At the Intersection of Main and Integrity

C.A. Lindbergh, lawyer, landowner, lawmaker and Swedish immigrant

At the turn of the century, Charles Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline, may have been the model for the endearing, educated fish-out-of-small-town-water Carol Kennicott in the Sinclair Lewis novel “Main Street.” Much younger than her husband, she had servants who gossiped that she nagged him and sisters who mocked her by calling her “Anvil Chorus.”

Lindbergh’s handsome father, C.A., had a reputation as an honest Minnesota lawyer and landowner who bought at the seller’s price and sold at the buyer’s price.

“Nobody in the district was more concerned about financial abuses of power; and nobody had been more outspoken, regularly firing of letters to the editors of local newspapers,” wrote A. Scott Berg.

Fighting for farmers, C.A. denounced a “favored class” in America that “grabs the profits and leaves industrious workers with only a bare subsistence.”

C.A. served on the boards of two Little Falls banks, and once said, “To make money, in my opinion, is not the sole purpose of a bank.” These days, Goldman Sachs and its bootlicking hired hands in the U.S. Treasury Department would have such an mouthy Occupy radical spied on, arrested and, if at all possible, smeared as a “terrorist.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg