The Flight of the Century: Lucky Lindy's Dark Side
Book Review
The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh
Thomas Kessner
By S. Mark Rhodes
Charles Lindbergh remains probably the most famous aviator in US History due in no small part to his historic and daring solo transatlantic flight in 1927. However Lindbergh’s racist tendencies open sympathy to the Nazis and poor record as a family man obviously complicates Lindbergh’s life and legacy. Lindbergh’s life and his influence on aviation in particular has been rendered in all its contradictions in Professor Thomas Kessner’s The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation(Oxford University Press).
Professor Kessner was nice enough to correspond via email with Mark Rhodes of In Flight USA about his book, Lindbergh’s influence on American aviation and whether or not he and Lindbergh might have been friends.
IF USA: Was there anything that surprised you about the man?
TK: “There were several things that I found surprising as I started to work on this book. The first was the circumstances of his youth. I had not realized that he was the son of a congressman who represented radical farm politics and went on to rail against big business and the Eastern banking interests. Nor did I realize that he had been brought up in what we would call today a broken home. His father, C.A. Lindbergh, lost his first wife to illness and he married a woman much younger than he who was his opposite in too many ways. Within a few years they were living apart and she was raising Charles virtually alone. As a child he went to no fewer than eleven different schools. He made few friends and came to cherish solitude and tinkering. He was great at understanding machines, mastering the mechanics of motorcycles, automobiles and complicated farm equipment, but when it came to formal studies he was a failure, compiling a dismal school record and being dropped from the University of Wisconsin. His prospects seemed entirely unremarkable.
“I was also surprised by his laser-like focus. His poor record at school did not prepare me for how brilliant he could be as a pilot, mechanic, navigator, and visionary. Also how aviation came to represent so much more than transportation to him and an entire group of flight enthusiasts who believed that flight opened up unparalleled possibilities for trade, diplomacy and international comity and understanding. He became an acolyte of the air, almost ascetic in his devotion. He did not date, refused to join his less disciplined buddies in their carousing, drinking and gambling, and pursued no other interests than flight.
“But perhaps even more surprising was the quick transformation he underwent after his flight when under the admiring but firm hand of American Ambassador to France, Myron Herrick this unlettered fly boy became a nonpareil agent of American diplomacy, impressing the world with his modesty, grace and dignity. Thereafter, tutored by a coterie of advisers, he became the face of American aviation.
“Most surprising to me were two things: the scale and duration of his popularity and more distressingly the extent of his racism and his open flirtation with Nazism.”
IF USA: There were a lot of great, colorful aviators (many of them females) of the period when Lindbergh catapulted into fame-Why did this laconic figure capture so much of the public’s imagination?
TK: “He came as it were from nowhere. The New York to Paris flight was a dream of many great aviators, and they had failed, many of them tragically, to achieve it. Six, all with sterling war records, had died or disappeared trying. He was unknown and yet he had the audacity to reject the prevailing theory of the experts: put together a crew of three or four build a big plane to withstand the stresses and turbulence of the transatlantic flight, strap on as many engines as you can and fill the fuel tanks to the brim. He challenged this approach, making his craft small, and as light as possible (even flying without a radio). Even more audacious was this decision to pilot the more than 33 hour trip alone on a course he himself had sketched out in a craft he helped design. Tall, handsome, with firm Midwestern values, an innocent flying alone, he became the darling of the press as he put his life on the line to compete against the biggest names in aviation and he bested them all.
“Even when they did make it across the ocean (as Richard Byrd and Clarence Chamberlin did within weeks of his flight) their flights were barely saved from disaster. His was picture perfect. In air-crazed Paris- and it was Paris’s frenzied welcome that set the tone for the rest of the world, including the U.S.— he was lionized for the gracious way he shared his victory with those who had come before and with those who had died to make his world free. Moreover, the other fliers were tainted by war. They represented aviation’s wrong turn, its misguided use for killing. He was clean, wholesome, a symbol of aviation’s better possibilities.
“In this greedy age, he refused the blandishments of sponsors, movie producers and would- be patrons, turning his back on millions of dollars of easy money. In this age of “normalcy,” of sports heroes and movie stars, of corporate business and unionized labor, he offered America an example of transporting individual achievement, genuine courage, and solid integrity.
“It is impossible today to comprehend the scale of his popularity, the void he filled in a bloody age searching for fresh heroes and new departures.”
IF USA: If Lindbergh had not become so famous for his Transatlantic solo flight would he be remembered as well today?
TK: “Almost everything that he achieved after the flight was as a result of the fame from the flight. It was that fame that allowed him to build American aviation’s credibility and to thrust it to world leadership. Absent the great fame that he rode to global celebrity he would not have had the impact and long lasting renown that he acquired.”
IF USA: Was there anything else that Lindbergh would have been as good at as piloting?
TK: “He would have been an excellent architect or draftsman or lab technician. But given his sorry record in school it is not likely that he would have completed the schooling necessary for such work.”
IF USA: Lindbergh was a public figure most of his adult life. Why then is it his influence on the commercial aspect of aviation is sometimes overlooked or even forgotten?
TK: “That and his other great flights, his historic diplomacy in France and Latin America and much more. But these all paled before the singular effect of his flight in capturing the imagination of an era and opening new frontiers of possibility.”
IF USA: Do you feel like you would have liked Lindbergh had you met him?
TK: “I would have loved to meet him but I do not think it would have led to much. He was entirely too certain about too many things and he related much better to things than to people. After all his mother had done for him, all that the people of Ryan aircraft had done to complete his aircraft in less than two months to keep him the race for the great flight, all that the his backers in St. Louis had done to raise the money for his flight and give him carte blanche in planning it, it was for his plane that he reserved his earnest thanks once he made it to Paris. For all his grace, skill and courage he lacked empathy. He found it hard to think of others, to sympathize with others, to relate to others, even those closest to him. He was a hero for good times but when the U.S. was wracked by an economic Depression he worried more about the profits of the airline industry than about the millions of unemployed. And by the time he reached middle age he was an irascible and cranky racist, who admired some of the most evil men and governments in the history of the world. He had little tolerance for the messy imperfections of democratic society much preferring the regimented order of totalitarian regimes. By the time he lived to comb gray hair he had lost his endearing humility and fancied himself a deep thinker, publishing an Autobiography of Values, but long before that he had proven untrue to his family, his nation and his early vision for aviation.
“He was a man much easier to admire than to like.”
