credibility and clout. For Lindbergh, it was a chance to fly, long and fast, for the second time, and to prove the viability of commercial air-flight.
The escort planes disappeared over the mountains, and a dead silence enveloped the crowd. Suddenly, a soldier pushed through the lines and ran to the grandstand. President Calles listened to him, then rose to the microphone. The sighting had been false, he said. What had passed was an oil plane. There was no sign of the Spirit of St. Louis. He begged their patience.
Dwight’s wife, Elizabeth Morrow, felt she had been patient long enough.27 She was hot, hungry, and tired of exchanging pleasantries with the president. Small and birdlike, Betty, as she was called, had a delicacy that belied the force of her will. Prim and voguish in her cloche hat and caped navy dress, she appeared more like a clubwoman awaiting her butler than a dignitary about to meet an aviator-hero in the godforsaken dustbowl of a tropical airfield. With perfect composure, she chatted with Mrs. Weddell, wife of the British foreign minister, who served her a proper English lunch of sandwiches and lemonade from her hand-woven, neatly packed picnic basket.
If Betty shared her husband’s impatience, she did not share his distress. For her, Lindbergh’s flight was theater at its best. She loved embassy life—the costume and the ritual, the deference and the decorum. Except for the heat, she might have relished the drama of Lindbergh’s late entrance, which made the prospect of meeting him that much sweeter.
All the years of struggle and waiting for the right post for Dwight had finally come to fruition. Like Dwight, she had a thirst for status and wealth which rose from fundamentalist roots. Wealth was the crown of a virtuous life, and she too had known the sting of poverty. As the eldest daughter of a ne’er-do-well lawyer, she had fought like a general in an all-out war to leave Cleveland, Ohio, and her mother’s domestic “slavery.” She had primed herself for upper-crust society, earning a degree at Smith College, wanting not only prestigious credentials, but the chance for financial independence. Marriage to a schoolmaster’s unpolished son may have been a capitulation, but her failure at a literary career and the eight years served as the functional head of her downtrodden family had brought her to the brink of desperation. The family’s dependence on her good-natured competence had become a burden and a social liability. It was now clear that Dwight Morrow was going places, and that her own ambition would amount to nothing. Morrow’s determination and his desire to please her was a reasonable bargain for a woman of nearly thirty who was feeling the smart of spinsterhood. And the brash Mr. Morrow had not let her down. By the time she turned forty, she was living the comfortable and well-connected life of a suburban New Jersey matron. With maids to tend her house and nannies for her children, she filled her days with the “municipal housekeeping” of a female philanthropist.
At first she had objected to Dwight’s Mexican assignment, calling it a “penny whistle” post, a trinket tossed to a whining child. She had hoped for Britain or, at the very least, France. But the Mexican people had taken her by surprise. She hadn’t been prepared for the opulence and the grandeur of the American Embassy or for the generosity and reverence of the people who served them. She wrote to her daughter Anne at Smith College that she had fourteen servants who didn’t permit her “to lift a pin.” It was a long way from Cleveland and her mother’s middle-class, threadbare drudgery.
But the sweet excitement of embassy life had its price. While their youngest child, Constance, sturdy and confident, traveled with them, Betty worried about her three older children. Elisabeth, the eldest, had recently graduated from Smith and was teaching at a Montessori school at home in Englewood, New Jersey. Anne was a senior at Smith; Dwight Jr. was a freshman at Groton.
Betty had been apart from her children before, but never for so long and never with so much uncertainty. Anne had written her not to worry about her children, that her responsibility to her father in Mexico was paramount. But Betty sensed that old patterns were breaking. In spite of the fact that Betty and Dwight had been moving toward this moment for twenty-five years, Dwight’s appointment to Mexico somehow took them by surprise. Betty feared that they were losing touch with ordinary life, that they were paying a price for their status and pleasure.
Lindbergh’s impending arrival made her eldest daughter’s absence particularly painful. Elisabeth would have been a comfort to Betty. So easy with people, so poised and confident, Elisabeth was nothing like Betty at that age and ev
erything she had wanted to be.28 She was a bit of a miracle, after all the self-doubt Betty had known. Blond, long-legged, filled with vitality in spite of a weak heart, Elisabeth was self-possessed and in control. She would make a perfect match for “the beautiful young Colonel,” and Betty was pleased that Lindbergh’s arrival coincided with Elisabeth’s impending visit for the Christmas holiday.
Anne, the Morrows’ “second daughter,” was to accompany Elisabeth. She, however, was cause for worry. More like a Morrow—small, brainy, brown-haired—Anne seemed vulnerable, like a bird you could frighten away by a wrong move or the slant of an eye. She was pretty enough, lithe and graceful, with violet-blue eyes, soft wavy hair, and, when she wasn’t trying to hide it, a full lovely figure. But she was slow and tentative, almost apologetic for her presence.29 She played the role of invisible observer, skirting a room with downcast eyes, sheathing herself in her own flesh. At times she cultivated her shyness, using it to keep others at a distance. Her acute sensitivity and solitary bent were far different from Betty’s gregarious nature. Betty and Elisabeth were usually in harmony, but Betty and Anne seemed at odds. Even as a child, Anne had played at the edge, posturing conformity while flouting her mother’s rules. When Anne made it clear that she wanted to go to Vassar instead of Smith, Betty felt her foundations shaking. Anne had capitulated like a good little girl, but the tension between them remained.
Dwight Jr., however, was the most fragile of all. Born on the eve of Morrow’s entry into international finance, he was the only son and the heir apparent to Morrow’s ambition, but he had been sickly from the start. As an infant he had suffered from a digestive disorder that left him malnourished and frail, and in spite of his strong intelligence, his natural athletic gifts, and handsome, chiseled face, he had been plagued by physical and mental illness.30