Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [113]
Hoping to tempt Lindbergh into starring in a biopic opposite Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst hosted a dinner for him in New York at which the bashful young aviator sat between Davies and Mary Pickford. Halfway through, Pickford slipped Davies a note: “He won’t talk.” Davies wrote back, “Talk about airplanes.” In Detroit, Lindbergh took Henry Ford up for his first flight. Al Capone was on Chicago’s official welcoming committee when Lindbergh landed on Lake Michigan in a seaplane.
Lindbergh’s solo flight created an extraordinary level of interest in aviation. Harry Crosby was not the only man inspired by Lindbergh to take to the skies (“I do know how to fly in the final and real sense of the word that is in the soul Flights to the Sun but now I want to learn also in the Lindbergian sense of the word,” he wrote). As Gloria Swanson put it, after Lindbergh’s flight, “everybody wanted wings.”
Applications for pilots’ licenses went up by 300 percent in 1927. New airfields were laid; the manufacture of aircraft soared. Ryan Aircraft, who had made the Spirit, received twenty-nine orders for new aircraft within weeks of Lindbergh’s flight and were soon manufacturing three planes a week. In 1928 Wright Aeronautical stock soared from 69 points to 289.
The companies that would become United Airlines, American Airlines, Eastern Airlines and Trans-World Airlines were founded, carrying twelve or fifteen passengers rather than the one or two whom mail pilots had occasionally transported. In 1928, the same year that the Havana Air Convention established the first rules for air traffic in the Americas, Pan American Airways used Lindbergh to publicize their international mail routes between the US, the Caribbean and South and Central America. By the spring of 1929 there were sixty-one U.S. passenger airlines and forty-seven air-mail companies.
The popularity of flying mirrored the advent of the motorcar at the start of the century, which had brought with it a host of new industries and infrastructures, from a network of roads to soaring steel, rubber and petroleum production. People began speaking of transatlantic passenger and mail routes as certainties, rather than as science fiction. In an era transformed by technological developments from the telephone to nylon to typewriters to electricity, a new airborne world had arrived. Lindbergh, who had loved “the sky’s unbroken solitude,” feared what the spread of aviation might lead to. “I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fences encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.”
In the rush towards the future, the negative aspects of progress and technological advancement were ignored. Nature was seen not as a treasure to be conserved and husbanded, but as a resource to be used up. In Middletown even before Lindbergh’s flight, people no longer walked or rode their bicycles, they scorned home-grown and home-made food in favor of shop-bought and were unable to fish the town’s polluted river, stinking with industrial run-off. But as the Lynds observed, people themselves had changed far less than the objects they dealt with every day: “Bathrooms and electricity have pervaded the homes of the city more rapidly than innovations in the personal adjustments between husbands and wives or between parents and children.” Those would come later.
Another fundamental social change revealed by Lindbergh’s flight and his extraordinary personal popularity was the introduction of the idea of modern celebrity. Americans made Lindbergh into a symbol of all that was best and purest about their country. He was modest, idealistic, a prophet of the future and yet untainted by modernity, radiantly handsome, virtuous, disciplined, selfreliant—in short everything that Americans aspired to be, as well as a blank canvas on to which people could project their dreams and fantasies. Former Secretary