Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Lindbergh, who had begun his career as an airmail pilot, and who worried that his name would be smeared, along with that of his employer, TAT, now TWA, sent a telegram to Roosevelt the very next day, leaking it simultaneously to the press. He wrote that the entire industry was being condemned without a trial, which transgressed the right of all citizens, especially those who had worked so hard to ensure its success. Roosevelt was appalled by Lindbergh’s action. It was unethical, he believed, in view of Lindbergh’s popular acclaim, to register his protest publicly without giving him the opportunity to respond in private. But Lindbergh was implacable. He feared not only for the safety of all the inexperienced army personnel who had taken over the airmail routes, but for the future of commercial aviation. On February 15, he received a “polite telegram” from the postmaster general, chastising him for his unjust accusations made without knowledge of the facts. It was sent to the Morrow estate, where, the next day, Lindbergh received it on his return from New York.

  Immediately, he duplicated the telegram and sent it to the newspapers, using it to further condemn the Roosevelt administration. Pitting his power to manipulate public opinion against the authority of the government, Lindbergh deepened the wound. Roosevelt had tried to squelch Lindbergh’s protestations by offering him a place on a new committee formed to study the army operation of airmail, but Lindbergh, growing more bold, threw the offer back in his face and used it to deride Roosevelt.

  Unfortunately, Lindbergh’s prediction of disaster came true. By the end of the first week of army operations, five pilots were dead, six were injured, and eight planes were wrecked. By May, twelve pilots were dead, and the cost to the government was almost four million dollars. In June the Air Mail Act of 1934 was passed, giving the air routes back to the airlines and placing them under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

  The incident, however, had made clear to Lindbergh the breadth of his influence on the press and public opinion. He was beginning to believe that he had a moral imperative to take a stand on public issues.

  As the airline scandal thrust Lindbergh’s name back into the public arena, it had the unintended consequence of making Betty Morrow’s poetry famous. A window into the Morrow and Lindbergh lives, her poetry was the coveted treasure of The Atlantic Monthly. With the death of her husband, the murder of her grandson, and the impending death of her daughter Elisabeth, Betty began to break with conventional rhyme and form, creating a dialogue between language and emotion. In April 1934, three of her poems were published by The Atlantic Monthly: “Saint of the Lost,” “Asphodel,” and “Hostage.” “Saint of the Lost” is the least personal of the trio, an ode to Saint Anthony, watchman of the fallen, the hurt, and the lost. “Asphodel” is a retreat into myth, riddled with the sadness of her husband’s death and the presentiment of her oldest daughter’s passing. But “The Hostage,” written in the masculine third person, is a clear expression of her anguish in the wake of Charlie’s kidnapping. She speaks of violent murder and its forms—strangling, stabbing, shooting, throwing, starving, drowning—and the vicarious death of those who wait for the “hostage” to return, exploring the evil that is human and the emotions it evokes. The poem reflects the family’s rage and marks a turning point in Betty’s work.

  Through this time of grief and foreboding, Anne and her mother gave each other courage and consolation. But in spite of the similarities in their writings, Anne never shared the intimacy enjoyed by her mother and Elisabeth. Especially in the face of Elisabeth’s illness, reminiscent of the slow and painful death of Betty’s twin, Mary, Anne felt inadequate and pushed aside. Like Betty, Anne sensed she could never fill her sister’s loss in her mother’s life, and both of them knew that Elisabeth was dying.

  Within three months, Elisabeth had gained seventeen pounds. Hoping her plumpness would project an image of health to her friends, she protested that she really looked wonderful. In truth, she was growing weaker by the day. In a letter written to her mother about the future of her school, Elisabeth began to come to terms with the closeness of her death. The letter carried the solemnity of one who wanted to make her wishes known. Wrapped in salutations of love for her mother, it was a statement of Elisabeth’s educational philosophy.

