Lindbergh Page 2

  Lindbergh had spent most of his adult life establishing the role of aviation in war and peace, proving himself one of the prime movers in the aviation industry. But because of his noninterventionist stance, Roosevelt refused to allow Lindbergh to fly after Pearl Harbor with the very air force he had helped modernize. He found other ways to serve. As a test pilot in private industry, he developed techniques that increased both the altitude and range of several planes in America’s fleet, saving countless lives. The military looked the other way as Lindbergh insisted on engaging in combat missions in the South Pacific; but his failure to condemn Nazi Germany before World War II haunted his reputation for the rest of his life.

  One of his greatest services to his country proved to be in helping launch the space program. As the first American airman to exhibit “the right stuff,” Lindbergh inspired his country’s first astronauts by sheer example. But more than that, he was—unknown to the public—the man most responsible for securing the funding that underwrote the research of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the inventor of the modern rocket. A friend of the first man to fly an airplane, Lindbergh lived long enough in a fast-moving world to befriend the first man to walk on the moon.

  In time, Lindbergh came to believe the long-range effects of his flight to Paris were more harmful than beneficial. As civilization encroached upon wilderness in the world he helped shrink, he turned his back on aviation and fought to protect the environment. He rededicated his life to rescuing nearly extinct animals and to preserving wilderness areas. For years this college dropout advanced other sciences as well, performing medical research that would help make organ transplants possible. He made extraordinary archaeological and anthropological discoveries as well. A foundation would later be established in Lindbergh’s name that offers grants of $10,580—the cost of the Spirit of St. Louis—for projects that further his vision of “balance between technological advancement and preservation of our human and natural environment.”

  Lindbergh believed all the elements of the earth and heavens are connected, through space and time. The configurations of molecules in each moment help create the next. Thus he considered his defining moment just another step in the development of aviation and exploration—a summit built on all those that preceded it and a springboard to all those that would follow. Only by looking back, Lindbergh believed, could mankind move forward. “In some future incarnation from our life stream,” he wrote in later years, “we may understand the reason for our existence in forms of earthly life.”

  In few people were the souls of one’s forbears so apparent as they were in Charles Lindbergh. As a result of this transmigration, Lindbergh believed the flight that ended at Le Bourget one night in May 1927 originated much farther back than thirty-three and a half hours prior at Roosevelt Field. It started with some Norsemen—infused with Viking spirit—generations long before that.

  2

  NORTHERN LIGHTS

  “I wonder why my folks ever left that place!”

  —C.A.L. (flying over Sweden, 1933)

  IN THE LATE SUMMER, THE SKY OVER SWEDEN SOMETIMES casts a striking color, an extremely pale but radiant blue. By fall the currents of the surrounding winds and waters shift, producing a quilt of clouds that can go unturned most of the winter.

  In 1859, even with the arrival of spring, dark clouds persisted in hanging over one Swede in particular, a prominent figure in Skåne, the country’s southernmost province.

  Ola Månsson had been born fifty-one years earlier in the village of Gårdlösa in the parish of Smedstorp. Educated in the local grammar school and raised a Lutheran, he had bought a farm in the village of his birth. The Baltic Sea lay but twelve miles from his two hundred acres of flat prairie land, which boasted numerous lakes and a trickling river. At twenty-five he had married a girl from the neighboring parish of Onslunda, Ingar Jönsdotter, eight years his junior. Over the next twenty-two years, they produced eight children.

  Because of the middling quality of the soil, Månsson’s “River Farm” subsisted off its dairy products and a few basic crops. But Månsson, a strong, stocky man with an imposing nose and piercing eyes, held the respect of his neighbors. Possessed of a dramatic oratorical style and a firm sense of his own rectitude, in 1847 he persuaded his district to elect him to the Farmer Estate in the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.

  Månsson arrived in the multi-islanded capital, six hundred miles away, at a trying moment in Swedish politics. Social reform was sweeping across the nation, and Månsson often led the charge, advocating a basic liberalism which he felt was in the best interests of his farm-labor constituency. Even as a freshman “Riksdagsman,” he argued for tax relief and a loosening of the Lutheran Church’s hold over Swedish society. He later advocated laws protecting children, the elderly, women, and Jews. He urged the abolition of the whipping post. He was soon appointed to the powerful appropriations committee, chosen from the entire Riksdag; and he was the odds-on favorite to become the next speaker for the Farmer Estate. But greater visibility brought greater vulnerability.

  The liberal press suggested that Ola Månsson was in the pocket of Crown Prince Carl—who was soon to become King Carl XV. Known as “The Farmer King”—largely for his rural tastes, which included a penchant for carousing with farmers and sleeping with their daughters—Carl was said to have bought Månsson’s support on several key votes.

