Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Online
Authors: Susan Hertog
Charles had made an important decision. Even before touching shore, he had cabled his friend General Henry (Hap) Arnold to say that he wished an army aviation post. Within two days of his return, after announcing to everyone that he would not stay long, Charles accepted the position President Roosevelt had reluctantly assigned him. Charles was to study the efficiency of aeronautical production in the United States,
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and, though neither man trusted the other, they understood the need to bury their anger. Charles was convinced that nothing about his current work would evoke Roosevelt’s opposition.
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Writing at her desk in their private suite at Next Day Hill, Anne assessed the quality of their lives since their return to America. She marveled at Charles’s robust energy and his power to find fulfillment wherever he went. For the moment, Anne was content to relax in the luxury of her mother’s home. The flowers were beautiful and the robins were huge, she wrote. Anne took much pleasure in the company of Margot, Con, and their babies, drinking it all in with the thirst of one who has been in an emotional desert.
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The war in Europe seemed far away, and too unreal to feel its pain. But America with its speed and brightness offended her sensibilities. She felt herself an outcast in a corrupt land. Everything seemed “false … flashy and cheap,” especially the movies and the press. She wanted her old America back—the one she had known in her innocence.
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There were many who would have welcomed a garish assault on their senses. To the German Jews, who feared for their lives, the bright face of America was an aspect of its democratic freedom. After Kristallnacht, nothing about America could deter the German Jews from banging on
its doors. Throughout Germany, people searched for relatives abroad who would help them through the arduous and serpentine process of emigration. But the concerted efforts of Jewish and non-Jewish groups in the United States to persuade Roosevelt and the Congress to liberalize immigration laws proved fruitless. Even legislation to permit German-Jewish children to bypass the quota system failed, and pleas from the international committee established by the Evian Conference were viewed by attendant nations as “Jewish blackmail.”
Only non-quota immigrants—university professors, research specialists, writers and artists—reached the United States in appreciable numbers. Nineteen thirty-nine was the biggest year: 56,347 German aliens were admitted. After that, the Nazi crematoria slowed the pace.
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Even though many Americans believed the Jews in Germany were treated unjustly, they didn’t, said one official, want boatloads of refugees arriving on their shores.
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After the Lindberghs and the Carrels were reunited on the same side of the Atlantic, Carrel, as usual, ran the show. He could not tolerate any disagreement; he would not accept any point of view but his own.
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Anne wanted to take a summer house in Washington, but the Carrels cautioned her against it. Charles’s voice was conspicuously silent. But Anne was troubled by their rootlessness. She did not want to be an exile—another “Henry James American.”
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She wondered if she could ever feel at home again.
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Even surrounded by the warmth of family, she felt alien, disconnected.
The American public, however, was proud to have the hero and his family back, and, for the moment at least, the press called a truce.
Commonweal
magazine pleaded with Lindbergh to assume good faith on the part of the press and to meet the American people graciously. And it asked the public to display discretion and forbearance.
Colonel Lindbergh is here again, summoned by the government to give his high abilities and exceptional experience to the aerial division of the national forces. May he be allowed to do so in peace.
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Charles “streaked” across the country in army pursuit planes, inspecting air corps centers and fighter-plane factories, and his colleagues were proud to have him in their ranks. Now that he was working for the United States government, doubts about his loyalty faded, as did any antipathy toward Anne and her books. Two weeks after their return, Anne’s photograph appeared on the cover of
Life
. The editors explained:
The fine sensitive face on the cover belongs to the wife of America’s greatest post-war hero. But Anne Morrow Lindbergh is now a celebrity in her own right. Her two beautifully written books
, North to the Orient
and
Listen! The Wind
, have won her wide acclaim.
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But Anne resisted taking center stage. She wanted a simple life, alone with her children. She tried to justify her material comfort in the Morrow home by engaging in her mother’s charitable activities, but she only felt harried, pushed, even more removed from herself and reality.
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Even a quiet social evening with friends was impossible. With Con and Aubrey, Margot and Dwight, all staying in the house, there was constant jockeying for space and chauffeured cars. It was easier, she wrote, to be alone.
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She and Charles, desperate for a place of their own, took the suggestion of Anne’s friend Thelma Crawford Lee and looked at a house at Lloyd Neck, Long Island. Set on a high, cool peak, the white clapboard, light-filled house had a lawn that sloped down to the Sound. Almost immediately, Anne and Charles decided to rent it.
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Anne was relieved by the prospect of staying home. With Jon and Land, now seven and two, aware of her presence and uprooted for the third time, she did not want to travel with Charles. Since their return home, their relationship had loosened; without the bond of a common cause, the seams frayed. Charles again was the aviator hero, and he was going places Anne would not follow. She imagined Charles happy and carefree in his work, climbing “effortlessly into the sky,”
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while she remained grounded in guilt and uncertainty.
To the world, Anne continued to appear contented. That spring, she was awarded two honorary doctorates, one from the University of Rochester and the other from Amherst, her father’s alma mater. President Alan Valentine of Rochester congratulated her for her literary and aviation achievements, adding that her “greatest victory yet has been a victory of the spirit.”
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The irony cut her to the core.
On June 22, 1939, Anne’s thirty-third birthday, she, Charles, and the children moved to the home in Lloyd Neck. The house looked new and fresh, and she was certain that the nearness of the sea would help her to find purpose in her work.
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She had her desk placed in the garage, and with two maids, a nurse, and a cook to help her, she was able to turn completely to her writing. When she reread the letters she had written to Elisabeth during the early years of her marriage, she was surprised by the spontaneity of her emotions.
