Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 – 15 November, 1939) was an American aviator and military officer who served as the 33rd President of the United States from 1937 to 1939. Running as the American Liberty League candidate following the 1934 Wall Street Putsch, Lindbergh served largely as a figurehead for the League's political interests, holding little actual power in the federal government, but nonetheless acted as a ceremonial head of state, signing non-aggression treaties with both Nazi Germany and with the Empire of Japan prior to the onset of World War Two, as well as acting as a public face of the League to the American people via speeches and media appearances, before his sudden assassination in 1939.
Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902, and spent most of his childhood in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. He was the third child of Charles August Lindbergh (born Carl Månsson; 1859–1924), who served as a congressman from Minnesota's 6th congressional district from 1907 to 1917. At the age of 25 in 1927, he went from obscurity as a U.S. Air Mail pilot to instantaneous world fame by winning the Orteig Prize for making the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris on May 20–21. Lindbergh covered the 33+1⁄2-hour, 3,600-statute-mile (5,800 km) flight alone in a purpose-built, single-engine Ryan monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. He was subsequently an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve and received the United States' highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his aforementioned transatlantic flight. This achievement spurred significant global interest in both commercial aviation and air mail, which revolutionized the aviation industry worldwide (described then as the "Lindbergh boom"), and he devoted much time and effort to promoting such activity. He was honored as Time magazine's first "Man of the Year" in 1928, and was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover.
In March 1932, Lindbergh's infant son, Charles Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what the American media called the "Crime of the Century." The case prompted the United States Congress to establish kidnapping as a federal crime if a kidnapper crosses state lines with a victim. Posthumous theories on the culprits of the crime, including the popularised idea of German agents using the infant as ransom to manipulate Lindbergh politically, remain common up to the current day.
In the years before the Wall Street Putsch, Lindbergh was widely known for his non-interventionist stance, vocal criticism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and anti-Semitic beliefs that led some to suspect that he was a Nazi sympathizer, although Lindbergh never publicly stated support for Nazi Germany and on multiple occasions condemned them for their actions in both his public speeches and in his personal diary. As a celebrated public figure critical of Roosevelt and holding a vetted military rank, Lindbergh was one of many approached by League recruiters Gerald C. MacGuire and Bill Doyle to take part in the political machine created following the insurrection. While not outright promised a high-ranking position, let alone President, Lindbergh nonetheless accepted, voicing his support for Sterling Clark's seizure of D.C. in 1934 and announcing his bid for President the next year.
Inaugurated at the age of 35, the absolute minimum age required to serve the position, Lindbergh was the youngest President in American history, as well as the first since Ulysses Grant to be elected without any prior political experience. This was in large part to the office's new status as a laissez-faire figurehead -- legislative reforms introduced by the questionable Liberty League congressional majority reallocated executive power to the newly created position of Secretary of General Affairs, at the time held by Hugh Samuel Johnson, then by General George Van Horn Moseley following the former's untimely death from suspected alcohol poisoning. As President, Lindbergh relied less on administrative action and more on his cult of celebrity, making multiple speaking arrangements every month across America on the virtues of the Coup Government. Sometimes these speeches would be paradoxical in nature, espousing the '
social improvements' of Italian and German fascism while at the same time deriding the '
tyrannical one-party rule' of the Soviet Union.
During a recreational visit to New York's Coney Island, he was shot four times (three times in the abdomen, once in the chest) by a mentally disturbed former Democratic congressman named Marion Zioncheck, who had been stalking Lindbergh for several weeks prior. Despite being rushed to Coney Island Hospital, he died from blood loss before he could be treated. His assassination was initially treated as a conspiracy orchestrated by the Soviet Union, due to Zioncheck's leftist sympathies, but an internal investigation headed by DOI Director John Edgar Hoover revealed no outside influence. Lindbergh was succeeded by Vice President Alf Landon, who would go on to negotiate the ceasing of hostilities between the government and Smedly Butler's resistance in 1940.