One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

By a curiously ironic twist, the event that left America far behind the rest of the world in aviation was the very one that ensured its dominance in so many other spheres: the First World War.

Their names were Jack Alcock and Arthur Whitten “Teddy” Brown, and they deserve to be a good deal more famous. Theirs was one of the most daring flights in history, but it is sadly forgotten now. It wasn’t particularly well noted at the time either.

In nine months, eleven people had died in the quest to fly the

Judd Gray. 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. The scale of economic loss was so large as to be essentially incalculable. Estimates ranged from $250 million to $1 billion. It wasn’t the most lethal catastrophe in American history, but it ruined more livelihoods and property than any other, and it lasted far longer. Altogether the Mississippi would be at flood stage for 153 consecutive days.

Belgium was overwhelmed by war, its farms destroyed, its factories shut, its foodstocks seized by the Germans. Eight million Belgians were in real peril of starving. Hoover managed to find and distribute $1.8 million worth of food a week, every week, for two and a half years—2.5 million tons of it altogether—and to deliver it to people who would otherwise have gone unfed. The achievement can hardly be overstated. It was the greatest relief effort ever undertaken on earth, and it made him, deservedly, an international hero. By 1917, it was reckoned that Hoover had saved more lives than any other person in history.

the American Relief Administration (ARA). The challenge was bigger than ever. Hoover was responsible for the well-being of four hundred million people. He oversaw relief operations in more than thirty countries. In Germany alone, the ARA ran thirty-five thousand feeding centers, which collectively provided three hundred million meals to people who would not otherwise have eaten.

Hoover illegally bought chemicals from Germany. This was an exceedingly grave offense in wartime. Remarkably, he did so not because the chemicals were unavailable in Britain, but simply because the German ones were cheaper. He saw no moral inconsistency in supporting the German economy even as Germany was trying to kill the sons and brothers of the people with whom he worked and lived.

Hoover to the role of secretary of state, Coolidge appointed him to head the relief efforts to deal with the emergency. Apart from that one act, Coolidge did nothing. He declined to visit the flooded areas. He declined to make any federal funds available or to call a special session of Congress. He declined to make a national radio broadcast appealing for private donations. He declined to provide the humorist Will Rogers with a message of hope and goodwill that he could read out as part of a national broadcast. He declined to supply twelve signed photographs to be auctioned off for the relief of flood victims.

That was why the Orteig Prize was for an epic flight and not a road race. It was also why

skyscrapers of the period began to sport pointed masts—so that airships could tie up to them. That this was patently inadvisable—imagine the Hindenburg crashing in flames on Times Square—seems not to have occurred to any architect. Even in routine dockings, airships often had to discharge quantities of ballast water for purposes of stability, and it is unlikely that passersby below would have welcomed a regular downpour of aquatic bilge.

Rodman Wanamaker, the department store magnate and financier of Richard Byrd’s flight, sponsored an exhibition in New York called the Titan City, which depicted a future world in which magnificent urban towers were connected by sleek aerial expressways while citizens were shot through glass tubes in pneumatic trains or glided regally from place

to place on moving sidewalks.

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.

Chapman, obviously gravely injured, dropped his bat, and began walking in a dazed manner toward second base, evidently making for the clubhouse in center field. After a few steps, his legs gave way and he collapsed. He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness. Ruth said nothing of the incident in his autobiography other than that it provoked so much bad feeling among the Indians that Mays wasn’t played against them again that year. Chapman remains the only major league ballplayer to be mortally injured during a game.

One person standing anonymously among the onlookers was a young woman named Gertrude Ederle, who may well have qualified as the most forgotten person in America. The daughter of German immigrants—her father owned a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue—Ederle was the finest swimmer, of either sex, America had ever

produced. In a single day in 1922, she broke six national records. She was also as strong as an ox and capable of swimming vast distances. In August 1926, she not only became the first woman to swim the English Channel but did it faster than any man ever had. This feat so impressed and excited her fellow Americans that she, too, was given a great ticker tape parade and was for a while so famous that crowds followed her everywhere.

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.

At a stroke it shut down the fifth-largest industry in America. It took some $2 billion a year out of the hands of legitimate interests and put it in the hands of murderous thugs. It made criminals of honest people and actually led to an increase in the amount of drinking in the country.

Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont in their authoritative book Eating in America report that 11,700 people died in 1927 alone from imbibing drink poisoned by the government. Other sources put the number much lower. 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 pa...

But then Germany made some tactical blunders that wholly changed that sentiment. First, it began bombing civilian targets. We have grown used to wars that target civilians, but in the 1910s killing innocent people by intent was widely seen as a

Then, worse, Germany announced that it would target passenger ships at sea.

In May 1915, a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania as it sailed in neutral waters off the Irish coast near Kinsale. The ship sank in just eighteen minutes, taking with it 1,200 people. A third of the victims were women and children; 128 of the dead were Americans whose country was not even at war. Outrage was immediate, but Germany made matters

infinitely worse by declaring—almost unbelievably—a national holiday to celebrate the slaughter. Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, head of the German Red Cross in the United States, said that those aboard the Lusitania got no more than they deserved. He w...

Restaurants stopped serving German food or gave it non-German names; sauerkraut famously became liberty cabbage.

