The November election hadn't even been close. Lindbergh got 57 percent of the popular vote, and, in an electoral sweep, carried 46 states, losing only to FDR's home state of New York and, by a mere 2,000 votes, Maryland, where the large population of federal office workers had voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt while the president was able to retain -- as he could nowhere else below the Mason-Dixon line -- the loyalty of nearly half the Democrats' old Southern constituency. Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the day after that everybody seemed to understand everything, and the radio commentators and the news columnists made it sound as if Roosevelt's defeat had been preordained. What had happened, they explained, was that Americans had shown themselves unwilling to break the tradition of the two-term presidency that George Washington had instituted and that no president before Roosevelt had dared to challenge. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Depression, the resurgent confidence of young and old alike had been quickened by Lindbergh's relative youth and by the graceful athleticism that contrasted so starkly with the serious physical impediments under which FDR labored as a polio victim. And there was the wonder of aviation and the new way of life it promised: Lindbergh, already the record-breaking master of long-distance flight, could knowledgeably lean his countrymen into the unknown of the aeronautical future while assuring them, by his strait-laced, old- fashioned demeanor, that modern engineering achievements need not erode the values of the past. It turned out, the experts concluded, that 20th-century Americans, weary of confronting a new crisis in every decade, were starving for normalcy, and what Charles A. Lindbergh represented was normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an undistinguished voice who had resoundingly demonstrated to the entire planet the courage to take charge and the fortitude to shape history and, of course, the power to transcend personal tragedy. If Lindbergh promised no war, there would be no war--for the great majority it was as simple as that.