Charles Lindbergh and the Businessmen Who Believed Him

Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five years old in the spring of nineteen twenty-seven, a former Army Air Corps pilot and airmail route flier with no celebrity and no money. He wanted to fly nonstop from New York to Paris to claim the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize, which had been unclaimed since Raymond Orteig offered it in nineteen nineteen. Lindbergh had a plan, a specific aircraft design, and a city that would believe in him when others would not.

A group of St. Louis businessmen, approached by Lindbergh through a St. Louis aviation promoter, agreed to back the project. The aircraft was built by Ryan Airlines in San Diego in sixty days. It was named the Spirit of St. Louis, for the city that funded it. The businessmen were not philanthropists. They calculated that a transatlantic aviation record would put St. Louis on the global map and attract aviation industry investment. They were correct.

On May twentieth, nineteen twenty-seven, Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He landed at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris thirty-three and a half hours later. He had not slept. He had eaten sandwiches he forgot about. The crowds at Le Bourget numbered in the tens of thousands and surrounded the aircraft before it stopped moving.

The Spirit of St. Louis is at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The St. Louis businessmen are less famous than they calculated, but their city's name is on the aircraft that changed the century. Lindbergh grew up in Minnesota. His story belongs to St. Louis because St. Louis believed in it first.