Don\u2019t get me wrong: I\u2019m very proud of this book<\/a>, and I\u2019ll claim copyright over it for the sake of how intellectual property laws work. But thinking of this book as \u201cmine\u201d can obscure much about how books are written, published, and read.<\/span><\/p>\n Like most Americans, I generally think about property the way John Locke did. In the fifth chapter of his <\/span>Second Treatise of Government<\/span><\/i><\/a> (1690), the English political philosopher arrived at a problem facing Christians. While \u201cnatural reason\u201d declares a human right of self-preservation, divine revelation makes clear that God has \u201cgiven the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common.\u201d (Here Locke cites Psalm 116:15 \u2014 \u201c<\/span>The heavens are the Lord\u2019s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings.\u201d) So if<\/span> \u201cno body has originally a private dominion\u201d over the earth, how can any individual \u201cappropriate\u201d that which is necessary for life?<\/span><\/p>\n By adding work to it:<\/span><\/p>\n The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Property so defined is what Locke guaranteed as a natural right, to be protected \u2014 with life and liberty \u2014 by the government.<\/span><\/p>\n While workers like me aren\u2019t exactly tilling fields and felling trees, others have expanded Locke\u2019s definition of property <\/span>to the realm of ideas<\/span><\/a>. By adding countless hours of my own labor \u2014\u00a0research, analysis, synthesis, expression \u2014\u00a0to the idea of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s life, I have created a kind of intellectual property over which I can claim ownership.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m not here to quibble with Locke\u2019s core argument. (Though I will note <\/span>Jill Lepore\u2019s point<\/span><\/a> that Locke\u2019s definition conveniently provided a justification for white settlers\u2019 appropriation of the \u201cgreat tracts of ground\u201d to which he claimed Native Americans \u201clie waste\u201d \u2014\u00a0i.e., didn\u2019t cultivate in the manner that European farmers would.) But if there is something important about labor being added to an idea, then I\u2019d like to take the occasion of publication day to talk about the other people whose work is essential to a book like mine.<\/span><\/p>\n For a biography, that list has to start with the subject. I could only begin to think about this book because of how Charles A. Lindbergh spent and misspent his 72 years on this mortal coil. And the same is true to a slightly lesser extent of his wife Anne, whose life story is told in parallel to her husband\u2019s in my book, and all those who become supporting characters in my drama.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve often thought how peculiar it is that I\u2019m working with the lives of other human beings the way an artist might work with clay or marble or paint. <\/span>(Would I want someone to render my likeness using my life? Not hardly.) <\/span><\/i>But of course there\u2019s a difference: as a historian, I can only reconstruct a life by engaging in the reasonable interpretation of available evidence. Historical writing is an act of imagination, but not in the way that a novel like, say, <\/span>Philip Roth\u2019s about Lindbergh<\/span><\/a> is.<\/span><\/p>\n So I also depend on the work that produces and preserves evidence. Work like <\/span>Charles Lindbergh scribbling in his diary in the middle of combat in 1944, then later turning over that slim leather volume to Judith Schiff and the other archivists at Yale University<\/a>, along with manuscripts of the published books<\/a> that also give me insight into his eventful life and complicated beliefs. Or Anne Morrow dispatching letters to her sisters about the handsome pilot she met and married, then <\/span>publishing that<\/span><\/a> \u2014 and even more revealing \u2014 private correspondence decades later. Or <\/span>pastors preaching Lindbergh sermons in May-June 1927, at a time in American history when such religious expression was still published in newspapers, on the same flimsy paper where journalists later reported on the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and columnists still later debated Lindbergh\u2019s views on U.S. intervention in WWII\u2026 fragile material that technicians like my former student Hailey work to <\/span>preserve digitally<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Then there are earlier employees of that same state historical society, so dedicated to preserving <\/span>the home<\/span><\/a> in Little Falls, Minnesota where Charles Lindbergh grew up that they would reconstruct the library in its drawing room, giving me some insight into the philosophical and spiritual life of his parents. <\/span>And still another person who worked for the Minnesota Historical Society: a Harvard-trained historian named <\/span>Grace Lee Nute<\/span><\/a>, who recorded interviews and correspondence with Charles Lindbergh and his extended family for a biography of his congressman father.