royalties. In the summer of 1927 he was also paid to take a crosscountry tour. Flying the Spirit of St. Louis he made stops in all 48 states, flying through all weather conditions and missing only one date in Portland, Maine. In every location he was mobbed, particularly by women. He was, after all, perceived to be the most eligible bachelor in the world, though anyone who took the time to inquire further found that Lindbergh held most women in disdain.
Harry Guggenheim, who had established the Foundation for Aeronautical Research, was the financial backer of Lindbergh's crosscountry flight. Known as "Captain Harry," Guggenheim was a wealthy philanthropist who was more than willing to provide Lindbergh a safe haven from the crowds and press by offering him a permanent room at his mansion on the north shore of Long Island. There Lindbergh rubbed elbows on a regular basis with influential people such as Thomas Lamont, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. the publisher George Palmer Putnam, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and a banker named Dwight Morrow.
These were the power elite of society mostly Republicans. Dwight Morrow was also the Ambassador to Mexico and a prominent Republican whose name was already being touted as a possible Presidential nominee. When Ambassador Morrow invited Lindbergh to come to his home in New Jersey and later to Mexico, Lindbergh readily accepted.
Morrow's New Jersey home was a sprawling manorial mansion in Englewood. He was married, and the father of a son and three daughters, one of whom was Anne Spencer Morrow.
Lindbergh used the invitation to Mexico to promote a South American tour, and to begin it, announced that he would fly nonstop from Washington to Mexico City in December of 1927.
Upon arrival Lindbergh found that Morrow had arranged a greeting by the President of Mexico and he was widely feted wherever he went. He stayed at the Ambassador's home during the Christmas holiday with his mother, who had also been invited by the Morrows, and who had reluctantly come.
While staying there he spent time with the three daughters. It was reported that he got along very well with Constance, who was younger than Anne and still attending an exclusive boarding school, Milton Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts.
Anne arrived from Smith College shortly after Lindbergh's arrival. In 1927 she was twenty-one years old. She was intelligent and sensitive but also extremely shy and introverted. Although she was not quite sure of herself around Lindbergh, she was definitely attracted to him.
In her diaries, Anne wondered whether Lindbergh would be more attracted to her older sister Elisabeth, or her younger sister Constance, with whom he seemed more at ease and able to engage in conversation. The pair seemed to have developed a natural rapport.
Dwight Morrow invited him to spend more time with them at their summer home off the coast of Maine. Later that year Lindbergh quietly began courting Anne Morrow. He asked her to go flying with him and this became his regular method for seeing her. Anne's diaries reveal mixed emotions about Charles Lindbergh and she wrote that he was "terribly young and crude in many small ways."11
Lindbergh maintained his tumultuous relationship with the press. He responded angrily at several newspaper accounts which reported that he was "getting a swelled head," and in a huff declared that henceforth he would only see reporters when it had to do with aviation.
Unless of course it furthered his own interests, as it did on October 3, 1928 when he released to the press a telegram he had sent to Herbert C. Hoover, then the Republican nominee for President:
The more I see of your campaign the more strongly I feel that your election is of supreme importance to the country. Your qualities as a man and what you stand for, regardless of party, make me feel that the problems which will come before the country during the next four years will best be solved by your leadership.
The newspapers continued to track Lindbergh's activities, reporting on his flights to further causes in aviation. They also tracked the possible link between Charles and the Morrow daughters. At the end of April, 1929, the New York Times had daily stories on the fact that Mrs. Morrow and her daughter Anne were on their way north by train, traveling from Mexico to New Jersey. What did not receive much attention however, is that Constance Morrow had received a letter at the Milton Academy threatening violence against her unless a ransom was paid. She was also instructed not to tell the police. The amount demanded as payment was $50,000 the same amount which, almost three years later to the day, would be asked for the Lindbergh baby. The official records of the Milton, Massachusetts Police Department reveal that on April 24, 1929 at 10:20 p.m. "A.H. Weed, 150 School Street brought to station a letter received by Constance Morrow, Milton Academy, demanding money under threats of violence. Miss Morrow lives at Hathaway House. Sergeant Shields sent to detail Officer Lee guard Hathaway House tonight. Mr. Weed will bring letters to station tomorrow after he had had a copy of it made."12
Two weeks later a followup letter arrived instructing her to put the $50,000 in a certain size box and to place it in the hole in the wall behind a nearby estate. By this time the police were involved and the whole Morrow family, including future inlaw Lindbergh, knew of their involvement. An actress placed an empty box in the designated hole and the police staked it out. No one picked up the box.
Charles Lindbergh and Anne Spencer Morrow were married May 27, 1929 in a small ceremony at the Englewood, New Jersey home of the Morrows. They left for what they had hoped would be a quiet honeymoon on a yacht moored off the east coast. But Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in America, and now there was a Mrs. Lindbergh. The media attention focused on the couple. Anne's diaries are particularly revealing about their relationship.
Although there is no doubt she was infatuated, there are many indications that she considered Charles her intellectual inferior. She expressed disgust with his "school boy pranks," which he continued to pull on a regular basis. She also chafed at the role of his faithful companion, there only to service his needs. It did not go unnoticed that Anne was expected to learn new skills in order to fly with Lindbergh and that she was the one carrying equipment from the plane when they landed while he remained the focus of attention.
Lindbergh himself certainly had a strange way of describing his courtship, marriage and relationship with Anne, the person with whom he had decided to spend the rest of his life. In his autobiography he wrote:
On May 27, 1929, I married Anne Spencer Morrow. From the standpoint of both individual and species, mating involves the most important choice of life, for it shapes our future as the past has shaped us. It impacts upon all values obviously and subtly in an infinite number of ways.
One mates not only with an individual but also with that individual's environment and ancestry. These were concepts I comprehended before I was married and confirmed in my observations over the years that followed. 13
This rather clinical description of "finding a mate," contrasts markedly with Anne's poetic descriptions of life, her trials, aspirations, hopes and dreams for the world. Anne Morrow was a deeply sensitive and caring person, who experienced and suffered much in her life.
After their brief honeymoon, Charles and Anne went to work promoting aviation. Charles taught Anne to fly. She also took courses on navigation, learned how to operate a wireless from a plane, and flew with him on many crosscountry flights. Harry Guggenheim announced that he had placed Lindbergh on a retainer for $25,000 for the Guggenheim Aeronautical Foundation so that Lindbergh could promote air travel as a safe, efficient, and effective means of transportation.
In the fall of 1929 Anne's suspected pregnancy was confirmed by her doctor. Nevertheless, Charles expected Anne to continue to accompany him on flights around the country. Lindbergh had announced to the press, with whom he had grown aloof and curt, that he and Anne would break the record for a transcontinental flight between Los Angeles and New York. He had a new plane specially built in California, which he and Anne picked up. They named the plane Sirius, after the bright star in our galaxy.
While in Los Angeles, he introduced Anne to Amelia Earhart at the home of Mary Pickford. Ever since her flight across the Atlantic in 1928 Amelia Earhart's fame as an aviatrix had grown. Newspapers had given her the nickname of "Lady Lindy," a title which she later confided to Anne she did not care for.
Nor, frankly, did she seem