One Summer: America, 1927 (27 page)

In a separate account written for
National Geographic
in the fall of 1927, Byrd made it sound as if he had intentionally sought out bad weather. “I had determined not to wait for such conditions [i.e., good ones], because I felt that the transatlantic plane of the future could not wait for
ideal
conditions,” he wrote. “Moreover, we probably could gain more scientific and practical knowledge if we met some adverse weather.” The result, he said, was “the toughest air battle I believe that has ever taken place.” He went on: “I did not convey my apprehension to my shipmates. They had enough upon them already. It was a terrific strain. Only an aviator knows what it means to be 18 hours without seeing the ground or water beneath. I doubt whether any other plane has ever flown blindly for half that time.”

All this stands in interesting contrast to an account Balchen wrote
for the
New York Times
just after the flight: “We had a good plane. Our motors never gave us any trouble. Not once during the whole flight did I have to crawl out on the wings to wipe the engine.… So far as this flight across the ocean is concerned, it was one of the dullest and most monotonous I have ever been on.” In his own book, Balchen described the night of the flight as one of “beautiful starlight” all night long. That was one of the statements that the Byrd family later made him excise from the book.

Upon reaching the French coast at Brest, Byrd instructed Balchen to follow the coastline toward Le Havre rather than head overland to Paris—a strangely deviant route. As Balchen noted later, a railway line beneath them traced a straight route to Paris, but Byrd insisted that they follow the coast to the mouth of the Seine and then follow that—a move that added two hours to the journey and ensured that they arrived after the bad weather.

As with Lindbergh, a crowd of thousands waited at Le Bourget, but as midnight came and went, and the rain continued, most gave up and went home. Among those in attendance were Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine, who had flown into Paris that day as part of a tour of European capitals.

Byrd wrote: “All the French aviators waiting for us at Le Bourget agreed that not only should we not have been able to land on account of the very thick weather but that we should have surely killed people had we attempted it.” This rather jars with Chamberlin’s account. “There was only a light drizzle of rain,” he recalled. “The clouds were low but not too low for the ship to have come in safely if she had sighted the glow of Paris through the fog and been able to come down.” Byrd said in his book that his plane was clearly heard by those on the ground. Chamberlin said they never heard a thing.

“My big job now was to try not to kill anyone beneath us and to save my shipmates,” Byrd went on, turning a manifest failure into a selfless act of heroism. “The only thing to do was to turn back to water.” He ordered the plane to return to the Normandy coast.

By the time they got there, their fuel was all but spent. In the darkness it was too risky to land in a field, so they elected to ditch in the sea. Balchen made a perfect landing about two hundred yards off the village of Ver-sur-Mer, and the four men waded ashore at a spot that would become more famous, seventeen years later, as one of the landing beaches for British forces during the D-Day invasions. The landing sheared off the wheels and landing gear, but the plane remained intact.

Of the experience Byrd wrote: “I felt myself entirely responsible for the lives of my shipmates. I don’t believe they thought there was much chance of getting down safely, but still they faced it gallantly.… To the last they calmly obeyed orders. Balchen happened to be at the wheel.” This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skillful landing.

The ridiculousness was not over yet. All four members of the crew were suffering from engine deafness and couldn’t hear one another. Acosta, according to nearly all accounts, had broken his collarbone, though he later said he didn’t feel any pain at the time. The others entirely escaped injury. They straggled ashore and almost immediately encountered a youth on a bicycle on the coast road, but he fled at the sight of four strange men entering France from the sea. Dripping and cold, they went from house to house but could not make anyone understand who they were. Noville, still unable to hear, unnerved villagers by shouting at them in poor French. At length they came to a lighthouse on a hilltop about half a mile inland from the beach. Marianne Lescop, daughter of the lighthouse keeper, recalled later that the family had already been woken once by the droning of the plane—an unusual sound in Ver-sur-Mer—and had looked out the windows but seen nothing in the dark. “About three o’clock,” she went on, “we were woken again by hammering on the door. Father saw four figures down below. One of them shouted, in French, ‘Airmen America!’ Four exhausted men came in. They’d knocked in vain at many other doors. They were queerly dressed, soaking wet, ragged, covered in mud. We were rather suspicious.”

