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by Brian Horrigan
Spring 2002 (Volume 58, Number 1, pgs. 2-15)
Charles A. Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit, the only son of Evangeline Lodge Land and C. A. Lindbergh, a lawyer from Little Falls, Minnesota. The family soon returned to Minnesota, where Charles spent much of his childhood on a farm on the banks of the Mississippi. After 1907, when C. A. began his first term in Congress, and for most of the next ten years, the family wintered in Washington, D.C. By 1918 America was involved in the war in Europe, and Charles left high school in Little Falls to run the farm year-round. In 1920 he entered the University, of Wisconsin but dropped out during his second year in order to pursue his dream of learning to fly airplanes. He spent some time barnstorming around the country and then enlisted in Army Air Cadet training, graduating in 1925. He next moved to St. Louis and became the chief pilot for a private airline company, flying the airmail between St. Louis and Chicago.
In 1927 Lindbergh threw his hat into the ring for the Orteig Prize—$25,000 to be awarded for the first nonstop airplane flight between New York and Paris. With the financial backing of several St. Louis businessmen, Lindbergh and engineers at Ryan Airlines in San Diego designed and built a plane The Spirit of St. Louis. He took off from New York on the morning of May 20, 1927, and landed in Paris 33 hours and 28 minutes later, touching off ecstatic celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic. After his return to the states, he flew the Spirit to every state in the union, and later to Mexico and Central America. Then he threw himself into promoting commercial aviation.
In May 1929 Charles Lindbergh married Anne Spencer Morrow, the daughter of the U. S. ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. In 1931, after the birth of their first child, the Lindberghs made a flight to China, surveying air routes, with Anne acting as navigator and radio operator. Then–after settling into a secluded home in rural New Jersey, tragedy struck. The Lindberghs' son–"Baby Lindy," as the press called him–was kidnapped on March 1, 1932. Several weeks later the baby's body was found, and the kidnapping became a murder case. In 1934 German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested for what was being called the "crime of the century." He was tried, convicted, and executed in 1936.
During these tragic years, Charles and Anne escaped into the world of aviation with a months-long tour in 1933 around the Atlantic in a two-seater plane. Back in the New York, Charles went to work in the Rockefeller Institute laboratories of surgeon and Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. Carrel and his associates were working on techniques to maintain organs outside the body, and Charles–who had always wanted to work in scientific fields–became a valued member of Carrel's inner circle.
To protect themselves and their second child from the glare of publicity, the Lindberghs moved to England in December 1935 and spent the next several years there and in France. Lindbergh became alarmed at the increasing tensions in Europe, which seemed to be leading to another world war. Based on his assessments of Nazi air power, made at the request of the U. S. embassy in Berlin, he concluded that Germany's strength would overwhelm armed forces in France and England, but he also believed that the Soviet Union posed the greater threat to Western Europe. Lindbergh carried his message back to the U.S. in 1939, where he soon became the most prominent spokesman for the "America First" movement opposing U.S. involvement in a European war. Lindbergh's open admiration for Germany's "spirit"–coupled with his denunciation on September 11, 1941, of Jews, the British government, and the Roosevelt administration as the "three forces" leading America into war–revolted and outraged many Americans.
When the U. S. fleet was attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941, compelling American entry into the war, Lindbergh ceased his anti-interventionist activities. He went to work for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit as a technical consultant on bomber production and in 1944 flew 50 combat missions in the South Pacific while serving as a civilian adviser on fighter planes.
After the war, Lindbergh continued aviation consulting. He also worked countless hours on the manuscript for his best known book, The Spirit of St. Louis, which appeared in 1953. Over the next 20 years, he became increasingly involved with environmental causes and wildlife preservation, writing articles and working with nonprofit conservation groups around the world. He died on August 26, 1974, and was buried near his home in Hawaii.