Monday, Feb. 25, 1929

Lindbergh-Morrow

Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh, prime Hero of the U. S., is well used but by no means resigned to the idolatry of his public. When he landed in Havana from British Honduras one evening last week in a Sikorsky amphibian, he eyed the thronging newsgatherers more moodily than ever. He knew their eagerness this time was not solicitude for his safety. He knew that they were not going to ask him about the new Pan-American air mail route he had been inaugurating.* He knew,.alas, that they knew that he was going to do something that contained the essence of what is called "Human Interest." It did seem to him that when a man, even a Hero, is going to get married, that he might be let alone. The newsgatherers were waving slips of paper which read: "Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow announce the engagement of their daughter Anne Spencer to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh." Well? Col. Lindbergh compressed his lips and only opened them to say: "You know all about it. I have nothing to say. I will confine my remarks to aviation." The next day he flushed in angry silence at public comment and curiosity about his plans. Finally in Miami he said: "I believe the announcement is sufficient acknowledgement of the engagement." But it really was romantic. The country gurgled its delight. The tabloids went wild with headlines about "Lindy and Anne," " 'We' now a Trio," etc. etc. Arthur Brisbane pontificated: "It is pleasing to know that the chain of Lindbergh's ancestry stretching back across the ocean to powerful men in the North is not to be broken." Instead of sharing the not altogether delicate Brisbanal anticipation of a Lindbergh son and heir, other commentators preferred to ponder the social evolution represented in the conjunction of the Lindbergh tradition and the House of Morgan. The late Charles Augustus Lindbergh Sr. (1860-1924) was a "radical" Congressman from Minnesota. At least "radical" is the word that J. Pierpont Morgan must have thought of when Charles Augustus Lindbergh Sr. was abusing the "Money Trust" and helping to precipitate the Congressional investigation of 1911.

An interested spectator during the crusade against the "Money Trust" at that time was Dwight Whitney Morrow. He was then a member of an old Manhattan law firm. In 1914 he became a partner of J. P. Morgan & Co.

A subtle metamorphosis has come to pass since 1914. Not often or loudly, nowadays, is the House of Morgan called sinister or arrogant. Among men generally credited with helping this change is Thomas William Lament, who became a Morgan partner in 1911. But even more credit has gone to Dwight Whitney Morrow.

The elder Lindbergh, it is true, was never satisfied that any change had come in the manner and method of large banking houses. To the end he saw them only as "accursed burdens upon the plain people." In 1923, in The Economic Pinch, he wrote:

"God pity our children for unless they compel the recognition of their rights, . . . they will be borne down with added burdens of increased wealth in profiteers' hands to command and compound still greater interest, dividends and rent.

"But," he added, "give the children the facts and they will correct things when it comes their time."

P:The Morrow-Lindbergh engagement was incredible not only to dream-sick young girls. Mr. Morrow's good friend and Englewood, N. J., neighbor, potent Board Chairman Seward Prosser of the Bankers' Trust Co., could not believe his ears when he heard the announcement by radio. P: In Mexico City, Miss Anne Spencer Morrow, 22, five-feet-five, brunette, blue-eyed, literary, bashfully quiet, shrank from the glare of being her country's Hero's fiancee. Her father let the world guess, without assistance, at the time and place of the wedding. Industrious press ferrets brought up Miss Morrow's poems. Her last, in Scribner's, concluded: Still, like a singing lark, I find Rapture to leave the grass behind. And sometimes standing in a crowd My lips are cool against a cloud. P: In the midst of the general good feeling, the fatherly New York Times published a report that the Hero's mother, Mrs. Evangeline Lindbergh, returning from Turkey aboard the S. S. President Wilson, was to marry Capt. F. A. Anderson of that vessel. Soon it was discovered, however, that Capt. Anderson already possessed a wife of 39 years standing.

*Second Assistant Postmaster General Glover announced last week that Col. Lindbergh had violated the Pan-American Airways Co.'s contract with the U. S. by transporting 170 pounds of mail stamped by the Republic of Panama to the U. S. Only U. S. mail, pending further postal arrangements in Central America, was to have been carried. Philatelists were charged with responsibility for the violation. Col. Lindbergh was not reprimanded. In Manhattan, last week, a stamped envelope carried over the North Pole in 1926 by Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd sold at auction for $79.