On May 21, 1927 Charles Lindbergh became the most famous, and admired, man in the world.
Today, you can hardly find a trace of him.
Why?
To know the answer, it helps to understand the spirit of Lindbergh’s times, which share characteristics, and even some slogans, with our own, the slippery creature known as public opinion, and the stark ambiguities of Lindbergh’s tortured, often bizarre biography.
Here was a man ready made for both Homer and Freud.
The Bashful Hero
When Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Airport near Paris on May 21, 1927, after more than 33 hours in the air fighting fear, fatigue, and hallucinations, 150,000 people rushed the runway. He was barely able to land without plowing into the crowds.
In the succeeding weeks, he was offered every honor in the gift of man. The New York World called his flight, the first solo crossing of the Atlantic by air, “the greatest feat by a solitary man in the records of the human race.” Later, H.L. Mencken, the conscience and curmudgeon of the age and given to pointed exaggeration, said Lindbergh was “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
There was much to recommend Lindbergh for the role of savior. He was six feet, five inches tall, ruggedly handsome with an endearing cleft to the chin, unobjectionably diplomatic and utterly devoid of earthly vanity. He was only 25 years old. Within months, streets, bridges, and babies around the world bore his name. Hundreds of marriage proposals poured in. In America, newspapers, the nascent aviation industry and the two major political parties couldn’t wait to get their hands on him. In 1929, Lindbergh merged his fortunes with one of the country’s most prominent families when he wed Anne Morrow, whose father, Dwight Morrow, was diplomat, adviser to presidents and senior partner in J.P. Morgan and Company.
He was the man of the hour; nearly a hundred years later, Lindbergh’s figure has been all but erased.
If you drive out Meadowbrook State Parkway on Long Island to East Garden City, New York you’ll come to a place called Roosevelt Field; it’s a flat, grey landscape of shopping malls and industrial parks. In the 1920s, Roosevelt Field was an airstrip. It was named after Quentin Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son killed at age 20 while serving in the U.S. Army’s 95th Aero Squadron over France during World War I. As authentic a hero as Lindbergh, Roosevelt was felled by two machinegun bullets to the forehead during a dogfight with German fighter pilots. The Germans found young Roosevelt’s body near the wreckage of his French-built Nieuport 28 aircraft. They buried him with full military honors, calling him in a dispatch “a gallant antagonist.” It was from Roosevelt Field that Lindbergh took off for France on the wet morning of May 20, 1927. Newsreel cameras and hundreds of well-wishers accompanied the feat.
Today, if you search hard enough, you’ll find a stark, pink-stone slab behind a parking garage near one of the malls marking “the second bump” of Lindbergh’s takeoff as The Spirit of St. Louis struggled to achieve lift against the weight of nearly 3,000 pounds of fuel. The slab shows a relief of the plane against a map of the North Atlantic but not the slightest glimpse of the pilot.
On the other side of the Atlantic, at Le Bourget, Lindbergh’s arrival on May 21 is commemorated by a statue…of a soaring, bare-breasted woman symbolizing “the aspirations and daring of flight.” (The monument includes the names of two others, French aviators Charles Nungessser and François Coli, who disappeared while trying to match Lindbergh’s feat.)
Lindbergh is apparently as inscrutable to artists as he was to biographers.
There are a few other markers scattered around the globe—a comic statue in Georgia, a puzzling one in San Diego, a modest museum in Lindbergh’s hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh´s single-engine plane, dangling from the rafters of the Air and Space Museum in Washington and, at the remote Palapala Ho’omau church on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, the hero´s gravesite. A small corner of the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey preserves macabre artifacts from the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindberghs’ two-year-old son, Charles Junior. At the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport one passenger wing is named for Lindbergh, the other for former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Odd company.
And yet Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived in homes in New Jersey, Connecticut and Great Britain, among other places. Almost nothing is left at any of those sites to mark their presence. The Hopewell, New Jersey mansion, called Highfields, where the Lindberghs settled, and from which their son was kidnapped in 1932, was long ago converted to a juvenile detention and recovery center. The Lindbergh name has been stripped from many of the streets, bridges and parks named for him in the euphoric 1920s.
Why?
The Least Public of Public Men
One of the contradictions of Charles Lindbergh´s life is that a man so taciturn should destroy himself with words.
Through much of the 1930s, Lindbergh was seen as remote, heroic, non-political and, after the 1932 murder of his son, tragic. He was the Lone Eagle. Starting in 1936, the Eagle screeched.
In England, living in the green hills of Kent, the Lindberghs came under the spell of their neighbor, a prominent medical doctor and researcher named Alexis Carrel. Carrel was carrier of a deadly intellectual disease—racism. The strain he harbored was among the most virulent circulating at the time; and it was highly contagious in a world where immunity had been compromised by severe economic depression. Carrel, prefiguring the Holocaust by just a few years, advocated “the elimination of defective individuals with the right kind of gas.” He was a purveyor of the credo of eugenics, the “scientific” engineering of a superior strain of humankind through breeding. “Breeding” favored the white race and, as Lindbergh would say in a 1939 radio address, a policy of pushing back against “a pressing sea of yellow, black and brown.” As late as 1941, Lindbergh, in another broadcast, decried “the infiltration of inferior blood” into Europe and America.
