America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (27 page)

But not long after his marriage, aviation, as he later wrote, went from “a primary to a secondary interest.” With the task of mapping out air routes for Trans World Airlines (TWA) not proving to be an adequate match for his grandiosity, he soon turned his attention to the mysteries of life and death. By the early 1930s, like Kinsey a half continent away, Lindbergh would switch obsessions; and his new all-consuming pursuit would be in the same field from which Kinsey was retreating—biology.

This was a return to an interest that he had abandoned when he took up flying. Ever since stumbling upon a dead horse in Little Falls, the farm boy had been fascinated by what “stopped life from living.” Inspired by several Detroit relatives who had made significant contributions to medicine and science, he had once toyed with the idea of becoming a physician. But while the indifferent student did not feel capable of handling the academic grind, the world-famous aviator held no such reservations; now supremely self-confident, Lindbergh was convinced that he could do anything if he only put his mind to it. In 1928, he began devouring medical textbooks. The following year, he treated himself to a sleek, new gadget—a high-powered binocular microscope—and began fantasizing about building his own laboratory. After moving with his new wife into a farmhouse near Princeton, New Jersey, Lindbergh got permission from Princeton University’s president to spend time at its labs. On one visit to campus, he observed the reactions of a decerebrate cat which, as he later noted, “seemed to…demonstrate the basically mechanistic qualities of life.” For Lindbergh, the fact that a cat could still eat, see, and claw without most of its brain raised existential questions. The man who attached more readily to machines than to people wondered exactly what it was that differentiated the two. “Certainly,” he speculated, “a decerebrate human would manifest similar reactions.”

Biology might have remained a hobby for Lindbergh, had not a medical crisis struck the family. In 1930, Anne’s elder sister, Elisabeth, whose mitral valve had been damaged during a bout of rheumatic fever, suffered a heart attack. She was just twenty-six, and the prognosis was grim. (She would die just four years later.) From the perspective of the onetime engineering student, his sister-in-law’s “engine” was malfunctioning, and he did not understand why a surgeon could not take it out and fix it (while a temporary pump kept her going) or put in a new “artificial heart” to replace it. Not sure how to answer his questions, a New Jersey doctor directed him to an expert, Dr. Alexis Carrel, an experimental surgeon.

On November 28, 1930, Lindbergh drove in to Manhattan to meet the fifty-seven-year-old French émigré at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Still just twenty-eight and at the height of his fame, Lindbergh towered over the short, squat, and balding Carrel, then widely considered the world’s top scientist. After listening sympathetically while Lindbergh detailed his mechanical solution to his sister-in-law’s health woes, his host mentioned that he had long been interested in developing artificial organs. At present, Carrel explained, the risk of infection precluded the insertion of a pump to replace the heart. But taken by Lindbergh’s curiosity, Carrel gave him a tour around his fifth-floor lab. Lindbergh got a chance to view up close the Frenchman’s most famous experiment, begun in January 1912, in which he kept tissue from a chick’s embryonic heart alive in a small flask. “These results showed that the permanent life [of tissues],” Carrel reported later that year in the
Journal of Experimental Medicine
, “was not impossible.” After eighteen years, as an impressed Lindbergh observed while peering through a microscope, these chick heart cells were still alive.

After pointing to a sink, where Lindbergh scrubbed his face and hands with disinfectant soap, Carrel escorted his visitor up a spiral staircase to the black operating suite in the attic.
Black
was the operative word. It was the color of the paint covering the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the operating table, and the cabinets. And the surgeons and staff all wore black robes and hoods, and their specially sterilized instruments were covered in black rubber sheets and towels. According to Carrel, his favorite color cut down on glare, and the black outfits, by highlighting dust, were easier to keep spotless. For this biologist, Louis Pasteur, the father of germ theory, was not just a towering icon but also a patron saint.

