Charles Lindbergh

Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit, Michigan, though he grew up mainly on a farm near Little Falls, Minnesota, along the Mississippi River ^[1]. His father, Charles August Lindbergh, was a Swedish born lawyer who represented Minnesota's sixth district in the United States House of Representatives from 1907 to 1917 and became known for opposing American entry into the First World War ^[2]. His mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh, taught chemistry and came from a Detroit family with a strong interest in science and invention.

The boy divided his childhood among Minnesota, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., following the rhythms of his father's political career. He was a mechanically minded student, more comfortable with engines than with classrooms, and he drove the family's car and farm machinery while still in his early teens ^[1]. In 1920 he enrolled in mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but the coursework held little appeal. He left in 1922, before finishing his second year, to pursue flying ^[2].

That spring he traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he took flying lessons and joined the barnstorming circuit as a wing walker, parachute jumper, and eventually a pilot. In 1924 he entered the Army flying schools at Brooks and Kelly Fields in Texas, graduating first in his class in March 1925 and earning a commission in the Air Service Reserve ^[3]. The military training gave him a discipline in navigation and engine management that would prove decisive two years later.

After his Army training, Lindbergh took a job with the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of St. Louis as chief pilot on the newly established airmail route between St. Louis and Chicago ^[3]. Flying the mail in the mid 1920s was dangerous work; pilots navigated by landmarks and dead reckoning through fog, storms, and darkness in open cockpit biplanes. Lindbergh twice had to bail out of failing aircraft on the route, and the experience taught him how far an engine, and a pilot, could be pushed ^[1].

During those mail runs he began thinking about the Orteig Prize, a 25,000 dollar award offered by the hotel owner Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris ^[4]. Several famous aviators had already died or been injured attempting the crossing in large multiengine aircraft with full crews. Lindbergh reasoned that a single pilot in a light, single engine monoplane, stripped of every unnecessary pound, stood a better chance than a heavy crew laden machine.

He persuaded a group of St. Louis businessmen to back the venture, which is why the aircraft carried the name Spirit of St. Louis. Ryan Airlines of San Diego built the custom monoplane in roughly two months in early 1927, fitting it with a Wright Whirlwind engine and enormous fuel tanks that blocked the forward view, so that Lindbergh had to see ahead using a periscope or by turning the plane ^[4]. In May 1927 he flew it from San Diego to New York with a stop in St. Louis, setting a transcontinental record along the way and arriving at Roosevelt Field on Long Island as the least known of the Orteig competitors ^[3].

At 7:52 on the morning of May 20, 1927, Lindbergh lifted the heavily loaded Spirit of St. Louis off the muddy runway at Roosevelt Field and turned northeast along the great circle route toward Europe ^[4]. He flew alone for 33 hours and 30 minutes, covering about 3,600 miles, fighting fog, icing, and above all sleeplessness; he had barely rested the night before departure. On the evening of May 21 he landed at Le Bourget Aerodrome outside Paris, where a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands surged past barriers to reach the plane ^[1].

The reaction dwarfed anything the young pilot had imagined. France awarded him the Legion of Honor, President Calvin Coolidge sent a Navy cruiser to bring him home, and he received the Distinguished Flying Cross and, by a special act of Congress, the Medal of Honor ^[3]. New York gave him a ticker tape parade witnessed by millions. Among the most cited Charles Lindbergh facts is the scale of what followed: in the second half of 1927 he toured all 48 states in the Spirit of St. Louis, visiting 92 cities, and applications for pilot licenses and airline investment in the United States rose sharply in the flight's wake ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Charles Lindbergh beyond the single flight finds a working aviation professional. He surveyed transcontinental routes for Transcontinental Air Transport, a predecessor of TWA, and flew pioneering survey flights across the North Atlantic and to Asia for Pan American Airways, often with his wife serving as radio operator and copilot ^[5]. In the 1930s he also worked with the Nobel Prize winning surgeon Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute, where the two developed a glass perfusion pump capable of keeping organs alive outside the body, a device that contributed to the later development of heart lung machines ^[6]. The list of Charles Lindbergh achievements therefore runs from record setting flights to airline route planning to biomedical engineering.

