Lovers of the American history documentary series “American Experience” had to be pleased with the announcement that GBH, the Boston-based public media provider, would relaunch the series next year.
The first on its list of documentaries to be aired on GBH, which is also available in Connecticut, will be about Charles Lindbergh, who lived in Darien from the 1940s to the 1970s. That story has as many ups and downs as Lindbergh must have had on his solo Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, which made him a national hero. The trip, which took 33.5 hours, required Lindbergh not to sleep for 55 hours, according to PBS.
Two years after the flight, he married Anne Morrow in a small ceremony in New Jersey, according to PBS. Only three years later, the unthinkable happened. On March 1, 1932, Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was kidnapped from his home in New Jersey, causing a media firestorm and offers of assistance even from Al Capone, who was awaiting to transfer to prison on charges of tax evasion, according to History.com. The boy’s body was ultimately found on May 12, just four and a half miles from the couple’s home, according to the FBI. Ultimately, German carpenter Bruno Hauptmann was charged and executed for the killing, the FBI reports.
Despite the public adulation and sympathy, public sentiment toward Lindbergh began to sour, especially after the celebrated pilot toured German combat units, factories, airports and military bases, including some that had never been seen by an American.
An isolationist, Lindbergh spoke to the Yale University student chapter of the America First Committee, a nationwide organization that opposed American intervention in the war, in 1940. The committee had been formed at Yale that year, according to the United States Holocaust Museum. Â The following year, in a speech delivered in Des Moines, Lindbergh pointedly criticized the Jewish people, accusing them of helping to push the country toward war.
“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration,” he said, according to PBS. “Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Â
It’s hard to overestimate just how large Lindbergh loomed in the American imagination. So it shouldn’t have been surprising when Connecticut Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth published a novel imagining a fictional character modeled on Lindbergh becoming president of the United States. Roth, who lived in Warren , published “The Plot Against America” in 2004.
To what famous actress was Philip Roth married?
The New Britain Museum of American Art is presenting the first career survey of  contemporary artist and musician John Hitchcock. “John Hitchcock: We are Defined by the Beat,” which runs through Nov. 29, will display how the artist “has transformed the sonic and cultural rhythms of his homeland into a distinct visual language,” according to a news release. An enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma with Comanche and Northern European ancestry, “Hitchcock merges personal expression with references to intertribal powwows, the Wichita Mountain landscape of his youth and the symbols and languages of Great Plains Native populations,” according to the release.
Philip Roth’s second wife was actress Claire Bloom, to whom he was married from 1990–1995.Â
