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How does one survive Lindbergh's kind of triumph? If he was condemned to a permanent sense of anticlimax, he gave no sign of it. In the aftermath of the flight, Lindbergh earnestly devoted himself to exploiting his fame for the sake of developing aviation. And aviation needed it. In 1927, in all the U.S., fewer than 9,000 people went aloft as passengers on scheduled airlines (compared with 109 million last year). Between accepting medals, he flew the Spirit of St. Louis to every state in the Union, pleading the future of aviation in a high, reedy Midwestern voice. Though he turned down million-dollar contracts for movies and cigarette endorsements, he accepted offers from Pan Am and Transcontinental Air Transport, Inc. (later TWA), to become a consultant. Stock options made him a millionaire almost overnight. The Minnesota farm boy and barnstorming pilot moved more and more in the ambiance of the very rich. Among them he found his wife—Anne Morrow, daughter of ex-Morgan Partner Dwight Morrow, who was then ambassador to Mexico, where Lindbergh had been sent on a good-will mission.
By this time, Lindbergh had become thoroughly bored with the press and publicity. Time and again, crowds would break through police lines to swarm up to his plane; more than once he swung the plane around to drive them back with the blast of his prop wash. In the four years after his marriage, he embarked on two world-swinging trips to explore aviation routes, the first across Canada and Alaska to Japan and China to dramatize the Great Circle course to the Far East (written up by Anne in North to the Orient), and the second across the North Atlantic to Europe and back across the South Atlantic (again recorded by Anne in Listen, the Wind!). The report he submitted to Pan Am embodied the same pragmatic realism he had shown in equipping the Spirit of St. Louis, and helped change the shape of airplanes. He argued that it was more important to design an airplane to stay aloft and fly over or out of danger than to add intricate, heavy features that might or might not help in a forced landing. This is general airline doctrine today.
For a time, the tragedy of the Lindbergh baby's kidnaping (in March 1932) blotted out all other concerns, but fanned his hatred of the press. Lindbergh plainly felt that the merciless mob of newspapermen descending on his Hopewell, N.J., farmhouse had scared the kidnapers out of their wits and perhaps panicked them into killing his son. After the long ordeal of the trial, he secretly loaded his family on a freighter and fled to England, where they settled on the estate of Author-Critic Harold Nicolson.
Thus began the period in Lindbergh's life in which he tried to be a political prophet—with results that shocked and saddened most of his countrymen.
Waves of the Future