Charles Lindbergh: Celebrity, Scandal and the Birth of “America First”
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The year is nineteen seventy four. And Charles Lindbergh knows that he is dying. Since the day his solo transatlantic flight catapulted him to worldwide fame nearly 50 years earlier, Every chapter of his life has been lived in front of the cameras. But in his secluded home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Lindbergh is focused on something the public Knows nothing about. And in a final series of letters. He pleads for the recipients to remain silent. His last secret must, he insists, survive him.
Limbo that the end of his life did have a secret side, but importantly because his public facade was always such a major part of him, we didn't know that he had a secret side.
The letters are posted to Germany. And not long after, Lindbergh succumbs to illness and dies. America mourns its loss. But decades after his death, that secret would be revealed. And when it is, it adds yet another layer to a man whose life and legacy remain fascinating, yet contradictory to this day. To take us through it is author and historian Nigel Jones.
He was courageous and adventurous. He was egotistical, there's no doubt about that. There was a positive side to him and there was an utterly negative, abhorrent side to him. he was a superhuman hero and at the same time he was a hero with feet very
much of clay. Welcome to the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Eric Myers, and this is Forbidden History.
It's the early 1900s, and the world is on the precipice of a new age. Internal combustion engines are beginning to send horses into early retirement. Electricity is banishing darkness. And mass production will soon reshape entire economies.
There was a feeling abroad both in Europe and North America that we were really on the verge of great things, and there was a great feeling that technology could solve the problems that technology was the future, and that the twentieth century would throw off the restraints of the nineteenth century and then all the old fashioned rubbish there and go forward into bright new vistas.
It's into this brave new world that Charles Lindbergh is born in 1902. just a year before the Wright brothers make their first flight. It's therefore little wonder that Lindbergh will grow up obsessed with technology.
He seems to have grown up completely entranced with technology and started uh messing around with cars and with aircraft as soon as I was gonna say as soon as he could walk, but certainly in his adolescence. And he was really entranced with the possibilities that technology
opened up. Like many children of the early 20th century, Lindbergh dreams of a life working with the new technologies of the day. And so he begins a course in mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. But in the middle of his sophomore year, he decides that his real passion lies elsewhere. I think
I think he probably was not particularly gifted at the technical side of it, oddly enough. He just wanted to master enough that would help him as a pilot, as a flyer, and was interested in that side of it. I don't think he was a person who wanted to build bridges or design new engines, although obviously that was part of it. And I think he didn't want the academic side of it. He wanted to get his hands dirty, he wanted to actually get in the cockpit and fly. That's probably why he gave up
Studies early. To pursue his dreams, Lindberg enroll at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's Flying School in Lincoln. But without the money to pay the required damage bond, he isn't able to fly solo. And so, to gain experience, he offers his services as a mechanic to a stunt pilot. And through him, is introduced to the phenomenon of barnstorming.
Barnstorming were things like looping the loop and actually the tricks of the trade of the flyers, the flyers who went up in the air, those magnificent men in their flying machines, literally and thrilled.
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