California is the destination that turns Charles A. Lindbergh’s 1940 presidential campaign into a spectacle of aviation, celebrity, and political persuasion. By flying west in the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh summoned the memory of his transatlantic triumph and presented himself to voters not chiefly as a politician, but as the admired Lone Eagle whose daring had once seemed to embody American possibility.

A campaign launch redirected west

Rather than appear at the Detroit Labor Day parade, where he was expected to launch his campaign, Lindbergh arrived without warning at the Long Island airfield from which he had begun his celebrated transatlantic flight. The Spirit of St. Louis had been secretly transported there under a tarp and kept overnight in a remote hangar. By the time Lindbergh taxied it onto the field the following morning, reporters from wire services, New York radio stations, and newspapers were waiting to witness his takeoff across the country to California.

The decision to fly west had been made only hours earlier by Lindbergh himself, not by the Republican Party professionals assigned to guide his first political campaign. The Democratic Party dismissed the flight as a publicity stunt arranged by his staff, although the account emphasizes that even Lindbergh’s own campaign team had expected him to go to Detroit. The unannounced change of course made the flight itself an opening political act: the candidate could appear to move by personal decision, in the manner of the independent aviator whose fame preceded his political career.

Arrival and reception

At Los Angeles Airport, Lindbergh’s coast-to-coast flight fell well short of the record he had set a decade earlier, using a more advanced aircraft. Its political effect, however, did not depend on speed. Tens of thousands of people, largely aircraft workers employed by the major manufacturers in and around Los Angeles, greeted him with an enthusiasm comparable to the crowds that had welcomed him elsewhere.

Lindbergh spoke in a high-pitched, flat Midwestern voice, markedly unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. His flight outfit—a shirt and tie under a lightweight jumper, with high boots and jodhpurs—reproduced the clothes in which he had crossed the Atlantic. He kept on his leather flight headgear, with goggles pushed up on his forehead. The look also echoed the placement of the goggles in Sandy Roth’s charcoal portrait of him, a private image that joined the campaign’s public staging to the family’s own experience of Lindbergh’s celebrity.

His Los Angeles address was brief: forty-one words, by the narrator’s count, including the A in his middle name. He framed his candidacy as a means of keeping the United States out of another world war and presented the voters’ choice as one between Lindbergh and war. The compressed appeal made California not simply a celebratory stop, but the first major setting for the campaign’s stark political argument.

California as campaign theater

After a shower, a snack, and an hour’s nap at the airport, Lindbergh boarded the Spirit of St. Louis again and flew to San Francisco, reaching Sacramento by nightfall. The sequence carried the spectacle beyond a single landing: the celebrated aircraft repeatedly descended into California’s cities, linking the candidate’s personal legend to a statewide public audience.

The reception seemed to restore an earlier America in which the Depression and the political conflicts of the present receded from view. Lindbergh’s appearance in his famous plane brought back the emotional atmosphere of 1927 and the image of the fearless, self-reliant aviator who accomplished what others had thought impossible. That revival was politically useful precisely because it shifted attention from Lindbergh’s record as a candidate to the already powerful story of Lindbergh the hero.

California was also the first destination in a much larger aerial campaign. Over the following month and a half, Lindbergh spent a day in each of the forty-eight states, traveling between cities, towns, villages, and rural communities by plane and broadcasting remarks locally and nationally. His return to the Long Island runway in late October completed the tour. California’s crowds and landings thus introduced the campaign’s method on a national scale: use the plane to bring the Lone Eagle directly to voters, then repeat the message that America could still avoid entering the war.