One Summer: America, 1927 (10 page)

With withering disdain Coolidge referred to his tireless commerce secretary as Wonder Boy, but though he sneered, he was glad to have someone to do so much of his work for him. And now when the Mississippi flooded as it never had before, it was to Herbert Hoover that President Coolidge turned. One week after making his enigmatic promise not to promote 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.

Hoover made his headquarters nominally in Memphis, but over the next three months he was to be found everywhere—in Little Rock, Natchez, New Orleans, Baton Rouge. Wherever a man of dignity was needed, there stood Hoover. To give the commerce secretary his due, he presented an air of statesmanship that the president declined to provide. It was he who addressed the nation by radio. “It is difficult to picture in words the might of the Mississippi in flood,” Hoover reported to the nation from Memphis. “To say that two blocks from where I stand it is at this minute flowing at a rate ten times that of Niagara seems unimpressive. Perhaps it becomes more impressive to say that at Vicksburg the flood is 6,000 feet wide and 50 feet deep, rushing on at the rate of 6 miles an hour. Behind this crest lies the ruin of 200,000 people. Thousands still cling to their homes where the upper floors are yet dry.… This is the pitiable plight of a lost battle.”

Much worse was to come. Over the next two weeks, the number of homeless would soar to half a million. Hoover, however, was in his element. He had a massive crisis to solve and the authority to instruct and
deploy people from a multitude of departments and agencies—the Red Cross, U.S. Weather Bureau, Public Health Service, Coast Guard, Veterans Bureau, Interstate Commerce Commission, U.S. Lighthouse Service, and at least a dozen more—
and
to interfere directly in the running of four large government departments: Agriculture, Navy, War, and Treasury. No one short of the president had ever been in charge of so much at once. No aspect of the operations escaped Hoover’s concentrated attention. He authorized the setting up of 154 refugee camps and provided exacting instructions on how each should be laid out and operated: tents should be eighteen by eighteen feet and arrayed in ordered ranks along streets exactly twenty-five feet wide, with ten-foot-wide alleys between each two rows of tents. (In fact, for practical reasons mostly to do with terrain, such geometrical perfection was almost nowhere achieved.) Amounts of food, types of entertainment, extent of medical care, and all other details of camp life were similarly prescribed, if not often followed. Rather amazingly, Hoover saw the camps as happy places. For many of the inhabitants, he insisted, “this was the first real holiday they had ever known.” These were people, remember, who had just lost everything.

As in Europe, Hoover was not comfortable with the people whose lives he had been sent to sort out. He particularly didn’t like the Cajuns of Louisiana, who he thought were “as much like French peasants as one dot is like another.” Hoover was particularly exasperated at the number of Cajuns who repeatedly ignored calls to move to higher ground. One farmer had to be “rescued” six times. In Melville, Louisiana, when a levee on the Atchafalaya River gave way in the night, ten people lost their lives because they hadn’t left when told to—nine from a single family: a woman and her eight children. To Hoover this was not so much a source of tragedy as irritation. “I concluded a Cajun would move only when the water came up under the bed,” he wrote.

The Cajuns, in turn, weren’t crazy about him. Near Caernarvon, Louisiana, a man with a rifle fired on Hoover’s party as it passed in a boat, then vanished back into the woods before he could be caught. The man’s animosity was perhaps understandable. The party was inspecting a levee that was about to be blown up to divert floodwaters away from
New Orleans—an action widely held to be unnecessary. Levee failures farther north had already lowered the river and removed any immediate or probable threat to the city, but it was decided to blow up the levee anyway. Two large parishes were sacrificed for the peace of mind of New Orleans businessmen. The city of New Orleans promised those affected that they would be fully reimbursed. They never were.

As always, Hoover was a tireless self-publicist. He traveled through the South in a private train, which included a car exclusively devoted to press operations. From this issued a stream of press releases mostly devoted to Hoover’s vision and hard work. He also made sure that every Republican senator received a copy of a magazine article praising him. To any newspaper, however small, that questioned or criticized his efforts, he wrote a personal letter of rebuke. Sometimes these ran on for several pages.

Hoover boasted that no more than three people died in the flooding after he took control (“one of them an overcurious sightseer”), but in fact the number was at least 150, and possibly many more. In the end, his efforts were far from an unqualified success. Relief funds were often wasted or misdirected. Emergency supplies were usually entrusted to the largest landowners to distribute to their tenants, and some owners unscrupulously charged tenants for the supplies or kept them to themselves. Reports of abuses were frequently brought to Hoover’s attention, but he dismissed them all. The refugee camps themselves were not comfortable places, and the food was often so poor and unwholesome that many of the residents came down with dietary diseases like pellagra. These were not matters that featured in Hoover’s press releases.

To the wider world, however, the Mississippi flood merely consolidated Herbert Hoover’s reputation as a colossus and made it almost a certainty that he would be the next Republican nominee for president. “It is nearly inevitable,” he told a friend simply.

In the normal course of things, the Mississippi flood would not in itself have troubled Charles Lindbergh, but it happened to coincide with a
broad band of turbulent weather that lay right across his flight path. A towering storm system that darkened the skies over a huge area of the Midwest and Southwest sent tornadoes spinning like demonic tops across eight states, from Texas to Illinois. In Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 80 people died and 350 were injured when a tornado tore through the business district. Elsewhere in Missouri, tornadoes claimed a dozen more lives, and many other deaths were reported in Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, and Illinois. In St. Louis, high winds caused extensive damage and falling debris killed one man (“a Negro,” the
New York Times
noted solemnly). In Wyoming, three people caught in a sudden blizzard froze to death. Altogether the storm toll was put at 228 dead and 925 injured in two days.