  Her school meshed progressive and traditional values. She wanted to keep “the best of the old and the best of the new.” She would find a way of educating children that would free them from the constraints of mindless conformity. While she would draw upon the ancient principles of Plato, there would be those who would call her a rebel. Nonetheless, she believed that the quality of life depended on self-knowledge and relationships. It was her goal to help children confront “the truth.”39

  Reflecting her parents’ commitment to the community, yet unaccepting of their Calvinist predilections, Elisabeth’s plan to foster individual needs was a desire for her own legitimacy and, with it, a kind of self-absolution.

  While Elisabeth approached reconciliation, Anne was at odds with her life in New York. She and Charles hated the tumult of the city and thought about moving to California. Anne wrote to Elisabeth that she and Charles had bought a new single-engine, high-wing monoplane, built by the Monocoupe Corporation of St. Louis. It would be ready at the end of July, and they planned to visit her and Aubrey in California.

  In early July, Anne luxuriated in the peace and beauty of the Morrow home in North Haven. The lull between trips let her slip into a midsummer torpor. She reveled in the island sun and soaked herself in long days with Jon, living a child’s life again.40

  For the first time, Anne was beginning to appreciate the past without dredging up the darkness of the kidnapping. Jon was just Jon—not a baby like Charlie, not Charlie’s brother, but her child—unique, sufficient. And yet, she did distance herself from him; practicing a survival mechanism to protect herself from loss. Anne resolved to see the “essentials of life,” the essence of childhood, not Jon alone.

  She left North Haven feeling healthy and strong, she wrote, at one with her family and with nature. Charles, too, was well. Tanned and rested, on August 2 he flew a 3000-horsepower Sikorsky seaplane, under the auspices of Pan Am, and topped all records for a seaplane flight.41 The craft, it was anticipated, would cut two days off the run from Miami to Buenos Aires, putting South America only five and a half days from New York. With planes like these, the 710-horsepower Tingmissartoq was quickly becoming a relic. Anne and Charles had arranged to have it displayed at New York’s Museum of Natural History.42

  By early fall, Anne and Charles had given up their apartment in the city and moved back to Englewood. Living in an apartment doesn’t work, wrote Anne, but she didn’t want to spend another winter in her mother’s home. Nonetheless, something had lifted. Anne felt “young and gay,” capable of ordinary conversation, dancing, and the companionship of friends. Even the press recognized it in her work. They called her first travel article for The National Geographic “a fast and friendly narrative,” written in a “gay humor.”43 While the article was of great interest to the public, the narrative was uninspired. The language was terse, and the descriptions threadbare, except for the rare moments when Anne’s poetic rhythms took hold. It was written too close in time to the experience, and its meaning was buried beneath fact and convention. But for Anne it was a tour de force, detailed and comprehensive, a rich source material for her new writings.

  Finally, after two months, their new monocoupe was ready, and on September 12 they flew to St. Louis to pick it up. The craft, however, proved defective. They were grounded twice for minor repairs, once in Wichita, when a wheel support broke on landing, and again in Woodward, Oklahoma, for motor trouble. In Oklahoma, they were forced to land on a farm owned by Homer Atkins. Although Mr. Atkins didn’t recognize the Lindberghs when he invited them home for supper, his wife knew immediately who they were. Thrilled to have them in their hometown, hundreds of ranchers and their families came to meet them. With an air of generosity, Anne and Charles sat on the front porch
of the Atkins’ ranch and discussed the problems of Depression farming—crops, drought, and federal subsidy. It was a moment of closeness with the public who adored them; a successful attempt at empathy and understanding. Charles felt at home with the farmers, immediately picking up the rhythm of ranch life. He accompanied his host on his morning chores and milked the cows in a neighbor’s barn. Anne talked to the children, smiling and laughing at their stories, and spent time in the kitchen with Mrs. Atkins.44

  After three days of delay, Anne and Charles arrived in Los Angeles, on September 17. Will Rogers, a friend of the Morrows, had offered his Santa Monica ranch to accommodate both the Lindberghs and Elisabeth and Aubrey Morgan. “Elisabeth looks marvelous,” Anne wrote to her mother; she seemed healthy and indomitable. As usual, Elisabeth bowled Anne over with her energy, her perspective, and her sense of accomplishment.45

  But one day later, as Anne and Charles basked in the California sunshine, they received a call from Colonel Schwarzkopf. On September 20, after a chance remark to a gas station attendant to whom he had passed a $20 gold ransom note, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, characterized by the press as a “blond-haired, tight-lipped carpenter” and former German Army machine-gunner, was arrested at his home in the Bronx as a suspect in the kidnapping.46 As the Lindberghs flew toward Englewood, they were sucked back into the belly of darkness. “Flailing their arms like sand through a whirlwind,” they arrived at the Morrow estate.

