Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (51 page)

It was terrible for Anne to leave Jon for Christmas, but Charles was intent on going, and she would not refuse.
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She bought the Christmas tree early, and seating Jon on her knee, told the boy the story of the birth of Christ. Did the wise men go fast when they followed the star, he asked? They went by camel, not by car, Anne explained.

On December 1, Anne and Charles left Long Barn and the children, and boarded a ship bound for New York. Even though they were registered under the name “Gregory,” they made no attempt to hide their identity.
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In contrast to their crossing two years earlier, they appeared
relaxed and comfortable. They lounged on the deck in the morning sun and sat at the captain’s table at dinner.
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And while they kept to themselves in the afternoon, it was clear, even to the press, that something new was in the air. Charles was re-entering the public arena, with a strong sense of personal influence. One magazine reported, “Lindbergh landed with probably more complete information of Europe’s airways than any individual on this side of the Atlantic.”
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Anne found life in New York crude. Having been moved by the bucolic life of Long Barn and the reserve of London, she felt out of place in the frenzied, acquisitive culture of New York society.
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Its pace left her no room to breathe, and seemed to lack any trace of the spiritual.
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Shopping on Fifth Avenue and living in the luxury of Next Day Hill, she had little cognizance of life on the street.
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In fact, the economy was beginning to lose the early gains of the New Deal. In the first half of 1938, industrial production would drop precipitously, and by the end of the year two million people would lose their jobs.
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But what Anne saw was magazines and shops full of luxurious clothes, furs, and jewels. It was all she could do not to be swept away by the mindless opulence.
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Meanwhile, the tension abroad was rising. Italy withdrew from the League of Nations, and on December 12 the Japanese bombed British and American gunboats on the Yangzte River. One day later, the Japanese staged the “rape” of Nanking, in which 200,000 civilians were slaughtered and 20,000 women were raped and murdered.
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The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, dissuaded an irate League of Nations from imposing sanctions. The British cabinet, however, overruled the aviation experts by approving a shift from the building of bombers to fighter aircraft. That dramatic change would later prove pivotal in Britain’s defense.
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As preparations for war intensified, Carrel deepened his commitment to “civilization.” In a bold attempt to sustain human organs in his laboratory, he used the pump designed by Charles to perfuse tissue with insulin, adrenaline, and other glandular extracts so that he could study the morphology and activities of the organs.
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In a speech to an audience of Phi Beta Kappa members at Dartmouth, he called for the establishment
of eugenics institutes throughout the world, for the express purpose of developing a higher breed of “civilized man.”
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Through December and January, Lindbergh worked at the Rockefeller Institute to further their experiments. Simultaneously, Carrel arranged to educate doctors in Italy and Germany in the techniques that he and Lindbergh were perfecting.
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By the turn of the year, Anne was eager to return to Long Barn. On January 17, she wrote in her diary that once again the pendulum of her life had swung too far. The visit to the States had been a frenetic attempt to see everyone and do everything. This hurried life was as numbing as the isolation of domesticity. As Anne would later write in
Gift from the Sea
, one must learn to navigate the sea between solitude and society.
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But Anne was about to get more than her share of isolation. At Carrel’s suggestion, Charles had consented to buy an island near to St. Gildas called Illiec. From the moment Charles saw the tiny, four-acre slip of land, washed by tides and flooded by light, he wanted to own it. And the Carrels were eager to have him join them. In spite of its wild beauty, reminiscent of Maine, Illiec seemed to Anne little more than a pile of rocks with a house set in a grove of pine trees.

She must have remembered she hadn’t married for happiness. Although she would have to leave Long Barn and the beauty and safety of its walled gardens and paths and the life they had carved in the small country village with Jon and Land, Anne knew she had to go. In spite of the fact that she disdained the Carrels and their racist views, Anne deluded herself that living on Illiec was what she should do.
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H
ermann Goering with Anne and Charles in Berlin, 1938
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(Culver Pictures)

