One Summer: America, 1927

‘Spirit’ commemorating Lindbergh’s flight stands, forlornly, on a traffic island in the car park.
    Not much survives even as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer – Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh – are rarely encountered now and most of the others are never heard at all. So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T, and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.
    Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.

E PILOGUE
     

     
    ‘The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.’
     
    Calvin Coolidge in his last State of the Union address, December 1928

 
    ON 30 APRIL 1928, almost exactly one year after his first test flight in the Spirit of St Louis , Charles Lindbergh delivered his treasured plane – his ship , as he always called it – to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. In its year’s career, it had made 175 flights and been in the air for 489 hours and 28 minutes. It went on display in the Arts and Industries Building on the Mall on 13 May, one week before the first anniversary of the historic flight. Lindbergh insisted that the Spirit of St Louis never be exhibited elsewhere. It has never left the Smithsonian’s care.
    ‘I don’t know why he was so insistent about that,’ Dr Alex M. Spencer, a cheerful senior curator, tells me one day in 2011 when I visit. ‘I don’t imagine anybody asked him.’
    Spencer and I are standing on a mezzanine overlooking the spacious entrance hall of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Directly before us, frozen for ever in imagined flight, the Spirit of St Louis hangs from the ceiling on thin wires. It looks small and unnervingly insubstantial. The absence of forward visibility is striking. It is hard to imagine Lindbergh folding himself into such a cramped space – even harder to imagine him squeezing in passengers like Henry Ford. It would have been extremely snug in there. At close range, it is also clear that the plane is covered in thinfabric, adding to its air of frailty. It is little wonder that Lindbergh fretted over people touching his beloved machine.
    I have come to the museum to ask Spencer what difference, if any, Lindbergh’s flight made to the history of aviation. ‘Oh, lots!’ he responds emphatically, and guides me to a neighbouring gallery, ‘America in the Air’, a vast cube of a room filled to a point just shy of crowdedness with gleaming vintage aeroplanes. To the uninstructed eye, the planes don’t seem to have a great deal in common, but in fact they have been chosen for display with care. ‘If you consider them in the order in which they were built, they tell quite a remarkable story,’ says Spencer.
    He points first to a Ford Tri-Motor dating from 1928. Grey and boxy, made of sheets of corrugated aluminium, it looks almost as if it might have been built in a home workshop by someone who didn’t entirely understand aerodynamics. It is perhaps telling that Henry Ford declined ever to go up in one of his own machines.
    ‘Now compare that with this plane,’ Spencer says and moves us along to a Boeing 247-D. The Boeing is larger and strikingly sleeker. Every surface is attractively streamlined. The cantilevered wings are free of wires and struts, the engine cylinder heads are hidden beneath shiny cowlings, the engines themselves are built into the wings rather than just bolted on. This is clearly a plane from a new, more stylish era.
    ‘And then came this,’ says Spencer proudly, presenting his pièce de résistance, the Douglas DC-3. Created in 1935, launched in 1936, the DC-3 was the first truly modern airliner. It had twenty-one seats, could fly almost 1,500 miles and cruise at nearly 200 miles an hour. A