One Summer: America, 1927

minister.
    The Canada trip proved tragically eventful. On the Fourth of July, while the rest of America was celebrating, Lindbergh flew to Selfridge Field in Michigan where a squadron of military planes was waiting to escort him onwards to Ottawa. The plan in Ottawa was for Lindbergh to land first while the others circled above. Unfortunately, two of the escort planes clipped wings and one went into a nosedive. Lieutenant J. Thad Johnson jumped free of the crashing plane but lacked the height to get his parachute open. He struck the earth with a sickening thud close to where Lindbergh had just landed, and died instantly. The incident rather spoiled the day for many people, but Lindbergh accepted it calmly. In his world, death was an occupational hazard.
    Immediately after Ottawa, Lindbergh returned to Long Island and moved into Falaise, a French-style chateau on the Guggenheim family estate at Sands Point on the Gold Coast, a dozen miles from the Mills property where Benjamin Strong and his fellow bankers were concurrently holding their talks. The Guggenheims’ end of the Gold Coast was fractionally more bohemian than the rest and was popular with people from Broadway and the arts. Florenz Ziegfeld, Ed Wynn, Leslie Howard, P. G. Wodehouse, Eddie Cantor, George M. Cohan and, for a time, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald all had homes there, as did a few more louche types, like the mobster Arnold Rothstein. This was the world of The Great Gatsby , published two years earlier. Sands Point, where the Guggenheims clustered in three substantial houses, was the wealthy East Egg of the novel.
    Working in a bedroom overlooking the sea, Lindbergh scribbled out his life story, using Carlyle MacDonald’s draft as a guide. In a little under three weeks he completed a manuscript of about 40,000 words – an impressive achievement in terms of output if not literary merit. The book, called We , was coolly received by critics. Lindbergh devoted just eighteen lines to his childhood and sevenpages to his historic flight. The rest was mostly about barnstorming and delivering airmail. As one reviewer drily observed, ‘as an author Lindbergh is the world’s foremost aviator’. The buying public didn’t care. We was published on 27 July and went straight to the top of the bestseller list. It sold 190,000 copies in its first two months. People couldn’t get enough of anything Lindbergh did.
    And now the attention that he so little enjoyed was not only about to get much worse, but at times quite dangerous.
     
    fn1 A doubleheader is two games played on one day (usually because an earlier game was rained out).
    fn2 A pinch-hitter is someone who is sent in to bat for another, usually for some strategic reason.

C HAPTER 17
     

     
    FOR A MAN who changed the world, Henry Ford travelled in very small circles. He resided his whole life within a dozen miles of his birthplace, a farm at Dearborn, just outside Detroit. He saw little of the wider world and cared even less for it.
    He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of the New Yorker , ‘mildly unbalanced’. He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan & Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.
    His ignorance was a frequent source of wonder. He believed that the earth could not support the weight placed on it by skyscrapers and that eventually cities would collapse in on themselves, as in some kind of biblical apocalypse. Engineers explained to him that a large skyscraper typically weighed about 60,000 tons while the rock and earth excavated for the foundations would weigh more like 100,000 tons, so that skyscrapers actually reduced the burdenon the earth beneath them, but Ford was unpersuaded. He seldom let facts or logic challenge the certainty of his instincts.
    The limits of his knowledge were most memorably exposed in 1919 when he sued the Chicago Tribune for libel for calling him an ‘ignorant idealist’ and an ‘anarchist’. fn1 For eight days, lawyers for the Tribune entertained the nation by punting through the shallow waters of