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Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day – or 1.4 newspapers for every household.
Billy Wilder made the latter into the artfully lit 1944 movie of the same name starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. This was the movie that created film noir, and so became the template on which a generation of Hollywood melodramas was based. Double Indemnity the movie is the Snyder–Gray case, but with snappier dialogue and better-looking people.
The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn’t actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in 115 of those cases no one was arrested. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 per cent.
As early as 1919, Europe had its first airline in KLM and others quickly followed. Before the year was out, daily flights were introduced between London and Paris, and soon more than a thousand people a week were flying that route alone.
By the mid-1920s it was possible to fly almost anywhere in Europe – from Berlin to Leipzig, from Amsterdam to Brussels, from Paris to distant Constantinople (by way of Prague and Bucharest).
In March 1927, an article in Scientific American, under the heading ‘Invisible Beams Guide Birdmen in Flights Between European Cities’, noted admiringly how pilots in Europe could fix their locations instantly via radio beacons. Lost American pilots, by contrast, had to search for a town and hope that someone had written its name on the roof of a building. In the absence of that – and it was generally absent – pilots had to swoop low to try to read the signs on the local railway station, often a risky manoeuvre.
Of the nation’s 26.8 million households, 11 million had a phonograph, 10 million had a car, 17.5 million had a telephone. Every year America added more new phones (781,000 in 1926) than Britain possessed in total.
Byrd’s preparations were conservatively estimated to have cost $500,000. Lindbergh’s total expenses – plane, fuel, food, lodging, everything – came to just $13,500.
The man she targeted, as a kind of specimen case, was a bootlegger in South Carolina named Manley Sullivan. Lawyers for Sullivan argued that criminals could not file tax returns without incriminating themselves, and that would be a breach of their Fifth Amendment rights. The lawyers also maintained that in claiming a share of the illegal profits the government would make itself an accessory to the original crime – a breach of its fiduciary responsibilities.
No place in the world was less hospitable to a speeding convoy than New York in the 1920s. It was the most congested city on earth. It contained more cars than the whole of Germany, but it also still had 50,000 horses.
America’s insistence on being repaid in full, with interest, the $10 billion it had lent to Europe during the war seemed a bit rich to the Europeans since all the money borrowed had been spent on American goods, so repaying it would mean that America profited twice from the same loans.
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.
His years of communal living had left him wholly innocent of modesty when naked or on the lavatory, and with virtually no sense of private property. His first roommate, Ernie Shore, was dismayed to discover weeks into the season that throughout that period Ruth had been sharing his toothbrush.
Babe Ruth
Chapman remains the only major league ballplayer to have been mortally injured on the field of play.
Baseball
Surprisingly, the man who made more money out of baseball than almost anyone else was an enterprising Englishman named Harry Stevens, who came to America as a young man around the turn of the century, fell for baseball in a big way and hit on the best idea of his life – namely, that fans might enjoy a hot snack in the course of a game. He experimented with various combinations of hot sandwiches and found that sausages in a roll kept warm longer than anything else he tried. He secured the right to sell his ‘red hots’, as he rather generously called them, at the Polo Grounds and almost at once
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The result was like something fired from a gun. It was hypnotic and rare – and now here was a man who could do it pretty regularly. Babe Ruth’s home runs were not merely more frequent, they were more majestic. No one had ever seen balls travel so loftily and far.
In a single year, 1922, the number of American radio stations went from 28 to 570.
Not everyone was captivated by the new technology. Many believed that all the invisible energy flying through the air must be dangerous. One widespread belief was that birds found dead on the ground were there because they had been struck by radio waves.
In 1927, New York had just overtaken London as the world’s largest city, and it was easily the most cosmopolitan. A quarter of its eight million residents had been born abroad; it had more foreign-born residents than Philadelphia had people. Native-born Americans were flocking to it, too. Two hundred thousand southern blacks had moved to New York since the end of the First World War, and now the Mississippi flood was sending tens of thousands more.
Charles Lindbergh
Nothing mattered to him but making America dry. Where other temperance groups involved themselves in all kinds of side issues – tobacco, short skirts, jazz, even post office policy and government ownership of utilities – Wheeler never strayed from his single monotonous message: that drinking was responsible for poverty, broken marriages, lost earnings and all the other evils of modern society.
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.’
Wow. Awful.
(In the week that Lindbergh flew to Paris, US Prohibition Commissioner James M. Doran authorized the production of an additional three million gallons of whisky for medicine. When it was suggested that that was a lot of whisky for such a narrow purpose, a Treasury official replied that stocks were rapidly depleted ‘from evaporation’.)
The bar in the Knickerbocker Hotel (reputed birthplace of the dry martini) took in $4,000 a day before Prohibition, a sum not easily replaced. Without its bar takings, the Knickerbocker went under. So, too, did the Manhattan Hotel, where the manhattan cocktail was first created. Some hotels tried to survive by offering what were known as ‘set-ups’ – ice, seltzer, Angostura bitters and so on – to which the customer could add his own alcohol, but that hardly compensated for all the lost liquor business.
Orville Wright, co-inventor of the aeroplane with his late brother Wilbur.
