One Summer: America, 1927

crowd moving past him. Miraculously, in the poor light their focus switched to a hapless American bystander who bore a passing resemblance to Lindbergh, and they now carried him off, wriggling and protesting vehemently. A few minutes later, officials in the airport commandant’s office were startled by the sound of breaking glass and the sight of the unfortunate victim being passed through the window to them. Wild-eyed and bedraggled, the new arrival was missing his coat, his belt, his necktie, one shoe and about half his shirt; a good deal of the rest of his clothing hung from him inshreds. He looked rather like the survivor of a mining disaster. He told the bemused officials that his name was Harry Wheeler and that he was a furrier from the Bronx. He had come to Paris to buy rabbit pelts, and had been drawn to Le Bourget by the same impulse that had attracted much of the rest of Paris. Now he just wanted to go home.
    Lindbergh, meanwhile, was rescued by two French aviators who conducted him to the official reception area. There he met Myron Herrick and Herrick’s son, Parmely, and daughter-in-law, Agnes. They gave Lindbergh a few minutes to catch his breath and assured him that his plane would be made safe. It took some hours for Lindbergh and the Herrick party to make their way through the congested streets to the ambassador’s residence on the Avenue d’Iéna in central Paris. There Lindbergh declined the offer of a medical examination, but gratefully accepted a glass of milk and a little food, followed by a brief hot bath.
    By now Lindbergh had been up for over sixty hours, but he agreed to meet with reporters who had collected outside the residence. Parmely Herrick showed them in. Though Lindbergh was clearly very tired, he chatted genially with them for several minutes. He told them that he had fought sleet and snow for a thousand miles; sometimes he flew as low as ten feet, sometimes as high as ten thousand. Then, in a pair of pyjamas borrowed from Parmely, he crawled into bed. It was 4.15 a.m.
    The most famous man on earth closed his eyes and slept for ten hours.
     
    fn1 Casts in the 1920s could be enormous. A Max Reinhardt production of 1924, The Miracle , had a cast of 700.

C HAPTER 7
     

     
    IT WAS DAYTIME in America. The news of Lindbergh’s arrival was known all over within minutes. Horns sounded, sirens blared, church bells rang. From end to end the nation erupted in the kind of jubilant cacophony made when wars end.
    Newspapers struggled to find words adequate to Lindbergh’s superlative achievement. The New York Evening World called it ‘the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race’. Another called it ‘the greatest event since the Resurrection’. According to the North American Review , the Earth reverberated with ‘the long-waiting joy of humanity at the coming of the first citizen of the world, the first human being truly entitled to give his address as “The Earth,” the first Ambassador-at-Large to Creation’. In terms of rhetoric and emotion, this was a Second Coming.
    The New York Times gave Lindbergh’s flight the whole of the first four pages of the paper even though there was little more to say than that he had made it. In the first four days after the flight American newspapers ran an estimated 250,000 stories, totalling 36 million words, on Lindbergh and his flight. Unsuspecting of just how much attention he would get, Lindbergh had subscribed to a newspaper-clipping service, with the articles to be sent to his mother, who discovered to her horror that a fleet of trucks waspreparing to deliver several tons of newspaper articles by the end of the first week.
    A kind of mania swept the nation. Proposals were put forward to exempt Lindbergh for life from paying taxes, to name a star or planet after him, to install him in the cabinet as head for life of a new aviation department, and to make 21 May a permanent national holiday. He was given a lifetime pass to all major league baseball games everywhere. Minnesota for a time considered a proposal to rename itself Lindberghia.
    President Coolidge announced that 11 June would be Lindbergh Day in America – the highest tribute ever paid to a private citizen by the nation. The Post Office rushed out special airmail stamps – the first time a living person had been so honoured.
    Parks were named after him, children were named after him, streets and mountains, hospital wards and zoo animals, rivers and