Charles Lindbergh as the First Global Celebrity Hero
Although I’d never had much interest in American history when I was young, the name of Charles A. Lindbergh was certainly known to me, with the story of that early pioneering aviator always rating at least a few sentences in my introductory textbooks.
I’d vaguely known that Lindbergh had been the first to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight from New York City to Paris, becoming world famous for that daring exploit. A few years later, his story had turned tragic when the kidnapping of his infant son became one of our most infamous crimes, with the entire nation mourning when the young child’s body was found, and the Lindbergh Case prompted changes in federal law. Matters took another dark turn in the early 1940s as Lindbergh became one of America’s leading isolationists, fiercely opposing our entry in World War II, with some of his antisemitic public statements permanently shattering his once-heroic image and leading to accusations that he was a supporter of Nazi Germany.
Technocracy: The Hard ...
Best Price: $33.00
Buy New $24.59
(as of 03:55 UTC - Details)
That small handful of facts largely exhausted my knowledge of Lindbergh, who hardly loomed very large in our history books or our media. I’d never been drawn to the early history of aviation, so I vaguely lumped Lindbergh in with the Wright Brothers, and hardly questioned such minimal coverage.
But very occasionally I’d see reviews of new books about Lindbergh in my newspapers or magazines, and as my interest in American history and our entrance into World War II grew over the last couple of decades, his apparent role in that controversy attracted my curiosity. One of those books had been Lindbergh, a well-regarded 1998 biography by A. Scott Berg, and a couple of years ago I happened to pick up a copy at a book sale for a dollar or two, eventually reading it in order to broaden my knowledge of a historical figure about whom I knew so little.
I found that Berg’s biography fully deserved its Pulitzer Prize, running well over 650 pages and being an excellent, very thorough, and even-handed treatment of its subject, well written and based upon exhaustive archival research.
Although it essentially confirmed the basic facts that I’d always known, I was shocked by the sheer scale of Lindbergh’s fame both in America and the rest of the world, discovering that during the 1920s and 1930s he had loomed far larger than what was suggested by the brief descriptions in the textbooks or media that I’d absorbed. Those accounts now seemed as severely distorted as if George Washington had been relegated to merely four or five sentences in all our American history textbooks.
I think that most of us fail to realize how much our world has been transformed by the creation of the modern media and also just how recently that process unfolded. Large circulation daily newspapers providing news of breaking events only appeared during the mid to late nineteenth century, around the same time that popular national magazines began to hit their stride, while the even more powerful electronic media of films and radio followed during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. This important history was told in Prof. Paul Starr’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning volume The Creation of the Media, which I read last year, though I found his account rather plodding and dull.
These days all of us are aware of the tremendous role that celebrities play in American society and the rest of the West, with these individuals often exerting popular influence far greater than that of almost any of our leading political figures, let alone our academics or writers. But the elevation of such celebrities was impossible before the appearance of the modern media. And what I had completely failed to grasp until reading Berg’s biography was that Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic in 1927 had established him as the world’s first great international celebrity, transforming the flyer at the age of 25 into something entirely new in human history.
Lindbergh’s Wikipedia page runs nearly 25,000 words and one of its sections effectively summarizes many of the striking facts about the immediate consequences of his solo flight. As word spread that his plane was approaching its French destination, 150,000 Parisians flocked to the airport to await him, mobbing his aircraft for souvenirs. The United Press claimed that a million Belgians greeted him when he soon flew on to Brussels, apparently the greatest welcome ever accorded a private citizen. His next stop was in Britain, where a throng of 100,000 awaited his arrival at Croydon airport. These huge, unprecedented numbers were drawn to see a private citizen, being comparable to the largest crowds that had ever greeted the most important kings, emperors, or popes.
The New York Times announced Lindbergh’s achievement in an above-the-fold, page-wide headline “Lindbergh Does It!” When he finally returned to New York City a few weeks later, he was received by the mayor who gave him a ticker-tape parade and the governor who awarded him a special medal at a ceremony attended by 200,000. Contemporary news accounts claimed that some 4,000,000 people saw Lindbergh that day, and according to Berg people were “behaving as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it.”
The American government created an entirely new award for Lindbergh, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and it subsequently became one of our highest national honors. But because that wasn’t quite enough, a special act of Congress also gave him our Medal of Honor, hitherto restricted to our greatest combat heroes, which President Calvin Coolidge presented to Lindbergh at a White House ceremony. Time Magazine had been founded a couple of years earlier, and on January 2, 1928 it named Lindbergh its first Man of the Year, thereby starting a media tradition that has now lasted for nearly a century. At least 200 songs were written in tribute to his achievement.
Lindbergh soon published his autobiography, which was translated into most major languages and sold more than 650,000 copies during the first year at a time when our population was only one-third of its current size. Lindbergh then spent three months traveling over 22,000 miles to 82 different American cities, giving 147 speeches to 30 million people, representing more than a quarter of our country’s entire population. More than one quarter of the entire American population came out to see and hear Lindbergh in person.
I was absolutely stunned by all of these facts, which I’d never suspected. I’m hardly an expert on these sorts of matters, but I doubt if any later celebrity has ever matched Lindbergh’s mark during the century that followed.
Lindbergh’s flying achievement and the unprecedented scale of his global media celebrity also had some very practical consequences, setting off the huge “Lindbergh Boom” in the worldwide aviation industry. Within months of his triumph, applications for pilot’s licenses in the U.S. tripled, and over the next couple of years the number of U.S. airline passengers rose by an astonishing 3,000% while large numbers of new aviation companies were founded and funded. Thus, Lindbergh and his exploit probably played a huge role in the creation of the American airline industry, which otherwise might have taken many more years to fully come into existence.
