The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh, page 1
ALSO BY CANDACE FLEMING
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QUOTATIONS IN THIS BOOK
You will notice that some of the quotations in this book are in present tense. This is how Charles Lindbergh wrote them himself. Often, when recording past events in his journals or memoirs, he recalled them as if they were happening in real time, allowing his readers to get inside his head during actual moments of inspiration, decision, or debate. In these instances, I have chosen to italicize his thoughts rather than placing them within quotation marks. It should be noted that none of the internal dialogue found in these pages has been invented. All of it comes directly from Lindbergh’s firsthand accounts. The liberal use of both his and Anne Lindbergh’s real words to reveal their thoughts and feelings, observations and conversations will, I hope, allow readers to form a deeper connection with them.
Text copyright © 2020 by Candace Fleming
Cover photographs courtesy of Underwood Archives/Archive Photos/Getty Images and Yuko Yamada/Moment/Getty Images
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fleming, Candace, author.
Title: The rise and fall of Charles Lindbergh / by Candace Fleming.
Description: First edition. | New York City: Schwartz & Wade Books, [2020] | Audience: Ages: 12+. | Audience: Grades: 9–12.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019014659 | ISBN 978-0-525-64654-9 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-525-64655-6 (hardcover library binding) | ISBN 978-0-525-64656-3 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus), 1902–1974—Juvenile literature. | Air pilots—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC TL540.L5 F56 2020 | DDC 629.13092 [B]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780525646563
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Candace Fleming
Title Page
Quotations in This Book
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Rally
The Rise
Part One: Growing Up
Chapter One: In the Beginning
Chapter Two: Rootless
Chapter Three: Changes
Part Two: Airborne
Chapter Four: Schooled
Chapter Five: Daredevil Lindbergh
Chapter Six: Silver Wings
Part Three: New York to Paris
Chapter Seven: Plans and Frustrations
Chapter Eight: The Flying Kid
Chapter Nine: 33 Hours, 30 Minutes, 29.8 Seconds
Chapter Ten: The Most Famous Man in the World
Part Four: Copilot
Chapter Eleven: Charles and Anne
Chapter Twelve: I Do
Chapter Thirteen: Settling Down
Chapter Fourteen: Immortal
Part Five: Kidnapped
Chapter Fifteen: “They Have Stolen Our Baby”
Chapter Sixteen: “Jafsie” and Cemetery John
Chapter Seventeen: The Ransom
Chapter Eighteen: Search’s End
Photo Insert
Part Six: Blown Off Course
Chapter Nineteen: Rebuilding
Chapter Twenty: Ordeal by Trial
Chapter Twenty-one: Lost Faith
The Fall
Part Seven: Losing Altitude
Chapter Twenty-two: Spring 1936
Chapter Twenty-three: “Hitler Is Undoubtedly a Great Man”
Chapter Twenty-four: Lindbergh Reports
Chapter Twenty-five: No Place Like Home
Part Eight: America First
Chapter Twenty-six: An Influential Citizen
Chapter Twenty-seven: The Hero Speaks
Chapter Twenty-eight: “The Bubonic Plague Among Writers”
Chapter Twenty-nine: Crash Landing
Chapter Thirty: The Lindberghs’ War
Part Nine: Final Flight
Chapter Thirty-one: Out of the Ashes
Chapter Thirty-two: Together, Yet Apart
Chapter Thirty-three: Sorrows and Secrets
Bibliography
Source Notes
This book would never have taken flight without the dedication and generosity of so many librarians, archivists, and historians who answered questions, combed through documents, and dug out photographs. I need to thank several of them in particular: Matthew Schaefer, head archivist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; Dennis Northcutt, associate archivist at the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center; the entire staff of the Yale University Library, who oversee the Charles Augustus Lindbergh Papers housed there; the archival staff at the National Air and Space Museum, especially Elizabeth Borja; and the reference librarians at the Minnesota Historical Society. I am particularly grateful to Mark W. Falzini, author, Lindbergh kidnapping expert, and archivist in charge of the largest collection of documents pertaining to the case, housed at the New Jersey State Museum, for opening my eyes to the complexities of the case, as well as for fact-checking the manuscript. I also owe a huge debt to Susan A. Brewer, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and author of Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. Not only did she read and comment on the completed manuscript, she emailed and called to discuss those Gordian knots in history and find solutions for its telling, not because she had to, but because she cared.
Friends, too, have made a vast contribution to this book. What would I have done without Katrin Tiernan, who sacrificed her summer days (and at times, her sanity) to translate the German text of Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh into English? Thanks, too, to the talented and insightful women of my writers group—Penny Blubaugh, Stephanie Hemphill, and Barbara Rosenstock—for their sharp eyes and smart comments.
For the writing—the actual crafting of this story—I need to thank first and foremost my editor, Anne Schwartz. As always, she pushed me to make the story better with her piercing questions and brilliant suggestions. In Anne, I have found not simply an editor but a writing coach, a sounding board, and a good friend. I would be remiss not to thank designers Rachael Cole and Stephanie Moss for once again creating a gorgeous book; Anne-Marie Varga, editorial assistant at Schwartz & Wade for fielding my many requests; copy editors Barbara Perris, Alison Kolani, and Colleen Fellingham for their close and careful read; Adrienne Waintraub and Lisa Nadel for their unwavering support of my books; Ethan Ellenberg, my literary agent, for his always-wise counsel; and last, but never least, my shoulder to lean on, provider of diagrams, maps, and takeout, Eric Rohmann.
