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Expanding on reasons for the Lindberghs' move, Reporter Lyman reviewed the tide of threatening letters from cranks and crooks which had begun in 1927, ebbed & flowed as the Lindberghs were more or less prominent on the nation's front pages. Since the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., Federal, State and local police had guarded the Lindberghs unremittingly, traced some of the threats, made a few arrests. Still the famed family lived in fear. Gratified were they when threats died down as excitement over Bruno Richard Hauptmann's arrest and conviction diminished. Then came two deciding events. Last month New Jersey's Governor Harold Giles Hoffman caused a fresh Press furor over Murderer Hauptmann by paying a midnight visit to his death cell, publicly reviving old doubts that the German carpenter was solely responsible for the Hopewell crime (TIME, Dec. 23). Promptly threats against Jon Lindbergh took on new volume and violence. Meantime the Lindberghs were thoroughly alarmed by an incident in Englewood. As Jon was being motored to his nursery school a large automobile sped up, forced the Lindbergh car to the curb. Strange men leaped out, thrust cameras at the child (see cut), sped away. Since then Jon had not been to school. "National Disgrace— First reaction of U. S. editors to news of the Lindbergh flight was to beat their breasts in shame, to deplore U. S. lawlessness for driving the Nation's No. i hero into foreign exile. "It is a national disgrace . . ." moaned the San Francisco Chronicle. "No battle lost could bring the American People so great a humiliation," gloomed the Chicago Tribune. "Nations have exiled their heroes before," boomed the New York Herald Tribune. "They have broken them in misunderstanding or persecuted them with meanness. But when has a nation made life unbearable to one of its most distinguished men through a sheer inability to protect him from its criminals and lunatics and the vast vulgarity of its sensationalists? ... It seems as incredible as it is shocking. . . . The Lindberghs can live with some freedom in England . . . because of the adult public sense of good taste, restraint and respect for individual right and privacies which underlies the British freedom from crime."
"If it is said that this is the price which must be paid in America for celebrity . . ." barked the Baltimore Sun, "so much the worse for America!"