Charles Lindbergh lived an incredible life. Born in 1902, just before the discovery of flight by the Wright brothers, he would live to see not only the Apollo launches but the successful entry of Skylab into space, Lindbergh passing away in 1974. His work developing aviation to transcontinental and then intercontinental reach, his design of the perfusion pump, his gathering of intel on German and Russian air capabilities, his numerous survey flights around the world, his Corsair combat missions with the Marines in the Pacific and the contributions he gave to the development of rocket technology are just some of what make Lindbergh’s mark on modernity so felt even today.

The source of his fame, the incredible solo crossing of the Atlantic in his customized monoplane Spirit of St. Louis, opened doors he never imagined and changed the course of his life more than once. President Coolidge is a minor character in this recounting of his life, Lindbergh’s last autobiographical rendering, occurring only four times in connection with the President’s ordering the aviator home from Paris aboard the massive cruiser Memphis. Coolidge would first meet him at age 25, already having accomplished a great deal as an officer of the Air Corps and mail delivery pilot. His use of Lindbergh as a kind of aviation ambassador led, indirectly, to his meeting Dwight Morrow’s second daughter, Anne, on his flight to Mexico City.

Coolidge would successfully shepherd the advancement of aviation in his own sphere while Lindbergh took on the task of technical adviser to commercial and military applications of its growth and power. Wishing to travel more of Europe and at first chagrined that his plane, having made the primacy of oceangoing vessels obsolete, Lindbergh notes how the past seemed to be recapturing and mastering the future. That was only a temporary impression. Lindbergh finds the trip back to Washington to be rewarding to his curious and inquisitive mind.

The relentless acclaim and intense loss of privacy came as an understandable shock to him, a cost of his accomplishments few understood let alone respected. It resulted in tragedy: the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh’s first baby and the despicable media attention toward his second son forced them to leave America for seclusion in Europe. This combined with his confrontation of President Roosevelt regarding the disastrous air mail order and his secret travels – gathering intelligence on the German war machine – combined to further destroy his reputation in the eyes of many. The Autobiography explains each of these instances and shows how, properly understood, he merits our sympathies in this regard not our condemnation in historical memory.

Lindbergh and his mother are guests of President and Mrs. Coolidge at the temporary White House at Dupont Circle, June 11, 1927.

His unpersuasive worldview, however, cultivated since childhood, leaves the reader empty and uninspired. He was clearly a man who had followed Rousseau’s autonomous humanism to its twentieth century conclusions only to step back from the precipice and be unable to explain how he got there and how to find a way out that was coherent and consistent with his hopeful faith in science to save. He admits the dehumanizing results of science when embraced without an objective source of values, leaving man as so much machinery in an impersonalized universe. He continues course to find that this readily leads civilization to its own destruction before an impersonal universe and values-neutral natural selection of the fittest genes. His story of the baby elephant and the Masai’s obstruction of better genetic material illustrate this dismal conclusion. Man and nature are ripped from their proper proportions and reality is impossible to decipher from non-reality or “dream,” as Lindbergh calls it. This is right where humanist man found himself in the twentieth century. Having removed what was rationalized to be religious superstition and Biblical myths, a replacement for objective truth and source of values had to be found. Man, first placing it in himself and his powers of reasoning learned the horrible results of his power unchecked by moral obligations in what was the Christian worldview. It was a worldview where man’s values come by being made in the image of God, God has spoken in the Bible, through Christ we have the redemption from a fallen world, and in Him we discover an ordered universe (with ourselves and nature in proper place) with all its unity of coherence, its cause and effect, its meaning and worth.

Lindbergh, hamstrung by his own worldview, could only see the terrors of Hitler’s regime as misguided or lacking balance, evil would be too strong a term when such values as good and bad, right and wrong were not only passe but incompatible with his relativity of value judgments. Of course, while he suggested leaving all he knew for the jungle, he did not live the way he spoke or wrote. He could not. Even Sartre and Gauguin could not find a consistent existence from their worldviews. Lindbergh could not bring himself to take the leap with humanist man off the cliff into post-modernity with all its fragmentation, pessimism, and apathy. For all of his rhetoric in this book, he remained stuck at the impasse, left only with non-reason as his feeble consolation. To do so he must deny the identity and value of the individual for the irrational concepts of Hindu and Buddhist absorption into collective identity with the objects of the universe. Man is not man, he has descended to the meaningless and impersonal identity of mere material masses that somehow pass the knowledge and enlightenment of the ages genetically while becoming one with everything around us. This bleak picture is all Lindbergh leaves for us as he ends his book.

It is a worldview Coolidge would not have countenanced, even with all he loss and grief he suffered, having retained his clear grasp of reality in faith and our important place in a universe God lovingly created and continued to nurture through the darkest of times. It was man’s fallibility and sinfulness that ushered in all the death, suffering, and turmoil. Within the Christian worldview, there was no less a wonder, curiosity, and joy in the complexity and beauty of the designed world, for the early scientists were inspired to learn more by their Christian worldview. Even Lindbergh’s simplistic view of the cell illustrates the aviator’s limited understanding of how complex the smallest designs are in our world. God did not tempt man, as Lindbergh claims, relegating him to the tyranny of his own awareness and knowledge. It was man’s will to enthrone himself and believe in his own perfectability that overthrew God’s good world and brought Lindbergh with the rest of modern man to the hopeless void he discovered. The actions of Christ, on the other hand, are what fueled Coolidge’s law of service and the obligations we have to each other, because we are beholden to what God has spoken and what Christ has done for us as individuals with eternal selves. For Coolidge, the love of God gives the values that so eluded humanist man. To Him we turn for the truth, and the real hope it gives, which nothing else can supply.

