One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio,

Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before.

Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New Yorker in 1925.

Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day—or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three.

Of the nation’s 26.8 million households, 11 million had a phonograph, 10 million had a car, 17.5 million had a telephone.

Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world’s movies and 85 percent of its cars.

With a population of just under 120 million, the United States had only about four people then for every ten it holds today. Half of those 120 million still lived on farms or in small towns, compared with just 15 percent now, so the balance was much more in favor of the countryside.

The saloon where Ruth grew up is long gone. By happy chance, the site today lies just beneath shallow center field in Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles—not unfitting since it was as a Baltimore Oriole that Ruth first played professional baseball and first got his nickname “Babe.”

1927, New York had just overtaken London as the world’s largest city, and it was easily the most cosmopolitan. A quarter of its eight million residents had been born abroad; it had more foreign-born residents than Philadelphia had people. Native-born Americans were flocking to it, too. Two hundred thousand southern blacks had moved to New York since the end of the First World War, and now the Mississippi flood was sending tens of thousands more.

New York was still also the nation’s largest industrial center. It was home to thirty thousand factories. One-tenth of all that America produced originated in the city.

By the light of a kerosene lamp—the Coolidge house did not have electricity or plumbing; rural homes still very often didn’t—Coolidge’s father, a notary public, swore his son in as president.

Although the twelve regional banks collectively form a single central bank and act on behalf of the government, they are at the same time private, individual, profit-making concerns owned by shareholders. Their principal function, from the government’s point of view, is to control the money supply, which they do by adjusting the discount rate—the rate of interest at which reserve banks lend to commercial banks. The discount rate is the foundation rate against which all other bank rates are calibrated.

gold standard is an appealingly simple concept. Under it, any paper money in circulation is supported by gold reserves. When America was on the gold standard, a $10 bill could be exchanged for $10 of gold, and vice versa. It was gold, in other words, that gave value to the otherwise worthless slips of paper known as money.

the amount of money in circulation was limited by the amount of gold that had been discovered—but

It made inflation almost impossible since governments couldn’t just print money. It kept the management of exchange rates out of the hands of politicians with their narrow short-term interests. It promoted price stability and, by and large, kept the heavy wheels of international tra...

Finally, and above all, came Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the most formidable double act baseball has ever produced. Gehrig was doing something no human had ever done before: he was hitting home runs as well as Ruth did. Together in 1927 they would hit a quarter of all home runs in the American League.

Henry Ford took this as a personal challenge. He hated in any case being dependent on suppliers who might raise prices or otherwise take advantage of him, so he always did all in his power to control all the elements of his supply chains. To that end, he owned iron ore and coal mines, forests and lumber mills, the Detroit, Toledo & Irontown Railroad, and a fleet of ships. When he decided to make his own windshields he became at a stroke the second-largest manufacturer of glass in the world. Ford owned four hundred thousand acres of forests in upper Michigan. The Ford lumber mills proudly boasted that they used every bit of the tree but the shade.

Vincenzo, ran away to the west in 1908 at the age of sixteen. The Capones got one letter from him the following year, from Kansas, and then heard nothing more from him ever again. In fact, Vincenzo had become a Prohibition agent known as Richard “Two Gun” Hart. He had named himself after the cowboy star William S. Hart, and dressed like him, too, in an outsized Stetson, with a tin star on his breast and a pair of loaded holsters around his waist. In the summer of 1927, extraordinarily enough, he was in South Dakota and working as a personal bodyguard to President Coolidge.

Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal than New York, with 6.1, Los Angeles, with 4.7, or Boston, with just 3.9—but it was less dangerous than Detroit, at 16.8, or almost any city in the South. New Orleans had a murder rate of 25.9 per 100,000, while Little Rock had a rate of 37.9, Miami 40, Atlanta 43.4, and Charlotte 55.5. Memphis was miles ahead of all other cities, with a truly whopping rate of 69.3.

A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spirituous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90—and all this without taxes. By 1927, Capone’s organization—which, interestingly, had no name—had estimated receipts of $105 million.

Babe Ruth’s home run record stood until 1961, when Roger Maris, also of the Yankees, hit 61, though Maris had the advantage of a longer season, which gave him 10 more games and 50 more at-bats than Ruth in 1927.

Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before. Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.