T
here is your island!” said Madame Carrel, pointing into the mist. Her eyes squinting against the cool April rain, Anne took the sighting on faith. No matter how hard she peered toward the open sea, Anne could not discern the shore.
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With their baby in a basket in the cockpit, Anne and Charles had landed in a field on the mainland. The Carrels, who had met them, drove to the coast of Brittany near Mont-Saint-Michel, and now, at high tide, they crossed by motorboat and moored on the cratered beach. When they climbed the pebbled spit of rocks toward a stone tower, a nineteenth-century manor house rose up to meet them. The wild beauty of the “galloping tides” and rocky coastline heightened the majesty of its imposing structure, and the gray light of the stormy sky bathed the rugged “gorse-covered” land with an air of medieval romance.
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Unfortunately, the house was dreadful inside, with no heat or plumbing or electricity. Built in the 1860s by the French composer Ambroise Thomas, it still had the look of an elegant mansion, but now it was in total disrepair.
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Anne’s mind was filled with possibilities as she walked the dark halls and surveyed the sparsely furnished rooms.
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Their decision to buy the island was spurred by both desire and desperation. When they returned from America in the dead of winter in 1938, the complacency of England was chilling. It was a land, they believe,
at war with itself and steeped in self-delusion; they felt alienated from English society and politics.
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But in part, the Rockefeller Institute had given them no choice. The board of directors had decided to discontinue its support of further collaboration by Charles and Carrel.
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In early June 1937, in a sudden change of policy, the board had declared a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, with a specific notice that those members reaching the age of sixty-four or over on July 1 of that year would be retired on July 1, 1939.
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The date was just three days after Carrel’s birthday, and he was the only member who would turn sixty-four in 1937. The decision seemed less than coincidental. Other members of the institute had been permitted to carry on with their work well into their late sixties and early seventies.

The institute could no longer tolerate Carrel’s vision of a social order determined by eugenics. To have as a member of its staff a radical ideologue was unacceptable to an institution dedicated to objective inquiry. Furthermore, the presence of Charles, an unqualified layman, diminished the standards of their institution.
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Carrel, in retribution, sought to expose the institute as a “Jewish operation.” He tried to intimidate the board by saying the institute was run by Jews who intended to replace him with one of their own.
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But the board was implacable, and Carrel and Charles left. Carrel, certain that he would find sympathetic colleagues in Germany and Italy, wrote to a friend that he would train doctors in both Padua and in Berlin.
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When Anne and Charles prepared for their move, they found themselves embroiled in English politics. The Astors now counted them among their own and again invited them to dine. Charles, who had found his views confirmed during his second trip to Germany, was eager to take a political stand. Anne, however, was put off by the Astors’ anti-Churchill, pro-German friends. She claimed she was too stupid to understand the wisdom of the intellectual elite,
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but Charles “shock[ed] the life out of everyone” with his views on Germany.

Slowly, Anne came to believe that Charles was right. At a dinner at Cliveden on May 1, Anne summoned up the courage to tell Lord Astor,
the perfect gentleman and host, that she and Charles agreed with his views. Accommodating Germany was the only hope of keeping peace.
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The next day, the Lindberghs and the Nicolsons conferred at Sissinghurst on the implications of the impending crisis between Germany and Czechoslovakia. Charles bombarded Nicolson with facts, noted Anne,
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but Nicolson had impressions of his own:

Nicolson may have exaggerated; he did not fabricate. Clearly, Charles saw the Third Reich as the embodiment of his values: science and technology harnessed for the preservation of a superior race, physically able and morally pure. While Charles valued democracy in the abstract, he had come to believe that its freedoms were not worth the price. Social and political equality, together with an ungoverned press, had produced a climate of moral degeneracy that had permitted the murder of his infant son. He did not disdain democracy so much as he did the common man—the uneducated and enfeebled masses, typified by Hauptmann, who lived like parasites on the body politic. America wallowed in decadence, the Russians sank into mediocrity, and England and France, at war with themselves, were weak, aimless, and morally defunct. To Charles, Germany under Hitler was a nation of true manhood—virility and purpose. The strong central leadership of a fascist state was the only hope for restoring a moral world order.

While Charles spoke his mind behind closed doors, Carrel publicly asserted his contempt. Democracy, he said, was an outright failure, incommensurate with the laws of nature. Human beings were not equal, and to build a system on such an ideology was to court failure. Eugenics and the government of the elite were the means for maintaining civilized life.
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