Lindbergh

A Biography

Leonard Mosley

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780486145624

In this highly readable biography, best-selling author Leonard Mosley offers a fascinating account of Lindbergh's childhood, days as a barnstormer and mail pilot, the flight to Paris and its aftermath, the Hauptmann trial, his later life, and much more. Source Notes. Index. 40 halftone illustrations.

Part One

The Makings

CHAPTER ONE

HUCKLEBERRY SWEDE

One afternoon in the spring of 1971, John T. Rivard, district manager of the Historic Sites Division of the Minnesota Historical Society, looked out of his window and saw that a car had pulled up to the gate of the old Lindbergh house. The house lies on the banks of the Mississippi just outside the small town of Little Falls, Minnesota, and, together with 110 acres of fields and forests surrounding it, was presented as a gift to the state by the Lindbergh family. The gift was made in memory of Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., father of the flier, former congressman from Minnesota and a considerable character in his own right. It is now a place of pilgrimage for followers of the Lindbergh legend, and its bosky groves and green riverbanks have been turned into a vast picnic and camping area.

Since this was rather too early in the tourist season, and the entrance gate was barred to traffic, anyway, Rivard guessed who the visitor might be even before he recognized the tall gray-haired man climbing out of the car. He walked across the parking lot to open the gate and shook hands with Charles Lindbergh. He was introduced to the man who was with him, Alden Whitman, but was not told that he was a reporter from the New York Times.

In the last years of his life, Lindbergh had by no means made his peace with the American press and still viewed most reporters and photographers with intense suspicion and resentment. He still insisted that they twisted his words or quoted them out of context, they took pictures of him and his family from unflattering angles, and their jostling and intrusive flashlights upset him. But Whitman, a veteran reporter of the New York Times, he admired as a conscientious newspaperman whose judgment and skill were to be trusted; and he shared, moreover, Lindbergh’s love of nature and passionate devotion to ecological causes.

In the spring of 1971 Lindbergh had contacted Whitman and suggested that he accompany him on a transcontinental and transoceanic tour of American territories designed to point out to the reporter, and, through him, to the public “some of the environmental breakdowns” he had witnessed in his lifetime, between the Atlantic coast and Hawaii. They had ranged over Connecticut and New Jersey in Lindbergh’s plane, and were now en route to Alaska, Washington, and California, with calls in Minnesota and Montana on the way.

It may well have been simply to indicate to Whitman how times and territory in Minnesota had changed that Lindbergh took him to Little Falls, but one senses that there was a significance behind the visit which had more to do with a feeling in his bones than a desire to make ecological propaganda. When he was alone with John Rivard, he said:

“I had to have a last look at the old house.”

It was a curious remark to make, in the circumstances. There was no need for Lindbergh to believe that this need be his last visit. He was sixty-nine in 1971 and made it manifest to everyone that he felt twenty years younger. On this same trip, a few days after leaving Little Falls, he met up with his two eldest sons and challenged them to a race across a Montana cow pasture to prove he was still their physical master, and either he was indeed or they let him think so, for he beat them blind. Throughout the trip he would march briskly for miles through woods and over mountains to demonstrate to the reporter puffing faithfully behind him, burdened down by his notebook, that he was tireless and on top of his form.

Rivard remembers that a curious remoteness from the rest of them—as if he were distancing himself not only from his companions but from the present time—seemed to settle over Lindbergh the moment he climbed the front steps and re-entered his childhood home. The house has been refurnished with family artifacts in a rough approximation of what it must have looked like from 1906 to 1920, when Charles Lindbergh lived there with his mother, Evangeline Land Lodge Lindbergh, and, more infrequently, with his father, Charles Angustus Lindbergh, Sr. The dining room table is set for a meal, with the Chinese dishes his parents bought during their honeymoon in San Francisco. The cookstove still works from the wood in the box beside it, though the stove in the basement that young Lindbergh installed to heat the house is now fed by oil; it is the same stove, though. In the living room is the swivel chair that his father brought down from his congressional office in Washington, and draped over it is a bead shawl embroidered by the local Indians, the Chippewas, who lived in the neighboring woods. Evangeline Lindbergh’s room upstairs still has its comfortable bed and family portraits. Across the landing is Lindbergh’s room, stuffed with the memorabilia of his boyhood: a box of toy soldiers and armed Indians; his first pair of snowshoes and the license plates of his first motorbikes hung on the wall beside a broken prop from one of his early planes; and pictures of family cars, an ice yacht he built powered by a small engine, an early outboard motorboat with which he explored the Mississippi, and the pump he fixed when he was sixteen years old to bring water to the house and save himself or the hired hand from to-and-froing to the well.

