One Summer: America, 1927

disappointment. ‘No parade at all would be preferable to one in which the hero is not to be satisfactorily seen,’ grumbled the Minneapolis Tribune in an editorial.
    Newspapers had begun to report that pickpockets and burglars were following Lindbergh around the country to take advantage of the distractions that his visits brought. In Chicago, during the Lindbergh parade armed gunmen strolled into a jewellery store on State Street and casually robbed it of $85,000 in cash and goods. Now came the dismaying news that souvenir hunters had broken into Lindbergh’s family home in Little Falls, unoccupied since his father’s death, and taken books, photographs and other irreplaceable personal items. Perhaps for this reason, Lindbergh wore a lookof grim resolve for much of his visit to his home town, though it may have been simple exhaustion. In any case, he listened politely but without emotion as six long-winded speakers, including the Swedish consul in Minneapolis, heaped praise upon him before he returned to his plane and with a look of clear relief took off for Fargo and points west. His trip was barely one third over. Little wonder he looked dazed.
    His tour, however, was having much greater effect than he probably realized. Papers everywhere lovingly recorded his flying times between cities: Grand Rapids to Chicago, 2 hours 15 minutes; Madison to Minneapolis, 4 hours; St Louis to Kansas City, 3 hours 45 minutes. For anyone who had ever travelled between any such pairs of places, these were magical times. Moreover, Lindbergh repeated these feats day after day, safely, punctually, routinely, without fuss or sweat, as if dropping in by air were the most natural and sensible way in the world to arrive at a place. The cumulative effect on people’s perceptions was profound. By the end of the summer, America was a nation ready to fly – quite a turn-around from four months earlier when aviation for most people simply meant barnstormers at county fairs and the like, and the United States seemed unlikely ever to catch up with Europe. Whether Lindbergh knew it or not, his tour of America had a far more transformative effect on the future of aviation than his daring dash to Paris ever could.
    The great irony is that by the time America was ready to take to the air properly, Charles Lindbergh would no longer be anybody’s hero.

S EPTEMBER
     

S UMMER’S E ND
     

     
    ‘A few Jews add strength and character to a country. Too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.’
     
    Charles Lindbergh

C HAPTER 26
     

     
    O F ALL THE labels that were applied to the 1920s – the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Ballyhoo, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense – one that wasn’t used but perhaps should have been was the Age of Loathing. There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.
    Bigotry was casual, reflexive and well nigh universal. At the New Yorker , Harold Ross forbade the use of the term ‘toilet paper’ on grounds of taste (it made him queasy), but he had nothing at all against ‘nigger’ and ‘darkie’. In the week before Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, the New Yorker ran a cartoon with the immortally dismal line ‘Niggers all look alike to me.’
    George S. Kaufman as a young man lost his job on a news paper in Washington when the owner came in one night and said, ‘What’s that Jew doing in my city room?’ Bert Williams, a black comedian who was described by W. C. Fields as ‘the funniest man I ever saw’, was beloved by millions and rich enough to rent a de luxe apartment in Manhattan, but was allowed to live there only if he agreed to confine himself to the service entrance and freight elevator when coming and going. At the Supreme Court, Justice James C. McReynolds was so prejudiced against Jews that he refused tospeak to fellow justice Louis Brandeis, and made a point of studying papers or even reading a newspaper when Brandeis was addressing the court. He was similarly rude to Mabel Walker Willebrandt because of her sex.
    Nothing better captured the expansive spirit of detestation in the period than the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Until recently moribund, the Klan burst on to the national stage in the 1920s with a vigour and breadth of appeal that it had never had in its antebellum heyday. The Klan hated everybody , but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional