Read One Summer: America, 1927 Online
Authors: Bill Bryson
Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Popular Culture
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 Nazi war trials at Nuremberg after the war, Carrel’s
Man the Unknown
was quoted in defense of Nazi eugenics practices.
Also dying in 1944 were two of Chicago’s leading figures. The first to go was Big Bill Thompson, who died in March at the age of seventy-six. 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.
Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh, died in 1954 from Parkinson’s disease at the age of seventy-eight. His widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, gave birth to 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.
Acknowledgments
As ever, I am greatly indebted to a number of people and institutions for kindly assistance in the preparation of this book. In particular I wish to thank Dr. Alex M. Spencer, Dr. Robert van der Linden, and Dr. Dominick Pisano of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.; my saintly editors, Marianne Velmans, Gerry Howard, and Kristin Cochrane; my British agent, Carol Heaton; my esteemed friend Larry Finlay; and my extraordinarily bright and diligent copy editors, Janet Renard and Deborah Adams, who saved me from a thousand careless mistakes, though of course any that remain are my own.
I am also most grateful to the ever helpful staff of the London Library; to Jon Purcell and his colleagues at the library of Durham University; to Bart Schmidt and colleagues at the Drake University Library in Des Moines; and to the staffs of the New York and Boston Public Libraries, the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, and the library of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
For advice, encouragement, introductions, and occasional meals I am most grateful to Keith and Win Blackmore, Jonathan and Rina Fenby, Tim and Elizabeth Burt, John and Anne Galbraith, Chris Higgins and Jenifer White, Anne Heywood, Larry and Lucinda Scott, Patrick Janson-Smith, Patrick Gallagher, Brad Martin, Oliver Payne, John and
Jeri Flinn, Andrew and Alison Orme, Daniel and Erica Wiles, and Jon, Donna, Max, and Daisy Davidson.
Special thanks go also to my children, Catherine and Sam Bryson, for their generous and extremely affordable research assistance, and, above all and as always, to my dear long-suffering, imperturbable, all-forgiving wife, Cynthia.
Notes on Sources and Further Reading
Below are the principal sources used in this book, as well as suggestions for further reading. Full publication details for books can be found in the accompanying bibliography. Notes on individual citations and other sources used can be found at
www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/
.
General
The most entertaining and briskly informative account of the period remains
Only Yesterday
by Frederick Lewis Allen, originally published in 1931, but reissued many times since. Also excellent is Mark Sullivan’s six-volume history,
Our Times
, though it goes only to 1925. More recent works of value include J. C. Furnas’s
Great Times
and Nathan Miller’s
New World Coming
. The only book specifically on 1927 of which I am aware is
The Year the World Went Mad
by Allen Churchill. A website containing an encyclopedic range of background information, including photographs and reprints of articles on Charles Lindbergh, is
CharlesLindbergh.com
. For the New York Yankees, a similar service is provided by the Unofficial 1927 New York Yankees Home Page at
www.angelfire.com/pa/1927
.
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
An Explorer in the Air Service
, though only incidentally useful for this volume, is a fascinating study of America’s position with respect to military aviation in the period of World War I. For America’s financing of World War I, see
The House of Morgan
by Ron Chernow and
Empire of Wealth
by John Steele Gordon.
Details from the Snyder-Gray case come mostly from the
New York Times
and other contemporary accounts. A good general overview is provided in Landis MacKeller’s
The “Double Indemnity” Murder
. Other details come from
The American Earthquake
by Edmund Wilson and “The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder,” by Jessie Ramey in the
Journal of Social History
, Spring 2004. An interesting essay on the influence of the Snyder-Gray case on Hollywood is found in the October 2005 edition of the academic journal
Narrative
, “Multiple Indemnity: Film Noir, James M. Cain, and Adaptations of a Tabloid Case,” by V. P. Pelizzon and Nancy Martha West. Many of the details on the extraordinary quirks of Bernarr Macfadden come from a three-part series that ran in
The New Yorker
in October 1950.
