How much do you know about Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh? For years, those names only meant one thing to me – the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. It was a scandal that shocked the nation in the early part of the twentieth century and it is a heart-breaking tale to this day.
Who Were Anne Morrow & Charles Lindbergh
Their love affair or storybook romance as the popular press wrote of them in their own time was not quite a fairytale. Lindbergh made history as an aviator and he was a national hero. He met Anne Morrow during a visit to Mexico – she was the daughter the U.S. ambassador. Their relationship spawned what would become a popular phenomenon in the modern day. They were a celebrity couple to be celebrated, dissected, written about and even vilified at times.
Their romance was a complicated one filled with acts of control, repression, joy, passion, grief and rage. For his part, biographers detail that Lindbergh wanted his wife to be a modern and independent woman whose focus remained on him. Their daughter, Reeve described the relationship as: ”It was sometimes an uneasy and uncomfortable union, but my belief nonetheless, is that neither one of my parents felt fully alive, or truly like himself or herself, unless the other one was there.”
Lindbergh gained fame and notoriety for making the first solo flight from New York to Paris. In December of 1927, Dwight Morrow invited Lindbergh to visit Mexico. Lindbergh flew to Mexico City by himself and when he arrived, there was one face amongst the throngs (over 150,000) that caught his eye. Just 21, Anne Morrow’s quiet and gentle nature attracted him. He pursued his relationship with her with the same dedication he did his flying. During the course of their courtship, he taught her how to fly.
The man I was to marry believed in me and what I could do and consequently I found I could do more than I realized …
Married on May 27, 1929, Charles and Anne welcomed their first child just a year later. His name: Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. Though they had five more children together, it was the 1932 kidnapping and murder of their first son that would forever change their lives. Kidnapped on March 1, 1932 – it would be 72 agonizing days before a baby’s remains were found in the woods not far from the Lindbergh home. He’d been dead since the night of the kidnapping. Though the ransom was paid and the money tracked and a man even jailed for the crime – the Lindberghs never got over the agonizing loss.
Tarnish
Lindbergh’s reputation and popularity would suffer from his support of Hitler and even his contention that it was the power that corrupted the Nazi’s would do little to alleviate the damage on his image. Through tragedy and triumph, Anne Morrow Lindbergh remained at his side. There would be affairs, there would be jealousy and there would be anger and recriminations, yet they were always better together than they were apart.
There has been speculation over the years that it was the loss of their son and the media circus that followed that crippled them for the decades to come. Charles Lindbergh died in 1974, but Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived for some years to come and she continued to write both about life, her experiences and her viewpoint. Of her writings, the most popular is likely her Gift from the Sea a book she published in 1956. The book contains 8 essays that are both inspiring and uplifting about the meaning of a woman’s life.
Love Letters are a part of our 14 Days of Romance here in the Marriage Blog, we hope you enjoy them!
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