One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

Network broadcasting proved to be extremely expensive. Radio was unique among entertainment media in that it didn’t charge for content.

Harold Bell Wright.

(1926).

i read all but Mantrap. mjp 12/4/13

Appleton, Wisconsin,

He sentenced Victor Berger, a socialist congressman from Wisconsin, to twenty years in prison for criticizing the war in a newspaper editorial.

fact not often remembered is that the jury found all eight not guilty, then went out with them to a restaurant to celebrate. One reason the players were cleared was that it was not actually illegal to fix a baseball game, so they could only be charged with willfully defrauding the public and injuring Comiskey’s business, and the jurors decided that that case was not proved.

He developed a private theory that men at the University of Wisconsin wore lace underwear and dispatched a reporter to find out if that was true.

A viewing of the footage—now available to everyone with access to the Internet—is

“And this all happened in less than a decade,” Spencer says, indicating the full range of marvels around us. “That’s what Lindbergh’s flight achieved.” “But wouldn’t it have happened anyway?” I ask. “Sure,” Spencer agrees. “But it wouldn’t have happened so fast, and it wouldn’t have been so overwhelmingly American.”

There is no evidence to suggest that Charles Lindbergh would ever have countenanced atrocities, but equally when a person speaks of the world as having too many of one kind of person, he is within hailing distance of those who do. What is certainly true is that both he and Anne were unapologetic admirers of Adolf Hitler. Anne described Hitler as “a visionary who really wants the best for his country.” Lindbergh thought Hitler was “undoubtedly a great man.”

Hoover did quite a lot to try to stimulate the economy. He spent $3.5 billion on public works, including several projects for which we may thank him yet—notably the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. He even donated his own salary to charity. An aide to President Roosevelt once confessed, “Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” But nothing could overcome his absence of lovability. At the 1931 World Series, he was “lustily” booed—the first time that that had ever happened to a president at a World Series game.

summer.

Fin 12-11-2013. Bought tickets to Riga in May 2014 yesterday. mjp, Wauwatosa