giulio nascimbeni

N. 3/2000

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Among the personages that had someway a role asprotagonists in the nineteenth century, besides politicians, scientists, generals and every sort artists and writers, the most newspapers pointed out the American Charles Lindbergh (1902-74).

Why? The answer is simple: because it was the Lindbergh's lot to be one of that man that change the world.

When the wheels of his craft "The Spirit of St. Louis" touched the runway of the Paris airport, on May 21st 1927 in the evening, it ended an epoch that has gone on for centuries: the epoch opened by the mysterious Viking boats and by the Colombo's caravels.

They called him "The Mad Flyer ", "The Lonely Eagle ". For million Americans he was only the "prodigious Lundy".

It was not clear immediately that Lindbergh had written a chapter of everyone's history. People saw in his undertaking an astounding and also a little mad gesture. Lindbergh came from the "barnstorming" school that is the school of those pilots going from place to place exhibiting in stunts.

And Lindbergh seemed only the cleverest, the most daring.

Lindbergh has been the new pioneer, he came straight from the people that conquered the west. But he got to Europe to symbolize that the direction had changed. The horizon was not anymore California.

The horizon was that rising beyond the muddy runaway of Long Island, from where the little craft took off, plenty of carburant.

Lindbergh represented the America of the motors and the industries, the reign whose sovereign was Ford. History changed, distances were to turn into romantic feelings, not a reality anymore.

Lindbergh experimented on his own skin the horrors of the violence sowed by the drum guns of the gangsters. He got married with Ann Morrow and from the marriage a child, Charles August, was born on June 22nd 1930.

On March 1st 1932, in the evening, the child was kidnapped and in few hours he become all over the world "baby Lindbergh". Weeks passed and then months.

On May 12th "baby Lindbergh" was found murdered notwithstanding a 50 thousand dollars ransom was paid to kidnappers. Police arrested a German, Richard Hauptmann that was electrocuted on April 3rd 1935.
Lindbergh did not stand the savage curiosity mass media imposed him and chose Europe as the possible way for the oblivion. He established in England. He travelled in the nazi Germany. Goering received him and showed him the wonders of the Luftwaffe.

They concerned the crafts that in little time will bring dead and destruction to Warsaw and London.
Lindbergh felt for Germany the fatal admiration that a technician feels in front of efficiency and organization.
In America they got to know it and his popularity suffered a considerable damage.
Lindbergh did very few to get back on the top. He became an admirer of the nazism (whose exterminations and barbarisms, truth to tell, were not yet known).

There were also political motivations in Lindbergh's behaviour: his anticommunism and his likes for isolationism. Substantially, he did not want that the United States entered war siding the Soviet Union.

When the war ended, he wrote in his diary:

"America has loosen the war since it cancelled the nazi peril to strengthen the communism ".
President Eisenhower named him brigadier of reserves. He sold, for a million dollars, the cinematographic rights of his book "The Spirit of St. Louis".

The picture (that got in Italy with the title of "The Lonely Eagle ") was direct in 1956 by the great Billy Wilder. Lindbergh's personage was stared by James Stewart (1908-97), very clever but that was deemed as too much old to be a believable and young Lindbergh.
The legendary name appeared on newspapers also as a discoverer of a tribe of cave dwellers in the Philippines.

And any time a child was kidnapped, here it is the recall from the archives to the story of the unhappy flyer, of the "baby", cruelly murdered.
But the myth was up; dust covered the ideal monument the enthusiasm of the world devoted him in 1927.

He embodied three Americas (that of the will and optimism, that of violence and that of the isolationism).
It was an oppressive weight: heavy as all memories, especially when life contradicts them.

Just Lindbergh that proved by his undertaking that limits could also not exist, followed then the dark suggestion of a close country. He devoted to music, a regret, without warning himself about its perils. Without feeling, mainly, that he put himself against even the spirit of his land.
Lindbergh died on July 26th 1974 in Hana, a village in the Hawaii, where he got a week before.

He knew he was dying for a lymphatic system cancer.

He had got even more lonesome, unrelated to life, relationships and friendships.

The flight across the Ocean

Anne Morrow, pilot woman

Lindbergh House

Spirit of St.Louis

The Lindbergh