  In the last weeks of 1858, Ola Månsson fell from political grace even faster than he had risen. Through his position in the Riksdag, he had been appointed as an officer of the State Bank of Sweden in Malmö. Using information furnished by one of Månsson’s enemies, the public prosecutor charged Månsson with embezzlement. The accusation stemmed from his having violated bank regulations—acting as an agent for people applying for loans, a conflict of interest compounded by the further accusation that he had exacted one percent commissions in helping secure loans. At first Månsson denied any wrongdoing; but as a paper trail was produced, he admitted that he had accepted some compensation. The courts ordered Månsson’s dismissal from his position as an officer of the bank and that he be stripped of his civil rights.

  The case went to Sweden’s Supreme Court, which Månsson treated with utter contempt. He insisted that his having served as an agent was his personal business. When he was presented on the stand with an extremely compromising document, he ripped it up, only to wipe his buttocks with one of the pieces of paper. On June 4, 1859, the Supreme Court of Sweden unanimously upheld the lower courts’ decision, depriving Månsson of his civil rights.

  The defendant was not present for the verdict. In the few weeks between his court apppearance and the final ruling, Ola Månsson disappeared. It would be months before Månsson’s even more troubling personal travails were revealed, which further explained his sudden flight. Some of the details would not come to light for another century.

  During the long parliamentary sessions, Månsson’s wife, Ingar, remained on the farm raising their children while Ola enjoyed the many pleasures of Stockholm, including its women. There the forty-nine-year-old man from Skåne fell in love with Lovisa Callén, a waitress at Lennström’s restaurant. She was a simple country girl, born in 1837 not far from Stockholm. Having lost her father, Lovisa went to the city at fifteen as a “piga,” a maidservant. She became a skilled seamstress before taking her restaurant job, by which time she had bloomed into a dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty, with a trim figure. In April 1857, the nineteen-year-old discovered she was pregnant.

  Her son with Månsson was born on January 20, 1858, five blocks from Lovisa’s Stockholm residence, at the home of her midwife. Månsson was in Gårdlösa at the time. The “piga” there was making his bed when she discovered a letter addressed to him, which she turned over to Ingar; it was from Lovisa, announcing the birth of their baby and asking what to call him. The birth was recorded in the capital city’s “oakta dopbok,” which registered the births of bastards, stating that the child’s parents were “unknown.” Two days late
r, the boy was christened Karl August.

  For more than a year, Månsson juggled his two families and his thriving career. Had his illegal banking activities not come to light, he might very well have kept his life and child with Lovisa in the shadows. But once he saw the handwriting on the courthouse wall, he began taking English lessons; and in May 1859, while his case was still pending, he had obtained a passport.

  By that time, fewer than twenty thousand Swedes had emigrated to the United States, though, over the next sixty years, stories of America would lure more than one million of their countrymen. Månsson was not as financially desperate as most Swedish refugees; but, more than most, he was by necessity intrigued by this place where he could erase his past—where, in his fifties, he and the young mother of their eighteen-month-old son could start a new life.

  Månsson returned to Gårdlösa and announced his intention to flee, offering his wife the opportunity to accompany him. When she and the rest of the family refused, he transferred ownership of the River Farm and all his other property to one of his sons, so that they would all be cared for. A robust forty-three at the time of Ola’s departure, Ingar would be dead within five years.

  Carrying as few possessions as possible—including a gold medal he had once received from his constituents, and Lovisa’s only heirloom, a gold watch—Månsson and his new family embarked on a three-day voyage across the North Sea to Hull, on the eastern coast of England. There they boarded a train across the Midlands for Liverpool—120 miles, some seven hours away. A few weeks later, a steamer took them to Quebec, a crossing that lasted a month. Upon arriving in the New World, Ola Månsson decided to give himself and his second family new names. At a time when Swedes were breaking tradition and assuming permanent patronymics—instead of last names that proclaimed whose son or daughter they were—he adopted the surname his two older sons had acquired at the University in Lund, and he adapted their own Christian names.

  And so the newly named August Lindbergh, his wife, Louisa Carline Lindbergh, and their baby, Charles August Lindbergh, boarded a train in Quebec and went all the way to Windsor, Ontario, on the Grank Trunk Railway of Canada. Unable to afford the extravagance of a first-class sleeping car, the Lindberghs spent most of a week sitting on wooden benches as the wood-burning locomotive chugged across southern Quebec and Ontario, occasionally attaining a speed of twenty-five miles per hour.

  In Windsor the Lindberghs crossed the Detroit River and entered the United States. They spent the better part of another week riding trains to Chicago, then across Illinois until they reached Dubuque on the Mississippi River. There they boarded a boat that carried them three hundred miles north into the year-old state of Minnesota. They disembarked at the Falls of Saint Anthony, a town of three thousand, which would merge in another thirteen years with the flour-milling town of Minneapolis. From there it was seventy-five miles west—by ox-cart and prairie schooner—through wilderness to the village of Litchfield, where the Lindberghs had friends from Sweden. With its open prairie land dotted by hundreds of surrounding lakes, Litchfield looked remarkably like Gårdlösa; but August Lindbergh chose not to settle there. He opted instead to squat on even more virgin timberland fifty miles north, about a mile and one-half outside a place called Melrose in Stearns County. On August 4, 1859, after ten weeks of arduous travel, the journey officially came to an end, when August Lindbergh appeared at the Minnesota District Court to declare his intention to become a Citizen of the United States.

