To borrow current parlance, Charles Lindbergh went viral. Yet the fragmented, quick burning digital celebrity of today’s viral stars drastically understates the universal fame and adoration Lindbergh endured after becoming the first pilot to complete a nonstop transatlantic flight from Long Island to Paris in May 1927.
Apps, smart phones, and “tech efficiencies” rule the roost today, but Lindbergh’s signature accomplishment not only propelled the world’s aviation dreams sky high, it was broadcast and transmitted in seconds by the maturing technologies of the time: radio, telephones, radiographs, and motion pictures with sound.
As A. Scott Berg writes in his Pulitzer prize winning biography, Lindbergh, “For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event—almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator […] the new technology found its first superstar.”
That introduction would of course be only the first viral chapter of Lindbergh’s life. The kidnapping of the firstborn Lindbergh baby from the aviator’s estate near Hopewell forever ties him to the local area, while his less well known medical, rocketry, and environmental achievements further fade into history.
In a recent phone interview, Berg said Lindbergh’s politics remain the most misunderstood. His six trips to Nazi Germany were at the behest of the U.S. government, and before Pearl Harbor he staunchly advocated U.S. neutrality. Lindbergh believed America would be better off staying out of the war, making anti-war speeches that drew the ire of FDR, who publically called the now ex-hero a “defeatist” and “appeaser.”
The Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton aims to tell a fuller story of the most widely known persons of their time in the exhibit “Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Couple of an Age.” Exploring the lives of Lindbergh and his writer wife Anne Morrow, the exhibit was prepared by curators Elizabeth Allan and Heather Smith. It opened last month and runs through Oct. 23, 2016.
Three years removed from his solo flight across the Atlantic, in 1930 Lindbergh purchased a 425-acre site in the Sourland Mountains. He was seeking isolation yet easy access to New York City, as well as proximity to the world-class facilities at Princeton University. Most of the estate is actually located in East Amwell township, three miles away from Hopewell borough.
“The Sourland estate was going to be a base for Lindbergh and his family,” Berg said. “There were plans for a private airstrip, though it was never built.”
In February of 1932, the construction of his three-story house in the Sourlands had finally finished and Charles Lindbergh just turned 30. According to Berg, he was developing a routine and enjoying family life. He busied himself with medical research at the Rockefeller Institute – teaming up with a Nobel laureate to develop the perfusion pump, an important precursor in medical technology – while also coming home to his infant son Charles Jr.
Anne Morrow was pregnant with their second child, and the Lindberghs spent weekends in Hopewell, preferring to spend most of their time at the large, full-service Morrow estate up north in Englewood. (Attendees at the funeral of Lindbergh’s father-in-law, New Jersey Senator Dwight Morrow, included Calvin Coolidge, Adolph Ochs, and a quarter of the U.S. Senate.) They would never end up settling down in Hopewell.
The “Crime of the Century” may well have never happened, if it weren’t for Charles Jr. coming down with a cold during one of the family’s weekend stays at the new Hopewell house. Anne Morrow decided to stay at the house to tend to her son instead of traveling back to Englewood at the start of the week, and on March 1, 1932, the baby was kidnapped in the evening. The house transformed into an auxiliary police base as a massive manhunt ensued.
“The federal government all the way down to the Boy Scouts offered to help find the baby,” Berg said. Two months later the body was discovered four miles away from the house off the Hopewell-Mt. Rose Highway, on a hill near the Mt. Rose hamlet.
The kidnapping has left an enduring mark in the minds of locals.
The borough had only two policemen at the time, Harry Wolfe and Charles Williamson. After the Lindberghs reported the missing baby, they notified the state police and were the first to arrive on the scene.
Wolfe’s grandson Doug Robbins still lives in the borough.
“My mother remembered the phone call,” Robbins said. “My grandfather and his partner were the first to arrive, they walked around the property. All of a sudden the state police showed up. He basically saw the politics that got involved and backed out. More powerful agencies were taking control anyhow. The Hopewell police were pictured as hillbillies, local yokels.”
National media converged after news of the kidnapping leaked. The Hall family lived across from Wolfe’s home.
“I was the same age as the kidnapped baby,” Dick Hall said. “My uncle, Joe Pierson, was the runner for the reporters. They were all living in the Hopewell Valley Inn, writing their stories and the kids would run the paper down to the train station and teletype it out.”
Hall’s cousin Joe Klett, who works as the director of state archives, said Pierson had a car and would also drive curious out-of-towners to the Lindbergh estate.
“He would tell stories of the visitors, he had fun with people’s perception of Hopewell,” Klett said. “A New York lady would say, ‘Excuse me young man, I’m here to see the hillbillies.’ Of course, people in town were different than the people living in the mountains.”
A German carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was convicted of the crime–Berg concludes the evidence proves his guilt–in a trial at Flemington.
Tom Fillebrown attended Flemington high school during the trial, and he remembers walking the two blocks after schoo to try and catch a glimpse of action outside the barricaded courthouse
“I wanted to see if they would bring Hauptmann back to jail,” Fillebrown said. “It was big news around the time, but it was no big deal to us kids. It was something that happened to somebody.”
As the Hopewell police chief in the 1950s and sixties, Fillebrown also got to know Wolfe and Williamson, though by then the furor had died down.
Tillie O’Donnell, 100, was a teenager living in Trenton in the 1930s. Now residing at Brandywine Senior Living, her first recollection when asked about Charles Lindbergh is Hauptmann’s execution at New Jersey State Prison on Cass Street.
“When they executed him we were standing outside the prison,” said O’Donnell 80 years later. “I lived three blocks from the prison at the time. There was a crowd, everybody in the neighborhood was there. We saw the lights kind of dim when they executed him.”
After the discovery of their child’s body, the Lindberghs tried to make the Hopewell residence work, but they moved back to the Morrow estate in August 1932. Soon thereafter Anne Morrow would give birth to their second son, Jon. They would have four other children. Never failing to disappoint the hungry public, in the past several years news has come out that Charles fathered an additional seven children with three European mistresses, two of whom were sisters.
The Lindbergh home is currently a state halfway house and the New Jersey State Police have a permanent exhibit of the famous case. If not for the kidnapping and the sustained flash of notoriety that the local area has capitalized on, would the Lindberghs have stayed and grown firmer roots in the area? Impossible to say, though Berg speculates Lindbergh would not have become Mr. Central Jersey.
“The Hopewell house was supposed to be a base, but in his life he ended up collecting a lot of bases,” Berg said. “He had bases in Maui and Switzerland. He was restless.”
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