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By Root 398 0

Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator committed suicide. Party bosses chose the governor-elect to run in a special election for the Senate seat. Bingham won again. He was sworn in as governor on January 7, 1925, and over the next twenty-four hours gave what was described as “the longest inaugural address in the history of the state”; appeared in a parade with full military escort; and hosted a governor’s ball at which he made his entrance flanked by two columns of men standing at attention, as a band played “Hail to the Chief.” So as not to be forgotten, he had commissioned the biggest portrait of a Connecticut governor ever to hang in the state’s official gallery. On the second morning of the Bingham administration, the governor resigned, and as one reporter recalled, “was off to Washington, his jaw set in broad self-satisfaction.”

Bingham’s eight years in the capital, during which the press dubbed him “the Flying Senator,” would have provided the raw material for an excellent March of Time newsreel. Here comes the handsome, silverhaired senator, landing on the steps of the Capitol in a blimp. There he goes, from almost the same spot, folding his six-feet-four frame into an autogiro—a sort of hybrid airplane/helicopter equipped with both rotors and a propeller—taking a recess from senatorial duty, golf clubs looped over one shoulder. Moments after sitting down for lunch at the exclusive Metropolitan Club, the senator from Connecticut hears the hum of the airship Graf Zeppelin; he hails a taxi to the nearest naval air base, changes into a flying suit, hops behind the controls of a plane and races to greet the first commercial transatlantic flight before the craft lands in New Jersey. When the chairman of the National Aeronautics Administration weds in Washington, D.C., best man Hiram Bingham is matched by an equally famous matron of honor—Amelia Earhart.

Such activities made Bingham wildly popular with reporters. Senior Senate colleagues who’d had their Spanish pronunciation corrected or received long lectures on aviation were less enamored of the Flying Senator. So when Bingham was caught secretly placing a lobbyist for the Connecticut Manufacturer’s Association on his Senate payroll, his fellow senators “fell upon him with a malevolent enthusiasm which can only be explained as a compensation for their own unhappy inferiority,” The American Mercury reported. Goaded by his colleagues to admit wrongdoing, Bingham refused, saying, “I have nothing to apologize for.” The other senators voted overwhelmingly to censure him, the first time the body had used such harsh punishment in twenty-seven years, since the two members of South Carolina’s delegation had physically attacked each other in 1902. His reputation blackened, Bingham was voted out during the FDR landslide of 1933.

Machu Picchu’s fame grew a bit more slowly than that of the man credited as its discoverer. For almost twenty years after Bingham’s last visit, the site was left untended yet again, until the Peruvian government ordered one final clearing in the 1930s. In 1939, the American songwriter Cole Porter, smitten by a story about the ruins that he’d seen in National Geographic, made the journey up to the location on horseback. “When they reached the top, a ‘hotel’ with three rooms and no bathroom was the only facility,” wrote one Porter biographer. Guests washed themselves with bowls of water and heeded nature’s call in the forest. Dinner was a chicken killed and cooked by their guide, “which when they ate it was still partly unplucked.”

Foreign interest in Machu Picchu—especially American interest—began to grow somewhat faster after 1948, when Hiram Bingham published a revised account of his adventures, Lost City of the Incas. To reshape what would become the most famous version of the story, Bingham wisely edited out the least interesting bits of Inca Land. Gone were the long-winded soliloquies on the deficiencies of canned goods and two entire chapters about climbing Coropuna. In their place was a narrative with three parts: an explanation of who the Incas had