POLITICAL NOTES: The Hoffman Case

The Lindbergh Case ended on Sept. 19, 1934 when Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested in The Bronx, N. Y. for possession of Lindbergh ransom bills. The Hauptmann Case ended in Trenton, N. J. last week when Hauptmann paid with his life for the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. (see p. 18). When and how the Hoffman Case would end, no man knew last week, but the political life of New Jersey's Governor Harold Giles Hoffman was indisputably at stake.

On the night of Oct. 17, 1935, eight days after New Jersey's Court of Errors & Appeals had unanimously affirmed Hauptmann's death sentence, Governor Hoffman, a Republican, secretly visited the condemned man's cell, talked with him for more than an hour. Shortly thereafter the squat, hard-driving Governor sensationally re-opened the quiescent Hauptmann Case by publicly expressing doubt of the German carpenter's sole guilt, announcing that he had launched an independent investigation of the crime under New Jersey's famed small-town detective, Ellis Parker. The Governor charged State Police Superintendent H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a non-Hoffman Republican holdover, with having bungled the original investigation. He accused Attorney General David T. Wilentz, Democrat, of having conducted Hauptmann's prosecution at Flemington with bias and prejudice.

Public criticism of Governor Hoffman's behavior was touched off late in December by the departure of Colonel Lindbergh & family for England (TIME, Jan. 6). At once a large section of the nation's Press hotly blamed the New Jersey Governor for driving the No. 1 U. S. hero into exile. One of its Democratic members demanded that New Jersey's Legislature investigate the Governor's actions. The Legislature, Republican-controlled, did nothing.

Party lines broke, however, when 30 hours before Hauptmann was scheduled to die on Jan. 17—New Jersey's Court of Pardons, a U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court having denied his pleas for clemency or delay— Governor Hoffman granted him a 30-day reprieve "for divers reasons," hinted that important new evidence had come to light. Few weeks later, no new evidence having appeared, New Jersey's Republican State Committee openly broke with the Republican Governor by declaring its intention to displace him as leader of the Party.

Meantime the bickerings of Republican Hoffman and Democrat Wilentz were filling the Press with charges and counter-charges which grew more bitter every day. When Dr. John F. ("Jafsie") Condon took ship for Panama, Governor Hoffman threatened to have him brought back for questioning. Superintendent Schwarzkopf announced that purported representatives of the Governor had tampered with his State troopers, tried to make them admit that Hauptmann had-been framed. Governor Hoffman impugned the credibility of the chief state witnesses at the Hauptmann trial. Last fortnight he took a PWA wood expert to Hauptmann's home in The Bronx, emerged after several hours to announce that the expert doubted whether "Rail 16" in the Lindbergh kidnap ladder had actually come from the carpenter's attic. "Nonsensical!" cried Attorney General Wilentz. '"Outrageous!"