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Lindbergh in 1927: The Response of Poets to the Poem of Fact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Laurence Goldstein
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Extract

More than half a century has passed since Charles A. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Paris, and we are less certain than ever how to judge its significance. The event remains so clouded by the aura of ballyhoo that even at this distance it seems to belong less to the history of aviation than to the triumph of that inflated rhetoric we have come to recognize and distrust as media hype. “Now is the most marvelous day that this old earth has ever known,” proclaimed the soon-to-be Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, at a banquet for the young pilot, adding, “This is the happiest day, the happiest day of all days for America.” The official account of the flight prepared for the Boy Scouts of America called it “all things considered, the greatest feat undertaken by a single man.” A historian must back away from such eulogies, but not so far that he loses sight of their contribution to the essential character of the event.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 5 , October 1980 , pp. 293 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. Cited in Lindbergh, Charles A., “We” (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927), p. 311.Google Scholar

2. West, James E., The Lone Scout of the Sky (Philadelphia: Published for the Boy Scouts of America by John C. Winston, 1928), p. 49.Google Scholar

3. Michelet, Jules, The Bird (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1876), p. 68.Google Scholar

4. Lindbergh, Charles A., The Spirit of St. Louis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p. 209.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., p. 403.

6. Ibid., p. 262.

7. Passos, John Dos, Airways, Inc. (New York: Macaulay, 1928), p. 12Google Scholar. John William Ward remarks, “I have always wondered whether Charley Anderson in The Big Money is not a conscious inversion by Dos Passos of Charles A. Lindbergh: the names, of course; both fliers; both Minnesota boys.” See Ward, John William, “Lindbergh, Dos Passos and History,” The Carleton Miscellany, 6, No. 3 (Summer 1965), 37.Google Scholar

8. Cited in Davis, Kenneth S., The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 237Google Scholar. Lindbergh's speeches disputed the to-his-mind reactionary belief in some influential quarters that his solo flight actually proved that the airplane could never compete with the ocean liner as a mode of transportation. “What then is the sum of the whole matter? There is no large and growing future for commercial aviation, because the future will never be much more than the present,” concluded [Navy] Captain Alfred Charles Dewar in an essay in Forum, 80 No. 2 (08 1928)Google Scholar. “Recent sensational achievements in aviation have blinded its exponents to the inevitable obstacles. The feats of heroism and endurance performed in long oceanic flights are merely a token of the stern limitations which beset them. ‘Thou hast placed bounds upon them which they shall not pass’” (p. 166).

9. Vale, Charles (pseud, for Arthur Hooley) ed., The Spirit of St. Louis (New York: Doran, 1927), p. viGoogle Scholar. All citations in the text are to this edition.

10. Shroder, Maurice Z., Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 55, 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. West, , Lone Scout, p. 23.Google Scholar

12. Monroe, Harriet, Poets and Their Art (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 202–7Google Scholar. Hart Crane, impressed by the experimental work of poets like Marinetti and Apollinaire, wrote in 1930 that “unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e. acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles, and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function.” The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Weber, Brom (New York: Anchor, 1966), pp. 261–62.Google Scholar

13. Poetry, 32, No. 2 (05 1928), 100Google Scholar. In the same review Zabel criticizes another such collection, The Sacco Vanzetti Anthology of Verse, for the same faults.

14. Cited in Beamish, Richard J., The Boy's Story of Lindbergh (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1928), p. 100Google Scholar. See also CaptainWood, Robert Schofield, Lindbergh: His Life and Achievements (New York: World Syndicate, 1927), pp. 168–80Google Scholar. Why these books written for boys should place such emphasis on the savagery of mob response to Lindbergh is a question worth pondering.

15. The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 450.Google Scholar

16. Bewsher, Paul, The Bombing of Bruges (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), p. 11.Google Scholar

17. Cited by Ward, John W., “The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight,” American Quarterly, 10, No. 1 (Spring 1958), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For poems comparing Lindbergh to Icarus, see The Spirit of St. Louis, pp. 22, 25, 152, 172, 204.Google Scholar

18. Bliven, Bruce, “The Flying Fool,” The New Republic, 52, No. 673 (10 26, 1927), p. 260.Google Scholar

19. I am indebted to Kenneth S. Davis's discussion of Lindbergh's later career in The Hero, pp. 363–433Google Scholar. See also Cole, Wayne S., Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).Google Scholar

20. Lindbergh, Charles A., Autobiography of Values (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 28Google Scholar. He remarks later in the book, “The communication I helped to bring with my airplane is rapidly standardizing all cities, towns, villages, and even remote tribes—so much so that there is no longer a city in the world I have a desire to visit” (p. 41).

21. “I have turned my attention from technological progress to life, from the civilized to the wild. In wildness there is a lens to the past, to the present, and to the future … an awareness of values that confronts us with the need for and the means of our salvation.” See “A Letter from Lindbergh,” Life, 67, No. 1 (07 4, 1969), 61.Google Scholar

22. Cited in Wecter, Dixon, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship (1941; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 427.Google Scholar

23. Lindbergh, , Autobiography of Values, p. 398Google Scholar. For a case study of this interchange, see my essay, “‘Kitty Hawk’ and the Question of American Destiny,” The Iowa Review, 9, No. 1 (Winter 1978), 41–49.Google Scholar