by Bryson, Bill
In the Fourth of July doubleheader against Washington, Gehrig hit 2 more, including a grand slam. At the end of the day, he had 28 home runs to Ruth’s 26. No one had ever pushed Ruth like this before. The baseball world was about to experience its first great home run race, and the excitement this would generate was almost uncontainable.
Remarkably, despite the rivalry and the fact that their personalities could not be more different, Ruth and Gehrig were the best of friends. Gehrig often had Ruth to his home, where Babe enjoyed Mrs. Gehrig’s hearty cooking and, according to several biographies, speaking German. (In fact, according to Ruth’s own sister, Babe spoke no German at all.) “I came to love that big Dutchman like a brother,” Ruth recalled, with every appearance of sincerity, in his autobiography. Ruth was as excited as any fan by Gehrig’s success, while Gehrig for his part was happy just to be allowed to play in the same ballpark as Ruth. He was especially touched by Ruth’s generosity of spirit. “It would be almost impossible to feel envy for a man who is as unselfish as Ruth,” he told reporters.
That warmth wouldn’t last, alas. By the 1930s, Gehrig would hate Ruth about as passionately as it was possible to hate a person. The fact that Ruth reportedly had by that point slept with Gehrig’s wife would seem, not surprisingly, to have had something to do with that.
Out west, the good weather was the best possible news, for the waters of the Mississippi were finally receding, if slowly. One and a half million acres were still underwater as July began, but the worst was over and Herbert Hoover was at last able to leave the day-to-day running of relief efforts to others.
For Hoover, the Mississippi flood relief was a personal triumph. He was especially proud that the federal government had provided no financial assistance at all. All the money for relief efforts came in the form of donations from private citizens and organizations like the Red Cross and the Rockefeller Foundation. “But those were days,” Hoover noted with a certain misty fondness in his memoirs thirty years later, “when citizens expected to take care of one another in time of disaster and it had not occurred to them that the Federal Government should do it.” In fact, the support provided for those trying to get back on their feet was hopelessly inadequate. Hoover helped push through the creation of a $13 million loan fund to help flood victims, which sounds reasonably generous, but worked out to just $20 per victim, and was, for all that, only a loan, hardly useful to even the poorest person who had lost everything.
The great Mississippi flood of 1927 had two lasting legacies. First, it accelerated the movement of blacks out of the South in what is known as the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better-paying jobs and more personal liberty. The movement transformed the face of America in a decade. Before the Great Migration, only 10 percent of blacks lived outside the South. After the Great Migration, half did.
The other important effect of the Mississippi flood was that it forced the federal government to accept that certain matters are too big for states to handle alone. For all Hoover’s proud reminiscence of how relief efforts were entirely private, it was widely recognized that government could not stand by when disaster struck. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge reluctantly signed into law the Flood Control Act, which appropriated $325 million to try to avert future disasters. It was, in the view of many, the birth of Big Government in America. Coolidge hated the idea and refused to have any kind of ceremony to celebrate the passing of the act. Instead, he signed the bill in private, then went to lunch.
Meanwhile, back in the flood zone, not quite everyone was benefiting from the receding waters. In Morgan City, Louisiana, Ada B. Le Boeuf, wife of a prominent local businessman, had a good deal of explaining to do when the body of her husband, bearing obvious gunshot wounds, was found bloated and glistening on a newly exposed mudbank nine days after she reported him missing. Under questioning, Mrs. Le Boeuf confessed that she had formed an attachment to another prominent Morgan City citizen, Dr. Thomas E. Dreher, who was a doctor and surgeon and, not incidentally, her husband’s best friend. The devious Dreher had invited Mr. Le Boeuf out for a day’s fishing, shot him, weighted the body, and dumped it overboard.
Nineteen twenty-seven was a memorable year for foolish murders, and this was certainly one of those, for it seems not to have occurred to Dr. Dreher that it’s never a good idea to dump a body in floodwater, because the water will eventually go away whereas the body may not. Dr. Dreher and Mrs. Le Boeuf were tried, convicted, and hanged side by side.
For Charles Lindbergh, July did not start at all well. Although he had nobly resisted the crasser of the commercial blandishments waved before him, he did agree to two moneymaking propositions and it was now time to make good on those. One was to undertake a three-month tour of America in the Spirit of St. Louis. The idea was to visit every one of the forty-eight states, partly to satisfy the national craving to see him in the flesh but also to help promote aviation. The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics would pay him $2,500 a week during the trip, a generous sum. The tour details would be arranged by Herbert Hoover’s ubiquitous Department of Commerce. The tour was scheduled to start on July 20.
At the same time, Lindbergh contracted with the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons to produce a quick autobiography. Putnam appointed a ghostwriter, Carlyle MacDonald of the New York Times, who came up with a first draft, but Lindbergh couldn’t stand his folksy tone and insisted on writing the book himself—a matter of alarm to his publishers since he had only about three weeks to do it, and that included time off for a trip to Canada to attend that country’s diamond jubilee celebrations as a guest of the prime minister.