Lindbergh
by A. Scott Berg is the standard biography. Kenneth S. Davis’s
The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream
, though more than fifty years old, is beautifully written and contains a great deal of detail not found elsewhere. Nothing, however, better captures the challenge and excitement of that summer than Lindbergh’s own Pulitzer Prize–winning account of 1953,
The Spirit of St. Louis
. Lindbergh offered a few additional observations on his life in
Autobiography of Values
, published shortly after his death. Technical details of Lindbergh’s flight and a superlative analysis of its importance are provided by Dominick A. Pisano and R. Robert van der Linden in
Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis
. All the titles mentioned here were of great help in this chapter and throughout the book.
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. A more general book, but also excellent, is
Floods
by William G. Hoyt and Walter B. Langbein. Hoover’s rise to greatness is chronicled by Kendrick A. Clements in
The Life of Herbert Hoover;
by George Nash in a two-volume work also called
The Life of Herbert Hoover;
and by Richard Norton Smith in
An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover
. Hoover himself left the exhaustive and surprisingly readable
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover
. Details on the financial maneuverings of Andrew Mellon are largely taken from David Cannadine’s elegant biography,
Mellon: An American Life
. 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.
The case of
United States v. Sullivan
is discussed in “Taxing Income from Unlawful Activities,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 2289, and in the March 2005 issue of the
Columbia Law Review
. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was the subject of an admiring profile in
The New Yorker
in the issue of February 16, 1929. Details of the American tour of Francesco de Pinedo come principally from contemporary reports in the
New York Times
, as do those of the murderous attack in Bath, Michigan, by Andrew Kehoe.
Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris remains one of the most written about events of modern times, so details here are taken from many sources. I have at all times taken Lindbergh’s own, meticulous
Spirit of St. Louis
as the last word on the flight itself. For details of
Rio Rita
and other Broadway productions, see
American Theatre
by Gerald M. Bordman and
The Theatrical 20’s
by Allen Churchill. The biographical details for Bill Tilden come mostly from Frank Deford’s
Big Bill Tilden
. Myron Herrick was profiled in
The New Yorker
in the issue of July 21, 1928. Little else has been written about him.
The mania surrounding Lindbergh’s successful flight is especially well captured in Kenneth S. Davis’s
The Hero
. Other details are taken from “Columbus of the Air,”
The North American Review
, September–October 1927; “Lindbergh’s Return to Minnesota, 1927,”
Minnesota History
, Winter 1970; and “My Own Mind and Pen,”
Minnesota History
, Spring 2002, and from various contemporary newspapers in New York and London. Details of Lindbergh’s reception in London come from various editions of
The Times
(London) and from
The Illustrated London News
, June 4, 1927.
Though not remotely reliable on many private matters, the most interesting and obviously personal account of Babe Ruth’s life is
The Babe Ruth Story
, by Ruth himself, with the help of the sportswriter Bob Considine. Also of note are
The House That Ruth Built
by Robert Weintraub,
The Big Bam
by Leigh Montville,
Babe Ruth: Launching the Legend
by Jim Reisler, and
The Life That Ruth Built
by Marshall Smelser. For details on Baltimore at the time of Ruth’s upbringing, see
Baltimore: The Building of an American City
by Sherry Olson.
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.
The flight of the
Columbia
and personality quirks of Charles A. Levine are well captured by Clarence D. Chamberlin in his autobiography,
Record Flights
, published in 1942 but still very readable. Other details of the flight and its aftermath come principally from the
New York Times
. A fascinating perspective on why there are no surviving copies of the movie
Babe Comes Home
is supplied by “The Legion of the Condemned: Why American Silent Films Perished” by David Pierce,
Film History
, vol. 9, no. 1, 1997.
The idiosyncrasies of Dwight Morrow were examined by
The New Yorker
in a profile in the edition of October 15, 1927. Additional details can be found in
The House of Morgan
by Ron Chernow. The refurbishments to the White House in the summer of 1927 are discussed in
The White House: The History of an American Idea
by William Seale. The anecdote concerning President Coolidge’s seasickness is from
The New Yorker
, June 25, 1927. A good survey of radio in the period is provided by “Radio Grows Up,”
American Heritage
, August–September 1983. Details on city life in America come from
Downtown: Its Rise and Fall
by Robert M. Fogelson. Gertrude Ederle and the craze for swimming the English Channel are discussed in
The Great Swim
by Gavin Mortimer.