  The immigrants settled into the rigors of pioneer life on the edge of the American wilderness, one of only three families in Melrose. They built a sod hut. Even though the Minnesota summer was hotter than those in Sweden, the winters were known to be colder; so Lindbergh at once got to replacing the crude one-room hovel with a log house, cut from trees on the free land he had staked out. Barely had it been finished when Louisa gave birth to the second of six children she would deliver in America over the next thirteen years—Lovisa, Linda, Victor, Juno, Frank, and Lillian. Lindbergh traded his gold medal for a plow, so that after clearing the land he could break the ground.

  As the Lindbergh family expanded, so did their house. It became one of the biggest in the county, with a frame addition to the cabin, upstairs bedrooms, and wood siding. On August 2, 1861, while milling wood for the house—nine miles away in Sauk Center—Lindbergh got too close to the exposed saw. The machinery caught his clothes and tugged him into the spinning blade. Men at the mill ran for help, summoning the local missionary. The Reverend C. S. Harrison later reported his findings, that the saw “had taken a slab off his [left] arm and then struck him in the back and hurled him half way across the mill,” gashing him so deep as to expose his beating heart and part of a lung. He dispatched a man to fetch the nearest surgeon, sixty miles away. Meantime, locals wrapped Lindbergh in a quilt, piled him into a lumber wagon and carted him home. Reverend Harrison noticed a spring of cold water nearby and prescribed constant bathing of the mangled arm; he also dressed the wound in the back as best he could, picking out cloth and sawdust before binding the ripped flesh together. The doctor arrived on the third day after the accident, by which time there was little to do but amputate the arm at the shoulder.

  When Lindbergh was able to get out of bed, he called for the dead limb so that he could bury it in his garden. “Bring him to me,” Lindbergh cried. Then, taking the fingers of the lifeless left hand, he said, “Gootbye, mine dear hand. You have been a goot frent to me for fifty years. You haf always been goot and true to me, but you can’t be viv me anymore.”

  Combatting adversity with stoicism, August Lindbergh established the work ethic his descendants would emulate. By the next harvest, he had rigged up a belt with a metal ring, into which he could insert one of the handles of his scythe, thus allowing him to continue to work. But feeling he could not do the job of a whole man, he summoned his son Per from the farm in Sweden; another son, Måns, would follow. Lindbergh grew a long, shaggy beard, making his now permanent scowl even more intimidating. It also proved practical in washing and drying his remaining hand.

  Thousands of Indians lived in the surrounding areas, mostly Sioux and the friendlier Chippewa, whose birch-bark teepees reminded the immigrants from old European communities just how new America was. The settlers viewed the Native Americans as a nuisance more than a threat, for they generally kept to themselves, only occasionally giving the settlers cause for alarm. In August 1862, Little Crow rebelled against the government’s treatment of his tribe and led the Sioux on the warpath. August Lindbergh unpenned his animals and herded his then-pregnant wife and two children into a cart, then headed to the stockade fort at St. Cloud, fifty miles east. There they waited out what came to be known as the Sioux Uprising, while tales of massacres, tomahawking, and children being shoved into ovens made their way into the fort. When the Lindberghs returned to their homestead many weeks later, newborn in arms, they discovered their farm intact and most of the animals rounded up. Many of the white men in the Minnesota Valley were not so lucky; three hundred fifty settlers were killed. The Indians won the battle but lost the war. The Sioux were banished from Minnesota by an act of Congress; and each month brought caravans of prairie schooners carrying new settlers.

  In October 1867, August Lindbergh officially acquired 160 acres of land in Stearns County at no cost through the Homestead Act; and the following spring he purchased forty adjacent acres for fifty dollars. Life on the new land was hard. The Lindberghs raised all their own food and made most of their necessities—clothes, soap, even bullets. The elements constantly conspired against them. Over three successive summers in the 1870s, grasshoppers ravaged the farm. One year the insects devoured everything but the garden peas, leaving the family to live off pea soup for months. Whooping cough took the lives of three Lindbergh children. When Louisa’s housedresses wore through, she took to wearing the few silk frocks she had carried from Sweden—even for such chores as milking the cow. When the cow died, she sold her gold watch to buy another. Lou
isa often suffered from crying jags. Through it all, August Lindbergh was thrilled to be in America and proud when he became a citizen on December 23, 1870. Both he and his wife learned English as quickly as possible, insisting that it be spoken at home. They both read their Bible, and August studied history for the rest of his life.

  Opinionated as ever, August Lindbergh found himself drawn into political discussions. He wrote letters to the editors of the local newspapers; and after organizing the local school district, he sat on its board and served as town clerk, justice of the peace, and postmaster.