The Arc Across the Skies
THE rebirth of splendid romance in the heart of the distracted modern world has shed glamour about the name of twenty-five year old Charles Lindbergh. Never perhaps has there been a more...
...He has turned a page in the book of history...
...It would be difficult, we think, to find in modern annals a more exact parallel to the courage and vision of Columbus, particularly in that single-handed control of events which made Lindbergh master of his accomplishment from the first thought of the deed to its final translation into action...
...But there were moments, quite as fateful as those of Columbus, when his own thoughts dwelt on abandonment, when he had to weigh the choice between going ahead to possible destruction or turning back...
...Butj if he has not discovered a continent, he has at least discovered a new race of men—for the people of France who greeted him with unrestrained joy, who were able to sink their own great and recent loss of Nungesser and Coli in a sea of generous emotion, these people are indeed a new race to us...
...Lindbergh had exactly the same conviction...
...During the voyage of Columbus there came a fateful moment when those around him clamored to return rather than forge ahead in a blind void...
...Lindbergh sought out the people whom he wished to have design his plane, and also took| part in the working out of those designs, indicating, for example, his preference for a gasoline tank in front instead of behind the pilot, with periscopes to aid his vision...
...Bald logic alone might fail to justify this statement...
...He has taken two countries that were separated by the ocean of distrust and united them again by blazing an arc of understanding across the skies...
...And instead of merely being hired by an existing corporation as a pilot, he practically created the group which gave him his opportunity...
...Since then we have tried in vain to understand a resentful people of France who have seemed at times to magnify the business adjustment of war debts out of all proportion to the great bonds of sympathy that should unite nations of the modern world...
...But in this effort to extol the sheer adventure of the flight, we think that the New York World has failed to understand what the simple heartbeats of humanity can mean in writing pages of history and achievement...
...Presumably, lie himself decided the route he would follow, and the methods of navigation he would use...
...No one living today can foretell the future alignment of world powers nor whether ultimate world peace may not depend upon an enduring spirit of common cause between those Atlantic nations from whom America received her people and with whom her future lies...
...We might take almost the exact words of the World's editorial and alter them to read: "In all truth this flight was great in the samei sense that the voyage of Columbus was great—it added much to human knowledge, it may affect momentously the history of the world...
...He has rekindled a lamp of understanding that was burning all too low...
...And it is precisely the imagination of peoples that Lindbergh has fired, and in so doing who can say he has not altered the course of human events...
...When the time approached for the great effort, Lindbergh made his own choice of the day he was to set off...
...Never perhaps has there been a more spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment...
...That voyage required financial assistance...
...It tries to carry us from the realms of accomplishment to those fields of quixotic adventure where humanity has always watched its heroes joust in great dreams...
...of the human temper that controls events...
...The very charm of it is that starting in adventure it ended by serving mankind...
...Of the second aspect of this adventure—that it added much to human knowledge—we must admit that Lindbergh discovered no new continent...
...In less than a day and a half, this boy of twenty-five succeeded in re-creating the great bond of understanding which riveted together the souls of two peoples on November 11, 1918...
...Certainly it was not the logical and exact military genius of Napoleon which carried him to momentary triumph, but rather the dramatic genius of the man which enabled him to wring destiny from a deed...
...The third aspect of his flight, the, greatest of all, links closely with the second...
...When one newspaper proclaimed Lindbergh's flight as "the greatest feat by a solitary man in the annals of the human race," the New York World suggested that "Instead of saying 'greatest' let us say 'most glorious.' For in all truth, this flight was not great in the sense that the voyage of Columbus was great—it added little to humani knowledge, it will not affect by a hair's breadth the history of the world...
...Suppose we take first the lesser aspect of Lindbergh's flight—the inherent greatness of the deed as compared to the voyage of Columbus...
...If we do not write upon that page events worthy of the chance thus offered, the fault does not lie in Lindbergh's arc across the skies, but in ourselves, for the chance of a great purpose that we have let slip by...
...When his friends advised his taking an assistant pilot, it was his own insistence that finally won them to the idea of making a lone flight...
...He knew that nations live, not by bread alone, but by the fire of their imaginations kindled afresh by every new and great emotion which sweeps them...
...Lindbergh had no companions urging him to quit...
...Logic alone has never justified or explained any great moment in human history— unless we are willing to include in the word "logic" the most complete understanding of the forces often difficult to identify which stir human imagination and promote great undertakings without apparent rhyme or reason...
...This statement is undoubtedly well meant...
...It is important not alone to us and to France, but to England, to Italy and to all countries whom the great war brought to a common task and community in effort...
...It is all too easy to accept the great happenings of history either as mere accidents or as purely spectacular incidents...
...When the World tells us that "It will not affect by a hair's breadth the history of the world," it seems to us that all history rises in protest against this misreading...
...The very charm of it is that it was not useful...
...Columbus laid down the principles upon which he would undertake his great expedition...
...But it seems to us that one journal at least, in its efforts to give Lindbergh his due place, has minimized the effects of his glorious deed...
...But a careless word by a German chancellor about a "scrap of paper" had more to do with the ultimate course of history than all the years of scientific military preparation stretching back to the arsenals of Frederick the Great, For this one contemptuous phrase stirred the temper of the world and set the pace of thought which swept Germany to defeat...
...Herrick has called Charles Lindbergh "the new ambassador to France...
...It was at the moment when the finest minds of America and France had begun to despair of preserving the deeper* bonds between these two countries that Charles Lindberg discovered a new French people for us and carried the best of what is American to the heart of France...
...If this alone is not capable of changing the course of history, of making possible further peace and accords, then we can well say that no great deed is worth the doing, because men will always rise to undo its greatness...
...We could understand, perhaps too easily, the joy with which they received the first American troops coming to their assistance after four years of torment...
...It is of the utmost importance in the shaping of history that France and America should remain friends, not alone in the polite phrases of diplomacy, but in the deeper convictions of the heart...
...We learned the heroism of France in the great war...
...But the France that greeted Lindbergh is one we have never fully known before, generous beyond all hope in acclaiming a great deed and utterly self-effacing in taking to her heart a man of alien race who had succeeded where two of her own devoted sons had tragically failed...
...Columbus convinced himself that the voyage his imagination pictured could be accomplished...
...Mistrust and misunderstanding over the tangled problems of international debts would be quite enough to alter the destiny of nations by making a concord of purpose impossible at a time of crisis...
...For we cannot, and must not, estimate too lightly the bitterness which was accumulating between France and America in the eight years since the war, nor can we shufi our eyes to what might have been a disastrous outcome...
...But he is rather more than that...
...Lindbergh did the same...
...He sought and obtained it...
...And, like Columbus, he went ahead...
...He has done with the instruments of peace what was accomplished before only by the torture of bloodshed and the terrors of war...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 5