On the morning of Lindbergh’s arrival in St. Louis the winds eased, but they were replaced by heavy fog. Players at that day’s Browns-Yankees baseball game at Sportsman’s Park complained that they could not see ten feet ahead of them. What the crowds could see was not reported, but as it was the Browns, not many were present anyway.
^*
Babe Ruth in any case saw well enough to hit a double and a home run, his eighth of the young season. No one yet suspected what kind of summer he was about to have. The Yankees won the game 4–2.

While a chill, damp fog lay over eastern Missouri, Chicago was suffering a scorching heat wave, while Colorado and the northern plains states lay buried beneath heavy late snows. Nebraska, bizarrely, experienced snow in several parts of the state while the southwestern corner reported two sultry tornadoes. Never had weather been more unsettled and strange. Lindbergh seemed blissfully oblivious. If he had any trouble finding Lambert Field in the fog he never mentioned it. In fact, he said nothing at all of bad weather in any of his published accounts of those eventful days other than to note that he was glad of the storm system because it kept the other fliers in New York pinned down until he got
there. That he was perhaps the only person between the two coasts bold enough to take to the air seems not to have occurred to him then or later.

In St. Louis, Lindbergh showed off the new plane to the men who had paid for it, had a nap, wolfed down a plate of steak and four eggs at Louie’s Cafe by the airfield, then took to the skies again, this time bound for New York. In reaching St. Louis he had already notched up an impressive double achievement: he had become the first person to fly through the Rockies by night, and he had set a record for the longest nonstop flight ever undertaken by an American pilot flying alone. Now with the flight to New York, if all went to plan, he would break the record for the quickest coast-to-coast flight as well. Remarkably, this was just at the time that dense fogs along the East Coast grounded migrating birds and made the hunt for Charles Nungesser and François Coli futile. No airman in the eastern United States was going anywhere. Francesco de Pinedo, wishing to resume his stately progress around America in a replacement plane, tried for three days to fly to Philadelphia from New York, but he was turned back each time by driving rains and low cloud.

Logically, the weather that was keeping aviators grounded in New York ought to have kept Lindbergh from getting through, but the normal rules of life appeared to have been suspended where he was concerned. For the time being at least, young Charles Lindbergh seemed to have acquired a curious immortality.

*
Actually the attendance of 1,500 that afternoon was not all that bad by Browns standards. Several times that season the Browns had attendances of 500 or fewer, and on one notably dismal occasion, on July 12, against the last-place Red Sox they attracted just 300 people. This in a stadium that seated 36,000.

4

To a foreign visitor arriving in America for the first time in 1927, the most striking thing was how staggeringly well-off it was. Americans were the most comfortable people in the world. American homes shone with sleek appliances and consumer durables—refrigerators, radios, telephones, electric fans, electric razors—that would not become standard in other countries for a generation or more. 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.

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. The stock market, already booming, would rise by a third in 1927 in what Herbert Hoover would later call “an orgy of mad speculation,” but in the spring and summer of 1927 neither he nor anyone else was worried yet.

The America that Charles Lindbergh crossed by air in May 1927 was, as you would expect, a rather different place from the America we find today. It was, for one thing, more roomy and self-evidently rural. With a population of just under 120 million, the United States had only about four people then for every ten it holds today. Half of those 120 million still lived on farms or in small towns, compared with just 15 percent now, so the balance was much more in favor of the countryside.

Cities were, on the whole, agreeably compact: they had not yet acquired the radiating shock waves of suburban sprawl that we find today. Nor, by and large, did roads of any consequence emerge from them. In 1927, when people traveled or shipped goods, it was still almost exclusively by rail. Paved highways in most places were a rarity. Even the great, newly built Lincoln Highway—which proudly called itself the first transcontinental highway in the world—was continuously paved only from New York City to western Iowa. From there to San Francisco, only about half of it was. In Nevada, it was “largely hypothetical,” in the words of one contemporary, with not even roadside markers to indicate a notional existence. Other, shorter through routes like the Jefferson Highway and the Dixie Highway were beginning to appear here and there, but these were enchanting novelties, not true harbingers. When people imagined the future of long-distance transportation it wasn’t highways they thought of, but rather airplanes and giant dirigibles cruising between city centers.

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.

An alternative possibility for getting passengers into cities was the skyscraper aerodrome, with runways cantilevered outward from lofty rooftops or shared between buildings. One visionary architect came up
with a plan to build a kind of giant table, with skyscrapers for the four legs and a four-acre landing platform perched across them. The
New York Times
for its part imagined a more personal approach. “The helicopter and gyroscope will enable a man to land and start from a shelf outside his dwelling window,” it stated with hopeful conviction in an editorial on the coming future.

That none of this was in any respect achievable—in terms of engineering, architecture, aeronautics, financing, safety, building codes, or any other consideration—seemed hardly to matter. This was an age that didn’t like practical concerns to get in the way of its musings. A writer in the popular
Science and Invention
magazine confidently forecast that people of all ages would soon be traveling—and briskly—on motorized roller skates, while Harvey W. Corbett, a prominent architect, predicted that skyscrapers would rise hundreds of stories into the clouds and that people living on the upper levels would get their meals by radio, without explaining exactly how he imagined that would work. 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. Whatever the future held, everyone agreed that it would be technologically advanced, American-led, and thrilling.