Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Lindbergh lost the governor’s primary by almost fifteen percentage points, but he did not end his political career there. In the summer of 1918 Bernard Baruch invited him to serve on the War Industries Board. Lindbergh was sworn in, but “a storm of protests” from Reserve Banks forced him to resign. He embarked on another venture, in Minneapolis, publishing Lindbergh’s National Farmer, a large-format magazine that would serve as his mouthpiece while he kept a hand in Minnesota’s newest political movement, the coalition between farmers and labor. With Farmer-Labor support, he ran for his old House seat in 1920, only to be trounced by his Republican successor, losing by more than a two-to-one margin.

  Swearing off politics, Lindbergh went fishing for new business involvements—a bank, a book, and real estate. His missives to his son were mostly advisory, about finances or farming, occasionally about his professional life. He sent money home in dribs and drabs, only when it was absolutely necessary, and he deeded the Little Falls property over to Charles a few parcels at a time.

  With America at war, C.A. felt the farm should step up food production. He stocked it with cattle and sheep, which doubled Charles’s duties. “Ours is a grand country and our flag is the Flag,” C.A. wrote Charles, inspiriting him for the hard work ahead; “—keep it flying, not as an approval that we like the political machine, but that it represents our country …”

  On top of basic farm chores, Charles still had his final year of high school to complete. If the road into town was not too snowy, he would bicycle to Little Falls High, often coming home for lunch; if the path was too thick, he would walk—even when temperatures dropped to forty degrees below zero. For the first time, Charles found himself excelling in a few subjects, Physics and Mechanical Drawing; but he found it almost impossible to stay interested in school with all the challenges of the farm. By the second term it seemed unlikely that he would pass the final examinations required for a diploma.

  Then one day at a school assembly, the principal announced that “food was so badly needed in connection with the war that any student who wanted to work on a farm could leave school and still receive full academic credit just as though he had attended his classes and taken examinations.” Charles would return to Little Falls High only once more, on June 5, 1918, to collect his diploma.

  Few of his seventy-five classmates had ever even spoken to him; and years later, when a magazine tried to capture Charles’s life in Little Falls, his former classmates could barely sketch a picture of an outsider. “Nobody recalls young Lindbergh’s ever having attended a social function or having looked at a girl,” read the article. “His favorite pastime was to hang around Martin Engstrom’s hardware store, where he could gaze at the latest mechanical gadgets …”

  Making plans for farm expansion, Charles read up on animal husbandry, and he decided to breed Guernsey cattle, Duroc-Jersey hogs, Shropshire sheep, leghorn chickens, and Toulouse geese. “I concluded that the farm should be mechanized and ordered a La Cross three-wheeled tractor with a two-gang plow,” Lindbergh recalled. “Later I ordered and installed an Empire milking machine and took on the Empire agency for the general Little Falls area.”

  Even with the assistance of a seventy-year-old Norwegian tenant farmer named Daniel Thompson, Charles spent most of his days alone among the heifers and ewes his father had bought. C.A. had got a very good price on the latter because, in fact, they were half-starved. Unfortunately, when lambing time came, most of the mothers died, leaving Charles and Evangeline to nurse the offspring. Every morning he would bring little wet lambs to the kitchen where they warmed them in baskets or tubs and fed them milk from bottles. Some literally died in their laps; but Charles and Evangeline saved sixty of them. The cows were a lot easier to raise but required great amounts of time, as some of them refused to be milked by anyone but Charles.

  By the spring of 1918, Charles also had six thousand chicks along with their many other birds. The incubators had to be kept at an even temperature, which meant that during cold nights Charles repeatedly had to awaken himself to regulate them. One morning, however, he found the room black with smoke. The incubator lamp had malfunctioned, roasting all the chicks and burning thousands of eggs.

  When he was not tending the animals, trees had to be cut, barked, notched, and fitted to make log houses for the hogs. A suspension bridge needed to be built over Pike Creek, fences had to be built or mended, ice had to be hauled. After experimenting with concrete, he poured a small pond for his ducks, about one yard in diameter and a few inches deep. “I tried to make the sides slope in such a way that the freezing of water in winter would not crack them and so that small ducklings could climb out in summer regardless of the water level.” He called his circular creation the “Moo Pond,” having been told that “moo” was the Chippewa word for dirty. He signed his name to his handiwork, and added that of his companion Wahgoosh as well. After eighty years of extreme Minnesota weather, the pond remains without a single crack in it.

  At a farm auction on November 11, 1918, activity was suspended when the auctioneer stopped gabbling to announce that the armistice in Europe had been signed. “Time was allowed for celebration before the sale continued,” Lindbergh later wrote about that moment. Most of the older men who farmed Morrison County knew what they had to return to, but Lindbergh was at a crossroads. He had assumed the war would continue at least until his eighteenth birthday, at which time he would enlist in the armed services. Beyond that he thought he might take a university course in engineering.

