The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh: Prologue–Chapter 6

The streets around New York City’s Madison Square Garden swarmed with America First rally-goers—thirty thousand in all—shouting, stabbing the air with their signs. The staunchest Firsters had begun lining up before dawn in hopes of getting a front-row seat.

Their hero, the face of America First and the man they’d come to hear speak tonight, had told them so. “Contemptible,” he’d called the press. “Dishonest parasites.”

It was time to build walls—“ramparts,” he called them—to hold back the infiltration of “alien blood.”

“For six full minutes,” a reporter would later recall, “he stood, smiling, as the mob leaped to its feet, waved flags, threw kisses and frenziedly rendered the Nazi salute.”

The speaker didn’t try to tamp it down. He didn’t repudiate violence.

Lying there, gripping his shoulder socket with his right hand to stanch the blood, he stared out his bedroom window at the farm he’d carved from the Minnesota wilderness.

Ola had responded to their claims with his typical irreverence. When prosecutors handed him a sheaf of legal documents in court, he’d ripped them in half, dropped his trousers, and used the pieces to wipe himself. The judges found him guilty.

For months afterward, August lay in bed, refusing to give in to either pain or death. Because he was poor and isolated, with no medical care beyond an unlicensed and itinerant doctor, nothing could be done for him.

Charles Lindbergh never knew his paternal grandfather. August died ten years before his grandson was born. But the story of the old man’s extraordinary gumption, told to Charles time and again by his father, made a deep impression on the boy.

He saw himself as coming from exceptional stock, being shaped by the inherited traits of courage, physical toughness, stoicism in the face of adversity, and stubborn individualism.

Years earlier, his father had bought some land on the outskirts of Little Falls—120 acres of imposing bluff and thick woodland on the banks of the Mississippi River.

The next day, Charles and his mother poked through the smoldering ruins of the only home he’d ever known.

Now he spent “hours on end in dry, heated rooms.” He grew pale, listless, and bored.

Beyond physical attraction, the two had little in common. Evangeline was brittle and demanding. C.A. was aloof and severe.

Beyond physical attraction, the two had little in common. Evangeline was brittle and demanding. C.A. was aloof and severe.

In June 1906, a group of Republican men urged C.A. to run for the United States Congress in Minnesota’s Sixth District.
At first, he demurred, saying he had better things to do with his time.

Despite her estrangement from C.A., Evangeline went to Washington eight out of the ten winters he was in Congress so that father and son could see each other daily.

“One of the planes took off,” recalled Charles. “You could see its pilot clearly, out in front—pants’ legs flapping, and cap visor pointed backward to streamline the wind.”

Perhaps if his parents had sent him to school more often, he would have developed a rapport with those his own age.

Evangeline disapproved of rote learning and believed she could do a better job of teaching Charles at home.

C.A.’s favorite topic to rail about on the House floor was banking reform. A congressional maverick, he relished the idea of battling America’s financial institutions.

Little did the boy know that twenty years in the future, he would emulate both his father’s sentiments and his fervor.

C.A.’s antiwar stand made him unpopular with voters. He was trounced by his opponent and retreated to Washington and his congressional seat, where he continued his fiery crusade against getting involved in Europe’s war.

Lithe and slender, he had high cheekbones, a dimpled chin, and a full mouth that rarely smiled.

Meanwhile, he plodded through his days, shearing sheep and milking cows.

Used to speed, excitement, and living on the edge, they found it impossible to settle down into the humdrum routine of American life as if nothing had changed.

They were sick and tired of heroic efforts, disillusioned by war and cynical about peace.

They wanted fun and freedom and release from those stodgy prewar morals and ideals.

The whole country, declared novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, was “going hedonistic.”

Male students donned raccoon coats and carried around ukuleles in hopes of wooing these newly emancipated girls.

Male students donned raccoon coats and carried around ukuleles in hopes of wooing these newly emancipated girls.

Now his interest in flying and his frustration over college coalesced.

Civilian aviation in those days was perilous, and completely unregulated by the government.

Flying was also considered slightly seedy.

In good-weather months, these men—and women, too—crisscrossed the country, “vagabond[ing] in the air,” as one pilot put it, in constant search of a job.

This was the first time he’d been close enough to an airplane to touch it. His fingers stroked wooden struts and trailed down slender wires. His nostrils filled with the acrid odor of acetate.

Ray Page, the company president, gave the gangly twenty-year-old the once-over. What did the kid want?

With a weatherworn face and a propensity for colorful cursing, Biff, as he was called, had trained pilots in the war.

With his unpolished boots and oil-stained clothes, he looked like a country bumpkin beside the crisply uniformed army pilots.

Nonetheless, week after week, the mailbags remained nearly empty. To potential customers, the savings of a few hours was seldom worth the extra cost per letter (ten cents in postage as opposed to three cents for regular letter mail). Still, Charles and the others flew doggedly on.