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, but for the moment reading remained most people’s principal method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild. Both were immediately successful. Authors were venerated in a way that seems scarcely possible now. When Sinclair Lewis returned home to Minnesota to work on his novel Elmer Gantry (published in the spring of 1927), people came from miles around just to look at him.

Book clubs begin

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. President Coolidge announced that June 11 would be Lindbergh Day in America—the highest tribute ever paid to a private citizen by the nation. The post office rushed out special airmail stamps—the first time a living person had been so honored.

Lindbergh

In Hollywood, a young cartoonist named Walt Disney was inspired to create an animated short feature called “Plane Crazy” featuring a mouse who was also a pilot. The mouse was initially called Oswald but soon assumed a more lasting place in the nation’s hearts as Mickey.

Lindbergh

Then life in France returned to normal. Within a day or so, American tour buses were being thumped with stones again and visitors on the Champs-Élysées were finding it awfully hard to catch the waiter’s eye. As it turned out, this was only a prelude. Before the summer was over, millions of French would hate America as they never had before, and it would actually be unsafe to be an American on French streets. The summer of 1927 would not only be the most joyous in years for America, but quite an ugly one, too.

France and Americans

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.”

Ruth and Camden Yards

He could not have been greener. He didn’t even realize that the majors consisted of two leagues. The nickname his teammates gave him now, “Babe” (on account of his innocence and youthfulness), could hardly have been apter. Ruth was in every sense but the physical one a little boy. With his first paycheck he bought himself a bicycle. In hotels when there was nothing else to do, he rode the elevators for hours.

"Babe"

It was almost impossible to imagine anyone ever having a better year—or, come to that, a more timely one. Baseball was about to be sent reeling by its greatest scandal, the throwing of the 1919 World Series by the Chicago “Black Sox,” an event that, when it was revealed in the fall of 1920, wholly undermined people’s faith in the game. Ruth’s colossal swatting was the greatest distraction in sporting history. He didn’t just transform the game, he very possibly saved it.

Ruth saves baseball 1920

Lindbergh Day in Washington was in many ways the day that radio came of age. It takes some effort of imagination to appreciate how novel radio was in the 1920s.

Radio

the broadcast of Lindbergh’s arrival was nearly as notable and exciting as the arrival itself.

Radio

It escaped no one’s attention that American breweries were nearly all owned by men of German extraction and presumed German sympathies. Temperance advocates seized on this to make beer drinking seem an all but treasonous act.

WWI German Breweries Temperance

For Warren G. Harding, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. Few people have undergone a more rapid and comprehensively negative reappraisal than America’s twenty-ninth president. When he died suddenly in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage (though some said it was heart failure and others ptomaine poisoning), he was widely liked and admired. He had been elected in 1920 with the largest plurality in modern times. An estimated three million people turned out to watch the funeral train that carried him back to Washington. The New York Times called it “the most remarkable demonstration in American history of affection, respect, and reverence.” In fact, at the time of his death President Harding was on the brink of being exposed as a scoundrel and a fool.

Warren G. Harding, Lack of Popularity after death

Harding’s death was so well timed, in terms of escaping scandals, that it was widely rumored that his wife had poisoned him for the sake of his reputation. Her behavior following his death was certainly curious: she immediately began destroying all his papers and wouldn’t allow a death mask to be made. In addition, she stoutly refused to give permission for an autopsy, which is why the cause of his death has always been uncertain. All that can be said is that the president had been unwell ever since arriving in California from Alaska, where he had been on vacation.

Wife poisoned Harding?

One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit. The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows.

Fun fact

Also racing up from behind was the new Chrysler Corporation, which was formed out of the old Maxwell Motor Company and named for Walter Chrysler, its dynamic head. 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.)

Fun fact

Willard’s victory provided a crucial, if not laudable, milestone for boxing: it gave the sport a white heavyweight champion, a shamefully necessary prerequisite for its becoming a popular mainstream sport. Before this time, boxing was virtually the only sport in America—indeed, pretty much the only activity—in which blacks could compete with whites on equal terms. It is an ironic point from a modern perspective, but part of the reason boxing was considered unwholesome and insupportably raffish before about 1920 was that it wasn’t racist. And a big part of converting it into a respectable entertainment in the 1920s was making sure that it was, like all other major sports, dominated by white people. No black fighter would get a crack at the heavyweight title for a generation.

Boxing & Race

In most places—New York State, most notably—boxing was banned altogether or so ringed around with restrictions as to make it ridiculous. Prizefights, where they were allowed at all, had to be advertised as “sparring exhibitions” or “illustrated lectures on pugilism,” with the participants sometimes described as “professors.” Because the matches were only exhibitions, it was forbidden for one participant to knock out another or for a panel of judges to declare one man the winner. In consequence, prizefighting remained a marginal sport and fights were held in (no disrespect to Toledo intended) marginal places.