Carrel proceeded to show Lindbergh his various attempts to keep the thyroids of cats, dogs, and chickens alive outside the body by means of a glass perfusion pump. As the Frenchman conceded, his gizmos invariably failed to prevent infections. “I was as impressed by the perfection of Carrel’s biological techniques,” Lindbergh later recalled, “as I was astounded by the crudeness of the apparatuses I inspected.” The aviator then offered to help him design a better pump. It was a perfect match. Giving the new volunteer his own key to the black kingdom, Carrel would describe their relationship as “the marriage of [Lindbergh’s] mechanical genius with my scientific research.” Of Carrel, who soon became a mentor, Lindbergh later wrote, “there seemed to be no limit to the breadth and penetration of his thought.”

By early 1931, Lindbergh was commuting four times a week from New Jersey to his “secret” Manhattan office—he refused to tell the inquisitive press what he was doing—sometimes staying until the wee hours. “The moment I entered the black-walled room,” Lindbergh later observed, “I felt outside the world men ordinarily lived in.” Like the sky (and later his European love nests), this escape hatch insulated Lindbergh from the angst of quotidian existence. For this product of two volatile parents, regular contact with others in the ordinary world—particularly, his own wife and children—would prove nearly unbearable. While unstructured domesticity could increase his anxiety, “the precision of trained efficiency” that permeated Carrel’s aseptic workplace could mitigate it. The man who longed to get all the little things right enjoyed studying “every detail of his operating procedures in an attempt to make my designs conform to them.” Lindbergh also burned some midnight oil looking through Carrel’s microscopes. One night, he examined his own semen, which he described as “thousands of living beings, each one of them myself…capable of spreading my existence throughout the human race.” (As Lindbergh aged, his interest in finding receptacles for his seeds would not let up.) As Anne recorded in her diary, she had “never seen him as happy as when he was working quietly there.”

Within a few months, Lindbergh had designed a tilting-coil pump, which allowed a chick’s carotid artery to survive for a few days before succumbing to infection. After this significant first step, Lindbergh worked on increasing the power of his instrument so that it could perfuse a whole mammal organ. Over the next few years—despite a hectic schedule, which kept him in the air for long periods of time—he would continue to sketch new versions. “[Lindbergh] is…very obstinate and tenacious,” Carrel would later tell the
New York Times
, “so that he does not admit defeat.” At Carrel’s urging, Lindbergh returned to the lab just a couple of weeks after his firstborn’s body was found. As a fellow obsessive, Carrel sensed that immersion in painstaking scientific research might boost the aviator’s spirits, a hypothesis that turned out to be true. In April 1935, the engineering school dropout completed his high-tech three-chamber glass pump, which was able to keep alive a cat’s thyroid for weeks at a time. Soon about one thousand different animal organs—hearts, lungs, livers, and spleens—had been kept alive for up to thirty days in “Lindbergh pumps.” In June 1935, Lindbergh and his boss summarized their preliminary findings in an article for
Science
, which they began expanding into a book entitled
The Culture of Organs
. Shortly after its publication in June 1938, when Lindbergh and Carrel were living on neighboring islands off the coast of France,
Time
put both men on its cover above a caption that read, “They are looking for the fountain of age.” That same month, the
New York Times
heralded their development of “medical engineering,” which the paper called as “of as much importance in the progress of medicine as Pasteur’s discoveries.”

But just as Carrel and Lindbergh were gaining worldwide attention for the fruits of their eight-year collaboration, politics intruded. From the beginning, their shared love of black hoods and efficiency had gone hand in hand with fantasies of racial betterment. And with Hitler now both committing unspeakable acts against Jews and readying his war machine, the public suddenly lost its appetite for the latest findings of “the men in black,” as
Time
referred to the two celebrity scientists in its cover story. Antidemocratic to the core, Carrel wanted to replace “liberty, equality, and fraternity” with “science, authority, and order.” In 1935, he had espoused eugenics in a pseudo-philosophical screed,
Man, the Unknown
. Translated into twenty languages, the blockbuster would sell more than two million copies. Going far beyond his standard praise for Pasteur and his longtime cause célèbre, “cleanliness,” Carrel now promoted racial hygiene. He argued that “a genetic elite” should control human affairs and that the weak, the criminal, and the insane should be “disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with the proper gases.” His interest in artificial organs was inextricably linked with his goal of “remaking man.” “The development of the human personality,” he wrote, “is the ultimate purpose of civilization.” Carrel’s theories were in lockstep with the policies of the Nazi government, which in July 1933—just six months after Hitler’s election as chancellor—passed a law requiring the sterilization of all Germans alleged to be suffering from genetic disorders. In fact, in 1936, Carrel added a few lines to the German translation of his bestseller in which he praised the Nazis for taking “energetic measures against the propagation of retarded individuals, mental patients, and criminals.”