The Canada trip proved tragically eventful. On the Fourth of July, while the rest of America was celebrating, Lindbergh flew to Selfridge Field in Michigan, where a squadron of military planes was waiting to escort him onward to Ottawa. The plan in Ottawa was for Lindbergh to land first while the others circled above. Unfortunately, two of the escort planes clipped wings and one went into a nosedive. Lieutenant J. Thad Johnson jumped free of the crashing plane but lacked the height to get his parachute open. He struck the earth with a sickening thud close to where Lindbergh had just landed, and died instantly. The incident rather spoiled the day for many people, but Lindbergh accepted it calmly. In his world, death was an occupational hazard.
Immediately after Ottawa, Lindbergh returned to Long Island and moved into Falaise, a French-style château on the Guggenheim family estate at Sands Point on the Gold Coast, a dozen miles from the Mills property where Benjamin Strong and his fellow bankers were concurrently holding their talks. The Guggenheims’ end of the Gold Coast was fractionally more bohemian than the rest and was popular with people from Broadway and the arts. Florenz Ziegfeld, Ed Wynn, Leslie Howard, P. G. Wodehouse, Eddie Cantor, George M. Cohan, and, for a time, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald all had homes there, as did a few more louche types, like the mobster Arnold Rothstein. This was the world of The Great Gatsby, published two years earlier. Sands Point, where the Guggenheims clustered in three substantial houses, was the wealthy East Egg of the novel.
Working in a bedroom overlooking the sea, Lindbergh scribbled out his life story, using Carlyle MacDonald’s draft as a guide. In a little under three weeks he completed a manuscript of about forty thousand words—an impressive achievement in terms of output if not literary merit. The book, called We, was coolly received by critics. Lindbergh, as noted earlier, gave only passing mention to his childhood, and devoted just seven pages to his historic flight. The rest was mostly about barnstorming and delivering airmail. One reviewer drily observed, “As an author Lindbergh is the world’s foremost aviator.” The buying public didn’t care. We was published on July 27 and went straight to the top of the bestseller list. It sold 190,000 copies in its first two months. People couldn’t get enough of anything Lindbergh did.
And now the attention that he so little enjoyed was about to get not only much worse but also at times quite
dangerous.
17
For a man who changed the world, Henry Ford traveled in very small circles. He resided his whole life within a dozen miles of his birthplace, a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. He saw little of the wider world and cared even less for it.
He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, “mildly unbalanced.” He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.
His ignorance was a frequent source of wonder. He believed that the earth could not support the weight placed on it by skyscrapers and that eventually cities would collapse in on themselves, as in some kind of biblical apocalypse. Engineers explained to him that a large skyscraper typically weighed about sixty thousand tons while the rock and earth excavated for the foundations would weigh more like a hundred thousand tons, so that skyscrapers actually reduced the burden on the earth beneath them, but Ford was unpersuaded. He seldom let facts or logic challenge the certainty of his instincts.
The limits of his knowledge were most memorably exposed in 1919 when he sued the Chicago Tribune for libel for calling him an “ignorant idealist” and an “anarchist.”* For eight days, lawyers for the Tribune entertained the nation by punting through the shallow waters of Ford’s mind, as in this typical exchange regarding his familiarity with the history of his own country:
Lawyer: Did you ever hear of Benedict Arnold?
Ford: I have heard the name.
Lawyer: Who was he?
Ford: I have forgotten just who he is. He is a writer, I think.
Ford, it transpired, did not know much of anything. He could not say when the American Revolution was fought (“In 1812, I think; I’m not quite sure”) or quite what the issues were that provoked it. Questioned about politics, he conceded that he didn’t follow matters closely and had voted only once in his life. That was just after his twenty-first birthday, when, he said, he had voted for James Garfield. An alert lawyer pointed out that Garfield was in fact assassinated three years before Ford reached voting age.
And so it went, day after day. The world was so delighted and enthralled with Ford’s ignorance that one enterprising man sold hastily printed copies of Ford’s testimony for 25 cents each day outside the courthouse, and bought a house with the profits. (Eventually the jury found in Ford’s favor, but the jurors—twelve stolid Michigan farmers who clearly believed they had better things to do with their time—awarded him damages of just 6 cents. The Tribune never paid.)
Whether Ford was stupid or just inattentive has fueled debate among historians and other commentators for nearly a century. John Kenneth Galbraith had no doubt about the matter. Ford’s life and career, he maintained, were “marked by obtuseness and stupidity and, in consequence, by a congeries of terrible errors.” Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill in a generally sympathetic biography of 1957 called him “an ignoramus outside his chosen field [but] an ignoramus of sense and integrity.” That was about as warm a tribute as Henry Ford received from those who knew him well or considered him carefully. He was not, in short, a terribly bright or reflective human being.
