One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

People in 1920s America were unusually drawn to spectacle, and by ten o’clock that evening the crowd had grown to an estimated one hundred thousand people—an enormous gathering for a spontaneous event.

The development of air-cooled engines—America’s one outstanding contribution to aviation technology in the period—gave planes greater range and reliability. The world also had an abundance of talented, often brilliant, nearly always severely underemployed aeronautic engineers and designers who were eager to show what they could do.

More than this, in many cities readers could get their news from a new, revolutionary type of publication that completely changed people’s expectations of what daily news should be—the tabloid. Tabloids focused on crime, sports, and celebrity gossip, and in so doing gave all three an importance considerably beyond any they had enjoyed before.

In no important area of technology has America ever fallen further behind the rest of the world than it did with aviation in the 1920s.

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.

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. Kansas alone had more cars than France. At a time when gold reserves were the basic marker of national wealth, America held half the world’s supply, or as much as all the rest of the world put together. No other country in history had ever been this affluent, and it was getting wealthier daily at a pace that was positively dizzying.

Until now, mobsters had seemed invincible. They couldn’t be prosecuted for murder or other serious crimes because no one was ever brave enough to testify against them. It was almost impossible to connect them to their illicit businesses because they never put their names to contracts or other incriminating documents. Willebrandt, however, was struck by the thought that mobsters were always demonstrably rich and yet never filed an income tax return. She decided to go for them on those grounds.

Even more unnoticed by history was the timing of the Ruth deal. It is not at all a coincidence that the New York Yankees purchased Babe Ruth in the same month that Prohibition came into effect. Jacob Ruppert at the time of the Ruth sale was three weeks away from losing his brewery business. He urgently needed an alternative source of income.

Ruth’s rise to fame could not have been more impeccably timed. It coincided precisely with the birth of tabloid newspapers, newsreel films, fan magazines, and radio—all vital cogs in the new celebrity culture—and his arrival in New York brought him into the throbbing heart of the media world.

Then two things happened: Babe Comes Home went on general release, and Ruth suddenly came to life. Goodness knows exactly how the movie galvanized him, but its release coincided exactly and peculiarly with his hitting a lot of home runs—5 in two days, one of which, in Philadelphia, was hit so far that it left the park and cleared a two-story house across the street. By June 7, Ruth’s total had jumped to 18—a much more respectable and promising number. Two days later against Chicago at Yankee Stadium, Ruth stole home plate—something that thirty-two-year-old men with paunches didn’t normally do. The season was suddenly getting interesting.

People needed wheelbarrows or baby buggies to carry enough paper money to conduct even the simplest transactions. Sending a letter cost 10 billion marks. A streetcar ride that had cost 1 mark in 1914 now cost 15 billion. Pensions became worthless. People found that savings carefully built up over a lifetime wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee.

For many like Harding, the great attraction was that you didn’t need money to take part. You could buy on margin—purchasing, say, $100 worth of shares for a down payment of $10, with the balance borrowed from your broker, who in turn borrowed from his bank. From the bankers’ point of view, the arrangement could not have been more pleasing. Banks borrowed from the Federal Reserve at 4 or 5 percent and lent it on to brokers at 10 or 12 percent. They were, as one writer put it, “in the position of being handsomely paid simply for existing.”

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.

Federal Reserve would cut its discount rate from 4.0 percent to 3.5 percent, to encourage holders of gold to move their savings to Europe, where they would enjoy higher returns. That in turn would bolster European reserves, help stabilize European currencies, and boost trade overall. Strong gambled that the American economy could absorb the stimulus of a small rate cut without going crazy. It would prove to be a spectacular miscalculation.

The process was perfected bit by bit between 1906 and 1914, not so much as a progressive, systematic plan, but more as a series of desperate expedients to try to keep up with demand. The basic idea of the assembly line—or “progressive assembling,” as it was at first known—came from the movement of animal carcasses through the slaughterhouses of Chicago, which, as has often been noted, was actually a kind of “disassembly line.”

In 1914, Ford not only introduced the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week but also doubled average salaries to $5 a day

When the bruised and puffy-faced Dempsey arrived home afterward, his horrified wife asked what had happened. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” Dempsey famously replied.

For his subjects Borglum selected Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and—to widespread consternation—Theodore Roosevelt, who was chosen, it seems, not for his greatness but because he and Borglum had once been chums.

As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

Considering that moving pictures and recorded sound had both independently existed since the 1890s, it took a surprisingly long time for anyone to work out how to put them together. The problem was twofold. First was the matter of sound projection. Nothing existed that would allow clear, natural-sounding speech to be played to an auditorium full of people, particularly in the new cavernous spaces of the 1920s. Equally intractable was the challenge of synchronization. Designing a machine that could precisely match voices and moving lips defeated all attempts at solution. As events demonstrated, it was easier to fly a man across the Atlantic than to capture his voice on film.

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.

Bigotry was casual, reflexive, and well nigh universal. At The New Yorker, Harold Ross forbade the use of the term toilet paper on grounds of taste (it made him queasy), but he had nothing at all against nigger or darkie. In the week before Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, The New Yorker ran a cartoon with the immortally dismal line “Niggers all look alike to me.”

Remarkably, the Ku Klux Klan was not the most dangerous outpost of bigotry in America in the period. That distinction belonged, extraordinary though it is to state, to a coalition of academics and scientists.

Grant’s explanation was that in ancient Greece and Rome the ruling class was composed of Nordic Achaeans, who weren’t really Mediterranean at all, but were northern Europeans who had drifted south. All the great Renaissance artists, Grant maintained, were “of Nordic type … largely of Gothic and Lombard blood.” All others—the real Italians—were dull, stunted, and shifty, and were genetically condemned to remain forever so.

“If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no radio left,”

It maintained that Farnsworth could not have conceived of electronic television in 1922 on the grounds that a fifteen-year-old schoolboy could hardly have come up with an idea that had eluded the most brilliant minds of science and technology for years. Luckily for Farnsworth, his old chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, was able to produce his original sketch in court.

A 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. The point was academic because Landis banned them for life anyway.

He also claimed, for reasons not easily discerned, that King George V of Britain was planning to annex Chicago, and promised that if elected he would find the king and “punch him in the snoot.”

Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in nearly every field—in popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology. The center of gravity for the planet was moving to the other side of the world, and Charles Lindbergh’s flight somehow became the culminating expression of that.

Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them even for one day?