Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  He amused himself one afternoon by locking all the doors in the toilet rooms from the inside. Another time he dropped light bulbs from the top floor of the House Office Building onto the street below. And Charles never failed to be impressed whenever his father took him onto the House floor itself. Other Congressmen objected to the boy’s presence in the chamber, insisting it was “not in keeping with the dignity of the House”; but the Lindberghs went their own way, trying not to laugh at those same men spitting apple peels on the carpet. Another of Charles’s favorite spots was in the House lobby, just outside the main chamber, where a weather map showed the entire country, marked in colored chalk. Remembered Lindbergh years later, “I always looked to see what the day was like at Little Falls and Detroit.”

  Through it all, Charles developed an appreciation of his country’s heritage and an appetite for culture. He considered himself a witness to history in the making, and he took photographs at every opportunity. He watched a “Suffragette parade” on Pennsylvania Avenue, and he met Senate legends Champ Clark, Knute Nelson, and “Fighting Bob” La Follette. He asked “Uncle Joe” Cannon for his autograph—the first such request Lindbergh ever made—and was rebuffed, which so embarrassed him that he vowed to “confine my attention to collections which did not inconvenience other people in obtaining them.” He saw Teddy Roosevelt in the backseat of an open car pulling up to Union Station and William Howard Taft exercising by walking behind his horse-drawn carriage. He rolled Easter eggs on the White House lawn; and once, his father got Charles excused from school so that he might accompany him inside the White House, where he was presenting President Wilson some Indian gifts. The President shook hands with the boy and asked how he was. Charles said, “Very well, thank you,” and later reported that the audience had not scared him any as “the President was just a man even if he is President.”

  In June 1912, C.A. arranged for Charles to attend the Aeronautical Trials at Fort Myer. Evangeline and Charles traveled by streetcar to Virginia, where they found a grandstand set up. A half-dozen airplanes, tuning up their engines, stood before them. “Then,” Lindbergh recalled of the moment, “one of the planes took off and raced a motor car around the oval track in front of us. You could see its pilot clearly, out in front—pants’ legs flapping, and cap visor pointed backward to streamline in the wind.” The experience was so “intense and fascinating,” Lindbergh would recall toward the end of his life, “that I wanted to fly myself.”

  Almost every Christmas and Easter, Charles and his mother made other trips to broaden his horizons, visiting Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and New York City twice. Once they went from Detroit to Washington by way of the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. In January 1913, weeks before his eleventh birthday, Charles was excused from school so that he could make a most extraordinary voyage.

  C.A. sat on a House Committee visiting Panama while the canal was under construction; and his reports home were so enthusiastic, he and Evangeline decided it would be an invaluable opportunity for their son to see this modern wonder being constructed. On January 3, 1913, she and Charles boarded the Colón, a second-class boat, in New York City. They shared a stateroom on the port side, saloon deck, and dined with the captain, who explained at dinner that night that the worsening weather was delaying their departure.

  The next morning Charles arose a little after five and went on deck, which he found covered in snow with a hard wind blowing, as they weighed anchor. Leaving the Lusitania in the berth beside them, they sailed the better part of a week. At daybreak on January 10, the Colón pulled into its eponymous homeport, Charles standing at the bow of the hurricane deck, looking through his binoculars at the lights of the approaching city.

  The next week was filled with the stuff of boys’ dreams, all of which Charles detailed in a diary. He saw the forests and jungles just outside the city, heard the tales of outlaws still terrorizing the towns, gazed on Morgan the Pirate’s castle, underground “torcher chambers,” alligators, monkeys, green lizards, tarantulas, coral snakes, deer, wild hogs, armadillos, wild turkeys, sloths, sharks, and butterflies galore. He watched great steam shovels gnawing away at mountains, creating the awesome canal. Sailing on the Ancon, Evangeline and Charles returned to a pier near Asbury Park, New Jersey, on January twenty-seventh.