Due to his mechanistic view of human nature—which, given his obsessive temperament, he felt needed to be controlled—Lindbergh was easily seduced by the erudite Frenchman’s twisted utopian vision. For years, he had nodded approvingly as Carrel expatiated on his crackpot sociology in their frequent conversations in the black halls of the Rockefeller Institute. And like his revered teacher, Lindbergh was receptive to vast chunks of Nazi ideology. These Teutonic sympathies only intensified after Lindbergh and his wife moved to Europe at the end of 1935 to elude the hounding by the American press corps.

From his farmhouse outside of London, which he rented from the renowned Bloomsbury writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Lindbergh conducted diplomatic missions to Germany at the behest of the United States Army. In the summer of 1936, Major Truman Smith sent Lindbergh to Berlin to report on the state of German aviation. As usual, he would focus more on the machines than on the mammals in his midst. Blind to the cruelty of the recently passed “Nuremberg laws,” which deprived Jews of their rights as citizens, Lindbergh praised the “organized vitality of Germany” that was busy creating “new factories, airfields and research laboratories.” He attended the 1936 Berlin Olympics as the special guest of Hermann Goering, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man. To Carrel, he described Germany as “the most interesting place in the world today,” adding, “Some of the things I see here encourage me greatly.” While he didn’t celebrate the virulent anti-Semitism, it didn’t bother him, either.

In October 1938, at a stag dinner—wives were verboten—at the American embassy in Berlin, Goering presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, an award speckled with four miniature swastikas that had been commissioned by the Fuehrer himself. A horrified American press corps would vilify Lindbergh for not returning the medal, but a week later, the appreciative aviator wrote to Goering, asking him to “convey my thanks to the Reichschancellor.” More entranced by Germany than ever, Lindbergh planned a move to its capital, Berlin. But after
Kristalnacht
—the pogrom of November 9, 1938, in which thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, hundreds of Jewish shops and synagogues destroyed, and dozens of Jews killed—the Lindberghs put that notion on hold. “I do not understand,” a puzzled Lindbergh wrote in his diary a few days later, “these riots on the part of the Germans. It seems so contrary to their sense of order.” Like other obsessives, Lindbergh was often hyperrational; disconnected from his own emotions (and those of everyone else), he had no idea that the Nazis’ love of order masked their pathological aggression. The couple ended up choosing Paris instead. As Anne explained in her diary, they did not “want to make a move which would seem to support the German actions in regard to the Jews.” Nevertheless, as
Time
reported in December 1938, what was “once the most heroic living name in the U.S.” was now hated by a considerable swath of Americans. Paying deference to this wave of “anti-Lindberghism,” TWA stopped calling itself “the Lindbergh line” in its advertisements.

As 1938 wound down, Lindbergh tossed in his black scientific hat, ending his experiments with Carrel. “Why spend time on biological experiments,” he later wrote, “when our very civilization was at stake, when one of history’s great cataclysms impended?” But while he no longer thought about how to prevent bacteria from infecting the organs in his pump, he kept worrying about abstract threats to racial purity. Moving back across the Atlantic to Long Island in the spring of 1939, Lindbergh began doing everything in his power to keep his country out of war with Germany. While nonintervention was popular among Americans of all political stripes, Lindbergh’s rationale was curious at best and extremely naïve, if not downright delusional at worst. Not long after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Lindbergh, recycling the racist doubletalk that he had honed with Carrel, explained his position in “Aviation, Geography and Race,” an article for
Reader’s Digest
. “We, the heirs of European culture,” he declared, “are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race.” Ignoring Germany’s obvious bellicosity, Lindbergh insisted that England, France, and America should all cozy up to the Nazis. According to Lindbergh, who would keep on airing his Teutonic-friendly views in a series of high-profile addresses, this “peace among Western nations” would, in turn, provide protection against the real enemy—the Mongrels, Persians, and Moors.