THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman
left their six-week-old infant in the care of a nanny as they flew for a several-day visit to the Guggenheims in Long Island. That was followed by other trips which took them away from Englewood for the better part of a month. Anne told her mother-in-law it felt like she boarded a plane straight from bed. In early September they flew to visit Evangeline in Detroit. Bad weather on their return trip compounded Anne’s dread. She worried they were tempting fate.
By the time they returned, Anne and Charles had begun serious efforts to find a place of their own. Lindbergh’s focus was on land in central New Jersey near Princeton. Lindbergh found a particularly appealing rural site with an adjacent field large enough to serve as an airstrip. Despite the property’s relative isolation, there was also an express train from Princeton Junction to New York City twice daily for commuters. It took just over an hour each way. By car, the Lindberghs’ new home was about two hours from the Morrows’ estate in Englewood and up to half-an-hour’s drive longer from Manhattan, depending on the traffic.
Lindbergh had deliberately focused his search for a suitable site on property near Princeton University. It seemed an ideal locale for the next phase of his career. Lindbergh first visited Princeton in 1928 by invitation from the brother of his transatlantic sponsor Albert Lambert. Back then, when given a campus tour, Lindbergh asked the university’s president for permission to use its labs in the future for experiments. By 1929, Lindbergh had bought a number of biology books and purchased a high-powered microscope. He likely got strong encouragement to move near Princeton from his advisor and closest friend Henry Breckinridge.
Henry’s middle name, Skillman, honored his mother’s uncle by marriage, a Confederate surgeon who ultimately headed the Kentucky Medical Association. The Skillman family tree actually could be traced back to colonial days in New Jersey. Henry came from a long line of men who attended Princeton. Most of the Skillman men stayed to become prominent local citizens. The nearby town of Skillman, New Jersey, where the State Village for Epileptics was located, was named for another member of his mother’s family tree.
In September 1930, the Lindberghs leased a two-bedroom farmhouse closer to Princeton in an unincorporated area called Lawrenceville near Mount Rose, New Jersey. Lindbergh observed to his delight that the rental property contained a field large enough to land a plane. There was also a road directly from Mount Rose to Hopewell so Lindbergh could easily check on progress in the building of his new home. Meanwhile, Dwight Morrow worried about protecting his grandson from intruders once Charles and Anne moved into their new home. Having already wrangled over trust funds for Little Charlie’s education, the family patriarch’s latest focus was household security at his son-in-law’s and daughter’s isolated farmhouse.
Every week, The New York Times covered the latest reports in a wave of lucrative kidnappings, averaging more than two a day nationwide since 1929. Morrow had become far more attuned to that risk after the incident in April 1929, described earlier, when an extortionist threatened to kidnap his youngest daughter. Police had never solved that crime. As the Depression deepened and kidnapping the children of the well-to-do skyrocketed, the multi-millionaire knew he and his wife remained prime potential victims. As newsreel darlings, Anne and her baby likely provided far more inviting targets.
The two-story rented farmhouse in Mount Rose came with servants’ quarters. The Lindberghs soon hired a middle-aged, British couple, Aloysius “Olly” Whateley and Phoebe Mary “Elsie” Whateley, to take care of the farmhouse for them. Meanwhile, it did not take long before word leaked out to the Lindberghs’ fan base about their rented farmhouse near Mount Rose and the larger farmhouse they were building in the Sourlands. Newspapers started covering the story of the layout and location of their new home in detail. Most intrusive of all was a spread in the New York Sunday Mirror revealing the floor plan and luring readers with the banner headline “THE LONE EAGLE BUILDS A NEST.” When the Lindberghs stayed at the Lawrenceville property on weekends, they were tracked there by reporters.
At the rental farmhouse, Lindbergh established his own household rules akin to those observed at his family camp in Minnesota. He had the Whateleys bring dinner to the table all at once in bowls and serving platters. He and Anne and their guests could then help themselves, not be waited on like at her mother’s mansion by servants bearing separate courses of food plated in the kitchen. With his huge appetite he must have found formal dining an irritating custom. At his insistence, the baby slept in the barn to build his endurance. Anne grew worried about the baby’s safety from prying eyes. She saw to it that Little Charlie was constantly watched over in the barn by Elsie Whateley or herself, or Betty Gow when she came down with the family for the weekend.
As a new mother, Anne fretted over parenting decisions for Little Charlie. Both Anne and Charles attended the third decennial Conference on Child Health and Protection in Washington, D.C., in November 1930, sponsored by the White House. Henry Breckinridge was both on the planning committee and chair of the legislation and physical education committees. Henry’s wife, socialite Aida de Acosta Breckinridge, was Assistant Director of Public Information.
The Breckinridges counted themselves among the elite who enthusiastically promoted eugenics. This conference on child health was in part a think tank for developing public policy. The same eugenics groups which convinced the Supreme Court in 1927 to validate forced sterilization were even more focused than ever before on saving humanity from letting “citizens of the wrong type” procreate. By 1930, the American Eugenics Society had embarked on a national campaign to disseminate statistics that showcased the benefits of eugenics laws.
Anne and Charles were likely quite familiar by then with state fair Fitter Family Contest booths that used flashing red lights to compare birth rates of “able-bodied people” compared to what organizers called “degenerates.” The exhibits aimed to horrify fairgoers with claims that capable children were only born “every seven and a half minutes, whereas a feebleminded child every 48 seconds, and a future criminal every 50 seconds.”
The Washington, D.C., conference the Lindberghs attended featured a number of prominent eugenicists they already knew from New York and New Jersey, the hub of that movement for the past thirty years. They might have met the superintendent of Skillman State Village for Epileptics which was located near the new property they intended to build on. The village had a street in it named Morrow Drive in honor of Anne’s father, who had served on two statewide oversight boards for New Jersey institutions more than a decade earlier. The Lindberghs already knew President Hoover, who himself was a strong proponent of eugenics. Their pediatrician, Dr. Philip Van Ingen, was on the panel that focused on medical care for children.
Of particular interest to the new parents, the conference also featured psychologists who taught the latest ideas about diet, sleep schedule and preschool education. Anne sat up front taking many notes, sometimes accompanied by Aida Breckinridge. The Lindberghs had already begun to follow the advice of popular psychologist John Watson on the care of infants and children. Dr. Watson recommended that babies should be fed on a strict schedule and woken up to change their diapers at 10 p.m. each night, to increase the likelihood they would then sleep through till morning. This practice would reinforce the notion of some of the policemen who later responded to the kidnapping that the crime had to involve insider knowledge.
Both photos courtesy of New Jersey State Police Museum.
Elsie Whateley
Elsie and Olly Whateley were first hired to take care of the Lindberghs’ rental home in Mount Rose, New Jersey, and cook and chauffeur for the Lindberghs when they spent weekends there. The Whateleys moved into an apartment above the garage of the Lindberghs’ new farmhouse outside Hopewell in October of 1931.
Olly Whateley
8.
Back in the Air — Grounded by Tragedy
THROUGHOUT 1931, the airlines continued to call upon Lindbergh to make promotional tours overseas and to comment on