Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  The Calvinist ethic of his father had made Dwight fear the temptation of money. He saw himself, after all, as a waylaid academic, conceding to the marketplace for “higher” ends. His father had never earned more than $1800 a year; Dwight now had assets over $100,000, surely a sum sufficient for his needs. But his work at Simpson and Thacher had become a tiresome set of routines, and his career stretched before him like a “desert” of familiar challengers.

  He understood the power of Morgan. The Wall Street panic of 1907 had made it a one-man federal reserve, raising millions in minutes to save faltering banks and New York City’s payroll. The nineteenth-century consolidators of the nation’s rail network, the Morgan partners were now the country’s most powerful trust builders in farming, shipping, and steel. They underwrote foreign government bonds and helped to finance Britain’s war in South Africa. In December 1913, the company was about to become the official wartime purchasing agent for Great Britain in the United States.22

  More than the partners’ power, Dwight valued their honesty and good character. The fine reputation of Morgan and Company was as important as its influence. The firm had achieved a rare coalescence—high-minded conscience with international power. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a conservationist who had cringed at the way Morgan bartered railroads for Alaska’s land resources, believed in the integrity of the Morgan partners. There were others, of course, who disagreed; one was the congressional representative from the Sixth District of Minnesota, Charles A. Lindbergh. The year before, Lindbergh had spearheaded the Pujo Commission to investigate the Eastern “money trusts,” a code term, it was said, for J. P. Morgan and Company.

  Morrow assured his friends and family that the work at Morgan was important enough to justify its responsibilities. But faith, not logic, ultimately governed his choice. Faith, he wrote to a friend, was the only valid premise of “big decisions.”23 He was determined to use his position at Morgan to earn the money and the reputation that would permit him the opportunity for public service. With access to a network of four banks in three countries, the law clerk who had dreamed of being a Supreme Court justice might, indeed, make it to the top.

  Betty too was climbing higher. Once she entered the Morgan circle, her life assumed a new pace and rhythm. Although she was now the mother of four children—Elisabeth, ten; Anne, eight; Dwight, five; and Constance, six months—Betty was hardly ever home. Taking her cues from Flo Lamont, the grande dame of Morgan, Betty spent her evenings at dinner with the partners or in New York City entertaining dignitaries. In Englewood, her days merged one into the other at endless meetings of clubs and organizations. Like many of her educated contemporaries, Betty wanted more than the promise of suffrage. She valued the community of other women and a chance to engage in public service. Just as the women’s colleges had offered its students escape from their parents’ homes, the clubs provided young mothers with a door out of the nursery. Viewing themselves as a sisterhood of social and cultural custodians, these women built hierarchies of power that reflected but did not overshadow the male structures.24

  Fortunately for Betty, Englewood was fertile ground for women with time and money to spare. While the men were in New York, running their law offices and investment banks, the women wielded influence in the hospitals, churches, and clubs. The Community Chest, the Red Cross, the Children’s Aid Society, the Missionary Society, the Presbyterian Church, the Shakespeare Literary Club, and, of course, the Smith College Club were among the organizations Betty served.

  Her daily life became little more than a sequence of club meetings and dates with friends, punctuated with the mild regret of one who sensed she was paying a price for an ambition she did not understand. Rarely did she visit the children at school, and more and more she traveled with Dwight, leaving them at home with the nurse. She wondered why Anne sobbed and clung to her when she returned from an extended shopping tour in Europe; she regretted leaving Anne when the girl had the flu, but tending the nursery was more than she could bear.25 Unable to acknowledge or clarify her motives, even to herself, Betty played her domestic and social roles one against the other. Without a model for quantifying her needs, among the first generation of women with both education and leisure, she could not define her role as a mother. She simply had no time for her children.

