The Story Of The Century

On the raw, gusty night of March 1, 1932, in the Sourland Hills of New Jersey, the twenty-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh and the former Anne Morrow, their first-born, was kidnapped from his nursery. Discarded nearby was a rough-made sectional ladder with a broken lower rung. A ransom note, with expressions and misspellings that suggested a writer whose first language was German, was left in the nursery. It led, on the night of April a in a Bronx cemetery, to the payment of fifty thousand dollars by an intermediary to a lone extortioner. But the child was not returned. Various hoaxers entered the picture, and underworld emissaries sought vainly to make contact with any gangsters who might have been involved.

On May 12 truckers stopping in woods not far from the Lindbergh home came across the child’s body.

Meanwhile a number of the ransom bills, of which police had recorded the serial numbers, began to appear in the New York area. A large part of the ransom, incidentally, had been paid in gold notes, which bore a yellow seal on the face and were redeemable by the Treasury in gold specie. By a decree of the Roosevelt administration taking the country off the gold standard in !933, gold currency was officially withdrawn from circulation. Such ransom bills therefore became all the more conspicuous.

On September 15, 1934, some two and a half years after the kidnapping, a New York gas-station attendant jotted down the license number of a driver who not only paid with a $10 gold note but boasted of having a “hundred more” at home. Four days later, after trailing the car owner about, FBI agents and New York police arrested him—a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who lived in the north Bronx with his wife and infant son. In his wallet they found a $20 ransom bill, and $14,600 more in the garage behind his rented home.

Hauptmann went on trial for murder in the Hunterdon County Court at Flemington, a little town in the rolling farmland of west New Jersey, on January 2, 1935. “We realized,” said Lindbergh, testifying at the trial, “that after this circumstance had originally happened the sequence of events would probably be peculiar, not according to the ordinary logic of life.”

In fact, the tragic kidnap-murder of the Lindbergh baby became the occasion of a long-running carnival-circus that took one bizarre turn after another and ultimately reached its low, in many respects, with the trial of Hauptmann.

Outside the whitewashed nativestone courthouse in Flemington, a marketplace for chicken and egg farmers some seventy miles southwest of New York City, where nothing much had ever happened before in two centuries, souvenir peddlers promptly swarmed in to hawk tiny wooden replicas of the kidnap ladder.

On the first Sunday of the trial, when the courthouse was opened to sightseers, an estimated sixty thousand visitors from as far away as Chicago and Washington, according to their entries in the “guest book” the local sheriff provided, descended on Flemington, whose normal population was less than three thousand. Some twenty thousand automobiles, at times moving only three miles an hour and at other times not at all, choked the roads all the way back to New York and Philadelphia.

At the courthouse deputy sheriffs served as barkers, pointing out the main attractions. Tourists elbowed one another for the thrill of sitting in the chair Lindbergh occupied daily as an observer, marked with a sheet of paper breezily inscribed “Lindy.” But they backed off with a shudder from the camp chair assigned to Hauptmann; only three brave sightseers risked it all day. Hundreds had themselves photographed in the judge’s place and carved their initials into the bench. The century-old witness chair had to be nailed down lest it be carried off.

As the trial progressed attendance became an absolute must for the cafesociety set presided over by that huge, pear-shaped, rumpled arbiter of elegance Elsa Maxwell. Packs of “women in mink,” as they came to be called, became a regular feature of the court sessions, along with Broadway and Hollywood stars such as Lynne Fontanne, Clifton Webb, Jack Benny, and Estelle Taylor. The Union Hotel, the town’s only hostelry, which normally served fifty meals a day, dished out a thousand for the duration of the trial, and—significantly—two thousand drinks a day.

An inside group of newspapermen, doing their best to live up to the lifestyle of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s rowdy play THe Front Page, concocted a special trial anthem, adapted from the German beer-garden ditty “Schnitzelbank,” that ridiculed almost everybody and everything connected with the trial. A printable sample stanza went:

Ist das nicht der noon recess? Ya, das ist der noon recess. Schmells der court like Bronx Express? Ya, like rush-hour Bronx Express.

During the six weeks of the trial some dozens of volunteer “confessions” were received from all over the country, “clearing” Hauptmann. The confessors turned out to be a variety of publicity seekers, psychopaths, and convicts hoping to wangle a brief vacation from their prison cells by being brought to Flemington to testify.

Nevertheless, for all this nightmarish hullabaloo, Justice Thomas W. Trenchard, a massive man who looked like a monument of Jurisprudence, managed miraculously to keep a firm hand on the trial proceedings and to guide them so fairly and dignifiedly and humanely (he bought rubbers for the entire jury to wade through the winter slush on their way to and from the courthouse) that no error was ever laid against him during the many appeals before Hauptmann died in the electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton on April 3, 1936.

Why this mass hysteria that for six weeks made Flemington a world news center? The main reason, of course, was that Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, was still a world hero seven years after his epic solo flight across the Atlantic. Also this was a time when sensational murder trials, including the Hall-Mills and Snyder-Gray cases of a few years before, were the favorite reading matter of the newspaper public.

Reporters came from every continent to pour out as much as a million words a day from the little courthouse on a web of 168 specially installed lines that included direct wires to London, Paris, Berlin, and Sydney. It was the largest setup ever created for a news event, including the World Series and Olympic games. Technicians estimated that for the duration of the trial Flemington had a communications system large enough to provide normal service for a city of a million.

Newspapermen enjoyed calling the Hauptmann trial “the Story of the Century,” airily by-passing World War i. It was nevertheless a fact that day after day on the front pages of America, and many foreign journals as well, the trial was given top play over such simultaneous, and ultimately more significant, events as the first of the Moscow trials of Old Bolsheviks; the first appeasement of Adolf Hitler, this by the return to Germany of the Saarland territory (after which New Jersey’s local Sourland was misnamed); and the Roosevelt administration’s introduction of a key piece of New Deal legislation, the Social Security Act.

Seating capacity of the courtroom, with its church-pew spectator benches and some extra facilities, was no more than five hundred, and there was a daily struggle for admission that went all the way from primitive elbowing to ruses like obtaining pretend witness subpoenas from friendly lawyers in the case. I happened to be one of a hundred and fifty privileged newspapermen who were issued special press passes. My own blood-red ticket, imprinted in black, entitled me to Press Seat No. 3, which consisted of about twenty meager inches of sitting space in the first of two rows of unpainted pine benches and tables that were installed directly behind the enclosure for judge, defendant, lawyers, and witnesses.

There, in my narrow lebensraum, wearing down ten pencils daily, I contributed some five thousand words a day of the running story for the New York Post . This was a consecutive, chronological account of all that happened in the courtroom while it was happening: question-and-answer testimony, an evaluation of the same in relation to previous testimony and happenings, description of the appearance and behavior of the witnesses, skirmishes of the lawyers, reaction of the defendant and spectators. And every word of it had to be written by hand on manuscript-size sheets, passed up the aisle by messengers, and relayed to the attic, where a telegrapher especially assigned to me transmitted my running account to the Post , an evening paper, where it would be set up in type and printed only minutes later.