Lindbergh Was of the Twenties

On the fiftieth anniversary of Lindbergh’s pioneer flight from New York to Paris, we will surely hear more of an old story. Frederick Lewis Allen popularized it in his Only Yesterday. It is the story of how a daring young man, who had been a stunt flier and a mail pilot, had, by making the first continent-to-continent trans-Atlantic flight (there had been island-hopping flights before), rescued the American people from the fetid swamps of the Twenties and provided them with an authentic hero to worship.

There are bits of the Allen thesis that one doesn’t quarrel with. The Twenties had been a cynical era, at least in part. It had been a time of debunking, to use the word invented by W. E. Woodward, and there was a hunger for clean and chivalrous deeds in those years when daring had seemingly been patented by the bootleggers on Rum Row. It was the age of the F. Scott Fitzgerald look, with the flappers more in evidence than the philosophers. But the picture of the boyish Charles A. Lindbergh as counterpoint to an epoch is not quite as I remember it. The real truth is that Lindbergh was very much of the Twenties himself, a hero in an age that worshipped heroes with the sole proviso that they should be non-political.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

Featured Tags

Manage following

American History

Airplanes

On the fiftieth anniversary of Lindbergh’s pioneer flight from New York to Paris, we will surely hear more of an old story. Frederick Lewis Allen popularized it in his Only Yesterday. It is the story of how a daring young man, who had been a stunt flier and a mail pilot, had, by making the first continent-to-continent trans-Atlantic flight (there had been island-hopping flights before), rescued the American people from the fetid swamps of the Twenties and provided them with an authentic hero to worship.

There are bits of the Allen thesis that one doesn’t quarrel with. The Twenties had been a cynical era, at least in part. It had been a time of debunking, to use the word invented by W. E. Woodward, and there was a hunger for clean and chivalrous deeds in those years when daring had seemingly been patented by the bootleggers on Rum Row. It was the age of the F. Scott Fitzgerald look, with the flappers more in evidence than the philosophers. But the picture of the boyish Charles A. Lindbergh as counterpoint to an epoch is not quite as I remember it. The real truth is that Lindbergh was very much of the Twenties himself, a hero in an age that worshipped heroes with the sole proviso that they should be non-political.