  The children were tended by a German nanny, who ran their lives with an iron hand.26 She demanded restraint and complete obedience, and the children, in trepidation, complied. The upstairs nursery was a world apart, a place to rehearse social poses and manners and to earn the right to join the grown-ups downstairs. Elisabeth, Anne, and Dwight ate their meals at a small white table that doubled as a playhouse on rainy days. Acting out their fantasies in dramatic games, they staged imaginary rebellions. Donned in their parents’ coats and hats, they would play librarian, detective, and nurse. Elisabeth was usually the librarian, Dwight loved the cops-and-robbers chase, and Anne was always the nurse or nanny. Her job was both to emulate and to taunt their guardian, who watched their movements from the upstairs hall. Leaving the nursery, having assumed a haughty, nanny-like demeanor, Anne would suddenly return to surprise the children. The goal of the game was for the players to learn the art of perfect silence at the snap of a verbal command. Anne may have feared her nanny’s wrath, but she loved the excitement of the role. If only for a moment, she was the judge and executor, wielding power over her siblings.

  As though Betty understood the price of a “proper life,” she required each of her children to keep a diary, which she presented as a tool for a disciplined life. Betty’s requirement, in fact, was a gift, inspired perhaps by her own rebellion, which had found its voice in the privacy of her diaries. For Anne, it was both a release and a comfort; a mirror to her fears and a means of self-mastery. Instead of ordering her life, it permitted her to live between the rules, to free the force of her imagination. Protected from the censure of her nurse and her mother, Anne lost herself in thoughts and feelings, confessing all that inhibited her in daily life.

  Like her mother, Anne with her diary at her side lived the double life of an obedient child and a probing observer. Yet her confessions filled her with guilt. Afraid that she had transgressed divine law, fearing the wrath of a vengeful God, Anne paced the garden of her Palisades Avenue home, counting her sins and praying for mercy.27 The diary, in turn, nourished her confidence to share her stories with other children. Her parents, following the suit of the Morgan partners, took their yearly midwinter vacation in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. The heart of a cotton-smuggling operation during the Civil War, Nassau was now an international banking center and a winter resort for the American and British business elite.28 In the backyard of a rented cottage on the bay, down a private lane that may once have been forbidding, Anne wrote, directed, and produced plays for the children of her parents’ friends. Never again, Anne later said, would she have the same belief in the power of her words.29

  Anne’s memories of Nassau, recorded in sensual imagery, became the core of the spiritual “gifts” that Anne believed came from the sea. Impressionistic vignettes, awash in sunlight and steeped in native culture, they defined the perimeters of subjective time. Swept into contemplative reverie, Anne wrote the detailed descriptions of flower, sun, sky, and sea that presaged her later writings.30

  In 1919, once again following the path of the Morgan partners, the Morrows purchased an apartment in New York City, relegating their Englewood home to a weekend retreat. While their “seven-thousand-square-foot home in the sky”31 at Four East Sixty-Sixth Street did not rival the Lamonts’ custom-built townhouse, its high ceilings and huge rooms became the perfect stage for their social lives. For Anne, the move was an opportunity. Elisabeth had chosen to leave the public schools in Englewood and board at Milton Academy in Massachusetts; Anne preferred to stay in New York with her parents and attend Miss Chapin’s School for Girls.

  With Elisabeth away, Anne basked in her mother’s attention. Perhaps for the first time since Anne was a ch
ild, Betty recognized the acuity and sensitivity that lay behind Anne’s timid exterior. On Anne’s fourteenth birthday, on the eve of her entry into Chapin, Betty gave her oil paints, brushes, and a portfolio, in the hope that her little artist would sketch and paint during the long summer days ahead.32

  Out of Englewood and in the mainstream of city life, Anne saw her world begin to expand. Like Elisabeth, she had attended the Dwight School in Englewood, and, though it was a fine academy, dedicated to the individual needs of girls, it was a conservative school in a suburban enclave. Miss Chapin’s School, located in two brownstones on East Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, was a window into the larger world of politics and suffragism, personal rights and public responsibilities. The intention of Miss Chapin, who founded the school in 1901, was to make it a paradigm for women’s education. Here, girls were deemed capable of academic as well as athletic and civic excellence. Bible study and prayers were integral to the daily program, but the focus was on individual accomplishment. With an enrollment of only seventy-five girls, the small classes were able to focus on each student’s needs. The school’s innovative club system comprised extracurricular classes that encouraged the members’ artistic expression.

