Lindbergh and Earhart in later years

 

The news clippings in this post I found in the family copy of this book.

Charles Lindbergh is a largely forgotten personality in American history these days.  Oh, there are echoes of his past fame -- or notoriety, depending on your point of view -- but really very little.  Out of curiosity, I've mentioned him to an assortment of people recently and more than one had never head his name, others have said the name seems familiar, didn't he invent some kind of rifle or have something to do with the movies?  

Others, more familiar with the past, do remember him as being the first to fly the Atlantic, which is not quite correct, but close enough.  But they don't know anything else about him.  About his involvement with the America First movement or the fight to keep America out of foreign wars, they know nothing.  They aren't even aware there was an anti-war movement.

Part of the reason he is forgotten is because he wanted to be forgotten.  Nothing had resulted from his public roles in the 1930s, his efforts to avoid American involvement in World War II futile.  And he had been savagely smeared.   So he had enough and was happy to just fade away.

 

The house where Lindbergh was born was demolished in 1973 without much fanfare and the property is now part of Wayne State University.  The house he built that was the site of what was then called the crime of the century, the kidnapping of his first child, still exists but is now operated by the state of New Jersey as a residential treatment center for male juvenile offenders and its upkeep has not been the best.

Mention Amelia Earhart, however, and almost everyone has heard of her and knows that she disappeared on an around-the-world flight, most believing that was the first time such was attempted. They are unaware that Pan American Airways already had scheduled air service between the United States and China and the United States and New Zealand at the time of her flight or that Wiley Post, whom they have never heard of, had already flown around the world twice.

The house where Amelia Earhart was born.

Of course, people have heard of her because there are those who make money from trying to find her airplane, and promote her adventure and the supposed mystery surrounding her disappearance.  So every few months, it seems, there's another media story announcing that a new clue to her vanishing has been discovered.  No one ever actually finds her airplane, of course, because then that would be the end of the money stream.  And even if someday her plane is found and the mystery is solved, then what?  Nothing, that's what.  A one-day wonder and then Earhart will fade back into the past and be forgotten just like Charles Lindbergh.  Both were people of their time, which is now very long ago. The issues and politics of those days are as curiously odd as are the automobiles and women's fashions of that era.

The house is now a museum dedicated to Earhart's life.

But then again, even without the financial incentives involved in ostentatiously looking for her airplane and the stream of news stories the searches provide, she would, I think, still be remembered.  There is just something about her that lingers in the imagination.  Her birthplace is on the National Register of Historic Places and is administered by the National Park Service and kept in immaculate condition.  To this day, people make trips to its out-of-the-way location in Atchison, Kansas, just to visit.  There is even a portrait of Earhart visible only from the air on a nearby hillside. 

Earhart with her fans.

To read her books is to be charmed by her personality, as everyone seems to have been who met her.  She also fought the good fight for women's equality in the workplace, and, of course, especially in aviation, where there were calls that no woman should be allowed to pilot an airplane without a man also in the cockpit.  She helped put a stop to that simply by doing what she did. I am one of many who personally benefit from her actions. Earhart was also the only woman of that era who bought her own airplane herself from money she earned (working as a nurse), then paid an instructor to teach her how to fly it.

Kansas hillside effigy of Amelia Earhart.

Earhart came from a prosperous family, her father a lawyer, her grandfather a judge and bank president.  She was of good stock, as they used to say, but she had no children herself,  thus no one to carry on her line.  So whatever good qualities she had were not bequeathed to the future, and though her fame lingers, her genes do not.

Charles Lindbergh, on the other hand, although scarcely a footnote in history today, did bequeath his genes to posterity, having 13 children -- six with his wife (one murdered in infancy) Anne Morrow, two with his secretary/interpreter, three with a German woman and two more with her sister, all of whom he supported financially and visited on a regular basis.  Some say he had even more children than that with other women.

Anne Lindbergh looking pensive.

What did Anne Morrow think of Charles' roving eye?  She wrote, "Him that I love I wish to be free, even from me." She also wrote, "I have been overwhelmed by the beauty and richness of our life together."

Sigh. 

Maybe you can understand why, although I find Charles Lindbergh an historically significant person, whose non-interventionist foreign policy I am deeply sympathetic to, who led a storied life full of fascination, I like Anne Morrow not only as an interesting, thoughtful and intelligent writer, but as a human being, while not feeling the same way about her husband, who was, when you come down to it, just a man.


“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity ― in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits ― islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh