One Summer: America, 1927

and waved whenever a crowd greeted him. That wouldn’t last.
    On Thursday 26 May Lindbergh went to Le Bourget to check on his plane. It had been heavily damaged by the happy crowds, but was now being painstakingly repaired. While he was at the airfield, Lindbergh borrowed a French Nieuport fighter plane and took it up for a spin. Although he had never flown a Nieuport before and could not be sure of its tolerances, he proceeded to execute a series of loops, rolls, corkscrews, barrel turns and other aerial acrobatics. French officials watched in something like stupefaction as the most esteemed and treasured human being on Earth swooped and rolled in the sky above them, pushing to its limits a plane he knew nothing about. With frantic gestures and much hopping, they implored him to cease these dangerous manoeuvres and return to earth.Eventually, good-naturedly, Lindbergh did. It was an arresting demonstration of the proposition that Lindbergh was very possibly both the best and luckiest pilot who ever lived.
    Lindbergh’s plan was to make a tour of Europe – he particularly wished to visit Sweden, land of his fathers – and then fly back to America. He was still undecided as to whether he would attempt a risky return crossing of the Atlantic against the prevailing winds or whether he should continue east, flying home across Asia and the north Pacific. In fact, Herrick informed him, he would do neither. President Coolidge had dispatched a naval cruiser, the USS Memphis , to bring him home so that America could honour him in person and in style. The president wanted to get the ceremonies over with so that he could start a vacation trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota.
    Lindbergh was allowed to make brief visits to Brussels and London to honour promises made earlier. Remarkably, he was permitted to fly himself.
    More than 100,000 people were waiting for him at Croydon Aerodrome outside London – so many that the police couldn’t keep the runway clear. Twice Lindbergh had to abort landings as the excited crowds surged forward on to the grass – a sight that must have been deeply unnerving to a pilot without any forward visibility. Then the car carrying Lindbergh was mobbed. The police were able to force it through the crowds only by getting Lindbergh to lie down under a coat and telling people that the car was carrying a seriously injured woman.
    Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose.
    George V, not to be deflected from a full understanding of this aspect of his flight, asked how many times Lindbergh had employed it.
    Coming from the family he did, Lindbergh may never before inhis life have discussed his evacuations with anyone, and now here he was doing it with the king of England.
    ‘Twice,’ he whispered hoarsely, looking as if he might faint.
    ‘And where was that?’ the king persisted.
    ‘Once over Newfoundland and once over the open ocean.’
    The king nodded thoughtfully, satisfied.
    Three days later Lindbergh was in Cherbourg, boarding the USS Memphis for the trip home. He waved to the crowds and they cheered him in adoration. Many threw flowers. The French newspapers all wrote warm tributes and wished the young American bon voyage.
    Then life in France returned to normal. Within a day or so, American tour buses were being thumped with stones again and visitors on the Champs-Élysées were finding it awfully hard to catch the waiter’s eye. As it turned out, this was only a prelude. Before the summer was over, millions of French would hate America as they never had before, and it would actually be unsafe to be an American on French streets. The summer of 1927 would not only be the most joyous in years for America, but quite an ugly one, too.

J UNE
     

T HE B ABE
     

     
    ‘He was bigger than the President. One time, coming north, we stopped at a little town in Illinois, a whistle stop. It was about ten o’clock at night and raining like hell. The train stopped for ten minutes to get water, or something. It couldn’t have been a town of more than five thousand people, and by God, there were four thousand of them down there standing in the rain, just waiting to see the Babe.’
     
    Richards Vidmer, New York Times sportswriter

C HAPTER 8
     

     
    IN THE LATE nineteenth century, Baltimore was the sixth largest