In December 1927 Lindbergh flew a goodwill mission to Mexico City at the invitation of Dwight Morrow, the American ambassador to Mexico. There he met the ambassador's daughter, Anne Morrow, a shy Smith College graduate with literary ambitions. They married in May 1929, and Lindbergh taught her to fly; she became a skilled pilot and navigator in her own right and later a celebrated author, best known for the 1955 book Gift from the Sea ^[5].

The couple's fame turned catastrophic on March 1, 1932, when their 20 month old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., was taken from his crib at the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Despite ransom payments, the child's body was found in nearby woods ten weeks later. The case, called the crime of the century by the American press, led Congress to make kidnapping across state lines a federal offense ^[7]. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German born carpenter, was convicted of the murder in 1935 and executed in 1936, though debate about aspects of the investigation has continued among writers ever since ^[7].

Hounded by reporters and fearing for their surviving children, the Lindberghs left the United States in December 1935 and lived in England and on a small island off the coast of Brittany until 1939 ^[1]. They eventually raised five more children. Decades after Lindbergh's death, DNA testing confirmed that he had also fathered children in secret relationships with three women in Germany and Switzerland beginning in the late 1950s, a revelation made public by those children in 2003 ^[8].

While living in Europe, Lindbergh made several visits to Germany at the request of American military attachés to assess the Luftwaffe, and in 1938 Hermann Goering presented him with a German decoration, the Service Cross of the German Eagle ^[2]. His refusal to return the medal after the November 1938 pogroms damaged his reputation at home. After returning to the United States he became the most prominent spokesman for the America First Committee, arguing that the country should stay out of the European war. A speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, in which he named the British, the Roosevelt administration, and American Jews as the groups pressing for war, drew widespread condemnation as antisemitic and cost him much of his remaining public standing ^[2]. President Franklin Roosevelt criticized him publicly, and Lindbergh resigned his Air Corps Reserve commission in April 1941.

After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh sought to serve but was denied reinstatement. He instead worked as a civilian consultant for aircraft manufacturers, and in 1944 he traveled to the Pacific theater, where he flew about 50 combat missions as a civilian technical adviser and taught fighter pilots fuel management techniques that meaningfully extended the range of their aircraft ^[3]. In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower restored his commission and appointed him a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve ^[1].

His 1953 account of the Paris flight, The Spirit of St. Louis, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1954 and was made into a film starring James Stewart ^[9]. In his final decades Lindbergh turned sharply toward conservation. He campaigned for the protection of humpback and blue whales, worked with the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and lobbied for the protection of tribal peoples in the Philippines and of wild lands in Hawaii ^[6]. Suffering from lymphoma, he arranged to spend his last days at his home in Kipahulu on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where he died on August 26, 1974, and was buried in the churchyard of Palapala Hoomau Church ^[1].

The 1927 flight remains one of the hinge events in the history of technology. Lindbergh did not make the first transatlantic crossing by air (Alcock and Brown had flown from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919), but the solo New York to Paris flight, linking two great cities nonstop, captured the public imagination in a way no earlier flight had and helped convert aviation from spectacle into industry ^[4]. The Spirit of St. Louis hangs today in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where it has been displayed since 1928 ^[4].

His legacy is permanently divided. Historians credit his contributions to commercial aviation, rocketry (he helped secure funding for the physicist Robert Goddard), medical technology, and late in life conservation, while also examining his prewar views on race and his admiration for German air power as serious moral failures ^[2]. Biographer A. Scott Berg, whose 1998 life of Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize, portrayed a man of extraordinary discipline whose judgment outside the cockpit often failed him ^[1].

The name endures across American life: airports, schools, and the Lindbergh Foundation, which for decades funded work balancing technology and the environment. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries and books provide an unusually intimate record of the costs of twentieth century celebrity. Nearly a century after Le Bourget, the image of a lone pilot navigating by the stars toward Paris still defines the romance of early flight, which is why interest in Charles Lindbergh facts and in the man behind them has never gone away ^[9].