One Summer: America, 1927

America!” Four exhausted men came in. They’d knocked in vain at many other doors. They were queerly dressed, soaking wet, ragged, covered in mud. We were rather suspicious …’
    Monsieur Lescop and his family brought the flyers in, and gave them blankets and hot drinks. They listened in astonishment to Noville’s account of their flight, but they couldn’t report America ’s arrival to the world because the town had no telephone or telegraph service between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. By the time Byrd and his men managed to return to the beach and check their plane, it was daylight and they found that the locals had dragged it on to dry land. Less helpfully, the same locals were now plundering it, as they might a shipwreck. Six men were staggering up the beach under the weight of one of the large motors. Byrd prevailed upon them to bring the motor back, but other parts of the plane were permanently missing, including a forty-foot strip of fabric bearing the plane’s name: ‘ AMERICA ’. The missing strip was later reported to be hanging on the wall of the casino in Deauville. The plane was never reassembled. All that remains of it today are a few tattered bits of fabric in a glass display case in a museum in Ver-sur-Mer. The forty-foot strip appears to have vanished permanently.
    Despite their blunderings, the reception the Byrd team received in Paris when they finally got there (by train, the following day) was noless rapturous than that accorded Lindbergh. ‘Never have I seen anything like the wild hysteria of Paris,’ Balchen wrote in his memoirs. ‘Around the railroad station when we arrived the streets were blocked with crowds and they swarmed over the car and broke the windows and almost tipped it over.’ Women bruised them with kisses. Such was the crush that Acosta’s collarbone may in fact have been broken by the jostling crowds. It was then in any case that he first noticed pain. The car that was supposed to take them to the Hotel Continental wouldn’t start, so the mob pushed them there, shouting joyously as they went. ‘Women jumped on the running board and threw their arms around us and kissed us until our faces were daubed with red,’ Balchen went on. ‘Gendarmes flung up their arms in despair at controlling the traffic, and elbowed their way through the crowds to the car and begged for autographs themselves.’
    In America, the excitement was almost as great as it had been for Lindbergh and much more than for Chamberlin and Levine. Newspapers persisted in putting a positive spin on every aspect of the flight. The fact that Byrd’s plane was in the air for forty-three hours – almost 25 per cent more air time than Lindbergh required – was treated as heroic in itself and not a reflection of their failure to reach their destination by a direct route. Byrd told the New York Times : ‘We are nearly as all right as four men could be who went through such a strain as we did through those forty hours.’ He admitted frankly that for much of the flight they did not know where they were – a confession that would be eliminated from his book of the trip the following year.
    Because of his superior rank, the official reception for Byrd was even grander than Lindbergh’s had been. On his second day, Byrd visited Les Invalides. There a paralysed aviator named Captain Legendre was so inspired by Byrd’s presence that he rose from his chair and, for the first time in nine years, walked. Hand in hand, he and Byrd moved towards the tomb of Napoleon, a sight that made grown men weep.
    America, it seemed, had become a land of gods.

J ULY
     

T HE P RESIDENT
     

     
    ‘I’ve never liked that man from the day Grace married him, and the fact he’s become President of the United States makes no difference.’
     
    Lemira Barrett Goodhue, mother-in-law of Calvin Coolidge

C HAPTER 14
     

     
    FOR WARREN G. HARDING , the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. Few people have undergone a more rapid and comprehensively negative reappraisal than America’s twenty-ninth president. When he died suddenly in San Francisco on 2 August 1923, of an apparent cerebral haemorrhage (though some said it was heart failure and others ptomaine poisoning), he was widely liked and admired. He had been elected in 1920 with the largest majority in modern times. An estimated three million people turned out to watch the funeral train that