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Through her words to her sister, Anne could see that she had betrayed herself for Charles. She prayed for the peace and clarity of mind to sustain their marriage and Charles’s “spirit.”
But Charles, it seemed, required little encouragement to maintain his belief in a new world order. He and Carrel made plans to establish the Institute for the Betterment of Man. Its purpose was articulated by Carrel:
Politically naturalistic democracy is incapable of keeping the peace or of providing adequate food, shelter and clothing for its peoples. Physiologically, the race is degenerating. Morally, force and materialism predominate. We allow this collapse of civilization to proceed without using against it the powerful weapons which science possesses. Unintegrated and specialized resistance is offered. What we need is to assemble in one coordinated group all the weapons of knowledge and thought which are so abundantly available.
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The plan was to have a “nucleus” of men, with practical experience and “universalist minds,” who would govern a group of fact-finding specialists studying contemporary issues crucial to the sustenance of a
“civilized” society. The findings of the studies would become the basis for reforms in education, legislation, and all aspects of American life, from the breast-feeding of babies to labor law. American individualism would diminish and, in time, disappear, and the new state would promote the welfare of all. The governing nucleus would comprise Alexis Carrel and his closest friends, Charles A. Lindbergh, James Newton, and Edward Moore.
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The world according to Carrel would see that women accomplished their divinely ordained purpose of sustaining and educating a new generation. The women selected for the task would be governed by benevolent, visionary, and “civilized” men. Because the quality of civilization was determined by genetic pooling, Charles understood that “mating involves the most important choice in life.” He had chosen well, not only in the individual he married, but in her “environment and ancestry.” He had no doubt that Anne was capable of carrying the “species” forward.
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Their biggest obstacle in promulgating their theories, wrote Charles in his diary, would be the mindless intrusions of a free and ungoverned press. “Someday, they’ll need friends and find them lacking,” he wrote in his diary.
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If only they could get rid of “British and Jewish propaganda.”
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Charles’s assessment of the American press echoed the Nazi view. The Jew, according to the German press, was the source of all evil in American society and was fast pushing America into conflict with foreign powers. The leading Nazi daily informed its readers that 97 percent of all American newspaper publishers were Jews, and that the abduction of the Lindbergh baby had been a Jewish plot, carried out for the purpose of obtaining the child’s blood for a religious ritual.
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On a flight to Denver, a week after his meeting with Carrel, Charles climbed to an altitude of 20,000 feet to avoid an oncoming storm. Darting through the clouds, he “rode on top of them like a God,” feeling as if he “owned the world.” Piercing through the open sky, he mocked the arrogance of the mountains. Even the valleys belonged to him.
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Once again, he was prince of the sky. He had navigated the storm of public opinion, and now he would fill his role in governing the lives of his wayward countrymen.
Whenever Charles came home between trips, he scolded Anne for wasting her time writing letters when she should be writing books. Anne, believing he was right, planned a book of reminiscences. But the nearness to the sea had not kept its promise of renewal. Isolated and aimless, still unable to conceive a child or to write, Anne sank deeper into depression.
On August 4, just as she seemed to reach her nadir, Charles handed her a letter from the publisher of the French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The envelope also contained Saint-Exupéry’s preface to the French edition of
Listen! The Wind
. He had read her book at the publisher’s request while traveling to the States to promote his own book,
Wind, Sand and Stars
. Intending to write a one-page piece, Saint-Exupéry had instead written a nine-page essay. As Anne read his analysis, she felt he had plumbed the depth of her loneliness and self-doubt.
There is a little girl who runs more slowly than the others. Over there the others are playing. “Wait for me!” Already, she is late, they will get tired of waiting for her, they will leave her behind, she will be forgotten and left alone in the world. How can she be reassured? This kind of anguish is incurable.
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Saint-Exupéry’s publisher relayed the author’s desire to meet her on his arrival in New York. Quickly, she pulled
Wind, Sand and Stars
from the bookshelf and started to read. Riveted by its insights and poignancy, she wrote, “It is all I ever wanted to say and more of flying and time and human relationships.”
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Like Anne, Saint-Exupéry reveled in the metaphysics of flight. It was both a laboratory and “a baptism,” a means for stern self-examination and a spiritual journey toward salvation. The detachment and timelessness of flight produced for him, as it did for Anne, the paradox
of clarity in oblivion. Flying removed the veneer from his daily life and laid bare his human frailty. The “lonely glaze” of his cockpit window, he wrote, confirmed the divinity of nature, the delusory arrogance of machine-age man, and the hope of redemption through human relationships.
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Anne, intimidated by his literary fame, asked Charles to call him at his hotel the next morning. But Charles, unable to speak French, had to hand the phone to Anne. Nervously, in her “hesitant” French, she invited him to dinner at Lloyd Neck that evening. Charles, she said, would meet him at his hotel at five o’clock.
Charles left early for a meeting in Cold Spring, New York, with Grace Lee Nute, a Minnesota historian who was writing a biography of his father. But his meeting with Miss Nute did not go as expected. In her research, she had uncovered evidence of his father’s illegitimate birth and his grandfather’s conviction for embezzlement. Charles, fearing the effects of the book’s publication on his family, tried to persuade Miss Nute to drop the project.
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Because his visit was longer than he had expected, he called Anne to meet Saint-Exupéry in his stead.
Anne raced to New York, frustrated by the Saturday traffic, and went to the Ritz-Carleton bar, where Saint-Exupéry awaited his host. At first look, she was disappointed. She found him to be a typical Slav—“bald,” bent, and unattractive.
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In fact, Anne was being kind. He had a chunky, undisciplined body, and a pasty face with bulging black eyes and large drooping ears
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—the antithesis of the type Carrel would have deemed civilized.