A few essays ago I touched upon my fascination with certain famous New Jersey murder cases. Since then I had the time for a crash refresher course on “The Crime of the Century,” the Lindbergh kidnapping on March 1, 1932, perpetrated about ten miles from where I now live. It’s pretty easy to research a subject pre-organized for you on a special bibliography prepared by Amazon! It’s still that hot a topic in the conspiratorial-industrial complex. Indeed, though the “case” itself is endlessly fascinating, what now strikes me as most remarkable is the graph of its historiography. In recent decades there have been several revisionist books that have moved from exculpating the man convicted of the crime in the direction of inculpating Charles Lindbergh, father of the dead child. This is a remarkable phenomenon worthy of reflection.*
Little Lindy lost
The trial concluded with a guilty verdict against Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an immigrant German carpenter with a serious criminal history, an impressively loyal wife, a young child, a conveniently dead business partner, and a rented house in the Bronx. The trial was manifestly unfair to Hauptmann in various ways, but not in any way that succumbed to judicial review. The New Jersey law with respect to “felony murder” at the time was that any death occasioned by the commission of a felony was homicide. The theory held by almost everyone, and most probably correctly, was that the child’s death had been an accident caused when the kidnapper’s ladder broke as he was carrying the baby down it. The murder charge, which allowed the prosecutor to seek and obtain the death penalty, was a torturous stretch. Unfortunately, kidnapping was not a felony at the time. (The felony was stealing the night clothes the baby was wearing at the time he was taken!) Still, fairness or unfairness in legal apparatus is a different matter from innocence or guilt in criminal activity. Though many questions remain unanswered, I conclude that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was indeed guilty of participating in, or perhaps single-handedly executing, a terrible crime in which a baby was killed. I come to this conclusion on the volume and strength of unrebutted evidence presented in court four years after the crime.
Bruno Richard Hauptmann
The stronger the evidence that must be refuted, the more extreme and dramatic must be the claims of the revisionist who seeks to dismiss it. The prosecutors presented a huge amount of evidence against Hauptmann, some of it a rather tenuous and some of it convincingly strong. For brevity’s sake, consider two of the strongest bits. He had in his possession a large portion of the ransom money. His explanation for having it—the famous “Fisch story”—falls somewhere between the implausible and the preposterous. Then, one of the boards in the homemade ladder found at the crime scene indubitably had had a former life in the rough attic subflooring in Hauptmann’s garage**. When under the duress of scientific demonstration the conspiracy theorists were forced to abandon doubting the indubitable they had to move to a theory of a police frame-up, that is, conscious, criminal, and very wicked hoax perpetrated by local and state officials in New Jersey, including the Attorney General in his role as prosecutor. The ladder had indeed been made from a board in Hauptmann’s garage, but it was not the carpenter, but the police who made it! Richard Hofstadter’s classic Paranoid Style in American Politics has just been republished in the Library of America. Who will write a Paranoid Style in American Historical Writing?
It is no exaggeration to say that in 1927 Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world. His fame had if anything increased by 1932. Furthermore that fame, the product of historical, cultural, and technological circumstances of a unique moment, was of a kind unlikely ever to be matched in future generations. Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” may be overly cynical, but it’s probably closer to future norms. In 1932 Charles and Anne Lindbergh received more than 100,000 telegrams of sympathy when their baby’s remains were found in the woods where they had been cruelly dumped. By the end of the century supposedly serious writers were postulating that Charles himself had dumped them. How could this be?
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Historians, who ostensibly make history, are themselves made by history. If you read accounts of Lindbergh today you will hear more of his suspect politics and of the bizarre double life he undertook in his late fifties than of his heroic lone-eagle transatlantic flight in his twenties. As war in Europe appeared ever more likely in the late ‘Thirties, Lindbergh became an outspoken isolationist whose America First movement preached an aloof neutrality and presented a serious obstacle to Roosevelt’s semi-covert policies. America First was not simply a pro-fascist group, as sometimes represented, but a broad-based coalition uniting the Socialist leader Norman Thomas and King Kleagles of the Klan. But both Lindberghs were for a time way too Germanophile for their later reputational health. Once the war came, and Hitler became the most hated man in the Anglophone world, Lindbergh’s earlier enthusiasms diminished him. And when much later it became known that he had secretly sired several children with three different women in Germany, it may have seemed to many that there was no crime, however unlikely, of which he was incapable. Americans had always imagined the man in semi-mythical terms. So when in 2004, thirty years after Lindbergh’s death, Philip Roth published his brilliant counterfactual novel The Plot Against America, you could hear the click of the paradigm shifting into its new socket.
Virgil has a striking image of the personification of Fama (Rumor, or Gossip) as a great and most dangerous bird-lady flapping about the land spreading “news” in which truth and fiction are inextricably mixed. That would do as a description of the counterfactual historical novel, of which I know no more impressive an example than The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. In it Lindbergh—through circumstances made to seem not merely historically convincing but historically inevitable—wins the presidency in 1940 in a truly vast right-wing conspiracy compared with which Hillary Clinton’s is very small beer. In this book an inventive mind, like Fama, has so thoroughly dissolved what could have happened in what really did happen that only the knowing few will know the difference. It is the special gift of a powerful novelist to exercise supremely well a privilege that should not be claimed by historians. But that is exactly, I think, what the revisionists have done. That is why I call their work the plot against Charles Lindbergh. Despising his politics and feeling justified by his apparent sense of sexual exceptionalism, their strange retribution takes the form of accusing him of infanticide and imputing to the police and the judicial authorities of two states the elaborate framing of Richard Hauptmann: all in all an extraordinary exercise in blaming the victim.
*Among the principal revisionists are the following three: Ludovic Kennedy, The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann (1985); Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier, Crime of the Century: The Lindberg Kidnapping Hoax (1993); and Robert Zorn, Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2012). The most balanced and dispassionate antidote to the conspiracists is Richard T. Cahill’s Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2014). In A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh (1998), a masterly biography by a masterful biographer, the episode of the kidnapping is fully treated as a terrible event in its subject’s long and varied life. As his subject is Lindbergh, not Hauptmann, Berg takes no definitive position on the “revisionist question” but does recognize that despite all flaws of the police work, a rabid press, and the judicial proceedings, “there remained a veritable mountain of undisputed evidence against [Hauptmann], a man so secretive that his own wife declared that she did not even know his first name was Bruno…” (pp. 334-335).
**The sleuthing done by Arthur Koehler, an expert dendrologist in the U. S. Forest Service, remains one of the most amazing feats in the history of criminal forensic science. It is described more or less adequately in most of the books about the kidnapping, but best of all by Shirley A. Graham, “Anatomy of the Lindbergh Kidnapping” in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, no. 42 (1997), pp. 368-377.