He wandered through the rooms in a sort of moony distraction, down to the old boiler room, and then into the garage where two cars are parked. One is a Saxon Six, which was the Lindbergh family car in 1916, cannibalized by souvenir hunters after Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic flight, and later reconstructed with loving care by engineers from the Minnesota National Guard. The other is a 1959 Volkswagen in which he once drove out from Connecticut, sleeping in it (a feat of contortion for a six foot four man) and eating in it en route. He left it behind when he was abruptly summoned back to New York and later presented it to the exhibit, and there it stands beside the old Saxon, sleeping bag still spread across the collapsed spare seat, bully-beef tins littering the floor boards. The curator and the reporter watched him as he came back to the living room level and went to the large screened porch which looks out to a magnificent sweep of the Mississippi as it flows south from its source on Lake Itasca toward Minneapolis, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and the Gulf. It was here that Lindbergh as a boy did most of his sleeping, hidden under a mountain of blankets against the winter cold and rain, wakened in summer by the fire-and-brimstone flashes of summer storms, the angry red glow of distant brush fires, or the pyrotechnics of the fireflies doing their display of feux d’artifices outside the mosquito screens.

He stood there for a time, deep in thought. Then he said abruptly:

“No need to go to a motel. We’ll stay the night here.”

Rivard said, “I’ll have your mother’s old room made up for you.”

He shook his head. “Not necessary. I’ve got my sleeping bag with me. If you can get me a blanket, I’ll bed down in the kitchen.”

He walked past them, back into the house, out through the door, and down the steps to the riverbank.

Charles Lindbergh’s first conscious memory of the Mississippi was of its black waters turning red in the reflection of a huge fire blazing and crackling on its banks. He was three years old at the time, and the fire was the one that burned his first home to the ground. That was in 1905 and Lindbergh remembered how he began to blubber with fright at the smell of smoke and the sight of the flames, at the desperate shouts of the fire fighters as they sloshed water at the fire and vainly tried to get enough pressure through the hoses to reach the third floor, where the blaze had started. He was snatched up by a maid-cum-nurse and taken to the shelter of the barn, a couple of hundred yards away, where he was kept until nightfall; after which, when it was obvious that there was no hope for the house, he was taken by cart into Little Falls to stay with friends for the night. He sometimes said he could still “see” the flames in his mind as they flickered in the darkness while he was being driven away.

In a way, Lindbergh’s vivid memory of the conflagration is significant, for the fire not only burned up the family home but brought to a head the growing estrangement between his parents which was to have a profound effect upon him during the most formative years of his life. His father, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Sr., was the son of Swedish immigrants to the wooded lakelands of Minnesota which reminded them so much of their homeland. As a child he had been brought up to endure the rigors of early frontier days, and though by the turn of the century he was a well-established lawyer and realtor in Little Falls, it was not too many years earlier that he had had to live with a gun in his hand. With it he supplied the family with meat from the game forests and intimidated the marauding bands of Sioux Indians who divided their time between raiding the friendly indigenous Chippewas and looting or sacking local farms.

Lindbergh, Sr., had been married once before, to May la Fond, daughter of a French Canadian father and an Irish mother, and since she was an admixture of the best qualities of both her parents—proud, passionate, brave, and yet extremely gentle and tenderhearted—she had made her husband supremely happy, as well as having borne him three daughters. But in 1898 May died of an abdominal tumor, just a few days short of her thirty-first birthday, and for a time her husband was inconsolable. As the shock of his beloved wife’s death began to fade, he showed an increasing interest in a local kindergarten teacher, Helen Gilbert, whom he had brought into his house to look after his two surviving children (his second daughter had died at the age of ten months). When this caused a certain measure of local scandal, his mother, a stem and God-fearing Swede of the old school, moved into the house with him; and shortly afterward Lindbergh, Sr., departed to downtown Little Falls and took rooms in the Antlers Hotel. There, looking pensively out of his window one day, he saw a young woman gazing at him from an opposite window, and she seemed like the answer to a widower’s prayer.

Evangeline Land was in some ways a real-life version of that heroine of Western films, the young, beautiful, cultivated schoolteacher from the East who has come West to bring refinement and enlightenment to the sons and daughters of the rough pioneers along America’s frontier. Unlike her Hollywood stereotype, however, Evangeline Land was finding the experience dull rather than exciting, and uncomfortable rather than challengingly rough. It seems more than likely that by the time she saw Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Sr., for the first time, she was just about ready to wash her hands of Little Falls as unworthy of her social and professorial efforts. She had dreamed of teaching social graces to the offspring of two-fisted and trigger-happy miners in some rip-roaring gold or silver town, and Little Falls, an important lumber, fur-trapping, and farming area, had been growing increasingly respectable, and the air was filled with the smell of Swedish home cooking rather than the whiff of gunsmoke. The only drama she had experienced so far was a clash of temperament with her school superintendent, who made it plain that he did not appreciate her highhanded eastern ways.

Matters reached a climax during the winter of 1901. By that time, Eva and Charlie, as they had begun to call each other, were meeting regularly. Since they both lived in the same hotel, she was able to signal from her window when she was leaving her room, and Charlie would walk her to school before going on to his office. They were unofficially engaged by the time she tangled for the last time with the school superintendent. The temperature of the top-floor laboratory, where she was giving a chemistry lesson, was too cold to be borne, she decided, and she picked up the apparatus with which she was working and told her class to follow her downstairs to a lower (and warmer) floor. The superintendent met her on the stairs and ordered her back. She promptly dumped the apparatus at his feet and walked out. Charlie advised her not to go back.