Fun Fact Boxing

He was proposing to fly 4,600 miles—farther than anyone had ever flown before—over ocean and jungle, into a realm far beyond the range of reliable maps and weather reports. He packed as if he didn’t really expect to make it. He took with him fishing tackle, rifle and ammunition, quinine, mosquito nets, surgical kit, spare boots, and much else that would only be of use if he crash-landed in the jungle. For his short-term needs he packed twenty sandwiches, two quarts of coffee, a pound of milk chocolate, and two gallons of water. On August 25, he took off. Aviation experts quoted by the Associated Press said that it would take him at least sixty hours to reach Rio. Before he had even cleared the Caribbean he was lost, and dropped a message to a Norwegian freighter, the Christian Krohg, asking for directions. The message bounced off the deck and into the sea, but amazingly a Norwegian seaman dived in and retrieved it. The message said: “Point ship to nearest land, wave flag or handkerchief once for each 100 miles. Thanks, Redfern.” The ship obliged and Redfern, with a snappy wave, departed. It was the last anyone ever saw of him, though for years afterward missionaries and other visitors to the interior of Dutch Guiana passed on reports of a white man living among the Indians. According to these reports, the Indians treated the man as a divinity because he had dropped in on them from the sky. The white man, it was said, had taken a wife and now lived in contentment with the n...

Paul Redfern, Benedicts College, SC. SC to Rio attempt

By 1927, Hollywood was producing some eight hundred feature films a year, 80 percent of the world’s total output, plus some twenty thousand short features. Movies were America’s fourth-largest industry, employing more people than Ford and General Motors put together, and generating over $750 million for the economy—four times more than was earned by all sports and live entertainments combined. Twenty thousand movie theaters sold a hundred million tickets a week. On any given day, one-sixth of all Americans were at the pictures. It seemed crazy that such a huge and popular business could be struggling, but it was. The problem was that turnover was so rapid that few individual pictures made much profit. Programs were sometimes changed three or even four times a week, so there was a constant need for more product.

Hollywood

Variety in the summer of 1927 noted that some four hundred aliens were working as actors or in other creative positions in Hollywood, and that more than half of all leading roles were taken by performers of foreign birth. Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, Lya de Putti, Emil Jannings, Joseph Schildkraut, Conrad Veidt, and many others from Germany or central Europe were big stars, but only so long as the public couldn’t hear their accents. Universal and Paramount were both dominated by German stars and directors. Universal was said, only half in jest, to have German as its official language.

Silent movies and foreign actors

Moviegoers around the world suddenly found themselves exposed, often for the first time, to American voices, American vocabulary, American cadence and pronunciation and word order. Spanish conquistadores, Elizabethan courtiers, figures from the Bible were suddenly speaking in American voices—and not just occasionally but in film after film after film. The psychological effect of this, particularly on the young, can hardly be overstated. 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 world hears Americans.

The cumulative effect on people’s perceptions was profound. By the end of the summer, America was a nation ready to fly—quite a turnaround from four months earlier, when aviation for most people simply meant barnstormers at county fairs and the like, and the United States seemed unlikely ever to catch up with Europe. Whether Lindbergh knew it or not, his tour of America did far more to transform the future of aviation than his daring dash to Paris ever could.

America ready to fly

Buck v. Bell. The case focused on a seventeen-year-old girl in Virginia named Carrie Buck, who was deemed to be of low intelligence and had recently given birth to an illegitimate child, in consequence of which she was now confined in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded at Lynchburg. Her mother was already an inmate there. In 1924, Carrie Buck was selected for sterilization by the colony’s superintendent, Dr. John H. Bell (hence Buck v. Bell).

Lynchburg

the new Stanford version of the Binet-Simon test, which eventually became the modern IQ test (and it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are, but how stupid),

IQ test

Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will—a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention. The New York Times gave it a small mention on page 19. The News Leader of Richmond, Virginia, where the matter was a local story, didn’t report it at all.

Court case not in news

by Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Purporting to be the diary of a dizzy gold digger named Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes wasn’t great literature, but it sold and sold and sold. James Joyce was said to be enchanted by it. Liveright was a great publisher

Loos!

Show Boat was racy stuff in every sense of the word. It involved relations between blacks and whites, including miscegenation, and dealt sympathetically with the plight of black people in the South. It had a chorus of ninety-six singers, equally divided between blacks and whites, and was the first production in the history of American theater in which blacks and whites sang together on stage. Just three years earlier, when authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. So for that reason alone the play was tremendously exciting. For people inclined to be enlightened, this was a breakout moment.

Show Boat, races mixed

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

Roger Maris

The use of drugs as an aid to hitting is far beyond the scope of this book, so let us just note in passing that even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn’t hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hot dogs.

Babe fueled with hotdogs, modern players with steroids.😂

For Americans, there was also the gratifying novelty of coming first at something. It is a little hard to imagine now, but Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe.

America finally in spotlight

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.

Summary