The Lone Eagle is, in the curious way history has of repeating itself, a man of our times as much as his own. In 1940, he became the chief spokesman for a movement called…America First!
From 1936 to 1941, Lindbergh was also increasingly anti-Semitic. He wrote: “A few Jews add strength and character to a country. Too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.”
Anne Lindbergh didn’t help matters with her 1940 book The Wave of the Future. The “wave” Anne Lindbergh foresaw was totalitarianism, and Hitler, whom she called “a great man” and “a visionary,” was its harbinger and prophet.
The Lindberghs seemed especially enamored of Hitler’s Germany. They made frequent visits, met with Hitler and Hermann Goering, the drug-abusing, vainglorious Luftwaffe chief; Lindbergh received an embarrassing, and perhaps unwanted, medal from Goering at a dinner party; in 1938, Charles and Anne considered taking up residence in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb which, only four years later, would host the infamous conference decreeing and detailing “the final solution.” Back in the U.S., Lindbergh, in a series of speeches, advocated a Treaty of Non-Aggression with Germany modeled after the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
All of that changed in a few hours on December 7, 1941.
Isolationism was buried as a political creed that day and its spokesmen largely ostracized. Among those destroyed by their own words was Joseph Kennedy, the former U.S. ambassador to Britain. In a November 1940 interview with the Boston Globe that would come back to haunt him but which he never repudiated, Kennedy said “democracy is finished in England.” He transferred his ambition to be the first Catholic president to his sons.
Among others taken down by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a leading isolationist. In a case of “famous last words,” Wheeler told an interviewer in October 1941 that “I can’t conceive of Japan being crazy enough to want to go to war with us.” He was defeated for re-election.
Others scrambled to save their political skins, becoming zealous converts. Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg was not only an avid war supporter but turned into a full-fledged internationalist. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1947, he helped push through enabling legislation for the Marshall Plan. His 1948 Vandenberg Resolution paved the way for creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In a lesson for our time, it was Vandenberg, a Senate Republican cooperating with a Democratic State Department, who said, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”
Charles Lindbergh’s Third Act
Despite F. Scott FitzGerald’s dictum, there are not only second acts in American life but also, sometimes, third acts and even the possibility of a peaceful denouement.
Lindbergh’s third act was tragicomedy.
After Pearl Harbor, efforts to rehabilitate his public image largely failed. President Roosevelt shrewdly declined to put Lindbergh, only 39 at the time, into uniform. Lindbergh, instead, became a test pilot for aircraft manufacturers and actually saw combat in the Pacific but as an anonymous civilian advisor.
He never, after the war, renounced any of his previous racist, anti-Semitic or isolationist positions. Anne Lindbergh, on the other hand, would admit in the 1970s that she should never have written The Wave of the Future. “I didn’t have the right to write it,” she said. “I didn’t know enough.” But Charles and Anne by then had become estranged.
The most bizarre twist in the Lone Eagle’s story was Lindbergh’s return to Germany. In the 1950s, he traveled extensively in Europe on fact-finding missions for the U.S. government and as a highly paid airline representative. In 1957, he began an affair with a disabled Munich milliner named Brigitte Hershaimer, with whom he had three children. Later, he developed a relationship with Hershaimer’s sister, an artist, fathering two more children. In between his Munich affairs, Lindbergh found time to seduce his secretary and travel companion at a Rome apartment he rented, fathering two more children.
Lindbergh may have been prolific at fathering, with a total of 11 children including his legitimate offspring with Anne Morrow, but he was negligent when it came to parenting. He and Anne took two long air tours together in the 1930s, one to the Far East and another to Europe and South America, leaving their small children behind in the care of servants. In later years, Lindbergh portrayed himself as an American writer named Careu Kent, a friend of the Hershaimer family, when visiting his German children for short spells in Bavaria once or twice a year. They did not discover he was their father until long after his death.
The Lindbergh denouement was less fraught.
In the 1960s, before it became fashionable, Lindbergh took up the cause of environmentalism. He is still remembered by some for his work in protecting endangered species and the lush natural enclave of Maui where he lived out his last years. But he didn’t have much time. Charles Lindbergh died of cancer in 1974 at age 72. Many were taken by surprise. They didn’t know he was still alive.
Then, as now, we see him only in black and white, a figure from the distant past, forever young, courageous, and naïve.
-Thomas Murphy, 2025
Photo Credits: Lindbergh Second Bump Monument, Timothy Matthews, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Lindbergh_Flight_Monument-001/jpg; Lindbergh, Library of Congress
Coming in February: It’s Presidents’ Day…Again