One Summer: America, 1927

production called That Smith Boy , which was such an embarrassment that the theatre owner asked him to close the show after two weeks even though Tilden was prepared to cover the costs. Subsequent plays did little better, and exhausted his savings. Remarkably, throughout this period he would often play in the US Open or Davis Cup tournament by day, then rush to the theatre to appear on stage by night.
    Not surprisingly, age began to catch up with him. By the summer of 1927, he was still great but no longer invincible. The French now had four of the best players in the world – Cochet, Borotra, Brugnon and René Lacoste.
    Tilden and Hunter played valiantly against Borotra and Brugnon at the Stade Français that Saturday, but the Frenchmen were too youthful and strong and won the match 4–6, 6–2, 6–2. A reporter for the Associated Press called it ‘probably the greatest men’s doubles match ever staged in France’. Herrick, alas, didn’t get to see it all. Halfway through the third set he was handed a telegraminforming him that Lindbergh had been sighted over Ireland and would be in Paris that evening. Herrick recalled later that he had not until that moment recognized the importance of Lindbergh’s takeoff. Rodman Wanamaker had so inundated him with cablegrams that it had not actually occurred to him that someone other than Byrd might get there first. He now left the stadium in a hurry. To him the prospect of Lindbergh’s safe arrival in Paris was not good news, but a source of serious concern.
     
    In 1927, Americans were not terribly popular in Europe and not popular at all in France. America’s insistence on being repaid in full, with interest, the $10 billion it had lent to Europe during the war seemed a bit rich to the Europeans since all the money borrowed had been spent on American goods, so repaying it would mean that America profited twice from the same loans. That didn’t seem to them quite fair, particularly as the European economies were uniformly wrecked while America’s was booming. Many Americans failed to share this perspective. They took the view that a debt is a debt and must be honoured, and interpreted Europe’s reluctance to pay as a shabby betrayal of trust. For those Americans of an isolationist bent – of whom our hero Charles Lindbergh would one day become the most strikingly outspoken – the situation offered powerful vindication of the belief that America should always avoid foreign entanglements. In a renewed spirit of isolationism, America increased its already high tariff barriers, making it nearly impossible for many European industries to trade their way back to prosperity.
    The result of all this was quite a lot of anti-American sentiment, especially in France, where the struggling natives had to watch American tourists – many of them young, noisy and made obnoxious by wine, and no doubt sometimes also by nature – living like princes and whooping it up on their debased currencies. The number of francs to the dollar had almost tripled in the last year, making life a struggle for the natives and a frolic for visitors. On top of this, the French keenly felt the humiliating failure of Nungesserand Coli’s mission; many were reluctant to give up the suspicion that American meteorologists had withheld crucial information from the Frenchmen. In consequence, American tour buses in Paris sometimes felt the thump of an angry stone, and American parties sometimes found it hard to get served in cafés. The atmosphere was unquestionably uneasy. Ambassador Herrick had every reason to urge caution. No one could begin to guess what would happen when the first American flew in.
    What happened, remarkably enough, was that a hundred thousand people dropped whatever they were doing and went, entranced, to Le Bourget.
     
    Charles Lindbergh’s achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment’s consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means taking close note of compass headings, speed of travel, time elapsed since the last calculation and any deviations from the prescribed route induced by drifting. Some measure of the difficulty is shown by the fact that the Byrd expedition the following month – despite having a dedicated navigator and radio operator, as well as pilot and co-pilot – missed their expected landfall by two hundred miles, were often only vaguely aware of where they were, and mistook a