  Just days before Charles’s seventeenth birthday—February 1, 1919—C.A. wrote a letter appraising his son and praising him as well. It was a rare document not only because it marked one of the few times he remembered his son’s birthday but also because its sentiments were as unmasked as any he ever revealed to Charles. He suggested that Charles make a few changes in his life, that he ease up and enjoy himself more. “I am not disappointed with you in any way,” C.A. wrote. “I like to see you want to work, but don’t want you to overdo the work. I have one thing that I take pride in above all others, and that is that you are able to buck the world alone and independent if it was necessary. I love that quality in a person, and especially in you, because it was hardly forced on you. You gripped it yourself.”

  Keeping busy kept Charles from feeling lonely. The only times he indulged himself were at night, when he would escape by the golden light of his kerosene lantern. He had discovered the writings of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who wrote spellbinding accounts of his life among the Eskimos; and he took a shine to poet Robert W. Service, some of whose ballads he had even committed to memory, such as this stanza from “The Law of the Yukon”:

  This is the Law of the Yukon; that only

  the Strong shall thrive;

  That surely the Weak shall perish, and

  only the Fit survive.

  And beginning with the November 1917 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, he thrilled at “Tam o’ the Scoots,” a cliff-hanging serial of a bold, blue-eyed Scottish pilot during the Great War, in nineteen parts.

  There was, of course, a bonnie lass at the end of the stories, but the pretty girl was not what intrigued Lindbergh. For this solitary boy up in Minnesota, Tam “represented chivalry and daring in my own day as did King Arthur’s knights in childhood stories. If I joined the Army,” Lindbergh had decided, “I would apply for the branch of aviation and, if possible, learn to be the pilot of a scout.”

  For months Charles had even begun to dream of having a plane of his own. During the war he had become addicted to newspaper accounts of aerial combat, anything he could read about Fonck and Richtofen and Rickenbacker and the gallants of the Lafayette Escadrille. And when the war ended, there were still a few more installments of “Tam o’ the Scoots” to run in Everybody’s that he would read—before undressing in the warmth of the sewing room of the Little Falls house, putting on an old fur-lined coat of his father’s, and crawling through a window into his bed outside on the sleeping porch
. On cold winter nights, Wahgoosh would crawl in beside him. Evangeline would step outside briefly to shake her son’s hand goodnight.

  In the morning, Wahgoosh would join Charles in a bowl of coffee. Wahgoosh took his with cream and sugar. One morning Evangeline called repeatedly for the dog, but he would not come. Later, Charles found him dead in the well. A deranged neighbor, apparently so enraged at the sheer happiness of Charles’s only friend, had beaten the playful fox terrier to death with a crowbar.

  Charles kept putting off his decision about the future, opting to keep working the farm. For the first time since infancy, he stayed in one place for more than a year. But after eighteen years of transience, he was ambivalent about staying in Little Falls indefinitely. On one hand, he enjoyed working the Minnesota soil of his forefathers; on the other, he was intrigued with modern machinery and wanted to see more of the world. He bought himself a twin-cylinder Excelsior motorcycle and was exhilarated by “its power and speed”; but he did not know where he wanted to go. His parents told him repeatedly that a college degree “helps you get along in later life.”

  Thinking he might become a mechanical engineer, he scouted Midwestern colleges and selected the University of Wisconsin in Madison—“probably more because of its nearby lakes than because of its high engineering standards.” He began the “difficult and rather heartbreaking procedure” of liquidating the farm’s assets, its equipment and animals. And by the end of the summer of 1920, new tenants were working the land.

  Then the eighteen-year-old rode his Excelsior 350 miles from Little Falls to Madison. Except for a handful of days here and there over the next few years, Charles would never live on the farm again.

  Late that summer, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh also made a big decision about her future. She packed a bag for Madison.

  4

  UNDER A WING

  “Science, freedom, beauty, adventure;

  what more could you ask of life?”

  —C.A.L.

  TRAVELING ALONE BY TRAIN, EVANGELINE ARRIVED BEFORE Charles; and she wasted no time hunting for an apartment for the two of them.

  At first blush she did not take to Madison, finding it “a queer place.” Situated on an isthmus among a group of lakes, Wisconsin’s capital seemed incongruous—with its brand-new, two-million-dollar Capitol dome lording over what might otherwise pass for a small farming village. But she quickly discovered the many charms of this exceptional college community—an intellectual hub of the Midwest.

  Just blocks from the campus, at 35 North Mills Street, Evangeline found a third-floor apartment that rented for seventy dollars per month. While the building was closer to the railroad tracks than she would have liked, their flat was more spacious than any of the others she had shared with Charles. It had a living room and front porch, kitchen and dining alcove, a bedroom for each of them, even an extra room in which to study. She had shipped books and furniture from Little Falls to make it feel more like home.

  Charles had come to take pride in the fact that he had never been present for the first day of school, and freshman year at the University of Wisconsin proved no exception. His classes in Chemistry, Drawing, English, and a “sub-freshman” course in Mathematics had already begun when he buzzed into town on his Excelsior.

