Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century (review)

Heroism and the masterful individual have long been a problem for historians of technology as they confront the iron laws of narrative. They have tried to escape a history of winners and to focus instead on social forces and ideologies influencing the development of devices and systems—many people taking a long series of small steps—and on how those new capabilities affect people. Here, David Lewis has given us an unabashedly individual and heroic story from the heart of our era's passion for motorized speed.

But Lewis also takes us into the emotional life of an icon. One of the wonders of Rickenbacker's roller-coaster life of eighty-three years was his ability to find an independent-minded wife, Adelaide Frost Durant, and stay married to her for half a century while keeping on reasonable, if edgy, terms with their two adopted sons. Rickenbacker's childhood in Columbus, Ohio, sounds brutal. The boy was unruly, and William, his Swiss-born day-laborer father, did not spare the rod. William died before he was 50 after a lunch-break brawl with an African-American man he insulted. (Significantly, his assailant was not lynched, but instead sentenced to ten years in prison.) The event thrust the fourteen-year-old Eddie ahead of his brothers. The day after his father's funeral, a sleepless Rickenbacker found his adored mother Elizabeth sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Without hesitation, he sat in his father's chair and promised he would not let her cry again. He went off to find a job in a glass factory, working long hours for peanuts, but becoming the family's principal breadwinner. Soon, he and his penchant for art were embraced by David Gelerntner's "machine beauty."

Eddie Rickenbacker, a man who kept tinkering with his name, also tinkered with the machinery of cars and airplanes while piloting them in the dangerous worlds of racing on the ground, so crucial to the popularization of the automobile, and combat in the air above the bloody trenches of World War I. In recounting these events, Lewis gives us both character and devices. He takes the reader into arcane worlds: the special rules, mechanical exigencies, dangers, and pecking orders of the young men who raced cars before swelling American crowds in around 1910, and the young Americans using the last months of 1918 to build up their "kills" over the fields of France. They had to love machines, every part of them, knowing them in the way a jockey knows a horse. They had to have fanatical dash, and, if they wanted to win and live, they required an ability to throw cold water over their impulsiveness. Rickenbacker, sidelined briefly by an illness, had the chance to do this in France. Not all warriors can thus rein themselves in or go on like Rickenbacker to found a car company with his name on it and an airline—the no-frills, unloved Eastern Air Lines. Since the days of his youth he demonstrated great skill as a salesman and the ruthlessness necessary to hold the reins of a corporation. He kept exercising these qualities fanatically long after economic comfort might have softened them.

This is no golden boy like Charles Lindbergh, who was wreathed in the glow of his solo flight to Paris in 1927. This is no son of a congressman who marries the daughter of Calvin Coolidge's close associate. Instead, Lewis shows us an impulsive, rough-edged, and wily alley cat, careening through decades of wild swings between stupefying success and near-death experiences. Two of the latter, the crash of an Eastern airliner in Georgia and the ditching of a rattletrap B-17 on a complex War Department mission over the Pacific, aroused in him a messianic side that is not attractive. His commitment to a free-enterprise economy was so strong that on 12 April 1945, when word...