  YOU ARE LIVING in an extraordinary time,” C.A., then approaching sixty, told Charles back in Washington. “Great changes are coming. Great things are going to happen. I may not live to see them, but you will.” Between 1914 and 1916, when the Panama Canal opened for traffic, the world caught glimpses of this new age, evidence of a shrinking world. R. F. Scott had reached the South Pole, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson explored Arctic Canada; Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental telephone call; and Henry Ford produced his millionth car, paving the way for America’s becoming an automobile society.

  With advancements in technology bringing people everywhere closer, a royal assassination in remote Serbia in August 1914 impacted not only Europe but even farms in the American Midwest. “It is true that Europe is ablaze and the destruction of life and property is tremendous; but nothing should be destroyed here as a result of the war,” said Rep. Lindbergh in response to a war revenue tax proposed by the Wilson administration, “so why should we allow the European war to destroy our reason?”

  Over the first two years of the Great War, Lindbergh increasingly spoke out, but his suggestions that the Money Trust and industrialists were fueling the war fell on deaf ears. In search of a bigger power base, he sacrificed a sixth Congressional term in order to run for the United States Senate. In the spring of 1916, when Charles was fourteen, C.A. pulled him from school in Washington to help him in his campaign back home. C.A. was not merely providing Charles with another educational experience; he needed his expertise.

  Four years earlier, C.A. had sprung “Maria” (pronounced ma-RYE-a) on his family—a Ford Model T tourabout with Ford’s standard foot-pedal gearshift, carbide headlights, hand crank, squeeze rubber-bulb horn, folding waterproof cloth top, and quick fasten-on curtains for rainy days. C.A. had bought Maria for campaigning; but Charles was the only family member who had mastered the machine, having learned to drive at eleven. By the 1916 spring primary in Minnesota, the boy had hundreds of miles of driving experience; and he had shot up to almost six feet in height, so that his feet, at last, could comfortably reach the pedals.

  In hopes of better serving the campaign, the two Charles Lindberghs picked up a new Saxon Light Six automobile in Minneapolis for $935. The fourteen-year-old drove the crude back roads of Minnesota, which offered only blaze marks painted onto fenceposts and telegraph poles instead of signposts to mark the way. They stayed in small-town hotels for a dollar a night. In and out of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as far downriver as Winona, as far north as Duluth, Charles logged three thousand miles, averaging seventy-five miles a day. When he was not driving, he distributed pamphlets in the meeting halls and on the farms where C.A. spoke. Charles professed little interest in the content of the speeches himself—“While I wanted very much to have my father win,” he later wrote, “my primary interest in his campaign trips lay in the opportunity they gave me to be with him and to drive.” Hearing him harp upon the themes of trusts and non-intervention, how wartime waste of resources benefited the few at the expense of the many, could not help leaving an impression.

  Besides Lindbergh and the reform-minded incumbent Moses Clapp, running for the Senatorial nomination were former Governor A. O. Eberhart and a trust-busting St. Paul lawyer named Frank B. Kellogg. Senator La Follette considered Lindbergh the most “radical” of the contenders, and he felt the less controversial Clapp could “accomplish more for the general movement than any of the announced candidates.” Kellogg, with his theme of preparedness for war, won; and Lindbergh finished a humiliating fourth.

  Because C.A. would be retreating to Washington for only a few months in the fall, Evangeline felt no obligation to return with Charles. After ten years, they were st
ill little more than gypsies among the establishment there, having made no friends. No sooner had Charles entered Little Falls High School than his mother developed an urge to visit the opposite coast, for reasons never explained to Charles.

  The unspoken truth was that Evangeline had family business. Her stepdaughter Lillian, who had never been a robust child, had recently gone with her husband and daughter to California, hoping its climate might help her fight a case of tuberculosis. The climate provided no cure, and the doctors feared for her life. Evangeline wanted to see her one last time, so that their relationship might not end on a lingering dissonant note. Charles pleaded to make the trip—because it meant he would be able to drive. It was agreed that he could attend school in California for the rest of the year and that it would be yet another “great adventure and experience” for him.

