The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation by Thomas Kessner (review)

Thomas Kessner’s book The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation is a thoughtful, well-written and well-researched historical synthesis on Lindbergh and his significance for American culture. It is a valuable addition to the literature.

Kessner makes excellent use of primary and secondary sources, but he appears to have been influenced particularly by Scott A. Berg, Lindbergh (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1998) Charles I. Ponce De Leon, Self-Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity Culture in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and David M. Friedman, The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and their Daring Quest to Live Forever (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007), among other recent scholarship. This work has reevaluated Lindbergh in light of changing times and a plethora of research on the nature of celebrity in American culture.

In a less cynical era, despite the substantial evidence for his dark and even disturbing personality, Lindbergh would have been considered not merely a celebrity, but truly heroic. Daniel Boorstin has said as much in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1975). Boorstin qualified his admiration for Lindbergh’s courage by saying that “the biggest news about Lindbergh was that he was such big news. . . .” (66). Kessner assesses Lindbergh’s celebrity and his aviation contribution in a rather even-handed manner, but his conclusions are tinged with qualifications. In Kessner’s mind, as in that of other recent experts on the so-called “Lucky Lindy,” the unquestioned hero of the Roaring 20s became the pariah of the Great Depression era, a man sadly out of touch with the pulse of the United States in difficult times. As Leo Braudy has commented in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), “Whatever the sincerity of Lindbergh’s beliefs . . . in the context of the 1930s and 1940s, they easily shaded toward fascism” (21).

On his appeal to the American public and his celebrity, Kessner argues that Lindbergh struck a chord in that he “filled the desire for heroes built from common country stock. To a nation experiencing divisive bouts over monopolies, prohibition, Darwin, and immigration, this modest son of old America . . . affirmed heartland values of self-reliance and independence” (204). Unfortunately, Lindbergh was not prepared for how to handle his celebrity status and thus became hostile to his hosts of admirers. Likewise, Kessner concedes Lindbergh’s importance to the emerging aviation industry in the U.S. Yet he has no illusions about Lindbergh’s motives. “The new mood [of the Depression era] tarnished aviation’s purest and most admired brand, tying Lindbergh to the loose atmosphere of questionable profits and collusive monopolists. For years now Americans had cherished their untainted air hero, who pursued progress for the common good.” Nevertheless, “some solid profit taking,” Kessner says, “did not strike a public devastated by Depression as Viking-like abnegation” (219).

Then there is Lindbergh’s troubling relationship with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a man whom Lindbergh revered. According to Kessner, Carrel, a brilliant experimental surgeon, exerted tremendous influence on Lindbergh’s thinking. Carrel, Kessner writes, was a man who “offered theories regarding . . . the frightening implications of a new generation of educated white women choosing careers instead of raising children, thus contributing to the ‘decline of the white race.’ . . . Democracy, he maintained, was ‘an error of the brain’; social welfare programs violated the evolutionary imperative by perpetuating the unfit; Americans were endangering their future by allowing the immigration of inferior peoples who threatened to overwhelm the superior Westerners” (198). Carrel’s beliefs obviously contributed to Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi attitudes.

Even without Carrel’s influence and “social theories,” Kessner believes that “Lindbergh’s life-long regard for order, regimentation, and predictability made him uncomfortable with democracy’s sloppy inefficiencies. The untidy...