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"Here is a hero," Nietzsche wrote many years earlier, "who did nothing but shake the tree when the fruit was ripe. But just look at the tree he shook!" The significance of Lindbergh was as complicated as his personality. His exploit, proclaimed precisely because he achieved it alone, served to promote a new age of aviation technology in which men and women would be increasingly absorbed into teams, into bureaucracies. Lindbergh rode the Spirit of St. Louis on the updrafts of the future, but in many ways he was one of the last individualists. Even in the '20s, he represented a kind of nostalgia. In an era of Teapot Dome and bathtub gin, he seemed to Americans a cleaner, sharper version of themselves, as bright as a new silver dollar, still inventive and vigorous. If, as Historian Frederick Jackson Turner said, the U.S. ran out of frontier in 1890, Lindbergh opened a new frontier in the air — the U.S. arcing back in triumph to its European origins.
It is possible that from the beginning, Lindbergh was burdened with a bit more symbolism than he should have been made to carry. His flight, for all its significance, was in some ways merely a handsome stunt. It was also one of the first great media events of the century. Frenchman Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and France.* Through the winter and early spring of 1927, the newspapers — then in one of the most aggressively competitive eras of American journalism — had promoted the race among Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer, and others. In April, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster were killed during a trial flight. Two other flyers disappeared. Lindbergh was the Midwestern dark horse, caricatured as a Minnesota rube, self-sufficient, spunky as a cowlick. The possibility of another death gave the public a shot of adrenaline: Death v. the Kid.
In many ways, the papers were wrong about Lindbergh from the start. Somehow the myth was always askew; up until his death from cancer on Maui in 1974, Lindbergh remained elusive, difficult. Far from being merely a sort of hayseed genius of mechanics, he was the son of a populist Republican Minnesota Congressman and a schoolteacher, whose father, Charles Land of Detroit, was a distinguished dentist who invented porcelain caps for teeth. Lindbergh had lived in Washington, D.C., and studied at the University of Wisconsin until he dropped out midway through his sophomore year to take a course in flying. At 25, he was tough, intelligent and probably the best pilot in the U.S.
Lindbergh was amazed at becoming a hero. His life changed forever. After the Paris flight, people stole his laundry for souvenirs. When he wrote a check, it would be kept for his signature. Once, after a hearty lunch with some pilot friends, a group of women ran squealing to fight over the wet corncobs he had left on his plate. In 1932 came the kidnaping of the Lindberghs' child. He never forgave the mob of reporters who, he thought, had frightened the kidnaper into killing his son, or the pair of photographers who broke into the Trenton, N.J., morgue to photograph the baby's body.