  16

  The Arrest

  Bruno Richard Hauptmann, September 1934.

  (New Jersey State Police Museum And Learning Center Archives)

  God’s purpose is justice. I am a friend of Nature since I was a child. I see God growing up in the grass, and I hear the winds.

  —BRUNO RICHARD HAUPTMANN,

  OCTOBER 3, 19341

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1934, THE BRONX, NEW YORK

  Anna Schoeffler Hauptmann stood among the goldenrod and the mountain daisies on the terraced lawn beside her family’s home. Her robust eighteen-month-old son, Manfred, named for the German air ace Manfred von Richthofen, romped in the warm autumn air as Anna watched, in her flowered robe and slippers, in the shade of the fading oaks. From the street, she noticed a man watching her. He approached and showed her his badge.2 “I would like to see you, upstairs,” he said.

  Anna carried Manfred into the house, gave him to the care of her downstairs neighbor, Louisa Schuessler, and followed the man up the wooden stairs and into her apartment. Moments before, the rooms had been neat and spotless. Now, they were swarming with policemen, shoving aside furniture, rummaging through drawers, and emptying the contents of closets onto the floor. She found her husband, Richard, stooped next to their bed, handcuffed to a policeman and surrounded by agents, battering him with questions.

  “What is this?” she yelled.

  Richard didn’t answer.

  Putting her arms around him, she asked in German, “Did you do anything wrong?”

  “No, Anna,” Richard replied in German.

  She yelled louder, this time breaking down in tears, “Tell me! Tell me if you did anything wrong! What are they doing here?”

  “They’re here over a gambling problem I had the other night,” Richard replied.

  Satisfied, Anna backed down. As she was led outside, she noticed the police had stripped the bedclothes off Manfred’s new ivory-colored crib.

  Two hours earlier, three black police cars had lain in wait as Richard pulled his dark blue Dodge out of the garage.

  At thirty-five, Bruno Richard Hauptmann had an air of tutored breeding. He knew how to dress and how to flash his money with the nonchalance of a man-about-town. His face had a boyish quality, but his deep-set eyes spoke of cool determination. He was pleasing rather than handsome, and his delicate features contrasted with his athletic frame. His brawny arms and large powerful hands, strengthened by years at a carpenter’s lathe, hung gracelessly beside his muscular legs. He looked like a laborer in rich man’s clothing, surly and arrogant yet strangely serene.

  His laconic mien and self-conscious speech belied a fun-loving, impulsive personality. He liked to hunt deer and rabbits, to gamble on the stock market, and to drink and play the mandolin with friends. While he had a taste for women other than his wife, he considered himself a dedicated father and a family man. He believed in God, was loyal to his friends, loved children, and delighted in the beauties of nature.3 By all appearances, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a gentle man with good Christian values—a self-made success with an eye on the American Dream.

  In September 1934, while many of his friends and family were out of work and out of luck, Richard Hauptmann was building his fortune. He had suffered a loss in the early winter of 1932, but he seemed to have an instinct for picking stocks. He bragged to friends that he could make $2000 in one day, as much as $50,000 with any luck.4 When he met Isidor Fisch, a skinny, short, big-eared German Jew, in the summer of 1932,5 they became friends and business partners. Hauptmann continued to invest in the market, and Fisch traded in pelts and furs.

