Mastering the Lindy Hop

by Jeffrey Hart

Nine years in preparation, A. Scott Berg's biography of Charles Lindbergh is a masterly work. He is the first to have been granted full access to the Lindbergh archive at Yale — all twenty thousand boxes of it; Lindbergh saved everything — as well as the Anne Morrow Lindbergh collection, and much else.

He handles the weight of his scholarship with notable grace. His prose is a pleasure, not only lucid but rising to lyricism when the moment requires it. The subject of his first biography, the great editor Maxwell Perkins, would thoroughly approve.

Because he knows his subject so well, Mr. Berg is in a position to comment on the various problems and questions about Lindbergh, and he does so with assurance and good judgment. I will come to this in a moment.

But one subject he does not address, at least not directly, is just why Lindbergh's 1927 flight to Paris made him such a colossal hero. He had courage, he navigated, and, most of all, he stayed awake. But the utter mass adulation does seem to me out of proportion to the achievement.

Perhaps it had to do with the special spirit of that era. It has always struck me as appropriate that during that same year, 1927, Babe Ruth hit his sixty home-runs, and became another larger than life figure, the “Sultan of Swat,” the “Big Bambino.”

Lindbergh became the “Lone Eagle,” “Lucky Lindy,” and people danced the “Lindy Hop” and chewed “Baby Ruth” candy bars. Though Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa seem to be fine fellows and have surpassed Ruth, they will not become the mythic figure that Ruth remains, and the astronauts who walked on the Moon will not resemble Lindbergh.

In 1927, I will speculate, something in the era wanted and evoked the Hero. We have great football players today, but our sports writers don't speak of them as Grantland Rice did about Rockne's “Four Horsemen”: “Outlined against a blue-grey October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.” Of course their names were Layden, Crowley, Miller and Stuhldreyer — but Rice immortalized them.

The Fighter was the “Manassa Mauler,” Jack Dempsey; the Golfer was Bobby Jones; the Tennis Player was “Big Bill” Tilden, seven singles championships during the 1920s.

It has been called the Age of Ballyhoo, which we call hype, but there was substance too. The year 1925 saw the publication of Hemingway's In Our Time, Drieser's An American Tragedy, and Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Frost, Moore, Cummings, Crane were poets. Anything was possible, America was the strongest nation, the Stock Market went up, up, up and people sang “It Ain't Gonna Rain No More.” It seems a champagne high of unlimited promise.

I would now like to touch on some of the main issues raised by the Lindbergh biography.

Five years after The Flight, with some awful inevitability, the Lindbergh baby died in a kidnap attempt.

Possibility was closing down, this was the Depression. Some still doubt that Hauptmann was the criminal, but Mr. Berg shows that he was. The evidence is mountainous. The trial, of course, was a media sensation, a circus, but the verdict was correct.

Lindbergh established himself as an airline consultant and also did some useful work in applied science.

For example, he invented a heart pump which would keep the organ functioning during an operation and this was exhibited at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.

He worked on cell biology with the visionary French scientist Alexis Carrel. Mr. Berg does not say so, but there is something a little chilly here in Lindbergh's attraction to machines and in his science or scientism. One guesses he prefers the company of machines and instrumets to human association.

With stubborn strong-mindedness, he got in way over his head in international politics. It was not that he favored staying out of the looming European war. That was a majority position until Pearl Harbor. But Lindbergh was drawn positively toward the regime in Germany, admiring its technocratic achievements, energy, panache. He did not like its irrational anti-Semitism, but mistakenly saw that as incidental.

He correctly warned about the power of the Luftwaffe, but did so in tones that made it sound irresistable, mistakenly said it could destroy Paris and London, and wildly over-rated the JU-88 Stuka dive bomber, a slow-moving death trap useful only against inferior Russian planes. It did not help at all that Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote a silly book entitled “The Wave of the Future,” discounting democracy. It is not on record that Lindbergh checked out a British Spitfire.

In 1938 I was eight years old and knew little about the “Sudenten Germans” or the “Polish Corridor,” but I did listen to Hitler speeches from Berlin, translated in the flat tones of the BBC.

Even an eight year-old knew Hitler was bad news. His voice rose from a growl and a sneer to near hysterical shrieking as the audience wildly screamed “Sieg Heil.” I knew these were not Fireside Chats. Lindbergh completely misread what was going on.

After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh served effectively as an aviation advisor in the Pacific, flying with the fighters, coaching tactics, and even engaging in dog fights.

FDR remained his vindictive foe, against the best interest of the war effort, given Lindbergh's undoubted technical genius.

About Lindbergh himself, one of my boyhood heroes, I have developed some reservations. In many ways he is admirable.

He achieved much, and he wrote well. He was something of a home-made philosopher — a recurring American type, as in Mark Twain and Ezra Pound. Autodidacticism has its limitations.

But also there is his fanactical precisionism, his perfectioniam, his endless “check-lists about things other people must do, his unconscious bullying, his absence of humor, and much more than a touch of philistinism.

His wife felt the limits of all this so severly that she fell Platonically but deeply in love with Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, the poetical French aviator who, though bald and dumpy, could “feel.” She was devastated when he was killed in 1940. When Lindbergh died of cancer in 1974, his last check-list covered every detail of his grave and funeral in Hawaii.

I suppose I admire Lindbergh without much liking him. Surely his privacy would have nothing to fear from me.

On the other hand, I'm not Swedish.