Media-driven celebrity culture was an entirely new aspect of our society, and many observers expected the intense popular interest in Lindbergh to fade within a few months or a year, but they were mistaken. The youthful aviator was a rather shy and subdued Midwesterner who hardly seemed eager to be the center of so much public attention, but his diffident reaction provoked the media and the public to even greater continuing interest in all aspects of his life. Indeed, for the next dozen years, Lindbergh’s status as America’s greatest national hero would remain unchallenged.
On a goodwill trip to Mexico in late 1927, he met Anne Morrow, the youthful daughter of our ambassador Dwight Morrow, a former top Wall Street executive, and married her in 1929, with that story-book romance reigniting media attention, as did the birth less than a year later of their first son, Charles Jr.
The Lindbergh baby immediately became one of the most famous infants in American history, so his sudden kidnapping in 1932 produced an absolutely unprecedented wave of public anger and outrage. Although a large ransom was paid, the remains of the baby’s body was later found in a wooded area close to the Lindbergh home. A German immigrant was eventually arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for what the American media called “the crime of the century.” Famed journalist H.L. Mencken described the case as “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
This was the first such high-profile kidnapping in our national history, and federal law was changed as a consequence, giving jurisdiction to J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-crime investigative unit within the Justice Department. The resulting public attention helped his organization become the very powerful FBI.
Frustrated over the endless media hounding that his family endured and fearful of the lives of his other young children, Lindbergh waited until the conclusion of the murder trial, then took his family into self-imposed foreign exile in late 1935, moving to Europe and mostly living in Britain for the next several years until the eve of World War II.
Lindbergh vs. FDR on War and Peace
Although I found all these aspects of Lindbergh’s public life quite interesting and important, my original curiosity had centered on his later role as the leading public spokesman for the America First Committee (AFC), the national anti-war organization that unsuccessfully opposed our eventual entrance into World War II. Berg’s book devoted only a single lengthy chapter to that subject, hardly unreasonable since those events occupied just a year or two of his subject’s long life. But this merely sketched out a story that I wanted to see covered in much greater detail.
Therefore, I was very pleased last month when a review in the Wall Street Journal alerted me to the release of a new book devoted entirely to that topic. The author was Prof. H.W. Brands, who had published more than thirty popular biographies and histories, two of which had been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
In that Journal review, Roger Lowenstein criticized America First as “a revisionist study” but this only raised my own interest, and just as I’d hoped the book provided exactly the sort of detailed narrative I had been seeking, a very thorough and seemingly even-handed account of those extremely important events. The subtitle was “Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War,” and it accurately characterized the political battle over war or peace during 1940 and 1941 in terms of its two leading protagonists, with the very powerful President Franklin D. Roosevelt facing off against the aviator who ranked as America’s greatest national hero and popular celebrity.
Once we recognize the huge role of media power in determining political outcomes, we see that the contest between an American president and a private citizen who had never held any elective or appointive office was far less one-sided than what might be suggested by our constitutional system of government. Lindbergh’s enormous media clout made him the one figure who could go toe-to-toe with one of America’s most powerful presidents in the arena of public opinion.
Indeed, a few years earlier Lindbergh and FDR had previously tangled on a far less weighty matter, which Berg covered in a half-dozen pages. In early 1934, Roosevelt had abruptly revoked all domestic airmail contracts between the federal government and numerous private airlines, suggesting that these had been awarded corruptly by the preceding Republican administration and instead ordering Army planes to assume responsibility for carrying the mail. The potential financial impact upon America’s nascent aviation industry was devastating, and Lindbergh sent a 275 word telegram of protest to the president, while also releasing a copy to the press, with his statement generating huge public attention.
FDR was outraged at this challenge and directed his minions to attack Lindbergh in the media and blacken his reputation, and for the next couple of months, a public battle was fought over the issue. The president’s Democratic allies had total control over Congress, so Lindbergh was called to testify before a special committee investigating the matter, speaking in a room packed with cameras and microphones. But despite these potentially hostile surroundings, Lindbergh completely carried the day, with one representative describing his resulting constituent mail as running 97% in Lindbergh’s favor. The New York Times and top Washington pundits also soon came out in support of the latter’s position.
At the Origins of Poli...
Best Price: $58.50
Buy New $39.99
(as of 09:06 UTC - Details)
One point the renowned aviator made was that Army flyers were probably inexperienced in carrying the very heavy mail payloads, and his warning proved correct, with a dozen of those planes soon crashing and killing their pilots. So despite some face-saving gestures, the result of what became known as the “Air-Mail Fiasco” was the complete surrender of the Roosevelt Administration, which returned airmail service to private carriers. As Berg explained, this was the first great political defeat that FDR had suffered since reaching the White House, and neither man forgot nor forgave that early skirmish.
This incident came years before the beginning of Brands’ narrative so he omitted it, but it surely helped to explain Lindbergh’s audacious willingness to directly challenge the president of the United States over the far more important matter of war and peace.
The battle over American involvement in World War II constituted one of the most momentous political turning points in our country’s modern history, and for more than 80 years this story has been obfuscated by a thick layer of congealed propaganda, with the true facts only very rarely if ever reaching any substantial mainstream audience.
America First, the huge antiwar organization that Lindbergh helped lead, lost that political battle and as a consequence for more than three generations it has been heavily condemned and even demonized in our media descriptions of that era, a fate extended to many of its leaders, Lindbergh foremost among them. This explains why the individual who probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero of the twentieth century was relegated to just a few sentences in my introductory history textbooks.
Many contrary accounts of those important events have been written and published, but nearly all of these have been carefully excluded from mainstream distribution, so that even among well-educated Americans I suspect that relatively few are fully aware that there were two sides to that story.
