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Before 1914, airplanes barely featured in military thinking. The French air corps, with three dozen planes, was larger than all the other air forces in the world put together. Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan, and Austria all had no more than four planes in their fleets; the United States had just two.
military commanders quickly saw how useful planes could be—for monitoring enemy troop movements, for directing artillery fire, and above all for providing a new direction and manner in which to kill people.
“Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.”
women were not allowed to hear murder cases in New York State in 1927—were
The plane’s frame was covered in pima cotton painted over with six coats of aluminum-pigmented dope—a kind of aromatic varnish that made the cotton shrink to fit tight around its wood-and-tubular-steel skeleton.
Although the Spirit of St. Louis looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot and the outside world, the Spirit of St. Louis was deafeningly noisy and unnervingly insubstantial.
The American fliers also had an advantage over their European competitors that nobody yet understood: they all used aviation fuel from California, which burned more cleanly and gave better mileage. No one knew what made it superior because no one yet understood octane ratings—that would not come until the 1930s—but it was what got most American planes across the ocean while others were lost at sea.
Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt.
The nation’s inattentiveness notwithstanding, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was the most epic natural disaster in American history in extent, duration, and number of lives affected.
Altogether the Mississippi would be at flood stage for 153 consecutive days.
Cities were, on the whole, agreeably compact: they had not yet acquired the radiating shock waves of suburban sprawl that we find today.
In 1927, when people traveled or shipped goods, it was still almost exclusively by rail.
skyscrapers of the period began to sport pointed masts—so that airships could tie up to them.
The amount of fabric in the average dress, it was calculated, fell from almost twenty yards before the war to a wispy seven after.
In desperation, lawmakers tried to legislate probity. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offense for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes.
No place in the world was less hospitable to a speeding convoy than New York in the 1920s. It was the most congested city on earth. It contained more cars than the whole of Germany, but it also still had fifty thousand horses. The combination of hurrying motorized vehicles, plodding carts and horses, and lunging pedestrians made New York’s streets wildly dangerous.
All the students had a history of behavioral problems, but the brothers attributed that to inadequacies of upbringing rather than any deficiency of character—a decidedly enlightened view for the time. They believed that any boy treated with decency, encouragement, and respect would grow into a model citizen, and they were nearly always right. Ninety-five percent of Xaverian boys went on to live normal, stable lives.
Putting numbers on uniforms didn’t start until 1929, when the Yankees and Indians introduced it.
in the space of one-thousandth of a second—the duration of contact—through the miracle of physics it converted the sizzling zip of an incoming 90-mile-an-hour baseball into an outgoing spheroid launched cloudward at 110 miles an hour.
By the time of Lindbergh’s flight, one-third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
Many believed that all the invisible energy flying through the air must be dangerous. One widespread belief was that birds found dead on the ground were there because they had been struck by radio waves.
Interesting!
Los Angeles instituted strict limits on building heights—which is partly why LA sprawls so today—but still allowed the city hall to rise to twenty-eight stories in violation of its own ordinances.
As buildings grew taller, the number of workers pouring into city centers grew and grew. Boston by 1927 had 825,000 people a day coming into its downtown—or more than the entire population of the city. Pittsburgh absorbed 355,000 workers every day; Los Angeles and San Francisco 500,000 each; Chicago and Philadelphia over 750,000 apiece; and New York, superlative in everything, took in a whopping daily load of 3 million.
The 1920s was in many ways the most strange and wondrous decade in American history, and nothing made it more so than Prohibition. It was easily the most extreme, ill-judged, costly, and ignored experiment in social engineering ever conducted by an otherwise rational nation.
Although it was illegal to produce wine for private consumption, vineyard owners could send out packets of grape concentrate, which could be turned into wine at home. In case anyone missed the point, the packets came with warnings in large type that read: “Caution: Will Ferment and Turn into Wine Within 60 Days.”
LOL
Nearly everyone recognized Prohibition as a colossal failure, and yet the nation persevered with it for thirteen years.
The great Mississippi flood of 1927 had two lasting legacies. First, it accelerated the movement of blacks out of the South in what is known as the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better-paying jobs and more personal liberty. The movement transformed the face of America in a decade. Before the Great Migration, only 10 percent of blacks lived outside the South. After the Great Migration, half did.
By the late 1920s, GM was well on its way to perfecting the annual model change, a practice that was essentially needless but magnificently effective as a marketing tool.
By the late 1920s, Chrysler was doing so extraordinarily well that he could afford to build a magnificent monument to himself. The result was the fabled seventy-seven-story Chrysler Building, which was the world’s tallest building upon completion. (Not for long, however. Eleven months later it was superseded by the Empire State Building.)
Before the 1920s, Florida was known for citrus fruits and turpentine and not much else. A few rich people went there for the winter, but hardly anyone else considered the state a destination.
America was in the grip of something known as the Great Red Scare. In 1917 and 1918, Congress had enacted two startlingly restrictive laws, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act.
The numbers of immigrants changed the face of urban America utterly. By 1910, immigrants and the children of immigrants made up almost three-quarters of the populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston.
The widespread perception of Italians was that if they weren’t Fascists or Bolsheviks, they were anarchists or Communists, and if they weren’t those, they were involved in organized crime.
No part of his life was normal, and there was no prospect that it ever would be again. As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
Lindbergh also flew by request over scores of small towns, but only if they agreed to paint their town name on a rooftop for the benefit of other aviators.
In communities where he could not land he dropped leaflets that read: Greetings. Because of the limited time and the extensive tour of the United States now in progress to encourage popular interest in aeronautics, it is impossible for the Spirit of St. Louis to land in your city. This message from the air, however, is sent you to express our sincere appreciation of your interest in the tour and in the promotion and extension of commercial aeronautics in the United States.
Studios were churning out as many as four new films a week, a rate that was clearly incompatible with quality.
For some time, what exactly constituted sound movies was a matter of uncertainty. Eventually, a consensus arose. A picture that offered recorded music but no talking was said to be “with sound.” If it additionally had some sound effects, it was said to be “with sound and effects.” If it had any recorded speech at all, it was a “talking picture.” If it was a proper movie, with a full range of speech and sounds, it was an “all-talking picture.”
With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.
The Ansonia was an apartment hotel—a popular new concept in the twenties—which meant that it combined the spaciousness and permanence of an apartment with the conveniences of a hotel: maid service, concierge desk, daily replenishment of towels, and so on.
it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are, but how stupid),
At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.
Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. 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
When students at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago (named for Robert McCormick’s grandfather) were asked in 1927 to name the ten most outstanding people in the world, they chose Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, the golfer Bobby Jones, and Al Capone.
is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: 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.
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This is a good summary.
Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris remains one of the most written about events of modern times, so details here are taken from many sources. I have at all times taken Lindbergh’s own, meticulous Spirit of St. Louis as the last word on the flight itself.
The story of Henry Ford’s life and business is exhaustively covered
