Read One Summer: America, 1927 Online
Authors: Bill Bryson
Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Popular Culture
Two excellent studies of Prohibition are Daniel Okrent’s
Last Call
and Michael Lerner’s
Dry Manhattan
. Other details are taken from
Texas Guinan: Queen of the Night Clubs
by Louise Berliner and
The Night Club Era
by Stanley Walker. Many
other details are taken from various issues of
The New Yorker
, which had an all-but-obsessive interest in alcohol and drinking throughout the thirteen years of Prohibition.
Richard Byrd’s version of the flight of the
America
and associated events is related in his book
Skyward
, first published in 1928. He also wrote a long article titled “Our Transatlantic Flight,” published in
National Geographic
in September 1927. Sharply contrasting views by men who knew Byrd well are Anthony Fokker’s
Flying Dutchman
and Bernt Balchen’s
Come North with Me
. Additional perspective is provided by
Oceans, Poles and Airmen
by Richard Montague and
The Last Explorer
by Edwin Hoyt. The more sullen side of Charles Lindbergh’s character was explored in a pair of profiles in
The New Yorker
on September 20 and 27, 1930.
Though obviously biased and selective,
The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
. published in 1929, provides a clear, unvarnished account of the events of Coolidge’s life. Other details come from
Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President
by Donald R. McCoy and from the 2013 book
Coolidge
by Amity Shlaes. The latter provides an interesting revisionist view not just of Coolidge but also of Warren G. Harding. For a contrasting view of Harding, see
The President’s Daughter
by Nan Britton, which remains breathtaking even today. An insider’s account of Coolidge’s foibles is found in “Aide to Four Presidents,”
American Heritage
, February 1955. Coolidge’s mental state is interestingly dissected in “Psychological Pain and the Presidency” by Robert E. Gilbert in
Political Psychology
, March 1998. Also of note is the essay “Too Silent” in
The Review of Politics
, Spring 1999. More of Coolidge’s odd disengagement from executive commitment is seen in “Coolidge Refuses to Issue Proclamation Calling for Observance of Education Week,”
New York Times
, October 18, 1927.
The story of the meeting of the four central bankers on Long Island in the summer of 1927 is well told in
Lords of Finance
by Liaquat Ahamed. Additional details come from
Once in Golconda
by John Brooks;
Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939
by Barry Eichengreen; and
A History of the Federal Reserve
by Allan H. Meltzer. Also very good, if a bit dated, is
The Lords of Creation: The Story of the Great Age of American Finance
by Frederick Lewis Allen. The rise and fall of Long Island’s Gold Coast is interestingly surveyed in
Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened
by Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, and the story of America’s addiction to consumer credit is well told by Louis Hyman in
Debtor Nation
.
The most thorough (and enthusiastic) account of the 1927 Yankees is Harvey Frommer’s
Five O’Clock Lightning: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the Greatest Baseball Team in History, the 1927 New York Yankees
. Conclusions on Lou Gehrig’s character are drawn from Jonathan Eig’s
Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig
, and from profiles of Gehrig in
The New Yorker
, August 10, 1929, and
Liberty
, August 19, 1933, as well as all of the other baseball books already cited. Very little has been written on the life of Jacob Ruppert, but a good profile can be found in
The New Yorker
, September 24, 1932.
The story of Henry Ford’s life and business is exhaustively covered in the two-volume
Ford
by Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, and more succinctly in Robert Lacey’s
Ford: The Men and the Machine
. Neil Baldwin’s
Henry Ford and the Jews
gives a scholarly take on Henry Ford’s singular brand of anti-Semitism. An affectionate appraisal of the charms and idiosyncrasies of early Ford cars can be found in
Henry’s Wonderful Model T
by Floyd Clymer. A more technical assessment is provided by Terry Smith in
Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America
. Perspective from men who knew Ford well is found in Charles E. Sorensen’s
Forty Years with Ford
and Edwin G. Pipp’s
Henry Ford: Both Sides of Him
.
An indispensable account of the Ford Motor Company’s adventures in Amazonia is Greg Grandin’s
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
. For the story of rubber generally, Henry Hobhouse’s
Seeds of Wealth
and Joe Jackson’s
The Thief at the End of the World
are both good. For an absorbing account of Henry Fawcett’s ill-judged jungle explorations, see
The Lost City of Z
by David Grann and
Man Hunting in the Jungle: The Search for Colonel Fawcett
by George M. Dyott.
The Florida property boom and bust is extensively considered in
Some Kind of Paradise
by Mark Derr and two
American Heritage
articles, “Bubble in the Sun,” August 1965, and “The Man Who Invented Florida,” December 1975. The details of Jack Dempsey and his fights come principally from
A Flame of Pure Fire
by Roger Kahn, and from an occasional series in
The New Yorker
called “That Was Pugilism,” in particular from the issues of November 19, 1949, and November 4, 1950. Other details come from “A Sporting Life,”
The New Yorker
, October 2, 1999, and “Destruction of a Giant,”
American Heritage
, April 1977. The best account of Charles Lindbergh’s tour around America is “Seeing America with Lindbergh,”
National Geographic
, January 1928. Details of the sesquicentennial exposition in Philadelphia come from
Philadelphia: A 300-Year History
, edited by Russell F. Weigley.
