in New York, , 1927
The New York Times printed an
above the fold, page-wide headline: "Lindbergh Does It!" and his mother's house in Detroit was surrounded by a crowd reported at nearly a thousand. Lindbergh became "an international celebrity, with invitations pouring in for him to visit European countries", and he "received marriage proposals, invitations to visit cities across the nation, and thousands of gifts, letters, and endorsement requests." At least "200 songs were written" in tribute to Lindbergh and his flight. After landing, Lindbergh was eager to embark on a tour of Europe. As he noted in a speech a few weeks afterward, Lindbergh's flight marked the first time he "had ever been abroad", and Lindbergh "landed with the expectancy, and the hope, of being able to see Europe." The
French Foreign Office flew the American flag, the first time it had saluted someone who was not a head of state. At the
Élysée Palace, French
President Gaston Doumergue bestowed the
Légion d'honneur on Lindbergh, pinning the award on his lapel, with Ambassador
Herrick present for the occasion. Lindbergh also made flights to Belgium and Britain in the
Spirit before returning to the United States. On May 28, Lindbergh flew to
Evere Aerodrome in
Brussels, Belgium, circling the field three times for the cheering crowd and taxiing to a halt just after 3:00 PM, as a thousand children waved American flags. On his way to Evere, Lindbergh had met an escort of ten planes from the airport, who found him on course near
Mons but had trouble keeping up as the
Spirit was averaging "about 100 miles an hour." The
United Press reported that "One million persons are in Brussels today to greet Lindbergh", constituting "the greatest welcome ever accorded a private citizen in Belgium." After Belgium, Lindbergh traveled to the
United Kingdom. He departed Brussels and arrived at
Croydon Air Field in the
Spirit on May 29, where a crowd of 100,000 "mobbed" him. Before reaching the airfield, Lindbergh overflew London where crowds, some on roofs, "gazed at the flyer" and observers with "field glasses in the
West End business district" watched him. About 50 minutes before Lindbergh landed, the "roads leading toward Croydon airport were jammed." Accompanied by two
Royal Air Force planes, Lindbergh then flew 90 miles from Croydon to
Gosport, where he left the
Spirit to be dismantled for shipment back to New York. On May 31, accompanied by an attache of the
U.S. Embassy, Lindbergh visited British Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin at
10 Downing Street and then motored to
Buckingham Palace, where
King George V received him as a guest and awarded him the British
Air Force Cross. In anticipation of Lindbergh's visit to the palace, a crowd massed "hoping to get a glimpse" of him. Lindbergh received the first award of this medal, but it violated the authorizing regulation. Coolidge's own executive order, published in March 1927, required recipients to perform their feats of airmanship "while participating in an aerial flight as part of the duties incident to such membership [in the Organized Reserves]", which Lindbergh failed to satisfy. awards Lindbergh the
Distinguished Flying Cross, June 11, 1927 Lindbergh flew from Washington, D.C., to New York City on , arriving in
Lower Manhattan. He traveled up the
Canyon of Heroes to City Hall, where he was received by Mayor
Jimmy Walker. A
ticker-tape parade followed to
Central Park Mall, where he was awarded the New York Medal for Valor at a ceremony hosted by New York Governor
Al Smith and attended by a crowd of 200,000. Some 4,000,000 people saw Lindbergh that day. The following night, Lindbergh was honored with a grand banquet at the
Hotel Commodore given by the Mayor's Committee on Receptions of the City of New York and attended by some 3,700 people. He was officially awarded the check for the prize on . On July 18, 1927, Lindbergh was promoted to the rank of colonel in the Air Corps of the
Officers Reserve Corps of the
U.S. Army. On , 1927, a Special
Act of Congress awarded Lindbergh the
Medal of Honor, despite the fact that it was almost always awarded for heroism in combat. It was presented to Lindbergh by President Coolidge at the
White House on , 1928. The medal contradicted Coolidge's earlier executive order directing that "not more than one of the several decorations authorized by Federal law will be awarded for the same act of heroism or extraordinary achievement" (Lindbergh was recognized for the same act with both the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Flying Cross). The statute authorizing the award was also criticized for apparently violating procedure; House legislators reportedly neglected to have their votes counted. Lindbergh was honored as the first
Time magazine
Man of the Year (now called "Person of the Year") when he appeared on that magazine's cover at age 25 on , 1928; he remained the youngest
Time Person of the Year until
Greta Thunberg in 2019. The winner of the 1930 Best Woman Aviator of the Year Award,
Elinor Smith Sullivan, said that before Lindbergh's flight:
Autobiography and tours "'' 1st Edition, 1927 Barely two months after Lindbergh arrived in Paris, G. P. Putnam's Sons published his 318-page autobiography
"WE", which was the first of 15 books he eventually wrote or to which he made significant contributions. The company was run by aviation enthusiast
George P. Putnam. The dustjacket notes said that Lindbergh wanted to share the "story of his life and his transatlantic flight together with his views on the future of aviation", and that
"WE" referred to the "spiritual partnership" that had developed "between himself and his airplane during the dark hours of his flight". However, as Berg wrote in 1998, Putnam's chose the title without "Lindbergh's knowledge or approval", and Lindbergh would "forever complain about it, that his use of 'we' meant him and his backers, not him and his plane, as the press had people believing"; nonetheless, as Berg remarked, "his frequent unconscious use of the phrase suggested otherwise." Putnam's sold special autographed copies of the book for $25 each, all of which were purchased before publication.
