One Summer: America 1927

"Babe Ruth hit sixty 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...Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before."

So writes Bill Bryson in his free-wheeling and entertainingly informative book One Summer: American 1927, which, as the title suggests, focuses on one season in American history, give or take a few weeks. Though I think American history is rich enough that you could do this about almost any year, I must admit this one has a lot of highlights.

Bryson breaks the book into five parts, four of them dealing with one person or persons: Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, and Sacco and Vanzetti. But intertwining through these stories are a myriad of others, and Bryson goes on some wonderful tangents, all the while keeping on a chronological course through the summer.

The book and the season start with Lindbergh's flight to Paris. Attempts to cross the Atlantic were many around that time, as there was a prize waiting for the first team to do it. Robert Byrd and other prominent aviators had planes that were being tested, while many others attempted it and were never heard from again. Lindbergh was completely unknown and did it alone, and pulled it off with an aplomb that was astounding. He would become the most famous man in the country, a national hero, and spend the rest of the summer on a tour of the nation. "It is impossible to imagine what it must have been like to be Charles Lindbergh in that summer. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Every person on earth who could get near enough wanted to grasp his hand or clap him on the back. He had no private life anymore."

As for Ruth, Bryson chronicles his 1927 season, when he broke his own record for home runs by clouting sixty. Bryson doesn't spare on Ruth's excessive appetite, both for food and sex. As with Mantle and Maris and McGwire and Sosa in the future, it was a two-man race for a good part of the season, as Lou Gehrig actually had more home runs than Ruth as September began, but Gehrig's mother's illness took his mind off the game and Ruth hit 17 home runs in September. Bryson offers this bit of locker room confidential about the great Yankees: "By the 1930s, Gehrig would hate Ruth about as passionately as it was possible to hate a person. The fact that Ruth had reportedly by that time slept with Gehrig's wife would seem, not surprisingly, to have had something to do with that."

Calvin Coolidge was president, and in the summer of 1927 he was vacationing in South Dakota. Coolidge was a taciturn man, who seemed to want to do as little as possible (he had four-hour work days). "He was the least affable, gregarious, metaphorically embraceable president of modern times. Yet America came to adore him. Though he would spend the 1920s doing as little as possible--that was essentially his declared policy as president--he set the mood in the nation in a way few other presidents have. If the 1920s was the age of anyone, it was the Age of Coolidge."

He shocked the nation by announcing, in a tersely worded statement, that he would not run for re-election in 1928. His presumed successor was Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, who was responsible for many great things, including helping those in the devastating flood of the Mississippi earlier that year. But Bryson has some sharp words about Hoover's personality, which was unpleasant to the extreme.

As for Sacco and Vanzetti, they were arrested for murder during a payroll robbery on very flimsy evidence. But this was an after affect of a red scare, when anyone who was against the government was looked on with suspicion and prosecution. Bryson goes back to the Palmer raids and a series of bombings that were thought to be carried out by Italian anarchists. These poor souls, whose guilt or innocence is still hotly debated, ended up being electrocuted on largely circumstantial evidence.

There are a great many other characters who parade through the book. Boxer Jack Dempsey, who in 1927 lost the famous "long count" bout to Gene Tunney; Al Capone, who rubbed elbows with the politicians of Chicago (and whose brother would end up as a prohibition agent); Bill Tilden, tennis champion and seducer of young boys; Clara Bow, Al Jolson, the leaders of the temperance movement, the eugenics movement, and the Klu Klux Klan; Henry Ford, who shut down Ford to design the Model A and take a back seat to GM and Chrysler, and Philo Farnsworth, the man who invented television but has gotten lost in the history books. I particularly enjoyed this sub-heading of a New York Times article on the first broadcast, which featured none other than Herbert Hoover. "Commercial use in doubt," they predicted.

This book is like a bag of peanuts to the history buff--you just can't stop reading. It's written in a breezy style, and Bryson doesn't stint on his opinions and comes across as appalled as we are at some of the medieval thinking of some of these people, particularly the eugenicists, who fell into the trap of agreeing with the Nazis (this was the downfall of Lindbergh, who might have been president but for his anti-Semitism). In that way this is not scholarship, but it's damned interesting.