Aviation geeks like me remember that Charles Lindbergh, returning to America after his epic 1927 flight across the Atlantic, hounded by a starstruck public and obnoxious hordes of newspaper reporters, found refuge on the north shore of Long Island at the elegant and protected estate of one of the country’s wealthiest men, the former World War I flyer Harry F. Guggenheim. In the shelter of Guggenheim’s faux-Norman castle, Falaise, Lindbergh famously retired to a guest room and revised the ghostwritten, error-riddled account of his flight, “We.”

But...

Aviation geeks like me remember that Charles Lindbergh, returning to America after his epic 1927 flight across the Atlantic, hounded by a starstruck public and obnoxious hordes of newspaper reporters, found refuge on the north shore of Long Island at the elegant and protected estate of one of the country’s wealthiest men, the former World War I flyer Harry F. Guggenheim. In the shelter of Guggenheim’s faux-Norman castle, Falaise, Lindbergh famously retired to a guest room and revised the ghostwritten, error-riddled account of his flight, “We.”

But even devoted prop-heads are not likely to know that it was Guggenheim who conceived, planned and financed Lindbergh’s famous goodwill tour over the summer after he returned from crossing the Atlantic. During that three-month excursion across the country, Lindbergh flew his “Spirit of St. Louis” monoplane to packed events in 92 American towns and cities across the 48 continental states. The Lone Eagle’s continental tour cemented his fame and helped turn American aviation into a growth industry for the next half century.

Details like this abound in Dirk Smillie’s “The Business of Tomorrow: The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim—From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty,” a biography that sheds important light on 20th-century American history. The story of their friendship exposes a classic tale of American contradiction. While Lindbergh’s disastrous fascination with Hitler’s fascism drew him toward public, shameful expressions of anti-Semitism, his friend Harry was spending portions of his family fortune rescuing German and Polish Jews from the scourges of the Nazis. Still, the Lindbergh-Guggenheim collaboration would continue for almost 50 years. Lindbergh recognized his friend as “an extraordinary and wonderful man,” and together they were two of America’s most effective promoters of aerospace development.

But Mr. Smillie’s account goes well beyond Guggenheim’s conflicted relationship with Lindbergh. In the late 19th century, the Guggenheims made their fortune in silver, copper and lead mines in Colorado and South America, which enabled the third-generation Harry, born in 1890, to pursue a distinguished career in philanthropy. After attending Yale and Cambridge University in England, Harry was entranced by the adventure of flying, purchased a Curtiss flying boat, and served with distinction during World War I.

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There were stints afterward with the family mining businesses in South America, but mostly Harry was devoted to aviation, philanthropy and high living. The foundation that Harry created with his father, Daniel, was almost singlehandedly responsible for sponsoring many of the innovations that catapulted America to leadership in aviation and rocketry—aeronautics schools, pilot training, air-mapping on the North American continent, the early rocket experiments of Robert Goddard and the pioneering, instrument-flying demonstrations of Jimmy Doolittle. The Guggenheims funded efforts to establish weather forecasting along major air routes and loaned money for the first scheduled commercial service between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Lindbergh, Doolittle and Amelia Earhart were the famous names of aviation before World War II. Harry Guggenheim, who became known as the “Godfather of Flight,” provided the capital that underwrote their progress.

Guggenheim’s heroic support of aviation carries significant echoes today, when government versus private support of new growth industries is still hotly debated. During the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal devoted an estimated $50 billion toward economic rescue programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Recovery Administration. Except for relatively modest efforts like subsidies for airmail carriers, however, federal support for aviation development was minuscule, significantly lagging behind the support provided by the industrialized countries of Europe—one reason why the United States faced a dire shortage of pilots, planes and even an air-traffic system on the eve of World War II. “The Business of Tomorrow” describes a rare instance when private capital—the Guggenheims’—kept the patient on life support until a national crisis forced the government to act.

Between aviation exploits, Guggenheim squeezed in a stint as Herbert Hoover’s ambassador to Cuba, during which he unsuccessfully lobbied Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado y Morales for reforms, chaired a New York commission investigating organized crime, and invested heavily in a beef cattle operation in the South and thoroughbred stables that made his name on the track. Guggenheim became as famous as Howard Hughes for flying himself in his own twin-engine planes. Like Hughes, he was slowly acclimating the American public to regard aviation as an indispensable tool of business.

It’s interesting that Guggenheim didn’t become more famous during World War II for a most impressive display of midlife combat duty. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Guggenheim, in his early 50s, convinced Pentagon officials to recommission him as a lieutenant commander in the Navy. Guggenheim ran a test-flight center at the Naval Air Station in Trenton, N.J., and then joined his old pal Lindbergh in the Pacific as a geezer combat aviator. As a tail gunner in a TBM Avenger torpedo bomber, Guggenheim flew several missions off the aircraft carrier Nehenta Bay during the battle of Okinawa, firing his .50-caliber gun at radar installations and ammo dumps on kamikaze bases in the Sakashima Islands.

“The Business of Tomorrow” is what biography should be—it looks at a period of history through the lens of a single remarkable life. Harry Guggenheim’s life in the sky tells the story of how aviation and aerospace became a defining feature of the American experience.

Mr. Buck is the author of “Flight of Passage,” an account of his 1966 flight from New Jersey to California, when he became the youngest aviator to fly coast-to-coast.