Yet against this must be set his extraordinary achievement. When Henry Ford built his first Model T, Americans had some 2,200 makes of cars to choose from. Every one of those cars was in some sense a toy, a plaything for the well-to-do. Ford changed the automobile into a universal appliance, an affordable device practical for all, and that difference in philosophy made him unimaginably successful and transformed the world. Within just over a decade Ford had more than fifty factories on six continents, employed two hundred thousand people, produced half the world’s cars, and was the most successful industrialist in history, worth perhaps as much $2 billion, by one estimate. By perfecting mass production and making the automobile an object within financial reach of the average workingman, he wholly transformed the course and rhythm of modern life. We live in a world largely shaped by Henry Ford. But in the summer of 1927, Henry Ford’s part of that world was beginning to look a little rocky.
Henry Ford was born in July 1863, the same month as the Battle of Gettysburg, and lived into the atomic age, dying in 1948 just short of his eighty-fourth birthday. His earliest conviction was that he didn’t want to be a farmer, for “there was too much work on the place.” For the first half of his long life, he was little more than an accomplished mechanic. After leaving school at sixteen, he worked in various machine and engine shops in Detroit, eventually becoming chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company. In the 1890s, he quit that to pursue a fixation with building the best possible motorcar. According to Morris Markey, writing in The New Yorker, Ford was at a car race one day when a French driver crashed and was mortally injured. While others rushed to the stricken driver, Ford rushed to the car, which had survived better than he thought possible. Taking a hunk of chassis away with him, he discovered it was made of vanadium steel, a strong but lightweight material. Vanadium steel became the foundation metal for every car he made henceforth. However true or not that story, it is certainly the case that Ford didn’t rush into production until he had worked out every detail of production and composition. He was forty years old before he founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and forty-five when he produced his first Model T five years later.†
The Model T, like Ford himself, was an unlikely candidate for greatness. It was almost willfully rudimentary. For years the car had no speedometer and no gas gauge. Drivers who wanted to know how much gas they had in the tank had to stop the car, get out, and tip back the driver’s seat to check a dipstick located on the chassis floor. Determining the oil level was even trickier. The owner, or some other compliant soul, had to slide under the chassis, open two petcocks with pliers, and judge from how fast the oil ran out how much and how urgently more was needed. For shifting, the car employed something called a planetary transmission, which was famously idiosyncratic. It took much practice to master the two forward gears and one reverse one. The headlights, run off a magneto, were uselessly dim at low speeds and burned so hot at high speeds that they were inclined to explode. The front and rear tires were of different sizes, a needless quirk that required every owner to carry two sets of spares. Electric starters didn’t become standard until 1926, years after nearly all other manufacturers included them as a matter of routine.
Yet the Model T inspired great affection. It was the source of many loving jokes. In one, a farmer whose tin house roof had been mangled in a tornado sent the roof to the Ford factory hoping they could advise him how to restore it. The message came back: “Your car is one of the worst wrecks we have ever seen, but we should be able to fix it.” For all its faults, the Model T was practically indestructible, easily repaired, strong enough to pull itself through mud and snow, and built high enough to clear ruts at a time when most rural roads were unpaved. It was also admirably adaptable. Many farmers modified their Model T’s to plow fields, saw lumber, pump water, bore holes, or otherwise perform useful tasks.
One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit. The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows. Ford was no grea
t thinker, but he did understand human nature. Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford’s seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars.
The Model T was an immediate success. In its first full year, Ford produced 10,607 Model T’s, more than any manufacturer had ever made before, and still couldn’t meet demand. Production doubled annually (more or less) until by 1913–14 it was producing nearly 250,000 cars a year and by 1920–21 over 1.25 million.
The most persistent belief about the Model T, that you could have it in any color so long as it was black, was only ever partly true. Early versions of the car came in a small range of colors, but the colors depended on which model one bought. Runabouts were gray, touring cars red, and town cars green. Black, notably, was not available at all. It became the exclusive color in 1914 simply because black enamel was the only color that would dry fast enough to suit Henry Ford’s assembly-line methods, and that lasted only until 1924, when blue, green, and red were made available.
One thing above all accounted for Ford’s competitive edge: the moving assembly line. The process was perfected bit by bit between 1906 and 1914, not so much as a progressive, systematic plan, but more as a series of desperate expedients to try to keep up with demand. The basic idea of the assembly line—or “progressive assembling,” as it was at first known—came from the movement of animal carcasses through the slaughterhouses of Chicago, which, as has often been noted, was actually a kind of “disassembly line.” Other companies used assembly-line techniques—it was how Westinghouse made air brakes—but no other manufacturer embraced the system as comprehensively and obsessively as Ford. Workers in Ford plants were not permitted to talk, hum, whistle, sit, lean, pause for reflection, or otherwise behave in a nonrobotic fashion while working, and were given just one thirty-minute break per shift in which to go to the lavatory, have lunch, or attend to any other personal needs. Everything was arranged for the benefit of the production line.