<\/span><\/p>\n Nute never finished her book, but I could never make sense of the available evidence if other historians and biographers hadn\u2019t already made their own attempts at interpreting it. Or if other scholars hadn\u2019t done work that helped me understand the context for the life and ideas of Charles Lindbergh \u2014 like Erika Jackson and Dag Blanck on the racial views of Swedish immigrants, or Joseph Corn and Kendrick Oliver on the religious dimensions of flight and spaceflight, or Philip Boobbyer and Daniel Sack on Frank Buchman and his Moral Rearmament movement.<\/span><\/p>\n One of the <\/span>many reasons<\/span><\/a> that I dedicated this book to Bethel physics professor Dick Peterson is that he has done more than anyone to help me see scholarship as the collective work of a community that spans space and time. In his contribution to <\/span>an earlier book<\/span><\/a> with my name on its cover, he celebrated science\u2019s \u201cconsensus-seeking openness to the correction of fellow workers. In this fashion the global science community traditionally seeks to function almost like a giant brain that is open to input and peer review from fellow workers as it seeks consensus.\u201d Perhaps the same can be true of the humanities.<\/span><\/p>\n Even the very notion of writing a spiritual biography of Charles Lindbergh originated with the work of others. MRA worker-turned-Congregational pastor T. Willard Hunter tried that project almost thirty years ago, though I didn\u2019t actually read <\/span>his book<\/span><\/a> until my own project was well along. The seed of my own interest was planted in a graduate seminar on World War I, where Mary Habeck had us read Modris Eksteins\u2019 <\/span>Rites of Spring<\/span><\/i><\/a>. <\/span><\/i>To help illustrate how people in 1927 \u201cworshipped and adored\u201d Charles Lindbergh, Eksteins quoted Harry Crosby\u2019s description of the American landing in Paris: \u201c\u2026it seems as if all the hands in the world are touching or trying to touch the new Christ and that the new Cross is his plane.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Or so I thought that\u2019s where my Lindbergh interest began\u2026 Not long ago, my mom was moving some things around at home and found a paper that I wrote in 1989, for a unit on immigration in 7th grade U.S. history class. Though mostly a family history of my Swedish ancestors who settled in Wisconsin, it included a paragraph about a famous Swedish American who grew up one state west of my Peterson relatives.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean that I started thinking about writing this book I was thirteen. But it\u2019s a welcome reminder that the main reason that I\u2019m a historian in the first place is that I was inspired by the teacher of that 7th grade class: Maureen Conway<\/a>. She didn\u2019t know that her teaching would indirectly produce a spiritual biography of Charles Lindbergh \u2014 and she\u2019d surely recoil from many of his beliefs that I investigate \u2014 but I would never have written it without her labor.<\/span><\/p>\n And none of that effort \u2014 mine or others\u2019 \u2014 would have resulted in a book at all were it not for the work of people at Wm. B. Eerdmans Co., starting with the Dutch Reformed immigrant who founded that company <\/span>110 years ago<\/span><\/a> last week. What I\u2019ve written is just the latest installment in a venerable Eerdmans <\/span>series<\/span><\/a> now overseen by Heath Carter and Kathryn Gin Lum, a line that originated thirty years ago thanks to the vision and efforts of Mark Noll and the distinguished scholars he recruited to write religious biographies. (I still can\u2019t believe that I\u2019m sharing a series with <\/span>Harry Stout<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Edwin Gaustad<\/span><\/a>!) And the book reads like it does, looks like it does, and will reach that audience that it will because of people like David Bratt, Laurel Draper, Tom Raabe, and Laura Bardolph Hubers.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m a Christian historian writing for a Christian publisher, so I can\u2019t help but think of this book as the shared labor of a body that \u201cdoes not consist of one member but of many\u201d (1 Cor 12:14). \u201cIf the whole body were an eye,\u201d continued the apostle Paul, \u201cwhere would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?\u201d (v 17) If the whole body were an author, where would the editing and typesetting or the marketing be?<\/span><\/p>\n And yet the list of co-laborers is only beginning. There would be no reason for the research, writing, editing, and the rest if the book were not read, if the ideas were not communicated to people who would then enter into their own work of interpretation and reflection. That\u2019s why today, while a milestone, does not mark the completion of a project but its transition to a new stage, as I begin to hear from reviewers and readers adding their own intellectual labor<\/a> to the idea of Charles Lindbergh and his spiritual journey.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2021\/08\/989px-Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder-_The_Harvesters_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg\")
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