This photo was taken at a ticker tape parade for Charles Lindbergh in June, 1927. It was a celebration of the historic trans-Atlantic flight he’d completed just a few weeks earlier. It’s a snowy looking affair which was attended by more than 1,000,000 hats — which were worn by at least as many people. Lindbergh himself is in that photo, somewhere. He’s hard to see through the static, but such is the case with history.
On that day, rolling down New York City’s Canyon of Heroes (aka lower Broadway) in an open top limousine, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world. People were Lindy-crazed that summer; imagine, even without the aid of TikTok, they swooned, they bought merch, and they learned the steps of his eponymous hop. Nearly one hundred years later, Lindbergh is still among the ultra-famous. If you rolled Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Elon Musk, and Timothée Chalamet (and his accent aigu) into one enormous celebrity doobie, Lindbergh could smoke all of them. Why? Because Lindbergh could fly a damn plane, all alone, across the deep Atlantic where anything could happen. He was a verifiable American hero — and what is a Canyon of Heroes for if not for heroes?
Take a stroll along that stretch of lower Broadway today, and you’ll literally walk across scores of black granite plaques commemorating other paper-strewn celebrations. You might even be surprised at what you see. (Be careful: New Yorkers are not fond of pedestrians stopping in their tracks.) For well over over a century, offices around Wall Street have been throwing tons of paper out the windows for seemingly anyone — from presidents and emperors, to athletes and astronauts. There’s a plaque memorializing the parade for The Order of the Knights of Pythias, whoever they were. And a plaque for another handsome pilot, “Wrong Way Corrigan” who wound up in Dublin instead of L.A., but boy, did he get there fast. None of those parades, however, were as well attended as the one in this photo.
Standing on that unremarkable looking street (which may have the dubious distinction of “most Pret a Mangers per block”) you’re struck by the presence of a hard wind. What you’re actually feeling is a gust of history blowing up from New York Harbor, through Battery Park and howling directly through you on its way uptown. It’s a blustery place both psychically and meteorologically; this street, the oldest north-south thoroughfare in New York, began as the Wickquasgeck trail before the Europeans arrived. It runs like a 30-mile groove through time all the way north to Sleepy Hollow. The city, and the people in it, have built themselves around it. To parade along that street, open-topped or otherwise, is to be anointed by the city — and by history — itself. Add a billion pieces of ticker tape to the mix, along with a powerful updraft, and you can see how easy it would be to get lost in the blizzard.
The scene itself is a veritable snow globe. A simulacrum of nostalgia. A man-made frenzy. Not snow; but not not snow. The photo shows a street that might have been turned upside down and back again — a disorienting sensation for those who were there in 1927, as well as those of us who look back at it now.
But history thrives on disorientation. And by now, of course, most of us know that Charles Lindbergh was a schmuck — a Yiddish word which means penis, but in this case I’d tweak that by saying he was an “aggressive” schmuck. After the big trans-Atlantic flight (and the kidnapping and murder of his baby) Lindbergh went to a dark place. And by that I mean Germany. He became extremely chummy with the Nazi party, believing them to be not only admirable for their impressive airplanes, but also because they were on to something. As the United States braced itself against the headwinds of a second world war, Lindbergh remained a staunch isolationist. And by staunch, I mean anti-semitic. It wasn’t the German Luftwaffe that he admired most, it was the fact that they were interested in exterminating Jews.
Upon learning this, Lindbergh’s reputation suffered somewhat among the American public of his day. But Lindbegh’s America First, Maga-before-it-was-Maga rhetoric found a foothold here — in fact, it found a paved superhighway. His venomous disposition was clear, even cloaked in the iciness of rationalization: Why should we help others? We have enough problems of our own! Accusing American Jews of “agitating” for war, he delivered a 1939 speech in Iowa that placed any blame for a US entry into war on the Jews themselves.
“We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country into destruction.”
- Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh wasn’t the only fascist to take an open-top convertible through the Canyon of Heroes. There have been several. Philipe Pétain (and his accent aigu) and Pierre Laval were notorious Nazi collaborators in France. They were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews during the French occupation. Dino Grande, Foreign Minister of Italy, was given a snowjob of his own in 1932. He’s now famous for telling Mussolini he was not fascist enough. We sure have a funny way of picking heroes.
Besides parading people down the street where we can wave to them and dump paper on their heads, another odd human ritual is spending this last week of the year looking back. For both reasons, I find this photo particularly evocative. We continue to experience an indignant gasp in the process of looking back: how could anyone have allowed X to happen? The shame! This moment stretches back much further than the taking of this photo, of course. But what this charming black and white image shows me is that we continue to experience a significant disconnect while we’re still in the present tense. On the street-level, we tend to want to turn away from uncomfortable headwinds, but that gust blowing past us is asking us incessant questions: What do we believe in? Are we here for others, or are we here for ourselves? If the answer is the latter, then someone else will have to suffer. And if we ignore the questions all together, the suffering is all but assured. Unfortunately, history, like the streets and sidewalks of lower Broadway, is lined with onlookers.
Perhaps it would be easier for us to answer the question of belief if we could look back at times like this with a clearer field of vision. If it were possible to pierce the invisible firmament of this photo and drain out all the ticker tape, what would we see? We wouldn’t see a megahero riding down the Canyon of Heroes lost in a culturally-generated snowglobe. We’d see a man in a car riding down a very old street. And a lot of people wearing hats.
Let it Snow, Baby!