On May 21, 1927, at 10:24 p.m., Charles Lindbergh gently touched down on French soil, the first person to fly the Atlantic alone. Immediately, the world had a new hero — mobbed wherever he went, the recipient of thousands of letters and poems, the inspiration for popular as well as classical music. But what, exactly, Lindbergh meant to his generation and subsequent generations has remained a source of interest and controversy. In “The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight” (1958), for example, John W. Ward argued that Lindbergh revealed a deep tension in the American public: “Was the flight the achievement of a heroic, solitary, unaided individual or did the flight represent the triumph of the machine, the success of an industrially organized society?” Twenty-two years later, Laurence Goldstein, in “Lindbergh in 1927: The Response of Poets to the Poem of Fact” (1980), was less certain how to know the significance of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. But he did argue that Lindbergh's problematic relationship to the “idealizing tendency of popular discourse” was itself a way to understand his complex response to his times and his achievement. More recently, Susan M. Gray, in Charles Lindbergh and the American Dilemma: The Conflict of Technology and Human Values (1988), argued that Lindbergh is best understood as a case study of a larger American issue, the “dialectical tension between technology and human values.” Not only did Lindbergh reveal the complex tensions noted by Ward and Goldstein, but, more fundamentally, he revealed the dialectical imagination characteristic of American thinking since the early 19th century.