Monsieur Lescop and his family brought the fliers in, and gave them blankets and hot drinks. They listened in astonishment to Noville’s account of their flight, but they couldn’t report
America
’s arrival to the
world because the town had no telephone or telegraph service between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. It was daylight by the time Byrd and his men managed to return to the beach and check their plane, and they found that the locals had dragged it onto dry land. Less helpfully, the same locals were now plundering it, as they might a shipwreck. Six men were staggering up the beach under the weight of one of the large motors. Byrd prevailed upon them to bring the motor back, but other parts of the plane were permanently missing, including a forty-foot strip of fabric bearing the plane’s name. The missing strip was later reported to be hanging on the wall of the casino in Deauville. The plane was never reassembled. All that remains of it today are a few tattered fabrics in a glass display case in a museum in Ver-sur-Mer. The forty-foot strip appears to have vanished permanently.

Despite their blunderings, the reception the Byrd team received in Paris when they finally got there (by train, the following day) was no less rapturous than that accorded Lindbergh. “Never have I seen anything like the wild hysteria of Paris,” Balchen wrote in his memoirs. “Around the railroad station when we arrived the streets were blocked with crowds and they swarmed over the car and broke the windows and almost tipped it over.” Women bruised them with kisses. Such was the crush that Acosta’s collarbone may in fact have been broken by the jostling crowds. It was then in any case that he first noticed pain. The car that was supposed to take them to the Hôtel Continental wouldn’t start, so the mob pushed them there, shouting joyously as they went. “Women jumped on the running board and threw their arms around us and kissed us until our faces were daubed with red,” Balchen went on. “Gendarmes flung up their arms in despair at controlling the traffic, and elbowed their way through the crowds to the car and begged for autographs themselves.”

In America, the excitement was almost as great as it had been for Lindbergh and much more than for Chamberlin and Levine. Newspapers persisted in putting a positive spin on every aspect of the flight. The fact that Byrd’s plane was in the air for forty-three hours—almost 25 percent more air time than Lindbergh required—was treated as heroic in itself and not a reflection of their failure to reach their destination by a
more direct route. Byrd told the
New York Times:
“We are nearly as all right as four men could be who went through such a strain as we did through those forty hours.” He admitted frankly that for much of the flight they did not know where they were—a confession that would be eliminated from his book on the trip the following year.

Because of his superior rank, Byrd was given an official reception even grander than Lindbergh’s had been. On his second day, Byrd visited Invalides. There a paralyzed aviator named Captain Legendre was so inspired by Byrd’s presence that he rose from his chair and, for the first time in nine years, walked. Hand in hand, he and Byrd moved toward the tomb of Napoleon, a sight that made grown men weep.

America, it seemed, had become a land of gods.

•
JULY
•
THE PRESIDENT

I’ve never liked that man from the day Grace married him, and the fact he’s become President of the United States makes no difference.

—LEMIRA BARRETT GOODHUE
,
mother-in-law of Calvin Coolidge

14

For Warren G. Harding, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. Few people have undergone a more rapid and comprehensively negative reappraisal than America’s twenty-ninth president. When he died suddenly in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage (though some said it was heart failure and others ptomaine poisoning), he was widely liked and admired. He had been elected in 1920 with the largest plurality in modern times. An estimated three million people turned out to watch the funeral train that carried him back to Washington. The
New York Times
called it “the most remarkable demonstration in American history of affection, respect, and reverence.” In fact, at the time of his death President Harding was on the brink of being exposed as a scoundrel and a fool.

Three years earlier hardly anyone outside Congress had even heard of him. He was simply the junior senator from Ohio. By background and temperament he was a small-town newspaper proprietor, and that was about as far as his talents should have carried him. His nomination as a presidential candidate was one of the great astonishments of the age. It came about only because delegates to the 1920 Republican Party convention in Chicago grew hopelessly deadlocked over a slate of poor
candidates and, after four days of indecision in the midst of a merciless heat wave, settled on the worst one on offer. Harding’s only obvious qualification for higher office was his handsome bearing. “He looked,” one contemporary observed, “like a President ought to look.” In nearly every other respect—intelligence, character, enterprise—he fell considerably short of mediocre. His crassness in private could be startling. The
New York Times
reporter Richards Vidmer confided to a friend that he once saw Harding rise from his chair in the middle of a conversation and casually urinate into a White House fireplace. For his running mate, the party selected a person nearly as obscure and even more unpromising (though at least rather more refined): Calvin Coolidge.

Harding’s administration was the most breezily slack in modern times. Although he made a few irreproachable appointments—Herbert Hoover at the Commerce Department, Henry C. Wallace at the Department of Agriculture, Charles Evans Hughes at the State Department—for many posts he selected people he simply liked without considering whether they were qualified or not. His choice for head of the Federal Reserve Board was Daniel R. Crissinger, a friend and neighbor from Marion, Ohio, whose previous highest professional achievement was to be a director of the Marion Steam Shovel Company. For chief military adviser, Harding chose Ora Baldinger, who had formerly been the family newsboy. Harding gave his sister a senior position in the U.S. Public Health Service and made her husband superintendent of federal prisons; previously the couple had been Seventh Day Adventist missionaries in Burma.

The most extraordinary appointee of all was Charles Forbes, whom Harding had befriended on a trip to Hawaii and about whom he knew almost nothing. Appointed to the role of head of the Veterans Bureau, Forbes managed in two years to lose, steal, or misappropriate $200 million. Other Harding appointees wrought similar financial havoc at the Justice, Interior, and Naval Departments and at a relict department from World War I called the Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, corruptly sold oil leases to two slick (as it were) oilmen in return for $400,000 in “loans.” One of the leases was at a place near Casper, Wyoming, formally called U.S. Naval Oil Reserve
Number Three but popularly known as Teapot Dome, and that became the name of the scandal. The total cost to the country of all the various acts of incompetence and malfeasance in the Harding administration has been put at $2 billion—a sum that goes some way beyond stupendous, particularly bearing in mind that Harding’s presidency lasted just twenty-nine months.

Harding’s death was so well timed, in terms of escaping scandals, that it was widely rumored that his wife had poisoned him for the sake of his reputation. Her behavior following his death was certainly curious: she immediately began destroying all his papers and wouldn’t allow a death mask to be made. In addition, she stoutly refused to give permission for an autopsy, which is why the cause of his death has always been uncertain. All that can be said is that the president had been unwell ever since arriving in California from Alaska, where he had been on vacation. He seemed, however, to be rallying when at 7:35 p.m. on August 2, while in conversation with his wife in their room in the Palace Hotel, he shuddered and stopped talking. A moment later he was dead.

On the night he became president, Calvin Coolidge was at his boyhood home in Vermont visiting his father. It was after midnight, and he and his wife were fast asleep when news of Harding’s passing was brought to the Coolidge home from the nearby general store, the only place in town with a telephone.

By the light of a kerosene lamp—the Coolidge house did not have electricity or plumbing; rural homes still very often didn’t—Coolidge’s father, a notary public, swore his son in as president. As presidents go, Calvin Coolidge was not a magnificent specimen. He was slight of build and terse of manner. His face was pinched and inclined to scowl; he looked, in the well-chosen words of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, as if he had been “weaned on a pickle.” Whereas Warren G. Harding had charm but no brains, Coolidge had brains but little charm. He was the least affable, gregarious, metaphorically embraceable president of modern times. Yet America came to adore him. Though he would spend the
1920s doing as little as possible—that was essentially his declared policy as president—he set the mood in the nation in a way few other presidents have. If the 1920s was the age of anyone, it was the Age of Coolidge.