Charles Lindbergh’s Complicated Legacy Is Focus of September 15th Little Falls Presentation

(KNSI) – The man Minnesota claims as its most famous aviator will get a fuller telling next month, and not all of it flattering.

Benton County Historical Society Executive Director Lacey Fontaine will headline the Morrison County Historical Society’s annual meeting on September 15th with a presentation titled “Charles Lindbergh: Beyond the Spirit of St. Louis.” The free event begins at 6:00 p.m. at the Weyerhaeuser Museum in Little Falls, with Fontaine’s talk starting around 6:30.

Fontaine spent about five years working at the Lindbergh historic site in Little Falls. She says she read everything Lindbergh wrote, along with the writings of his wife and father, and that the subject has never gotten old.

“He did so many remarkable things in his life that has always been kind of overshadowed by this cloud of controversy. So that’s why I really like talking about Lindbergh because his relevancy never seems to slip,” Fontaine said.

Lindbergh was born in Detroit in 1902 and came to Little Falls when he was six weeks old. His father, C.A. Lindbergh, was a Little Falls lawyer and later a congressman. The family ran a dairy operation and later switched to chickens, and Fontaine describes the young Lindbergh as a Minnesota farm boy who ran equipment and served as the family mechanic.

He left for college in Wisconsin, lasted a year, then took up barnstorming, the acrobatic air show circuit that earned him the nickname Daredevil Lindy. Flying airmail routes, he set his sights on a $20,000 prize for the first nonstop New York to Paris flight and won it in 1927.

Fontaine says that is where most people’s understanding of the man stops. “People don’t know the extent of his life, because he’s brought up once in your history class as the first man to travel across the Atlantic nonstop. And that’s about where his story ends.”

The rest includes the kidnapping and murder of his infant son, the case that became known as the crime of the century. It also includes a medal accepted from a top Nazi official in 1938 and a 1941 America First speech in which Lindbergh blamed Jewish people for pushing the United States toward war. Fontaine says he never publicly took any of it back and doubled down in private papers and journals years later.

Fontaine says the work that gets lost includes conservation efforts that helped establish Voyageurs National Park, advocacy for animal protections overseas, and help developing a perfusion pump that keeps organs oxygenated outside the body, a forerunner of technology still used in transplant surgery today.

“You can characterize him as a hero or a villain. That’s really up to you. But we do know that he was a person and he was put on a very public pedestal. And when you do that to a person, they can fall really quickly,” Fontaine said.

She encourages anyone planning to attend to come with questions. The annual meeting is open to the public.

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