Scores of books have been written on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. For general background, Francis Russell’s
Tragedy in Dedham
and
Sacco & Vanzetti: The Case Resolved
are both excellent. For understanding the politics and motivations of the two anarchists, Paul Avrich’s 1991 study,
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background
, is without compare. For an understanding of the mood of the nation in the post–World War I years, see
Ethnic Americans
by Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, and
Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920
, by Robert K. Murray.
The Carving of Mount Rushmore
by Rex Alan Smith not only tells the story of Gutzon Borglum and his great monument, but also provides quite a lot of interesting detail on Calvin Coolidge’s summer in South Dakota. The carving is also discussed in “Mt. Rushmore” in the
Smithsonian
, May 2006, and in “Carving the American Colossus,”
American Heritage
, June 1977. The effect on President Coolidge of his son’s death is discussed in “Psychological Pain and the Presidency,” March 1998, and in “The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
, September 1999. The lives of the magnificently eccentric Van Sweringen brothers are comprehensively examined in
Invisible Giants
by Herbert H. Harwood Jr.
The
New York Times
ran perhaps five hundred stories on long-distance flights in the summer of 1927, and the facts in this chapter are almost exclusively culled from those. Edward R. Armstrong’s plans to build a string of floating platforms across the Atlantic Ocean are discussed in “Airports Across the Ocean,”
American Heritage Invention & Technology
, Summer 2001. The pleasures and perils of ocean travel in the period are entertainingly considered in
The Only Way to Cross
by John Maxtone-Graham. A long account of Charles Lindbergh’s visit to Springfield, Illinois, can be found in the October 1927 issue of the
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
.
An excellent discussion of the filming of
Wings
can be found in Robert Wohl’s
The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950
. Details of Clara Bow’s busy young life come from the aptly named
Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild
by David Stenn. Additional details on Bow in 1927 can be found in
Cinema Journal
, “Making ‘It’ in Hollywood,” Summer 2003. Books on silent film and the transition to sound pictures are almost numberless, but of particular usefulness to this book were
American Silent Film
by William K. Everson,
The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930
by Scott Eyman,
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
by Thomas Schatz, and
Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies
by Robert Sklar. The workings of Lee De Forest’s triode detector were comprehensively explained in the March 1965 edition of
Scientific American
.
The story of the career of Robert G. Elliott comes mostly from his 1940 memoir (written with Albert R. Beatty),
Agent of Death: The Memoirs of an Executioner
. The anger of the newspaperman Heywood Broun over the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti is taken from
Heywood Broun: A Biographical Portrait
by Dale Kramer. For Charles Ponzi, many interesting details, not found elsewhere, are given in a profile in
The New Yorker
, May 8, 1937. Details on the rioting in Europe come mostly from the
New York Times
, but also from the London
Times
of that week and the
Illustrated London News
of September 3, 1927.
The Ansonia and other apartment hotels of the period are discussed in
Elegant New York
by John Tauranac and
New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City
(
1869–1930
) by Elizabeth Hawes. The literature on American rail travel in the first decades of the twentieth century is surprisingly sparse. Two books that capture something of the romance, as well as the tedium, of rail travel then are
Railroads and the American People
, written by Roger H. Grant, and
We Took the Train
, edited by Grant. Also little written about was the Yankees’ manager Miller Huggins. Much of the information here was drawn from a
New Yorker
profile in the October 2, 1927, issue. Charles Lindbergh’s homecoming is well covered in “Lindbergh’s Return to Minnesota,”
Minnesota History
, Winter 1970.
America’s peculiar affection for negative eugenics is particularly well treated in
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
by Edwin Black and
Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics 1870–1940
by Anne Maxwell. Also of interest, though focused on the following decade, is
Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
, edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell. The history of the Ku Klux Klan is covered in
The Fiery Cross
by Wyn Craig Wade; additional details were taken from “Hooded Populism,”
Reviews in American History
, December 1994.
Not in My Neighborhood
by Antero Pietila is very good on restrictive covenants. Other aspects of race hatred in America are dealt with in
Hollywood and Anti-Semitism
by Steven Alan Carr, and
Hellfire Nation
by James A. Morone. The unhappy outcome of eugenics in Germany is surveyed in
Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials
by Paul Julian Weindling. The case of
Buck v. Bell
is the subject of an excellent chapter in
The Flamingo’s Smile
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Two outstanding books on the invention of television are
The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit and the Birth of Television
by Evan I. Schwartz and
Tube: The Invention of Television
by David E. and Marshall Jon Fisher. The sad end of Philo T.
Farnsworth is well treated in “A Critic at Large,”
The New Yorker
, May 27, 2002. John Logie Baird receives a sympathetic hearing in
John Logie Baird: A Life
by Antony Kamm and Malcolm Baird. Other details, particularly with respect to public demonstrations of television in the summer of 1927, come mostly from the
New York Times
.
Two books by Allen Churchill,
The Literary Decade
and
The Theatrical 20’s
, provide an excellent introduction to the worlds of books and theater in the 1920s. Also offering good details and much insight on life in New York in the period is
About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
by Ben Yagoda.
Show Boat
is especially well treated in
Jerome Kern: His Life and Music
by Gerald M. Bordman and
Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from
Show Boat
to Sondheim
by Geoffrey Block. The life stories of America’s two most popular authors of the period are recounted in
Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan
by John Taliaferro, and
Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women
by Thomas H. Pauly.
Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright
by Tom Dardis is illuminating both on the publisher himself and on the literary firmament through which he moved.