  He instantly delighted in the outdoorsy nature of the campus, with its wooded lakeshore trails and the steep walk up to the main building, Bascom Hall, which stood vigil over the campus and town. Once inside the classrooms, however, his mind shut down. After Charles’s first mid-semester report in December, his class adviser placed him on probation for poor marks in Chemistry and Math and for failing English. His only creditable work was in Shop and Drawing.

  As had been true when he had been a child—a farmboy in Washington, a Congressman’s son in Little Falls—Charles felt like a fish out of water. Socializing never came easily to him, and being at a large university only made it more difficult. Since his mid-teens, he had headed a household and run a farm; demoted to freshman, he was suddenly subjected to academic rules, surrounded by academic superiors, and expected to wear a Wisconsin-green beanie.

  Lindbergh steered clear of most people, armoring his insecurity in an attitude of aloofness. He become a smart-aleck, less concerned with learning than in outsmarting his teachers. When his English professor told him to write a theme on a close relative, but not a parent or sibling, he said he could not because “it is so many years since I have seen any of them that I am afraid I have forgotten what they look like.”

  Future English compositions reveal some playfulness about the rigors of academia but an equal lack of respect for them as well. One was a story about a clergyman presenting his passport to St. Peter, only to be turned away because of his failure on earth to use the serial comma; “[a] pity,” Peter states, “to permit so many minor mechanical errors to bar good material from eternal commendation.” Another essay, “A Day in the University Life of an Engineer,” followed a freshman hour by hour, preparing for a Chemistry quiz by attempting “to make up for six weeks’ neglected study.” More than one paper whose content merited an “A” got downgraded to a “D” because of bad grammar.

  Lindbergh abided his time in the classroom only by daydreaming. “Why should one spend the hours of life on formulae, semi-colons, and our crazy English spelling?” he wondered. He did not “believe God made man to fiddle with pencil marks on paper. He gave him earth and air to feel. And now even wings with which to fly. I’d like to stop taking English, and concentrate on engineering. Then, maybe I could take an aeronautical engineering course. I believe I’d be more successful in that. I could work hard to understand the magic in the contours of a wing. But the University of Wisconsin doesn’t teach much aeronautics. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the best place one could go—but I couldn’t pass the entrance requirements there.”

  The only aspect of university life that held any interest for Lindbergh was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. Taking his physical examination—standing six feet and two inches in his bare feet, with long, lanky arms, and weighing in at a lean 148 and a half pounds—he was asked if he bathed regularly. “Sometimes,” he kidded, if he “got the chance.” When the old local German tailor measured his sleeve-length for his uniform, Charles heard him say “Gott” under his breath.

  Field Artillery Cadet Lindbergh immediately took to the values of military life and found his happiest hours in the school armory—the Red Gym, as it was known, a vast Norman-style castle with Romanesque arches and heavy turrets. He looked forward to the discipline of the hour-long drills. He was assigned a Springfield rifle and was taught the manual of arms. He studied the construction and operation of three-inch field guns and the mathematics of fire control. There were also elementary courses in leadership. “On days of ROTC training,” Lindbergh recalled, “we wore our uniforms at all classes—proudly.” For the first time in his life, the shy loner belonged to a group. Ironically, it was in the military—with its drumming out of any individuation—that Lindbergh discovered his first adult identity.

  Lindbergh made a small name for himself as a member of both the University of Wisconsin’s rifle and pistol squads. The five men on the rifle team used .22-caliber rifles indoors and .30-caliber Springfields outdoors; the slightly larger pistol team fired Colt .45-caliber automatics. Standing or prone, Lindbergh regularly shot perfect scores, ten consecutive bull’s-eyes. For fun, he and a teammate used to shoot twenty-five-cent pieces out of each other’s fingers from fifty feet away. The Wisconsin rifle team ended the year number one in the nation; and when it held an outdoor competition to determine its best marksman, Lindbergh took home the prize, a Colt .45.

  Whatever time was not accounted for, Charles now spent in the university rifle gallery or at the YMCA, which he joined so that he could “get shower baths and swimming pools at any time.” Well into his freshman year, Evangeline noted that he still had not sported his green freshman’s cap.

  “Scarcely h
ad the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths,” wrote Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald—only six years Lindbergh’s senior—“when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste.” Charles Lindbergh was not among them. Even at college, he kissed no flappers and went on no dates. Although he had become strikingly handsome—with his smooth chiseled face, dimpled chin, blonde hair, and blue eyes—he went home every night to have dinner with his mother.

  Years later there were stories on campus of Lindbergh’s taking part in some intramural hijinks, particularly Wisconsin’s “bag rush,” in which the freshmen and sophomores vied to throw each other into Lake Mendota. But, truer to character, Lindbergh flatly denied any such activity beyond observing. Unlike many a collegian, Lindbergh avoided tobacco and alcohol altogether. His grandfather Land had told him that “cigarettes contained a poison”; and, as he later noted, “I was so revolted by the men I saw in and outside of the saloons I passed in Little Falls that I would have turned away from hard liquor.”