  Each morning at about nine, Hauptmann would leave his five-room apartment in the tree-lined suburban section of the northeast Bronx, and drive his sedan down to his stockbroker’s office. No one knew exactly how much money Hauptmann had made, but it was enough to buy him expensive suits, walnut furniture, a new radio and phonograph, vacation trips, and fashionable dresses for his wife. Meanwhile, those around him were scavenging for jobs and learning the art of self-denial.6

  Hauptmann had emigrated from Germany eleven years earlier, but not through the usual channels. Born in 1899, the son of a stone mason in a small town in Saxony, Bruno Richard was the youngest of the five children of Paulina and Herman Hauptmann. When he quit school, at the age of fourteen, he went to trade school to study carpentry, drawing, and architecture. In 1917, he was conscripted into the army and served on the German front with a regiment in Königsburg. Six weeks before the end of the war he was hit on his right temple with shrapnel. He lay unconscious for hours and was left for dead, but he crawled back to his post on his hands and knees. Though dizzy and disoriented, unable to fit his helmet back on his swollen head, he resumed his duties.7

  When he returned to his small native town of Kamenz in 1919, life was different. He was dizzy and forgetful most of the time. His father had died, and his two brothers had been killed in the war. He lived alone with his mother, working as a mechanic during the day and helping her at home at night. Frustrated by his work and his poverty, Hauptmann committed a series of assaults and robberies, for which he was convicted and jailed.8 One of the crimes consisted of robbing two women as they wheeled their baby carriages along a deserted street; another, of climbing a ladder into the mayor’s window in search of jewelry and cash. Later, Hauptmann said that the war had taught him that nothing was sacred.

  After his third arrest, Hauptmann escaped from jail. Considered a hardened and dangerous criminal by the authorities, he was quick to realize there was no place to hide. In the fall of 1923, Hauptmann left Germany as a stowaway on a passenger ship bound for the States. After another abortive attempt on a German ship, he successfully evaded discovery on an American cruiser, the George Washington, bound for New Jersey. On November 26, 1923, his twenty-fourth birthday, Hauptmann walked down the gangplank on the pier at Hoboken, a free man. He had no passport and only two cents in his pocket. His intent was to save five hundred dollars and to move to California to be with his sister.

  By memorizing English phrases, Hauptmann secured a job as a dishwasher and then as a mechanic. Through the kindness of friends, he met Anna Schoeffler in the spring of 1924, and by summer they decided to marry. Anna, sturdy, red-haired, and blue-eyed, was a twenty-six-year-old factory-worker and maid, who had legally emigrated from her hometown in Germany. She was attractive to Richard for her wholesome good looks, her good Christian character, and her $2500 savings account in a bank. She reminded him, he later said, of his saintly mother. Richard secured a steady job as a carpent
er, and they married in the fall of the following year. During the next four years, the Hauptmanns prospered. They moved from a furnished room to an apartment of their own, and then north to Needham Avenue in the Bronx, where they rented the upstairs floor of a two-story home owned by Mr. and Mrs. Rauch, German Jews.

  For two and a half years, the New Jersey State Police, along with the New York City cops and the FBI, had searched for the kidnapper. Clues had shifted the focus of the investigation across the river to New York City. The head of the investigation was James Finn, a doggedly ambitious city cop who had been on the New York City force for twenty-seven years. He had been assigned to protect Lindbergh during his return to New York after his flight in 1927, and Harry Bruno, Lindbergh’s public relations man, had never forgotten him. After the New Jersey investigation floundered, Bruno requested that Finn be assigned to the job. In January 1933, Finn was put on full-time investigation of the crime, and was promoted to lieutenant. Frustrated by Schwarzkopf’s unwillingness to share information, he had taken it on himself to chart the track of the gold ransom notes as they had surfaced.

  By the fall of 1933, he could see a pattern.9 At first, the bills seemed to have been deliberately scattered throughout the city, but after a year and a half, the bills started to surface in two specific areas—along Lexington and Third Avenues in Upper Manhattan, and in the German-speaking area of Yorkville. As a rule, they were folded in signature fashion, in eight parts, by a man who had the habit of throwing them on the counter for retrieval by the clerk. When those who had received the bills were questioned, they consistently remembered a man identical with Condon’s description of Cemetery John: about forty, of middle height and weight, with small features and a triangular face, and wearing a soft felt hat. The chance comment to a gas station attendant in upper Manhattan, who had written Hauptmann’s license number on the bill, brought the police to his blue Dodge and his Needham Avenue home.10