"WE" was soon translated into most major languages and sold more than 650,000 copies in the first year, earning Lindbergh more than $250,000. Its success was considerably aided by Lindbergh's three-month, tour of the United States in the
Spirit on behalf of the
Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. Between and , 1927, Lindbergh visited 82 cities in all 48 states, rode in parades, and delivered 147 speeches before 30 million people. Lindbergh then toured 16 Latin American countries between , 1927, and , 1928. Dubbed the "Good Will Tour", it included stops in
Mexico (where he also met his future wife, Anne, the daughter of U.S. Ambassador
Dwight Morrow),
Guatemala,
British Honduras,
El Salvador,
Honduras,
Nicaragua,
Costa Rica,
Panama, the
Canal Zone,
Colombia,
Venezuela,
St. Thomas,
Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic,
Haiti, and
Cuba, covering in just over 116 hours of flight time. A year and two days after it had made its first flight, Lindbergh flew the
Spirit from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., where it has been on public display at the
Smithsonian Institution ever since. Over the previous 367 days, Lindbergh and the
Spirit had logged 489 hours 28 minutes of flight time. A "
Lindbergh boom" in aviation had begun. The volume of mail moving by air increased 50 percent within six months, applications for pilots' licenses tripled, and the number of planes quadrupled. Lindbergh and
Pan American World Airways head
Juan Trippe were interested in developing an air route across Alaska and Siberia to China and Japan. In the summer of 1931, with Trippe's support, Lindbergh and his wife flew from Long Island to
Nome, Alaska, and from there to Siberia, Japan and China. The flight was carried out with a
Lockheed Model 8 Sirius named
Tingmissartoq. The route was not available for commercial service until after World WarII, as prewar aircraft lacked the range to fly
Alaska to Japan nonstop, and the United States had not officially recognized the Soviet government. In China they volunteered to help in disaster investigation and relief efforts for the
Central China flood of 1931. This was later documented in Anne's book
North to the Orient.
Air mail promotion Lindbergh used his world fame to promote air mail service. For example, at the request of Basil L. Rowe, the owner of West Indian Aerial Express (and later
Pan Am's chief pilot), in February 1928, he carried some 3,000 pieces of special souvenir mail between
Santo Domingo, Dominican Repulic;
Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and
Havana, Cubathe last three stops he and the
Spirit made during their "Good Will Tour" of Latin America and the Caribbean between , 1927, and , 1928, and the only franked mail pieces that he ever flew in his iconic plane. Two weeks after his Latin American tour, Lindbergh piloted a series of special flights over his old CAM-2 route on and . Tens of thousands of self-addressed souvenir covers were sent in from all over the world, so at each stop Lindbergh switched to another of the three planes he and his fellow CAM-2 pilots had used, so it could be said that each cover had been flown by him. The covers were then backstamped and returned to their senders as a promotion of the air mail service. In 1929–1931, Lindbergh carried much smaller numbers of souvenir covers on the first flights over routes in
Latin America and the
Caribbean, which he had earlier laid out as a consultant to
Pan American Airways to be then flown under contract to the Post Office as Foreign Air Mail (FAM) routes 5 and 6. On March 10, 1929, Lindbergh flew an inaugural flight from
Brownsville, Texas, to
Mexico City via
Tampico, in a
Ford Trimotor airplane, carrying a load of U.S. mail. When a number of mail bags came up missing for a period of one month, they subsequently came to be known in the
philatelic world as the
covers of the "Lost Mail Flight". The historic flight was received with much notoriety in the press and marked the beginning of extended airmail service between the United States and Mexico. ==Personal life==