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Gehrig wasn’t expected to speak—he was petrified of crowds—but he stepped to the microphone and made what has long been considered to be the most moving speech ever given in a sporting context in America.
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?
Ultimately, the Model A was no more than a modest success. It was discontinued after four years, as it became evident that American car buyers now
wanted annual model changes. In the 1930s, Ford dropped to third place in market share, with barely half the sales of General Motors and less even than Chrysler. Its payroll fell from over 170,000 in 1929 to just 46,000 in 1932, and total production at Ford plants dropped from 1.5 million vehicles to just over 230,000. The company survived, of course, and has remained one of America’s most important manufacturing concerns, but it would never again be the dominant force it once was.
The next morning, readers of the New York Daily News were greeted with a sensational image. Filling the whole of the front page under the single word “DEAD!” was a slightly blurred photograph of Ruth Snyder at the time of execution. Her head is covered, and she is obviously strapped in place, but otherwise she looks reasonably comfortable. The photo was taken by a Daily News reporter named Tom Howard, who was present as an official witness and had sneaked in a miniature camera strapped to his shin. At the right moment, he had discreetly lifted up his pant leg
A motion to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment came before Congress in early 1933. The House debated the bill for just forty minutes. In the Senate, as Daniel Okrent notes in his history of Prohibition, “Of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work.” In December 1933, Prohibition officially ended.
By 1933, nearly one-third of movie theaters in America were shut and many of the studios were in trouble. Paramount was bankrupt; RKO and Universal were nearly so. Fox was struggling to reorganize and eventually would have to be rescued by a much smaller studio, Twentieth Century.
Oscar Hammerstein II also seemed to have come to the end of his road with Show Boat. He went a dozen years without a hit, but then he teamed up with Richard Rodgers and between them they put together the greatest run of successes in the history of musicals: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music. Hammerstein died in 1960.
Gutzon Borglum didn’t quite live to see Mount Rushmore completed. He died in March 1941, of complications following prostate surgery, just a few months before it was finished. He was seventy-three.
Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England and close friend of Benjamin Strong, suffered a bizarre accident in 1944 that brought his career to a close. While visiting his brother on his country estate in Hertfordshire, Norman went for a walk in fading light and apparently tripped over a cow that was resting on the ground. The startled cow may have kicked Norman in the head in scrambling to its feet. Norman never fully recovered and died in 1950 at age seventy-eight.
Alexis Carrel was pushed out of his role at the Rockefeller Institute because his views were becoming too embarrassing. Carrel returned to France and started an institute that specialized in matters outside the scientific mainstream, including telepathy and water divination. He openly supported the Vichy regime and would almost certainly have been tried as a collaborator, but he died in 1944 before he could be brought to trial. He was seventy-one. At the...
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The following month, Kenesaw Mountain Landis took his earthly leave at the age of seventy-eight. Landis had spent most of the later part of his career fighting attempts to let blacks play in the major leagues. That ignoble battle was lost in 1947 when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
to Bart Schmidt and colleagues at the Drake University Library in Des Moines;
to Bart Schmidt and colleagues at the Drake University Library in Des Moines;
Particularly valuable for the history of flight in the period were the similarly named Aviation: The Early Years by Peter Almond and Aviation: The Pioneer Years edited by Ben Mackworth-Praed. Very good on the technical side of matters is L. F. E. Coombs’s Control in the Sky: The Evolution and History of the Aircraft Cockpit. Much additional detail came from Graham Wallace’s The Flight of Alcock & Brown, Robert de La Croix’s They Flew the Atlantic, and the semi-official American Aircraft Year Books for 1925–1930, published by the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America, Inc. Hiram Bingham’s
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excitement of that summer than Lindbergh’s own Pulitzer Prize–winning account of 1953, The Spirit of St. Louis.
The definitive work on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is Rising Tide by John M. Barry. Herbert Hoover’s personal role in relief operations is neatly surveyed in “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” American Quarterly, Autumn 1970.
The comments on Calvin Coolidge’s work habits are found in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s Crisis of the Old Order; in Wilson Brown’s “Aide to Four Presidents,” published in American Heritage, February 1955; in Donald R. McCoy’s Calvin Coolidge; and in “Psychological Pain and the Presidency” by Robert E. Gilbert in Political Psychology, March 1998.
Statistics on the comforts of American homes in 1927 come principally from the March and July issues of Scientific American. Other details come from American Culture in the 1920s by Susan Currell. For the state of American highways at the time, see The Lincoln Highway by Drake Hokanson. The situation at Roosevelt Field in May 1927 is well covered in “How Not to Fly the Atlantic,” American Heritage, April 1971, and in The Big Jump by Richard Bak and The Flight of the Century by Thomas Kessner.
One of the most fascinating books on America’s national pastime is Robert K. Adair’s The Physics of Baseball and one of the most delightful is Lawrence S. Ritter’s oral history, The Glory of Their Times. Also providing much useful detail were The Baseball by Zack Hample, Spitballers by C. F. and R. B. Faber, Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward (with Ken Burns), Total Baseball by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, The Complete History of the Home Run by Mark Ribowsky, and Past Time: Baseball as History by Jules Tygiel.