Byrd was smart, handsome, reasonably brave and unquestionably generous, but he was also almost pathologically vain, pompous and self-serving. Every word he ever wrote about himself made him seem valorous, calm and wise. He was also, and above all, very possibly a great liar.
Dont b this
Eventually, at the peak of the madness, prices rose to 1,422,900,000,000 times their levels of ten years earlier.
German inflation 1920s
While national output (as measured by GDP) rose by 60 per cent in the decade, stocks went up by 400 per cent. Since most of these inflated rises had nothing to do with any underlying profits or productivity, all that kept them so giddily buoyant was the willingness of fresh buyers to bid the prices ever higher.
‘Buy now, pay later’ proved such an irresistible concept that soon people were using it to purchase all kinds of things – clothing, furniture, household appliances, bathtubs, kitchen cabinets and above all cars. Instalment buying filled American homes with gleaming products and its roads with cars. It made America the consumer paradise it has remained ever since.
This was not actually a terrifically good thing. It might seem like a great idea to have all the gold, but in fact that would mean that other countries couldn’t buy any more of your products because they would have no gold of their own to pay for them. In the interests of trade and a healthy global economy, gold should circulate. Instead, it was accumulating – steadily, relentlessly, in a country that was already better off than all the countries of Europe put together.
In 1914, Ford introduced an eight-hour day, forty-hour week and doubled average salaries to $5 a day in what is often presented as an act of revolutionary magnanimity. In fact, it was necessitated by the costly waste of high employee turnover – a breathtaking 370 per cent in 1913.
At the Ford lumber mills, it was the proud boast that they used every bit of the tree but the shade. Bark, sawdust, sap – all were put to commercial use. (One Ford product still with us from this process is the Kingsford charcoal briquette.)
‘We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert – because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job.’
To a surprising extent, boxing was a 1920s phenomenon. Although people had been smacking each other around in rings for over two hundred years, prize-fighting in the 1920s acquired three things it had never had before: respectability, mass appeal and Jack Dempsey. Together they made it a sumptuously lucrative pastime. It was this that stirred the interest of men like Jacob Ruppert.
Valdinoci had been on the run since 1917 after an infamous bombing in Youngstown, Ohio. That bomb had not gone off as planned either. In fact, it had not gone off at all, so the police, in an act of unimaginable foolishness, took it to the station house and placed it on a table in the main operations room in order to examine it closely. As they tinkered with it, it exploded, killing ten policemen and a woman who had come to report a robbery. The bombers were never caught and the case was never solved. Radical cases rarely were.
Mount Rushmore was a granite outcrop so off the beaten track that no one had even noticed it until 1885, when one Charles Rushmore of New York happened to pass by on horseback and bestowed his name upon it. The idea for a mighty carved monument there of four presidents’ heads originated with the state historian, Doane Robinson, who saw it as a way of attracting tourists.
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.
By 1927, Hollywood was producing some 800 feature films a year, 80 per cent of the world’s total output, plus some 20,000 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 cinemas sold 100 million tickets a week. On any given day, one sixth of all Americans were at the pictures.
While the cinemas were struggling to maintain their audiences, things were not going terribly well on the production side of the business either. The previous November unions representing the craft trades – painters, carpenters, electricians and the like – had secured something called the Studio Basic Agreement, which granted them important and costly concessions. The studios were now terrified of being squeezed similarly by actors and writers. With this in mind, thirty-six people from the creative side of the industry met for dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in January 1927 and
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Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.
Designing a machine that could match voices and moving lips precisely 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.
By 1930, virtually every cinema in America had sound. Movie audiences jumped from 60 million in 1927 to 110 million in 1930. Warner Brothers’ worth shot up from $16 million to $200 million. The number of cinemas it owned or controlled went from one to seven hundred.
A picture that offered recorded music but no talking was said to be ‘With Sound’. If it additionally had some sound effects, it was said to be ‘With Sound and Effects’. If it had any recorded speech at all, it was a ‘Talking Picture’. If it was a proper movie, with a full range of speech and sounds, it was an ‘All-Talking Picture’. The first true all-talking picture was The Lights of New York in 1928, but such was the sound quality still that it came with subtitles as well.
Jannings, winner of the first Academy Award for acting, returned to Europe and spent the war years making propaganda films for the Nazis.
With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American sense of humour and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.
Altogether at least 60,000 people were sterilized because of Laughlin’s efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.
Only Charles Francis Jenkins saw clearly what TV could offer. ‘The new machine will come to the fireside … with photoplays, the opera and a direct vision of world activities,’ he predicted.
The Great Gatsby, published two years earlier, had been a failure. Unsold stacks of the book sat in the warehouse of Charles Scribner’s Sons, his publisher, and would still be there when Fitzgerald died, broke and all but forgotten, in 1940. Not until the 1950s would the world rediscover him.
So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer. Babe Ruth hit 60 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
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Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh, died in 1954 from Parkinson’s disease at the age of seventy-eight. His widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, produced five other children apart from the murdered Charles Junior, and became a successful and admired writer, mostly of memoirs. She died in 2001 at the ripe age of ninety-four, the last person of consequence to this story to have lived through that long, extraordinary summer.
