The Man Nobody Knows: Charles A. Lindbergh and the Culture of Celebrity

In July 1930, Charles A. Lindbergh appeared before a select group of reporters to announce that he would no longer “cooperate” with five New York newspapers. These papers, he claimed, had repeatedly violated his privacy. Lindbergh's decision marked the culmination of a bitter and well-publicized feud between the aviator and reporters for the tabloid press. For all intents and purposes, Lindbergh had ceased cooperating with the tabloids a year earlier, when he and Anne Morrow had wed in a secret ceremony and had eluded reporters for more than a week during their honeymoon. Therefore, no one was especially surprised by his announcement, which elicited a chorus of cheers among writers for “respectable” newspapers and magazines who shared his disgust for the tabloids' “contemptible” practices. Lindbergh's views on tabloid journalism, a writer for the Nation observed, “raise him still higher in our respect and admiration, something that we hardly felt possible in view of his great modesty, his dignity, and his refusal to let himself be ruined by the unparalleled publicity and popularity which have been his.”