One Summer: America, 1927

Wyoming, three people caught in a sudden blizzard froze to death. Altogether the storm toll was put at 228 dead and 925 injured in two days.
    In St Louis, on the morning of Lindbergh’s arrival the winds eased but were replaced by heavy fog. Players at that day’s baseball game between the St Louis Browns and New York Yankees at Sportsman’s Park complained that they could not see ten feet ahead of them. Babe Ruth in any case saw well enough to hit a double and a home run, his eighth of the young season. No one yet suspected what kind of summer he was about to have. The Yankees won the game 4–2.
    While a chill, damp fog lay over eastern Missouri, Chicago was suffering a scorching heatwave, while Colorado and the northern plains states lay buried beneath heavy late snows. Nebraska, bizarrely, experienced snow in several parts of the state while the south-western corner reported two sultry tornadoes. Never had weather been more unsettled and strange. Lindbergh seemed blissfully oblivious. If he had any trouble finding Lambert Field in the fog he never mentioned it. In fact, he said nothing at all of bad weather in any of his published accounts of those eventful days other than to note that he was glad of the storm system because it kept the other flyers in New York pinned down until he got there. That he was perhaps the only person between the two coasts bold enough to take to the air seems not to have occurred to him then or later.
    In St Louis, Lindbergh showed off the new plane to the men who had paid for it, had a nap, wolfed down a plate of steak and four eggs at Louie’s Café by the airfield, then took to the skies again, this time bound for New York. In reaching St Louis he had already notched up an impressive double achievement: he had become the first person to fly over the Rockies by night and he had set a record for the longest non-stop flight ever undertaken by an American pilot flying alone. Now, with the flight to New York, if all went to plan he would break the record for the quickest coast-to-coast flight as well. Remarkably, this was just at the time when dense fogs along the east coast grounded migrating birds and made the hunt for Nungesser and Coli futile. No airman in the eastern United States was going anywhere. Francesco de Pinedo, wishing to resume his stately progress around America in a replacement plane, tried for three days to fly to Philadelphia from New York, but was turned back each time by driving rain and low cloud.
    Logically, the weather that was keeping aviators grounded in New York ought to have kept Lindbergh from getting through, but the normal rules of life appeared to have been suspended where he was concerned. For the time being at least, young Charles Lindbergh seemed to have acquired a curious immortality.

C HAPTER 4
     

     
    TO A FOREIGN visitor arriving in America for the first time in 1927, the most striking thing was how staggeringly well off it was. Americans were the most comfortable people in the world. American homes shone with sleek appliances and consumer durables – refrigerators, radios, telephones, electric fans, electric razors – that would not become standard in other countries for a generation or more. Of the nation’s 26.8 million households, 11 million had a phonograph, 10 million had a car, 17.5 million had a telephone. Every year America added more new phones (781,000 in 1926) than Britain possessed in total.
    Forty-two per cent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 per cent of the world’s movies and 85 per cent of its cars. Kansas alone had more cars than France. At a time when gold reserves were the basic marker of national wealth, America held half the world’s supply, or as much as all the rest of the world put together. No country in history had ever been this well off, and it was getting wealthier daily at a pace that was positively dizzying. The stock market, already booming, would rise by a third in 1927 in what Herbert Hoover would later call ‘an orgy of mad speculation’, but in the spring and summer of 1927 neither he nor anyone else was worried yet.
    The America that Charles Lindbergh crossed by air in May 1927 was, as you would expect, a rather different place from the America we find today. It was, for one thing, more roomy and self-evidently rural. With a population of just under 120 million, the United States had only about four people then for every ten it holds today.