  At Chapin, Anne found a way to transform the “secret life” of her diary into literature, honing her thoughts and fantasies into poetry, stories, and essays. With the encouragement of a teacher, Anne submitted her work to The Wheel, Chapin’s new literary magazine. Her writing had the naughtiness of a child who had found the hole in a hermetic system. At home and in class, she concentrated on being “good;” on paper, she was playful and devilish. In the stories she wrote as a first-year student, she blithely set the “fairy tale” tradition on its head by having the dragon eat the beautiful but vacuous princess and the brave but insipid prince. Gaining confidence as she went on, she turned her formal poetic quatrains into mischievous displays of rebellion. She flaunted her sins—pride, sloth, jealousy, disobedience, anger—knowing they were safe behind the curtain of her page. In her sophomore year, in an essay on ambition, Anne declared that she would be “a singer or a dancer or an artist.” And although she might need a magic potion for the task, she was resolved to be “very tall and beautiful!”33 In recognition of her achievements, Anne was named Head of the School, “a position,” one of her friends later said, “that wasn’t one a dreamer got elected to.”34

  Before her senior year Anne had composed an essay called “Disillusions of Childhood.” Grown-ups, she wrote, feel pain. There are no fairies. Clouds are not solid. Balloons always break. And while she wanted to marry someone named “Rosebride … one can’t choose one’s husband for his name.” Somehow, Anne protested, it didn’t seem “right.”

  But there were compensations for Anne’s growing awareness: the possibility of adventure and travel, even if only in her imagination. In an essay on “the enchantment of distance,” Anne acknowledged the beauty and mystery of far-off places, and the magnitude of the seas that separated her from them. She was “lured” by travel and by the sea, she wrote, but not yet old enough to follow her whim. With memorabilia, articles, and photographs that she spread across the table in her bedroom, she played like a child with seashells at the beach, savoring little rituals and conjuring up daydreams. Her images of places and people, flowers and gardens and the horizon of the sea, became anodynes to dull routine. Perhaps, she concluded, imaginary voyages were truly the best. She could go anywhere she wanted at any time, on the impulse of a moment and the sail of a wish.35

  As her senior year approached, Anne wondered how to measure her success and worried that she would not be able to achieve it alone. On the night before graduation, in June 1924, the seniors were asked by the Chapin headmistress to record their hopes for the future. Anne wrote unabashedly, “I want to marry a hero.”36

  With college only a few months away, Anne’s fears of being overshadowed by her sister and her mother acquired a keen immediacy. She did not want to follow them by going to Smith. She wanted to join some of her Chapin friends who were going to Vassar, where life seemed free and avant-garde. But Betty was determined that all her daughters would go to Smith, no matter how much they protested.37

  Anne’s rebellion was far from ordinary. Her desire for autonomy was not only a breach of the family ethic, but a rare display of personal defiance. While women made up nearly half the college student population, only 7.6 percent of the women at the age of eighteen had the opportunity to go to college. At a time when most Americans, male or female, did not receive a high school diploma, the upper-middle-class parents who encouraged a daughter to go to school demanded, in return, proper obedience. Along with their checks for $800 for room, board, and tuition came the prerogative of choosing the child’s school.38

  In a letter to Elisabeth, Anne begged her to plead her cause. She didn’t see why she had to follow her mother’s wishes. Wasn’t Elisabeth’s compliance enough? She admitted she was weak and lacked the nerve to sever the ties which bound her to family tradition, but she couldn’t hold back her anger. She wanted to strike out on her own—to assert her independence and her strength.39 With all her power, she resisted her mother, but, forced once again to acquiesce, she donned the mask of obedience.

