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Harold Willis Dodds and 33 of his faculty and fellow townsmen presented an astonishing petition to the Legislature. "We hereby subscribe to the demand, 'Save Jersey Justice!' ", it began, requesting the Legislature "to investigate whether at tempts have been made, by public officials or by other persons, to annul . . . orderly processes of law and, if so, whether grounds exist for the removal or impeachment of such officials." The Grand Jury adjourned after two days without returning an indictment against Wendel. At 5 p. m. Governor Hoffman summoned Attorney General Wilentz to his office. The Attorney Gen eral had insisted that the Governor had no right to issue a second reprieve. At 7:30 p. m. Governor Hoffman announced that he would issue no reprieve. At 8:47 p. m. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was dead. Emerging from the State House some two hours later, Governor Hoffman at tempted to dodge a waiting crowd by cutting through a flower bed to the street. When a flock of impertinent questioners pursued him, the thickset Governor whirled, slapped one with his open hand, strode grimly on to his hotel. Motives. What motive had prompted Governor Hoffman's extraordinary efforts to save Hauptmann's life was last week anybody's guess. The Governor and his supporters insisted that he had been moved solely by his conviction that justice had not been done. Most public surmises came under the head of publicity & politics.
One guess made early in the case was that the Governor had sought to discredit Superintendent Schwarzkopf, whose term expires this spring, in order to have cause to replace him with a Hoffman follower. Later it was suggested that the Republican Governor had seen a chance to cripple his Democratic opposition in the State by discrediting Attorney General Wilentz. A third theory was that Governor Hoffman was simply seeking to strengthen his popular position because of factional disputes within his own Party, caused by his unpopular sales and income tax policies and by dissension over patronage.
Still another guess was that Governor Hoffman, a rising young statesman who a few months ago was being seriously talked of as his Party's possible choice for the Vice-Presidential nomination this year, had taken advantage of the Hauptmann case to make a name for himself. Had he succeeded in proving Hauptmann innocent or in revealing the whole story of the Hopewell crime, he would unquestionably have been a national hero. Many a plain person in & out of New Jersey feels that Hauptmann was railroaded to jail and death by invisible wealth and power and points, right or wrong, to the Lindbergh-Morrow-House of Morgan connection. Conceivably Governor Hoffman's activities would, if successful, be rewarded with political dividends from such persons.
Consequences. This week the lower house of New Jersey's Legislature listened to the Princeton petition, swiftly killed a resolution to investigate the Hoffman Case. But a test of Governor Hoffman's political fate had already been assured by Franklin William Fort, onetime (1925-31) New Jersey Representative, floor manager for Herbert Hoover in the Republican national convention of 1528.