  Accompanied by Evangeline’s brother and a new fox terrier named Wahgoosh (Chippewa for “fox”), they set off that October, expecting to arrive within two weeks. Despite his experience driving the campaign trails of Minnesota, nothing prepared him for the journey to California. They went West by going south and immediately hit bad weather and poor roads. After one particularly heavy rain in Missouri, they had to remain at a small-town hotel until the clay road had dried. They were slowed farther along by the inadequacy of the Saxon for such a trip. Its springs proved too weak to stand the strain, so that every time Charles approached a bump in the road, he had either to slow to a crawl or strain the springs further. After forty days on the road—highways sometimes narrowing to sandy trails—they arrived in Los Angeles. They checked into the Hotel Armondale, downtown on South Flower Street.

  Charles’s sketchy accounts of his time in California—little more than a few published sentences—reflect his ignorance of its purpose. He did not know that his mother had written Eva to ask if she could visit her ailing sister. “My feelings were running very high,” Eva later recalled, “knowing as I did how shamefully she had treated my sister and how strongly we all felt that that had contributed to undermining the health of a sensitive fragile girl.” With Lillian failing fast, Eva wrote to her father for advice. When he instructed her to decide for herself, she denied the visit.

  Meantime, C.A. rushed across the country to be at his daughter’s bedside. Around eleven o’clock on the night of November third, he leaned over to put his lips to her forehead, and she whispered, “Father, I am dying.” And in the next moment, she proved to be right.

  Evangeline did all she was allowed, which was to send Eva a letter of condolence. In it she said she was “no longer bitter.” The letter incensed Eva even more, for she did not know what Evangeline had to be bitter about. Eva asked her father if she even had to reply. As before, C.A. left the decision to Eva, though he did ask her to consider the feelings of young Charles, to give him “as little trub and as much chance as possible.

  He has reached the age of sensitivity and is developing along lines that give promise. I wish to make it as easy for him as possible, but I could not live with her. I would rather be dead a hundred times. She can’t help herself. No grudges toward such a person should be entertained, for she wishes when in the right mood to do right. And she has been punished for her eccentricities and always will be. I am sorry for her but can’t allow that to destroy my existence as it would if I tried to live with her….

  “I am awfully sorry for the boy,” C.A. said in closing the subject. “He feels so hurt. To my judgement you should answer for his sake … but you need not do it if it [is] too hard against your wish. Yield a little for the sake of the innocent boy …”

  She did not. She had caught sight of Charles a few times in the past few years; and, frankly, she could not keep her eyes off him. “He was so good-looking,” she recalled of the teenager. “I saw him grow tall and he was always handsome. And very shy.” But Eva could never get past her feelings for his mother. “I could and do forgive all she did to me,” Eva confessed more than sixty years later, “but not what she did to my father and sister. Only insanity explains it. She made life miserable for all of us.” And while she said she did always try to “protect” her half-brother, she noted, “I have always felt that Charles was hurt terribly.” Eva destroyed Evangeline’s condolence letter, never to respond.

  Evangeline remained on the West Coast, where Charles entered the eleventh grade at Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach. He made no friends there, sticking to himself, his family, and his dog, in the small cottage they rented on the beach. As in Washington, his mother prized any education for Charles found outside the classroom over that within. Taking the wheel, the boy drove her in the Saxon on trips from San Diego to San Francisco, visiting the missions along the way. They made another long visit to Catalina Island, where he gathered moonstones. He and his mother found another beach near Redondo with serpentines, which they set about collecting, and one afternoon they gathered too many of the green rocks to carry home. Charles suggested his picking up their Saxon at the local garage and coming back for his mother and their treasures. By the time he returned, night had fallen, and the Saxon’s headlamps would not light; so he had to make his way to the beach by the small light on the windshield. A policeman happened to see him and cited him for driving without a license. The next day in court it was further revealed that Charles was also underage. The Lindberghs thought it outrageous that he was prohibited from driving, especially as he had safely delivered his family halfway across the country.

