Q. But you still have not explained why Lindbergh is the way he is. You have only defined what he is.
A. Very well, but this is merely a personal interpretation of what built his character and formed his motives. I believe in the importance of emotional causes for most of men’s attitudes, and so I should like to mention these causes first. The young Lindbergh, as one can discover from We, seems really to have been possessed of the virtues catalogued by President Coolidge. He became the Lindbergh of today only after his flight. First came the initial impact of the hysterical reaction of the world to his accomplishment. It is bound to have affected him, and it did, despite the fact that he appeared to the public as still the simple, modest, somewhat shy boy who carried with him on his flight an introduction to the American Ambassador to Paris.
It took the public a long time to learn otherwise, because from the moment of his landing in Paris until only a comparatively short time ago, Lindbergh was protected by the press of America in a way that could happen only in this youthful country of hero-worshipers. When America has a hero, he remains a hero of purest ray serene, and no flaw may be found in him, and if any are privately discovered by newspaper reporters, or others, they are carefully hidden. This is our standard behavior toward heroes, but in the case of America’s hero of heroes the inhibitions voluntarily imposed by the press upon itself were Spartan.
In newspaper parlance a sacred cow is an individual who for reasons of policy must be protected from criticism. Every newspaper has its sacred cows. Lindbergh became the Supreme Sacred Cow of all the newspapers in America. Long after it became apparent to the working newspapermen who came in contact with him that he had succumbed to the adulation poured upon him and had completely lost that original modesty which had endeared him to the American public, perhaps above all his other qualities, and that he had, in fact, become impatiently egotistic, and convinced that he “knew it all,” he still was represented as the unassuming young man who aspired only to be left alone. He complained that the press would not let him alone, gave him no privacy, harassed him. Publicity, he declared, he hated worse than anything in the world. Newspapermen nevertheless observed that he and Greta Garbo appeared to have the same technique, and that he managed always to behave himself in such a way as to receive the greatest amount of public attention.
The normal cycle of publicity received by a celebrity of the type of Lindbergh was summed up by Sinclair Lewis. He and I were standing at the bar in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin a few days after Lindbergh landed in Paris, and the world had gone mad over him. It seemed as though never had such adulation been poured upon the head of any young man, and those who were not joining in the almost universal blaze of hysterical feeling were curiously examining the blaze, wondering what made the world go crazy.
Surely there had been more heroic exploits, even in the realm of aviation. The flight of Bleriot over the Channel in the primitive machine at his disposal in 1909 has been estimated a more important feat; while the flight of John Alcock and A. W. Brown from Newfoundland to Ireland, June 14, 1919, although almost forgotten in the din of Lindbergh’s ovation, was not only the first transoceanic flight, but considering that it was made eight years before Lindbergh’s with a machine correspondingly less modern, should rank as a greater feat. All these things were subjects of discussion, but Sinclair Lewis settled the matter by saying: “It doesn’t matter. Lindbergh is the best-known man in the world today, but ten years from now he will go into a hotel in Detroit and sign the register, ‘Charles A. Lindbergh,’ and the room clerk will say ‘Lindbergh? Yes, Mr. Lindbergh, Room 502. Boy! Show Mr. Lindbergh his room,’ and the clerk won’t know him from Adam’s off ox. That’s the way it is with fame. He has come by his with incredible speed; it will go the same way.”
But it did not. Lindbergh saw to that by behaving so eccentrically at times that even his mother-in-law, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, has been heard to complain of it. I was in London at the time of the birth of his baby there. Lindbergh for reasons of his own withheld formal announcement of the birth until long after it had taken place and the fact was known to so many persons that eventually the newspapers, although with British reticence, carried the report and queried Lindbergh to his great annoyance.
“I said to Charles,” Mrs. Morrow exclaimed to a friend, “if you want to avoid being bothered by the press, why don’t you simply announce the birth of your child? After all he’s normal and born within wedlock.” Douglas Corrigan confirmed the judgment of Lindbergh’s mother-in-law.
“Wrong-way Corrigan,” who flew to Ireland in the alleged belief that he was flying to California, was a devoted disciple of Lindbergh. I met Corrigan in Dublin shortly after he landed, and I remember two things he told me which shed some light on Lindbergh’s character. I was almost the first newspaperman to see Corrigan, and in our introductory conversation the little Irish flyer, whose flight in many ways was more remarkable than Lindbergh’s, said: “I’m not going to do like Lindbergh and be hounded to death by newspapermen. He refuses to see them and won’t say anything for quotation and makes himself so mysterious that they never have stopped going after him. If he had only opened up to them from the very first and never refused to see them, very soon they would have let him alone. That’s what I’m going to do—tell you anything you want to know, and go on seeing anybody who wants to see me, and pretty soon you will all get tired of it.”
Corrigan did just that and it all worked out exactly as he had planned. He was soon left in peace and never suffered from Lindbergh’s complaint. If Lindbergh had behaved as Corrigan did, there never would have grown up between American newspapermen and himself the secret feud that required all his prestige as national hero to keep under cover. You may say that Corrigan’s flight could not be compared to Lindbergh’s in its sensational appeal as the first solo flight across the ocean. Yes, but in another way the obscure little Irishman’s flight was the more audacious of the two. Lindbergh had a plane specially constructed, the finest money could buy. He had lavish financial backing, friends to help him at every turn. Corrigan had nothing but his own ambition, courage, and ability. His plane, a nine-year-old Curtis Robin, was the most wretched-looking jalopy.