May 20: Lindbergh Leaves, Nicaea Begins, and Levi Strauss Patents the Riveted Pocket

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At 7:52 in the morning on May 20, 1927, a twenty-five-year-old airmail pilot from Little Falls, Minnesota, named Charles Augustus Lindbergh opened the throttle of a single-engine monoplane called the Spirit of St. Louis and began his takeoff roll from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York. The plane was carrying 450 gallons of fuel, which was the majority of its total weight of 5,250 pounds, and the runway was soft from recent rain. Lindbergh had been awake for more than twenty-four hours before the flight began. He cleared the telephone wires at the end of the runway by about twenty feet. He had a window on one side of the cockpit and a periscope for forward visibility because the fuel tank sat directly in front of the cockpit, blocking the view ahead. He was going to Paris, 3,600 miles away, alone.

The Spirit of St. Louis had been designed collaboratively between Lindbergh and the Ryan Aircraft Corporation of San Diego, built in sixty days from the date of the contract. Lindbergh had insisted on a single engine — he argued that a single reliable engine was safer than multiple unreliable ones — and on a single cockpit, with every unnecessary ounce stripped out. He brought five sandwiches and a canteen of water. He did not bring a parachute or a radio. The parachute would have been useless over the Atlantic; the radio would have added weight and he would not have been able to maintain the plane and operate the radio simultaneously. He brought a pound of airmail — symbolic cargo, a nod to his day job.

The Longest Night

The flight took 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds. Lindbergh crossed the coast of Ireland in late afternoon on May 21, having navigated by dead reckoning — time, airspeed, compass heading — with remarkable accuracy. He had intended to pass over the southern tip of Ireland; he passed over it within three miles of his planned route after more than 2,000 miles over open ocean with no landmarks. He then crossed England, crossed the Channel, and arrived over Paris in the dark. He found Le Bourget airfield by the traffic jam below him: 150,000 people had driven to the airport to wait, and the line of automobile headlights was visible from the air. He landed at 10:22 PM Paris time. The crowd stormed the plane.

The crowds that met Lindbergh in Paris, then in Brussels, then in London, then back in the United States — four million people lined the streets of New York for his ticker-tape parade — represented something more than admiration for a flying achievement. The Atlantic crossing had been attempted several times before Lindbergh; six people had died in attempts just in the two months before his departure. What Lindbergh carried across was the early twentieth century‘s faith in individual heroism, in technology, in the idea that a single competent person in a well-built machine could defy the scale of the planet. He had done something that was also impossible, and then the impossible was behind him, and the future looked different from that moment on.

What came after the triumph is complicated. Lindbergh’s fame made him a target of the kidnapping and murder of his infant son in 1932, the crime of the century, which devastated him. In the late 1930s he became one of the most prominent voices in the America First movement opposing U.S. involvement in the war against Nazi Germany, made speeches containing anti-Semitic tropes, and received a medal from Hermann Goring at a dinner in Germany in 1938. He never fully repudiated his pre-war positions after the war, and his reputation never fully recovered. The hero of May 20, 1927, and the isolationist of 1940 are the same person, which is what makes him genuinely interesting rather than simply iconic. The uncomplicated heroism lasted about thirteen years.

The Council That Decided What Christians Believe

On May 20, 325 AD — or thereabouts; the exact date is uncertain — the Council of Nicaea convened in the city of Nicaea (modern Iznik, in northwestern Turkey) under the authority of the Emperor Constantine. It was the first ecumenical council of the Christian church: a gathering of bishops from across the Roman Empire called to resolve doctrinal disputes that had been tearing the church apart for a decade and threatening the unity of the empire that Constantine had recently reunited.

The central dispute was the Arian controversy: the question of whether Jesus Christ was of the same substance as God the Father (the position eventually adopted by the council: homoousios, “same substance”) or of similar but distinct substance (the Arian position: homoiousios, “similar substance”). The difference between the two Greek words — homoousios and homoiousios — is a single letter, the iota. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, used this fact to illustrate what he considered the theological hair-splitting that was ruining the empire. Later theologians have argued, with considerable force, that the distinction is not trivial at all: if Jesus is fully God, then the crucifixion and resurrection have a different significance than if Jesus is a subordinate divine being. The single letter carries enormous weight.

Constantine had no theological position of his own — he was likely not baptized until near his death — but he needed unity, and the Council of Nicaea provided it, or something that looked like it. The Nicene Creed that emerged from the council — “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty… and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds” — is still recited in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and many Protestant churches every Sunday. Several hundred million people say these words every week. They were drafted in committee in Nicaea in the summer of 325, with the emperor’s logistical support and political authority hovering over the proceedings.

The council also fixed the date of Easter, establishing that it would be calculated according to the solar calendar rather than the Jewish lunar calendar (Passover), and that it would be observed on the same Sunday throughout the empire rather than on different dates in different regions. The calculation of Easter is still derived from the method established at Nicaea, which is why Easter moves across a forty-five-day range in different years and why the Eastern and Western churches still observe it on different dates. The committee work of the fourth century is still organizing the calendars of the twenty-first.

The Seam, the Rivet, and the Garment That Outlasted Everything

On May 20, 1873, Levi Strauss, a dry goods merchant in San Francisco, and Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, were jointly granted Patent No. 139,121 by the United States Patent Office. The patent covered a method of reinforcing the stress points of pants — specifically the pocket corners and the base of the button fly — with copper rivets. Davis had been making riveted work pants for miners and laborers since 1870; Strauss was his fabric supplier. Davis did not have the money to apply for a patent himself and wrote to Strauss proposing a partnership. Strauss paid the fees. They split the proceeds.

