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3 books match the query '1902-1974'

cover of Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dilemma: The Conflict of Technology and Human Values

Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dilemma

The Conflict of Technology and Human Values

Susan M. Gray

University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Throughout his life, Lindbergh’s value structure, interests, and activities shifted and moved, yielding a conflict between instinct and intellect. Both its presence in his life and his readjustment of values in accordance with it are representative of his time and culture. He moved, with the twentieth century itself, from a faith in technology to a disenchantment with it and finally to a balanced resolution that synthesized the seeming oppositions of technology and the human spirit. This emphasis on a balance between technology and humanity, and Lindbergh’s belief that maintained the complementarity rather than the opposition of the two forces, finally culminated in a post-technological mysticism, a teleological worldview of science and nature as aspects of the same physical and spiritual environment.
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cover of Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories

Correction of Drift

A Novel in Stories

Pamela Ryder

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Explores the lives behind the headlines of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, evoking anew the scope of tragedy through the vision of literary fiction.
 
It was called the crime of the century, and it was front-page news: the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories imagines the private lives behind the headlines of the case, and examines the endurance—and demise—of those consumed by the tragedy.

Every character brings a different past life to the event, be it a life of celebrity, or of misfortune and obscurity. There is Anne Morrow Lindbergh—daughter of a millionaire, the shy poet who married a national hero; Charles Lindbergh—the rough-and-tumble Minnesota barnstormer, who at age twenty-five made the first transatlantic flight, bringing him world-wide prestige; Violet—the skittish family maid with a curious attachment to the boy and a secret life that lapses into hysteria and self-destruction; and the kidnappers—an assembly of misfits with their own histories of misery. All are bound by the violence, turmoil, and mystery of the child’s disappearance as it becomes evident that each life has been irrevocably changed. Patterns of bereavement and loss illuminate these stories: despair at the death of a child; the retreat into seclusion; the comfort and the desolation of a marriage. But the heart of this novel is the far-reaching nature of tragedy, and the ways the characters go on to live—or end—their lives.
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cover of The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping

The Case That Never Dies

The Lindbergh Kidnapping

Lloyd C. Gardner

Rutgers University Press, 2004

The Case That NeverDies places the Lindbergh kidnapping, investigation, and trial in the context of the Depression, when many feared the country was on the edge of anarchy. Gardner delves deeply into the aspects of the case that remain confusing to this day, including Lindbergh’s dealings with crime baron Owney Madden, Al Capone’s New York counterpart, as well as the inexplicable exploits of John Condon, a retired schoolteacher who became the prosecution’s best witness. The initial investigation was hampered by Colonel Lindbergh, who insisted that the police not attempt to find the perpetrator because he feared the investigation would endanger his son’s life. He relented only when the child was found dead.

After two years of fruitless searching, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant, was discovered to have some of the ransom money in his possession. Hauptmann was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. Throughout  the book, Gardner pays special attention to the evidence of the case and how it was used and misused in the trial. Whether Hauptmann was guilty or not, Gardner concludes that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of first-degree murder.

Set in historical context, the book offers not only a compelling read, but a powerful vantage point from which to observe the United States in the 1930s as well as contemporary arguments over capital punishment.

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