Eighteenth Amendment, banning the production and consumption of alcohol, swept toward ratification,

Volstead Act,

For a start, it introduced an entirely new level of danger to American life. The national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced. Being a Prohibition agent was dangerous—in the first two and a half years of Prohibition thirty agents were killed on the job—but being in the vicinity of agents was often dangerous, too, for they frequently proved to be trigger-happy. In Chicago alone, Prohibition agents gunned down twenty-three innocent civilians in just over a decade.

spirituous refreshments. When asked by American authorities to explain how four thousand people had developed such a sudden attachment to alcohol, the governor replied, with Gallic aplomb, that he was unaware of any significant rise in alcohol imports and hadn’t

noticed the two dozen large new warehouses that had sprung up around the main port at Saint-Pierre, but promised to look into the matter. Subsequently, he confirmed to the Americans that there was indeed a little wine on Saint-Pierre and Miquelon now, but it was all bound for the Bahamas, where drinking was legal. It was apparently just resting in Saint-Pierre.

Prohibition laws were nearly impossible to enforce in any case because they were so riddled with loopholes. Doctors could legally prescribe whiskey for their patients, and they did so with such enthusiasm that by the late 1920s they were earning $40 million a year from the practice. In most cases, according to The New Yorker, the doctors simply handed out blank prescription slips. (In the week that Lindbergh flew to Paris, U.S. Prohibition commissioner James M. Doran authorized the production of an additional three million gallons of whiskey for medicine. When it was suggested that that was a lot of whiskey for such a narrow purpose, a Treasury official replied that stocks were rapidly depleted “from evaporation.”)

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,” as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. He declined even to endorse National Education Week in 1927 on the grounds that it wasn’t necessary for the president to do so. In recent years a revisionist view has emerged that Coolidge was in reality cannier and livelier than history has

portrayed him. Well, perhaps. What can certainly be said is that he presided over a booming economy and did nothing at all to get in the way of

James De Cicco. One of the passengers, Mrs. Catherine Damiano, was just learning to drive and asked if she could take the wheel to practice. De Cicco

readily yielded it to her. Unfortunately Mrs. Damiano stalled the car on railroad tracks just as a train from the Pennsylvania Railroad—one of those being hurried to the city to help shift all the extra travelers—barreled through. The train struck the car at 40 miles an hour. Mrs. Damiano and all four of her children were killed instantly. Two other adults also perished. Two more were seriously injured. Only Mr. De Cicco managed to jump clear. The seven deaths were thought to be the most ever in a one-car accident. Mrs. Damiano’s unfortunate husband, who had a night job and didn’t know that his wife and children had gone out, learned the next morning that he had lost his entire family.

The previous day in Canada, according to an Associated Press report, a plane doing aerial survey work for the Canadian government had taken off from an airfield near Lake Manitoba. The plane carried a pilot, a photographer, and a surveyor. The weather was good. Several witnesses reported that the plane climbed to about two thousand feet in a normal manner, but then, as it emerged from a cloudbank and as onlookers watched in bewildered horror, the three occupants left the craft one after another and plunged to their deaths. What

caused them to jump or fall is a question to which no plausible answer could ever be supplied. The main

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. Together these provided severe penalties for anyone found guilty of displaying almost any kind of disrespect to the American government,

including its symbols—the flag, military uniforms, historic documents, or anything else in which was deemed to repose the glory and dignity of the United States of America—and these were imposed with a harsh and punitive zeal. “Citizens were imprisoned for criticizing the Red Cross at their own dinner tables,” one commentator noted. A clergyman in Vermont was given a fifteen-year jail term for handing out half a dozen pacifist leaflets. In Indiana, a jury took just two minutes to acquit a man who had shot an immigrant for speaking ill of America.

A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence. The judge allowed that such a depiction would be “permissible or even commendable” in ordinary times, but “in this hour of national emergency” Goldstein enjoyed “no right to subvert the purposes and destiny of the nation.” For insulting a foreign army from 150 years earlier, Goldstein was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

In Chicago, where the black population had doubled in a decade, a black youth

who fell asleep on a raft on Lake Michigan and drifted onto a white beach was stoned to death by a white crowd, provoking two weeks of bitter rioting in which thirty-eight people were killed and whole neighborhoods razed.

According to Hoover’s memoirs of 1952, he waited till both he and Coolidge were back in Washington in September, though other sources say they met sooner. When at last they caught up, Hoover, looking for clarity and perhaps even a kind of blessing, asked if Coolidge thought he should run. To which all Coolidge would say was “Why not?” If Coolidge secretly hoped that he would be implored by his party to stay on, that never happened; and if it bothered him, he never indicated. All that can be said is that he declined to endorse Hoover or any other

candidate on the ground that people should make up their own minds. He also, at once, looked much more relaxed, even more amiable, than he had in a long time.

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 natives. Several expeditions plunged into the jungle to try to find Redfern. At least two men lost their lives in the quest, but he was never found. In 1938, at the request of Redfern’s wife—that is, his one certain wife, back in America—Redfern was declared officially dead by a court in Detroit.

Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

Of all the labels that were applied to the 1920s—the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Ballyhoo, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense—one that wasn’t used but perhaps should have been was the Age of Loathing. There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.

Nothing better captured the expansive spirit of detestation in the period than the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Until recently moribund, the Klan burst onto the national stage in the 1920s