The garment covered by the patent was made from denim — a heavy twill cotton weave whose name derives from “serge de Nimes,” the French city where the fabric originated — and the Levi’s 501, which the patent protected, is the oldest continuously produced clothing item in American manufacturing. The 501 survived the transition from workwear to uniform of the American West, from Western wear to teenage rebellion icon (Dean and Brando in the 1950s), from rebellion icon to global fashion staple, from fashion staple to the universal default trouser of the late twentieth century. There is no other garment in human history with a comparable arc: from mine shaft to red carpet to literally everywhere, in one and a half centuries.

The copper rivets that Strauss and Davis patented were removed from the back pocket in 1937 — they were scratching saddles and schoolroom chairs — and from the watch pocket (the small fifth pocket inside the right front pocket) in 1966. The small extra pocket remains. Its original purpose was to hold a pocket watch; it now serves primarily to hold credit cards and to make people argue about what it’s actually for. The rivets on the front pockets, the belt loops, the signature orange stitching on the back pockets — these are still there, more or less as Davis designed them in the late 1860s, sold in approximately forty countries, in quantities that make the combined total of all other trouser styles look modest. The patent expired in 1890. The design survived the patent by about a hundred and thirty-five years so far.

Two Births, a Century Apart

John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806, in Pentonville, London, the eldest son of the philosopher James Mill, who undertook to educate him personally according to the most advanced rationalist principles available. Mill was reading Greek at three, Latin at eight, logic at twelve, and political economy at thirteen — taught directly by his father in a curriculum designed to produce the ideal liberal rationalist. He was never sent to school, never allowed religious instruction, and never allowed to associate with children his own age who might infect him with conventional opinions. At twenty, he had a nervous breakdown. He spent years recovering, came out of it with a considerably more nuanced view of human psychology than his father’s utilitarianism provided for, and went on to write On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869) — the last of these one of the earliest systematic arguments for women’s political equality published by a major philosopher.

Mill entered Parliament in 1865 and moved the first amendment in British parliamentary history to include women in a voting rights reform bill. The amendment failed. He also described himself, in public, as a utilitarian and a proponent of women’s suffrage during his election campaign, which his advisers considered suicidal; he won anyway. He was defeated in 1868. He spent the rest of his life writing and corresponding with Harriet Taylor Mill, whom he had loved for twenty years before she was able to divorce her first husband and marry him, and whom he considered the superior intellect in the partnership.

Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946, in El Centro, California, to an Armenian-American father and a mother who was partly Cherokee and partly of European descent. She dropped out of high school at sixteen, moved to Los Angeles, met Sonny Bono when she was sixteen and he was twenty-seven, and became one of the most durable performers in American entertainment history. She has had a successful career in six consecutive decades, won an Academy Award for Moonstruck (1987), received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018, and has had more number-one dance hits than any other artist in Billboard history. She once said that if she had to live her life over, she would not live it the same way; she was not specific about which parts. She was born in the same year as the first commercially available electronic computer, the ENIAC. Both are still operating.

Also on This Day

• 1347: Cola di Rienzo, a notary’s son who had educated himself on classical texts and become convinced that the Roman Republic should be restored, seizes power in Rome and declares himself Tribune of the People. He rules for about seven months, reorganizes the city government, issues visionary proclamations about Italian unity, and is overthrown by the Roman nobility. He returns to power in 1354 and is killed by a mob within weeks. His life inspired Wagner’s first opera, Rienzi, which is one of the less-performed Wagner operas. Adolf Hitler saw Rienzi as a young man and later told a friend that the opera was the moment he first had a vision of a united Germany led by a single heroic figure. The opera is now performed with extreme caution, if at all.
• 1498: Vasco da Gama, after sailing around Africa and across the Indian Ocean, arrives at Kozhikode (Calicut) on the southwest coast of India — the first European to reach India by sea. The voyage had taken two years. It opened the direct sea route between Europe and Asia, breaking the Ottoman and Venetian monopoly on overland trade routes and beginning the era of European maritime dominance in the Indian Ocean. The spice trade that da Gama opened eventually financed the Portuguese empire, and the disruption of established trade routes eventually ruined the Venetian economy. Everything connects to everything, if you follow the spice.
• 1609: Shakespeare’s Sonnets are first published in London by Thomas Thorpe, dedicated to “Mr. W.H.” — an identity that has been argued about ever since. The candidates include Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s patron), and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; the dedication may also be a printer’s private joke. The dedication is to the “onlie begetter” of the sonnets, which may mean the person who inspired them or the person who provided the manuscript. The sonnets themselves address a “Fair Youth,” a “Dark Lady,” and a “Rival Poet.” None of these figures have been identified with certainty in four hundred and sixteen years.
• 1902: Cuba officially becomes an independent republic after four years of American military occupation following the Spanish-American War. The Platt Amendment, written by the U.S. Senate into the Cuban constitution, gives the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and establishes the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, which the United States has maintained ever since. “Independence” under the Platt Amendment was widely understood by Cubans at the time as a constrained independence; the amendment was repealed in 1934. The Guantanamo lease has never been renounced by any U.S. administration.

May 20 is a day of things that were supposed to be temporary and became permanent. Lindbergh’s flight was supposed to be a stunt and became the hinge point of the aviation century. The Nicene Creed was supposed to resolve a dispute and has been recited every Sunday for seventeen hundred years. Levi’s riveted pocket was a practical solution to torn seams and became the universal garment. The Spirit of St. Louis is in the Smithsonian now, and the Nicene Creed is in the liturgy, and the 501s are in approximately forty countries, and all of them began as someone solving a specific problem on a specific day and did not imagine the duration. This is almost always how the permanent things happen: not by plan, but by solving the immediate problem well enough that the solution outlasts the problem itself.

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