In this section: Intro Vaudeville and Music Hall The First Stars The Challenge of the Air The Picture Palace4 Charles Lindbergh: The Challenge of the Air
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In June, 1927, Charles Lindbergh received 3,500,000 letters, 14,000 parcels, and 100,000 telegrams. The New York World got two bushels of Lindbergh poetry. While he was having dinner in New York, a woman broke through his guards to peer into his mouth and determine for herself whether he preferred green beans or green peas. The Hoboes of America proclaimed a thirty-day mourning period when Will Rogers died. Fifty thousand people followed the funeral procession of Sacco and Vanzetti through Boston. Well-fed Americans are starved for the pomp and ritual of older nations. We even have to improvise a pathetic little twenty-minute ritual for the inauguration of our president, the most important official in the world. Our academic rituals are dull and uninspiring, and parades (such as Mardi Gras or the Mummers) have to suffice us as a people. Those who want more form have to get it from ritualistic churches or lodges. There are no prescribed ceremonies for our Independence Day, July 4, or the birthday of the Father of our Country, February 22. Robert's Rules of Order give us about the only national rituals we have.
Flight was the adventure of the interwar years as developing technology briefly made aviation a competitive sport, in search of new speed and endurance records. None captured the popular imagination of the media so much as Charles Lindbergh's nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927.
Competing for a prize of £25,000 which had claimed six lives in the previous year, 24-year-old Lindbergh took off in a Ryan monoplane he called "The Spirit of St Louis" from Roosevelt Field, Long Island on the morning of 20 May. Thirty-three and a half hours later he landed at Le Bourget, Paris.
Lindbergh' s flight seemed to have an esthetic purity about it. Unlike his rivals, he flew alone. Although he had financial backing, his plane was built on a shoestring budget. It had no navigational system, and Lindbergh memorized his route. His exploits fed the hunger to discover new objects of attention, new sensations, new people. Christened "Lucky Lindy" and "The Flying Fool" by an already enthusiastic press before he took off, Lindbergh's story' sold a record number of newspapers.
As foreigners keep telling us, America has lacked many things. Yet no one can say that our people have been deficient in great memories. Without the symbols, heraldry, inherited titles, and traditions which Europeans exalt and revere, Americans have concentrated their affection on a few men. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us." He found public idols pivotal in American life, running out threads of relation through everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. Because it answers an urgent need, hero worship is an integral part of American life.
We identify ourselves with greatness by means of a signature in an album, a lock of hair, a photograph, or a baseball that has scored a home run; we haunt stage doors and locker rooms; we pursue our favorites with candid cameras and sound recorders.
4 Next Page: The New York World's Fair
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