Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris ushered in America's age of commercial aviation. Thomas Kessner takes a fresh look at one of America's greatest moments, explaining how what was essentially a publicity stunt became a turning point in history. He vividly recreates the flight itself and the euphoric reaction to it on both sides of the Atlantic, and argues that Lindbergh's amazing feat occurred just when the world--still struggling with the disillusionment of WWI--desperately needed a hero to restore a sense of optimism and innocence. Kessner also shows how new forms of mass media made Lindbergh into the most famous international celebrity of his time, casting him in the role of a humble yet dashing American hero of rural origins and traditional values.…
"Since Lindbergh’s flight there have been probably hundreds of accounts of it. He himself wrote two. We was a light biography with a 10-page account of the flight that he released within two months of landing. In We Lindbergh referred to himself and also his airplane, which he saw as his partner in that achievement. Then in 1953 he published a book called The Spirit of St Louis , which won the Pulitzer prize. He devoted most of the book to an hour-by-hour chronicle of the flight balanced by his meditations while in flight. In that way he interweaves the story of his life with the story of his historic flight. It was a brilliant literary achievement, very straightforward but often a bit scary, particularly when he’s falling asleep mid-Atlantic. That was his second book about the flight. Historians and journalists wrote many more. A Scott Berg wrote a magisterial biography using Lindbergh’s papers with the permission of his wife. But then Kessner comes along. He’s a historian at CUNY. Kessner focused on not just the flight itself but how the flight was promoted and its impact on American aviation and culture. He tells that story wonderfully. Thanks to movie newsreels, which had been developed in years before 1927, not only did people know about Lindbergh but they had a visual image of him. And thanks to radio they knew his voice too. I don’t think any world leader was as widely recognised, until you get to Stalin maybe and Roosevelt and Churchill. As to the impact on aviation – one dramatic thing was that aviation stocks all of a sudden were worth money. That’s a mark of the market’s belief that the future of commercial aviation seemed much brighter after Lindbergh flew. The Air Mail Act, which gave subsidies to passenger airlines for carrying the mail, was enacted in 1930. The publicity that Lindbergh generated facilitated the passage of that act."