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. Others had come straight from work on that Friday afternoon. Although everyone had a ticket, not everyone would get inside. The Garden’s cavernous arena wasn’t big enough to hold all the movement’s supporters. Those who didn’t manage to get through the door would h
So did the sudden appearance of a group of protesters. Led by a young woman with short dark hair, they marched back and forth, carrying signs that read AID TO FRANCE and MAINTAIN THE BRITISH BLOCKADE.
A sullen murmur of disapproval seemed to come from everywhere in the crowd, like low growls of thunder. A fist of men separated themselves from the other Firsters and pushed close to the protesters.
“Get out of here or we’ll kill you!” yelled one of the men.
“Nazis!” a protester retorted.
The men lunged. After wrestling away the protesters’ signs, the Firsters ripped them to shreds, while the mob hurled insults.
Policemen rushed in. They formed a wedge, then pushed through the yelling crowd and began leading the shaken protesters toward a safer place across the street. Still, Firsters ran in front of and behind them, jamming the way, being shoved aside by police, falling over each other. Violence simmered just beneath the surface. Anything could happen tonight. Anything was possible. These days, anger rippled across the country like waves, turning American against American. Neighbor against neighbor.
Flashbulbs popped as press photographers captured it all.
A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the press cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate as usual? Many rally-goers believed the media couldn’t be trusted. 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.” In a recent speech he’d even told supporters that the press was controlled by “dangerous elements,” men who placed their own interests above America’s. That was why he had to keep holding rallies, he explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls—“ramparts,” he called them—to hold back the infiltration of “alien blood.” It was time for America to close its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, “to preserve our American way of life.”
At 5:30 p.m., the Garden’s doors opened and a crush of people began pushing and shoving, eager to get inside. As the enormous space filled, it grew hot and deafeningly loud. There was anger here, too, brewing, seething, waiting to be channeled toward some common enemy. It seemed to fill every seat, all the way up to the dim balconies.
Down in front, rally-goers discovered a protester in their midst. Pointing, shouting, their faces flushed, they called out a tall, sullen man. Men and women climbed onto their seats for a better look. The boos and roars reverberated to the far-off corners of the building. “Throw him out!” they screamed. People were standing up all over the arena now; the aisles were filling; lines of police gathered. “Throw him out!”
The protester backed up the aisle, his eyes fastened anxiously on the policemen walking toward him. The officers followed him slowly, controlled and rigid. All the while a low, grumbling sound came from the mob, like thunder about to break into a storm. It felt, recalled one rally-goer, like “the rumbles of revolution.”
Onstage, the warm-up speakers approached the podium. Rally organizer John T. Flynn was first, followed by well-known orator and Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas. Both men gave brief, heartfelt speeches about building up the nation’s defenses. But hardly anyone in the audience listened. They were waiting for one man.
At last, he walked slowly toward the podium.
Pandemonium. It was as if every voice in the place fought to shout the loudest, the noise building and building until it was, as one rally-goer described it, “a deep-throated, unearthly, savage roar, chilling, frightening, sinister and awesome.”
“Give it to them!” shouted some in the crowd. “Give them the truth!”
“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.”
At last, he leaned into the line of microphones to utter words that would be broadcast far beyond the arena to millions of Americans across the nation. “We are assembled here tonight because we believe in an independent destiny for America.”
Foot-stomping, whistling, and clapping erupted.
The speaker waited, accepting it. When the crowd settled down a bit, he continued, pressing home his usual message. The country’s survival depended on three things: increased defense spending, isolation, and putting America first. As he ticked off each, the audience howled its approval.
The speaker didn’t try to tamp it down. He didn’t repudiate violence. He just nodded and waited for the howling to end before he continued, his fiery words repeatedly punctuated by shouts.
Sitting behind him onstage, his wife recognized the truth even if he did not. The crowd wasn’t really listening to her husband’s speech. It wasn’t his words that moved them, but the man himself. The celebrity. The personality. The hero, famous for his historic flight; the father whose family was the victim of the “Crime of the Century.”
Now the mob chanted his name: “Lindbergh! Lindbergh! Lindbergh!”
“A sound individual is produced by a sound life stream.”
—Charles Lindbergh
THE ORIGIN STORY
On a sticky summer day in 1861, Charles Lindbergh’s grandfather, August, accidentally cut off his left arm. It happened at the local sawmill. While guiding a log into the spinning blade, the young man slipped. Blood splattered across the room, and he saw both his arm and a slab of his back lopped off before he was hurtled across the room. His neighbors wrapped him in a quilt, delivered him to his bed, then went for the preacher. They expected him to die.
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. August would not permit himself to die. His wound, he knew, was bad, so deep it exposed his beating heart and part of his lung. But he believed dying was the lazy way out, and August Lindbergh was anything but lazy.
He’d come to America two years earlier to escape prison. Back in Sweden, where he’d been called Ola Månsson, he’d been a wealthy dairy farmer, as well as a member of the Swedish parliament and—through his government position—an officer of the state bank. But in 1858, political opponents accused him of embezzlement. 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.
Ola, however, was not in court to hear their verdict. To everyone’s shock—most especially his wife and children’s—Ola had run off. With him went a solid gold medal once given to him by his constituents as a token of their esteem, as well as his twenty-one-year-old mistress, Lovisa, and their seventeen-month-old son, Karl.
Ten weeks later, Ola resurfaced in another courtroom, this one in Minnesota’s Sixth District. Declaring his desire to become an American citizen (and “forgetting” to mention he was a fleeing felon), he gave officials his new name—August Lindbergh. His wife, he said, was Louisa Lindbergh. And their son was Charles August Lindbergh, called C.A. for short.