Mr. and Mrs. Morrow (right) and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (left), pictured in early 1931, shortly before Mr. Morrow’s death.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting has a short tribute to one of the best men in the Coolidge administration, Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow. Mr. Morrow would become an incredible resource to the successful resolution of more than one difficult problem in the 1920s. He began interaction with Calvin Coolidge at their college, Amherst, in the 1890s. While Cal would go on to local practice in Northampton and Morrow to more illustrious work in New York at JP Morgan, he was finally persuaded by Frank W. Stearns, following Coolidge’s election as Governor of Massachusetts, that Morrow (not Stearns) was the crazy one for failing to see earlier what potential his classmate (Coolidge) possessed, a potential that could take him to the White House.

When Coolidge rose to that very office in August 1923, it seemed that Morrow would not have an opportunity to render much service to his friend. Offering his help wherever needed, Coolidge would not tap Morrow until the tough situation over air power and flight technology (stirred unnecessarily into a political issue by Billy Mitchell) needed someone with the talents Morrow could bring to bear. He chaired the board that studied the problem and whose report of recommendations became the Air Commerce Act of 1926, shrewdly preempting by two weeks the report from another committee that was set to radically bureaucratize the Air Corps and defend Mitchell’s misbehavior. Morrow was there to help Coolidge emerge out of that controversy and it would not be long before the President would look to him again for an even greater mission: Mexico. Appointed as Ambassador to Mexico, Morrow came to the knotted array of issues with both a skill for meticulous mastery of the legal details but also the disarming and humble personality for which he was known. He approached the conflict as few do in diplomacy with a love for its people and a dedication to the central principles at stake. He won them over with his sincere curiosity and boyish enthusiasm and consequently resolved both the constitutional impasse and the religious war that could have, in the hands of a lesser man, driven the United States and Mexico into military confrontation, as had happened in previous administrations.

It came as an incredible shock to Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge when, just as Morrow was beginning what promised to be an exceptional term of service in the Senate, Cal’s former Ambassador died at the age of fifty-eight, October 5, 1931, leaving behind his devoted wife and a loving family of three daughters, one son, and a growing number of grandchildren. His son-in-law, Charles Lindbergh, already having made history with his solo crossing of the Atlantic, would go on to make aviation history together with one of his daughters, Anne, by traveling — and surveying — the world via plane.

It was a severe blow to Coolidge, especially, to lose so dear a friend and for America to lose so stellar a public servant.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Vice President Calvin Coolidge with citizens of Elizabeth, New Jersey, July 1, 1922. Courtesy of the Elizabeth Public Library.

As public discussion turns to the tax plans of Presidential candidates and even to budget negotiations ahead this month, how about we also include spending discipline and debt payment as central components to any real discourse on policy? Calvin Coolidge made a point of repeatedly celebrating the accomplishment that combines real debt payment with spending reductions – whether one is an individual, a household, or a government. For Coolidge, tax cuts were secondary to debt payment and spending discipline. Plenty of people want to talk about the former and far less about the latter two. As Coolidge would say two years after this photo was taken,

“The prosperity of the people is intimately bound up with the financial policy of the Government. A considerable but disorganized number of people exist who are willing to talk about economy in public expenditure. There are a very few who, in addition to talking about it, are willing to act and vote for the actual practice of economy. But spread all over the land there are thousands upon thousands of organizations ceaselessly clamoring and agitating for government action that would increase the burden upon the taxpayer by increasing the cost of government. To my mind, the practice of public economy and insistence upon its rigid and drastic enforcement is a prime necessity of the people of the United States. In fact, the necessity is world-wide. That nation which demonstrates that it has sufficient self-control to adopt this course will immediately become the leader in the financial world. That leadership is easily within American grasp. But to secure it requires prompt action and constant vigilance.”

He knew any genuine solution to economic turmoil had to confront, sooner or later, the harsh conditions that debts not paid and expenditures flagrantly indulged inflict on people. The end will only be worse the longer we delay that day of painful but necessary reckoning in America. Here is Coolidge recognizing the people of the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, for making the tough decisions and exercising the discipline required to pay off 50% of its debt. All this forty-three years after an earlier generation had declared bankruptcy, mistakenly believing the fiscal situation to be an irretrievable loss. The road back was not achieved by creating a constant climate of emergency whereby they could cover their procrastination with meaningless resolutions that did nothing but put off the real day of hard choices to some unknown time in the future. The way back toward solvency came by making their day the day of reckoning, not leaving the mess to get sorted out after they were gone. If we are ever to see a light at the end of our fiscal tunnel, it will demand the same kind of determination and courage that Coolidge’s generation had.