  When Anne entered Smith in the fall of 1924, along with 528 other young women,40 she would have been pleased to know that from its inception, in 1871, the college was dedicated to fostering female autonomy. Clearly an institution run by men and predicated on Victorian notions of femininity, it was nevertheless a groundbreaking experiment in social theory and female education. The Congregationalist clergymen and Amherst scholars who had founded the school broke ranks with prevalent social dogma, which perceived the female brain as being inherently inferior to the male’s. Determined to bring women into the prevailing activities of academic and social life, to dispel the cloister-like ambiance of earlier women’s schools, they developed the “cottage system,” which called for multiple structures situated on a central street. The trustees refused to build a college library or chapel, thereby inducing the students to use the town facilities. And they insisted that there be nothing in the curriculum or in the academic buildings that would denote the gender of the student body.41

  While she was not quite ready to define her womanhood, Anne found Smith a serious place. Within a few months, the confidence and playfulness she had displayed in her high school years were gone. Although she felt hampered by her mother’s reputation as a Smith alumna and her sister’s academic accomplishments, Anne tried to play down her feelings of discontent. She wrote to her father that she had found her place at Smith; she only wished she could keep her perspective.42 She worried, however, about her grades, and apologized to her mother for not meeting the high academic standards of the Morrow family.43

  Anne’s one sweet victory lay in her ability to write, but she was certain her mother wouldn’t approve. Her letters begged her mother for acceptance, urging her to remember her own youthful ambitions to be a writer. She buried her anger beneath “Mother Darling” and gratitude, as if her words might exorcise her mother’s contempt. Eager for praise, but afraid that her mother would not approve of her free-form style, so different from her own classical quatrains, Anne did not send her poems or stories home.44 Her hunger for the approval of an older woman, however, was satisfied by the admiration of her writing teacher, Mina Kirstein.

  Tall, dark, and elegant, Mina Kirstein was a charismatic teacher with high expectations and a generous disposition. If she believed a student was both talented and “serious,” there was “nothing she wouldn’t do to encourage her.”45 The brilliant and ambitious daughter of wealthy German Jews, also a graduate of Smith, she overflowed with ideas and energy. She could dominate a classroom like “a ship at full sail.” Unfortunately, she also dominated her students’ lives. Anne, uncertain of her own worth, was drawn to Mina’s nurturing will. In 1924, when she enrolled in Miss Kirstein’s creative writing course, she was unaware of the teacher’s life of promisc
uous sex and social-climbing adultery, and was delighted by the encouragement to submit her works for publication in The Smith College Monthly, the literary magazine. Anne wrote to her mother that the praise was “heart-warming.” Perhaps it wasn’t true and it wouldn’t last, but nonetheless it was satisfying.

  But try as she might to rekindle the spontaneity of her high school writing, she was overwhelmed by self-doubt. She wrote in her diary, “There is a kind of wall made of paper and the pen and the scratchy noise of the two; a wall between my thoughts and wishes and their expression.”

  In her junior year, happily, the wall itself became her inspiration. If she couldn’t penetrate it, she could wish it away. In her poem “Caprice,”46 written for the magazine, she tried to persuade an Angel to make her into a scarlet Spanish dancer:

  I should like to be a dancer,

  A slim persuasive dancer,

  A scarlet Spanish dancer,

  If you please!…

  But, says the Angel, there is only room for brown-haired Quaker Maidens.

  So I play the role of Quaker

  And I do not blame my maker

  For I think I wear the Quaker

  With a grace!

  But when a tune is tilting,

  Like a scarlet skirt is lilting,

  That my rebel heart is lilting

  No one sees…

  By the time Anne arrived in Mexico for the Christmas holiday during her senior year, her independence had begun to crystallize. Long disenchanted with her parents’ restraint and pretensions, hungry for something substantial and real, Anne had already left her “beribboned” childhood behind. Charles Lindbergh was the mirror of her ambitions, someone capable of making his own rules. From the moment her eyes locked into his, even before she flew in his plane, she heard the melody of her “scarlet” dance.