  They might have stayed in California indefinitely were it not for a letter from Detroit late in the winter of 1917. Grandmother Land had developed breast cancer; and by April, Evangeline and her brother decided their California sojourn must end. Brother went ahead by train; and, disobeying the court order, Charles drove his mother and dog the forty days home to Little Falls.

  There, Grandmother Land would spend as many of her final hours as possible in a room Evangeline and Charles kept constantly fresh for her with newly cut pine boughs. During the last eighteen months of her life, her only grandchild was forced into early manhood—heading the household, finishing high school, running the farm, keeping the books, caring for his mother and grandmother.

  By the time Charles and Evangeline had returned to Little Falls, Woodrow Wilson had been re-inaugurated President largely because he had “kept us out of war.” But during the winter of 1916 to 1917, American intervention became inevitable. While his family had been in California, Congressman Lindbergh did not slink away from Capitol Hill. He spent his last months in office taking some of the most dramatic stands of his career.

  On February 12, 1917, he delivered a tirade on the floor of the House against the Federal Reserve Board, which he believed was in cahoots with the Money Trust. On the House floor, without warning, he impeached the five members of the Federal Reserve Board of high crimes and misdemeanors—starting with its governor, Warren Harding. He listed fifteen counts, specifically citing such co-conspirators as National City Bank of New York, Kuhn, Loeb, and Company, and J. P. Morgan. “Don’t worry if the press slams me,” C.A. wrote his daughter Eva. “I hit the board a hard blow, and they are sore.”

  On March 1, 1917, the United States edged closer to war when the House voted on a bill authorizing the arming of American merchant ships. The tally was 403 to 14, with Lindbergh among that most radical minority, almost all Midwesterners. One month later—a new Congress in place—America entered the war.

  C.A. began sniffing out new opportunities. After a hernia operation (which he endured without anesthesia, taking his mind off the pain by discussing international economics for the hour with a friend), he returned to Minnesota. He spent most of his time in the Twin Cities, where he entered third-party politics. Worse than oblivion, he began sliding into political ignominy, becoming a crank. More than ever, Lindbergh took to writing articles and books about his constant bugaboo, the Money Trust. While he was neither a pacifist nor a socialist, he argued that it was not right to send poor farmboys off to war in Europe so that oth
ers might profit. “The trouble with war is that it kills off the best men a country has,” C.A. used to say.

  “It is impossible according to the big press to be a true American unless you are pro-British. If you are really for America first, last, and all the time, and solely for America and for the masses primarily, then you are classed as pro-German by the big press which are supported by the speculators,” Lindbergh would write in 1917—words that would resonate in the life of his son twenty years later.

  In 1918, C.A. Lindbergh ran in the Republican gubernatorial primary, receiving support from the Nonpartisan League—an agrarian protest party that sought to combat agricultural trusts through state ownership. Socialistic sentiments crept into his speeches. The election will forever stand as one of the most opprobrious in Minnesota’s history if not, as it was then considered, “the hottest ever in the U. S.” Charles chose never to recall the humiliations of this political fracas in any of his autobiographical writings. But journalist Harrison Salisbury, who was a child in Minneapolis at the time, later searched out the records of the campaign to confirm what he had heard, discovering—

  … that mobs trailed Charles Lindbergh, Sr…. He was arrested on charges of conspiracy along with the Nonpartisan Leaguers; a rally at Madison, Minnesota, was broken up with fire hoses; he was hanged in effigy in Red Wing, dragged from the speaking platform, threatened with lynching, and he escaped from one town amid a volley of shots.

  While there was only talk of tar and feathers, there was an actual record of “the vicious, vituperative, life-threatening mob action against a man who had fought against the war but once we got into it had said: ‘A few would destroy democracy to win the war and the rest of us would win the war to establish democracy.’” One day that spring several men presented themselves as government agents at the National Capital Press in Washington, D.C., and announced that the printing plates of Lindbergh’s Why Is Your Country at War and Banking and Currency were to be destroyed because of their “seditious” nature. There was never any official record of the incident or its perpetrators, but the goons did their job. The former title was reprinted a few years later, reset from one of the few hundred copies which had already been published and distributed in Minnesota.