Charles Lindberg was born on this day in 1902.
Best known as the first person to fly solo from America to Europe, and with that the first person to be in New York City one day, and in Paris the next.
Handsome and young, the acknowledgments rolled in. Already awarded the Legion of Honor, because he was in the US Army Air Corps Reserves, he became only one of three (I believe) awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for non-combatant heroism. Lindberg became the first Time magazine’s Man of the Year. And, he met, courted, and married the brilliant Anne Spencer Morrow, better known in later years as the author Anne Morrow Lindberg. His first book “We” made him a fortune.
Their lives were marked by tragedy when their infant son was kidnapped and murdered in what came to be called the Crime of the Century. There would be worse, but it was a personal tragedy that the nation embraced as its own.
His reputation was tarnished in the years running up to the Second World War for his leadership in the America First movement and hints of anti-semitism, racism, and fascist sympathies. Once the war was declared, refused an opportunity to reenlist in the Air Corps, he flew over fifty combat missions as a “civilian consultant.”
In later years he and his wife became known for their environmental activism.
He died in 1974.
While Lindberg’s disgraceful views on race and what he thought should be American relationship with the Nazis forever marred his reputation, deservedly, his earlier adventure and much of a lifetime working for environmental causes moderated the harsh assessment of his life.
A complicated man, he did bad, he did good.
And we remember him still…
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