One Summer: America, 1927

One Summer: America, 1927

Bill Bryson (2013, Doubleday)

     Any moment can be a historic moment, of course, and the world is always changing; but it's pretty hard to beat Bill Bryson's choice of 1927 as the year that changed everything. It would also be pretty hard to beat Bryson's gift for drawing characters and spinning narratives out of the American scene of the time. Giants walked the earth - Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Al Capone, and, probably first of all, Charles A. Lindbergh.

     At 7:52 on May 20, Lindbergh took off from a muddy runway at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, barely clearing the telephone wires in his path. 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds later, he touched down at Le Bourget, outside of Paris, France. "In that instant, a pulse of joy swept around the earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was safe in Paris." He had flown by dead reckoning through the night, in a cloth-skinned plane with no way of looking out the front. It was a truly brilliant feat of aviation. The degree of fame that came with the feat was unprecedented, too. The boyish twenty-five-year old from a modest Minnesota background was suddenly unable to do anything or go anywhere without an adoring crowd turning up.

     One reason that was true was that radio had established a foothold in the United States, thanks in large part to a man named David Sarnoff, who saw the possibilities of the medium and helped to found the National Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff also grasped that hearing advertisements was a price audiences did not particularly mind paying; NBC sold ten million dollars worth of advertising in its second year on the air, and continued to dominate the business through the Depression, as newspapers failed on every side.

     The automotive industry was also hitting its stride, which would change the American landscape profoundly. Henry Ford gets a chapter, full of glorious eccentricity and questionable business sense. By 1927, Chrysler and General Motors were stealing a march on Ford, but he had already made his mark by bringing cars within the reach of ordinary working people, permitting them to move out of cities.

     The Twenties were a violent time, more than we now remember. Prohibition, of course, made criminals of citizens, and heroes of criminals. Anarchists planted bombs, sometimes blowing themselves up in the process. Nicolo Sacco and Bart Vanzetti were executed in 1927 for a robbery that took place in 1920, or perhaps for being immigrants with dangerously radical friends; historians haven't quite made up their minds. The Ku Klux Klan enforced not just segregation, but subjugation. "The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere."

     Those biases were found in more respectable circles as well, in the form of a eugenics movement that bore the imprimatur of scientists from the leading universities. In the spring of 1927, by a vote of 8-1, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted a woman to be sterilized on the grounds of being feeble-minded. Scientific theories about the superiority of northern Europeans over Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans were as spurious as they were self-interested, but they influenced housing segregation in the U.S., and encouraged the Nazis in some of their most deranged practices.

      For all that, the mood of this book is cheerful, and occasionally joyful. Babe Ruth's mighty bat brought delight to thousands; the golden age of the movies was just getting started; and Charles Lindbergh may have had a miserable time being thrust into the limelight, but his achievement made America feel like anything was possible.

 

 

Any Good Books, 1 March 2022