THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

of the supposedly ‘better’ classes.”

      Yet Lindbergh was also painfully aware of his lack of social skills: dancing, small talk and etiquette. Getting up the nerve to invite a woman to the theater or a restaurant totally baffled him. He did know what he wanted to avoid. He had been disgusted by the paid sex pursued by his fellow Army recruits. Lindbergh felt strongly the whorehouse was “not an environment conducive to evolutionary progress.” He was just as nauseated by the one-night stands of his libidinous pilot buddies. Their dating habits did not reflect “selectivity, hardly any desire for permanence and children.”

      A year before Lindbergh’s flight, prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians and professors launched an organization expressly devoted to improving the gene pool, the American Eugenics Society (AES). Both the AES and the more established American Genetics Association (AGA) counted among their members the nation’s leading geneticists, strongly supported by powerful politicians and wealthy philanthropists, including the nation’s two richest men, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and oil baron John D. Rockefeller.

      Lindbergh likely first became aware of the AES in 1926 when it started an annual national contest promoted in county and state fairs — places where barnstormers then often performed. Dubbed “Fitter Families for Future Firesides,” these “Fitter Family Contests” awarded annual trophies through competition. The contestants vied for designation by AES doctors as the couple who produced “the most viable offspring based on physical appearance, behavior, intelligence, and health.” Invariably, the winners were those of white Northern and Western European ancestry.

      By the summer of 1927, Lindbergh’s own elevated view of self-worth matched eugenicists’ concept of ideal characteristics — narcissism that groupies reinforced everywhere he went. Looking for a wife in 1927, Lindbergh embraced the AES standard. He wanted a woman of “good health, good form, good sight and bearing.” Biographer A. Scott Berg describes Lindbergh’s formula as “more about animal husbandry than human relations…. emoting less about choosing a wife than a farmer might in selecting a cow.” But Lindbergh saw human procreation through that same lens. He felt he had a special obligation to pass on his acclaimed superior genes to help perpetuate the most advanced race of people.

      By his twenties, Lindbergh had clearly absorbed the knowledge that Nordic supremacy was a widely shared view. He, too, believed other races were inferior. Indeed, no one who came of age in the 1920s could escape the white supremacist message underlying the national agenda. In 1924, Congress passed a draconian immigration policy aimed at homogenizing the gene pool by excluding Asian immigrants and severely limiting the number of “Hebrews, Slavs, Catholics and Negroes” permitted to immigrate to the United States. Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger reduced the policy to a slogan: “More children for the fit; less for the unfit.”

      By the late 1920s, the widely publicized goal of eugenicists was both to purge the gene pool of as many people with “inferior” traits as possible and to encourage procreation by the best white families. Support for the eugenics movement hit its high point less than three weeks before Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic. That was when the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling endorsing forced sterilization of those deemed unfit. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Buck v. Bell prompted a major push to pass legislation to rid the country in future generations of “the socially inadequate” — defectives, dependents and delinquents. All of this coincided with the national campaign to encourage preferred white couples to compete in creating Fitter Families for Future Firesides.

      It is easy to see how Lindbergh felt compelled to be part of the solution. Like Teddy Roosevelt, who had been C.A. Lindbergh’s hero,

      Lindbergh believed people exhibiting excellent family traits had a duty to intermarry and produce numerous offspring. Lindbergh considered it important to have a definite objective in mind before committing himself to a plan of action. He decided he could best help improve the gene pool by producing twelve children like himself. He focused on finding a marriage partner with “good heredity,” a lesson learned from his “experience in breeding animals on our farm.”

      In the fall of 1927 when Lindbergh worked weekdays on rewriting his autobiography, Guggenheim continued his own mission. One wonders if he was inspired by the character Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s enormously popular play “Pygmalion” (later remade as the musical “My Fair Lady”). Guggenheim similarly planned to transform his houseguest from an uncouth barnstormer to the toast of high society. The debonair New Yorker had already fitted Lindbergh with a tuxedo and several hand-tailored suits. That fall, the wealthy philanthropist featured Lindbergh at numerous weekend parties held at the Guggenheims’ Long Island mansion.

      Lindbergh was still a virgin. He shunned women who wore too much makeup. He did not play tennis and found it awkward to learn parlor games or chat about movie stars or the latest styles. He was not comfortable holding doors open, discussing literature or escorting women to the theater. He studied girls’ bodies to see if the clothes they wore might be obscuring defects in their builds. He invited some of them swimming to see for sure. But Lindbergh was wary of showing too much interest in a particular young woman. Otherwise, the newspapers were prone to instantly have them engaged.

      While being feted at millionaires’ private estates, it crossed Lindbergh’s mind that one of their daughters would be a smart pick. He wanted a mate with a high-achieving father, a woman who would enjoy air travel and was game to assist him on future flights. He wanted a free-thinking girl, not a regular churchgoer with strong religious convictions. He also assumed she would be Caucasian. Guggenheim introduced the shy celebrity to a who’s who of powerful men: Herbert Hoover, Orville Wright, John Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan among them.

      Dwight Morrow, whom Lindbergh had already met, attended gatherings there as well. Morrow was a self-made man, who quickly mastered any subject he was assigned. J. P. Morgan had quickly nurtured Morrow’s consummate negotiating skills. When Lindbergh was still in high school, Morrow, through Morgan’s influence, had served as the top American civilian aide to General Pershing in France in World War I. (Morrow’s path to riches exemplified the war profiteering C.A. Lindbergh had railed against at the time.)

      When Lindbergh met his future father-in-law, Morrow occupied the powerful position of general counsel of Morgan’s bank. Morrow was also one of the trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics and had been one of the first dignitaries to greet Lindbergh on his arrival in Washington from Paris. Morrow then headed a board created by President Coolidge to elevate the air service to an Army Air Corps. At the time, an American war with Mexico loomed as a distinct possibility. The Coolidge administration hoped to avoid hostilities between the two countries.

      On meeting Lindbergh, Ambassador Morrow instantly realized the pilot’s potential value in smoothing relations with the nation’s southern neighbor. That fall, Morrow invited Lindbergh to his apartment in New York and persuaded the pilot to take the Spirit of St. Louis on another international trip before donating it to the Smithsonian — an historic nonstop flight to Mexico City from Washington, D.C.

      Anne Morrow first met Charles in December 1927, after her father engineered that public relations coup. At the invitation of Mexico’s President, Lindbergh took off from the nation’s capital on December 13, 1927, shortly after noon and flew through the night to Mexico City. Lindbergh emerged from the cockpit to yet another elaborate hero’s welcome. Dwight Morrow brought the pioneering aviator back to the embassy and convinced his wife to invite Lindbergh and his mother to join their family for the holidays. At first, only the Morrows’ two youngest children were present with their father and mother at the embassy: Dwight, Jr., aged nineteen and Connie, aged fourteen.

      On December 19, 1927, the Morrows’ two eldest daughters took the train to Mexico City to join their family for Christmas. Like their mother, both attended Smith College. Elisabeth, age 23, had already graduated and Anne, then 21, was in her senior year. Though Anne enjoyed her older sister’s company, she could not help feeling inferior. Elisabeth was the taller of the two, and a striking blonde adept at witty conversation. (She was named for her mother, but the Morrows spelled her first name with an “s” instead of a “z.”) Elisabeth seemed to draw beaux at will.

      Anne