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At thirty-eight stories, the Sherry-Netherland was the tallest residential building ever erected, and the scaffolding—put there to facilitate the final stages of construction—covered the top fifteen stories, providing enough wood to make a giant blaze around its summit.
He became known to his colleagues as the Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of Everything Else.
MANIAC BLOWS UP SCHOOL, KILLS 42, MOSTLY CHILDREN; HAD PROTESTED HIGH TAXES
The Bath massacre was the largest and most cold-blooded slaughter of children in the history of the United States, yet it was quickly forgotten by the wider world.
The plot of Rio Rita was interestingly improbable. Set in Mexico and Texas, it involved an Irish American singer named Rio Rita, a Texas Ranger traveling incognito while looking for a bandit named Kinkajou (who may or may not have been Rita’s brother), a bigamous soap salesman named Chick Bean, and a character identified only as Montezuma’s Daughter. These characters and some others of equal implausibility engaged in a series of amusing misunderstandings interrupted at intervals by songs that had little or nothing to do with the actions that preceded or followed.
It wasn’t all froth and melodrama, however. Eugene O’Neill produced his longest and densest play in 1927, Strange Interlude, which took five hours to perform and gave audiences an expansive, not to say exhausting, look at insanity, abortion, heartbreak, illegitimacy, and death.
A kind of mania swept the nation. Proposals were put forward to exempt Lindbergh for life from paying taxes, to name a star or planet after him, to install him in the cabinet as permanent head of a new aviation department, and to make May 21 a national holiday. He was given a lifetime pass to all major league baseball games everywhere. In Minnesota a proposal was made to rename the state Lindberghia.
He collected jade, books, ceramics, dogs, horses, and art, and had what was called “America’s finest collection of small monkeys.”
But on the whole people were enchanted. The ability to sit in one’s own living room and listen to a live event in some distant place was approximately as miraculous as teleportation. When an advertiser wrote, “Radio Leaps the Barriers of Time and Distance!” it was as much an expression of wonder as of fact. For many, the broadcast of Lindbergh’s arrival was nearly as notable and exciting as the arrival itself.
However small or large the total, it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizens an agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until recently been an accepted part of civilized life, was still legal nearly everywhere else in the world, and was patently harmless in moderation.
When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.”
Grace was a great support and did all the talking for both of them in social situations. He doted on her and called her “Mamma.”
“I doubt if it [the presidency] has ever fallen into the hands of a man so cold, so narrow, so reactionary, so uninspiring, so unenlightened, or who has done less to earn it than Calvin Coolidge.”
No one has ever more successfully made a virtue out of doing little than Calvin Coolidge as president. He did nothing he didn’t absolutely have to do, but rather engaged in a “grim, determined, alert inactivity,”
Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, was based on the simple idea of thinking of oneself in exclusively positive terms and of repeating over and over the simple mantra “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”*
That warmth wouldn’t last, alas. By the 1930s, Gehrig would hate Ruth about as passionately as it was possible to hate a person. The fact that Ruth reportedly had by that point slept with Gehrig’s wife would seem, not surprisingly, to have had something to do with that.
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.
The other important effect of the Mississippi flood was that it forced the federal government to accept that certain matters are too big for states to handle alone. For all Hoover’s proud reminiscence of how relief efforts were entirely private, it was widely recognized that government could not stand by when disaster struck. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge reluctantly signed into law the Flood Control Act, which appropriated $325 million to try to avert future disasters.
Nineteen twenty-seven was a memorable year for foolish murders, and this was certainly one of those, for it seems not to have occurred to Dr. Dreher that it’s never a good idea to dump a body in floodwater, because the water will eventually go away whereas the body may not.
One reviewer drily observed, “As an author Lindbergh is the world’s foremost aviator.” The buying public didn’t care.
He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, “mildly unbalanced.” He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews.
John Kenneth Galbraith had no doubt about the matter. Ford’s life and career, he maintained, were “marked by obtuseness and stupidity and, in consequence, by a congeries of terrible errors.” Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill in a generally sympathetic biography of 1957 called him “an ignoramus outside his chosen field [but] an ignoramus of sense and integrity.”
1913. At the same time, Ford established its notorious Sociological Department, employing some two hundred investigators who were empowered to look into every aspect of employees’ private lives—their diet, hygiene, religion, personal finances, recreational habits, and morals.
Who deserves the credit for Ford’s success has been a matter of dispute since that success began. Many have suggested that the real brains of the operation was James Couzens, Ford’s Canadian-born partner. Couzens had started his working life as a clerk in a coal yard, but joined Ford early on and showed an extraordinary flair for business. Couzens set up and managed Ford’s finances, sales, distribution network, and advertising.
The Independent became famous for the dullness of its features and the waywardness of its views. It was produced from some surplus factory space, prompting one wag to call it “the best weekly ever turned out by a tractor plant.”
Ford remained true to his word and never publicly criticized Jews again. That isn’t to say that he necessarily abandoned his beliefs, however. Just over a decade later, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he accepted one of Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honors—the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—which came garlanded with praise from Adolf Hitler. Only one other prominent American of the period was so admired and honored by the Nazis (or so openly admired them in return): Charles Lindbergh.
Ray Dahlinger, was a man of very few words. He offered only two terse verdicts on any car: it was either “damn good” or “no damn good.” “You could never get any details from him as to what was wrong or what needed improvement,” sighed one engineer. The company did have a stylish research lab, designed by Albert Kahn, but Henry Ford refused to invest in precision instruments or other useful tools.
although he may not actually have committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because [his] ideals are cognate with crime.” In
When I came to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before, but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there just as well. Work in the same condition but not so hard, about seven or eight hours a day, better food. I mean genuine. Of course over here is good food, because it is bigger country, to any of those who got money to spend, not for the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh, and I came in this country.
later. Coolidge was convinced that his role as president
if the rest of the nation did not, or at least did not necessarily.