They were married on March 27, 1901. The ceremony took place at the Detroit, Michigan, home of her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Charles Henry Land, and it was Charlie’s first meeting with his in-laws. Dr. Land was a dentist whose skills went beyond the mere extraction of aching molars. He had invented the porcelain cap and other orthodontological aids, and had built up a considerable reputation among his peers. It was a big wedding, and among the guests were most of Eva’s old classmates from Ann Arbor, where she had majored in chemistry. The couple then left for a honeymoon in San Francisco, Yosemite Park, and the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. Eight weeks after their return, Eva discovered that she was pregnant.

Determined not to trust herself or her child to the rough ministrations of the local Swedish midwives, she returned to Detroit to have her baby, and there, in the Land home, on February 4, 1902, Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born. By the time she and the infant came back to Little Falls, the home which her husband had been building for them was ready for occupation. It was about two miles south of the town, close to where Pike Creek flows into the Mississippi, and it was in this “richly furnished” three-story residence, “planned with taste and care,” that the Lindberghs and their son lived until it burned down three years later. The marriage went up in smoke with the house.

In truth, it had never really worked for more than a few months after the wedding ceremony, because Eva and Charlie were temperamentally quite unsuited to each other. May la Fond, Charlie’s first wife, possessed a gentle and romantic disposition which did much to soften and humanize the dreamy, poetic disposition that lay behind his stolid Swedish exterior. His second wife was too young, too self-centered, and too impatient to do likewise. There were seventeen years difference in age between them, but it was more a difference in outlook and attitudes that widened the gulf. Eva was full of amour-propre and could not bear to be found in the wrong, teased, or ridiculed. She did not easily forgive anyone who laughed at her when she had made a fool of herself, and Charlie, who had a broad sense of humor, made the mistake of doing so when she tumbled off a horse, fell into the river, or, as happened on one occasion, slipped on the ice in the main street of Little Falls and displayed an inordinate amount of her undergarments. She had a sharp temper and several times showed it in public. After the birth of their son, they rapidly drifted apart.

Since Lindbergh, Sr., was at that time beginning a career in politics—he was elected Republican congressman for the Sixth District of Minnesota in 1907—there was no question of divorce, for his constituents, many of them Roman Catholics, would have been profoundly shocked by it. The couple simply decided to live apart, though to keep up appearances and for the sake of their son, Eva continued to spend periods with her husband in Washington and he came to stay with them in Little Falls whenever he was mending his political fences. They lived separate lives or in separate rooms, and it was an arrangement that seems to have proved less painful to them than to their son.

For a time Charles and his mother lived in the Buckman Hotel in Little Falls, while a smaller house was being built with the insurance money on the site of the one which had burned down. Then they moved for one winter to a rooming house in Minneapolis. It was a period when the boy remembers that he spent most of his time “looking out of windows.”⁵ He had been told by his stepsisters about the breakdown in his parents’ relationship (or, at least, the fact that they slept in separate rooms), and though he did not realize the full significance of it, he sensed enough about the situation to feel miserable about it. The only bright light in a particularly dark period of his childhood was when he was summoned to Washington and taken to the House for the opening session of the 60th Congress. He was immensely proud of being permitted to sit next to his father among the legislators.

From the moment the new house was finished, ⁶ Charles and his mother would follow a routine. Each September they would take the train from Little Falls and travel via Chicago to Detroit, where they would stay two weeks with the Land family. Then they would go on to spend the winter “keeping up appearances” with Congressman Lindbergh. Each spring mother and son would return to Little Falls (again stopping off at Detroit en route) and live for the rest of the year in the house on the banks of the Mississippi. Except for the absence of his father, this was the best time for Charles, because each day brought some new excitement, adventure, or discovery. By the age of six he had his own gun (a gift from his grandfather, a Stevens single-shot .22), and it was the first of many. He taught himself the marksmanship that soon made him expert enough to shoot a duck through the head in full flight (and would one day enable him to win a psychological test of one-upmanship by outshooting the crackshot of the German Luftwaffe with a handgun). He wandered the river and forest on his own, shooting partridge and prairie chickens for the pot, studying woodcraft, collecting butterflies and fireflies, taming a chipmunk, swimming in the creek, catching crayfish, building himself a raft with which to pole himself along the reaches of the great river.

In the letters which he later wrote for the Minnesota Historical Society, Lindbergh gives some revealing glimpses of his lonely childhood.

“In the usual good weather of a Minnesota summer, I spent most of my time outdoors,” he wrote. He erected a plank seat in a linden tree, ten feet above the earth, so that he could sit there and scan the opposite bank of the Mississippi, or keep his eye upstream for the first sign of the logs floating down from the lumber cam...

Table of contents

• DOVER BOOKS ON TRANSPORTATION
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• Prologue: The Wound Reopened
• Part One - The Makings
• Part Two - Wings to Lift a World
• Part Three - Into the Abyss
• Part Four - Innocents Abroad
• Part Five - Peacenik
• Part Six - The Mote and the Beam
• Part Seven - Out of the Ashes
• SOURCE NOTES
• INDEX
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST
• DOVER BOOKS ON HISTORY, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE