by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
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.
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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.”
