by Bryson, Bill
“Why?” asked Dykes.
“You’ve been hit,” explained the umpire.
“Are you sure?” asked Dykes.
The umpire told him to check his hat. Dykes reached up and discovered that the cap was facing sideways from where Johnson’s last pitch had spun the bill. He dropped his bat and hurried gratefully to first base.
In twenty-one years as a pitcher, Johnson gave up only ninety-seven home runs. When Ruth homered off Johnson in 1920, it was the first home run anyone had hit off him in almost two years. In 1927, Johnson broke his leg in spring training when hit by a line drive, and never fully recovered. Now, with his fortieth birthday approaching, he decided it was time to retire. In the top of the ninth inning, in his last appearance in professional baseball, he was sent in to pinch-hit for Zachary. He hit a fly to right field. The ball was caught by Ruth, to end the game, Johnson’s career, and an important part of a glorious era.
In the clubhouse afterward, Ruth was naturally exultant over his 60th homer. “Let’s see some son of a bitch try and top that one!” he kept saying. The general reaction among his teammates was congratulatory and warm, but in retrospect surprisingly muted. “There wasn’t the excitement you’d imagine,” Pete Sheehy, the team equipment manager, recalled many years later. No one expected Ruth to stop at 60. It was assumed that he would hit at least one more the next day, and possibly reach even greater heights in years to come. Ruth after all had been the first to hit 30, 40, 50, and 60 homers. Who knew that he wouldn’t hit 70 in 1928?
In fact, neither he nor anyone else would hit so many again for a very long time. In his last game of the season, Ruth rather anticlimactically went 0-for-3 with a walk. In his last at-bat he struck out. Lou Gehrig, however, did hit a home run, his 47th of the season. That might seem a disappointing number after his earlier pace, so it is worth remembering that it was more than any other player had ever hit, apart from Ruth.
In banging out 60 home runs, Ruth out-homered all major league teams except the Cardinals, Cubs, and Giants. He hit home runs in every park in the American League and hit more on the road than at home. (The tally was 32 to 28.) He homered off thirty-three different pitchers. At least two of his home runs were the longest ever seen in the parks in which they were hit. Ruth hit a home run once every 11.8 times at bat. He had at least 6 home runs against every team in the American League. He did all this and still batted .356—and scored 158 runs, had 164 runs batted in, 138 walks, 7 stolen bases, and 14 sacrifice bunts. It would be hard to imagine a more extraordinary year.
Ruth and Gehrig between them came first and second in home runs, runs batted in, slugging percentage, runs scored, total bases, extra base hits, and bases on balls. Combs and Gehrig were first and second in total hits and triples. Four players—Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, and Meusel—each had more than 100 runs batted in. Combs was also third in runs scored and total bases, and Lazzeri was third in home runs. As a team, the Yankees had the American League’s highest team batting average and lowest earned-run average. They averaged 6.3 runs per game and almost 11 hits. Their 911 runs were more than any American League team had ever scored in a season before. Their 110 victories were a league record, too. Just one player was ejected from a game all season, and the team had no fights with other teams. Baseball has never fielded a more complete, dominant, and disciplined team.
Babe Ruth’s home run record stood until 1961, when Roger Maris, also of the Yankees, hit 61, though Maris had the advantage of a longer season, which gave him 10 more games and 50 more at-bats than Ruth in 1927. In the 1990s, many baseball players suddenly became immensely strong—some evolved whole new body shapes—and began to smack home runs in quantities that made a mockery of Ruth’s and Maris’s numbers. It turned out that a great many of this new generation of ballplayers—something in the region of 5 to 7 percent, according to random drug tests introduced, very belatedly, in 2003—were taking anabolic steroids. The use of drugs as an aid to hitting is far beyond the scope of this book, so let us just note in passing that even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn’t hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hot dogs.
Practically speaking, there’s no saying when the summer of 1927 ended. October brought some of the most summery days of the year, with temperatures touching 85 in New York and rising into the high 90s elsewhere in the East. Fall arrived gradually, on no particular date, as seasons generally do.
The Yankees met the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series (or World’s Series, as it was still commonly called), and beat them easily in four games, confirming in many people’s minds that the Yankees were the best team ever.
Calvin and Grace Coolidge returned to Washington from the West and moved back into a refurbished White House. The president stood by his vow not to run for office again. Herbert Hoover failed to secure Coolidge’s endorsement but made no secret of his wish to succeed him. In November, terrible floods ravaged much of New England, killing more than a hundred people. Coolidge declined to visit and sent Hoover instead.
The Jazz Singer played to huge crowds in New York, even at $10 a ticket. Samuel Raphaelson, who wrote the play on which the film was based, thought it was a terrible picture. “I’ve seen very few worse,” he said, but most people disagreed. The actress May McAvoy, who also starred in the film, recalled later that she would stand in cinemas where it was showing and watch the audiences. When Al Jolson spoke, she said, people reacted with such rapture “you’d have thought they were listening to the voice of God.” The movie cleared a profit of $1.5 million in its year of release.
The Holland Tunnel opened after five and a half years of construction, and work began in earnest on Mount Rushmore. In England, Dr. Dorothy Cochrane Logan, an American doctor working in London, was charged with perjury for claiming to have swum the English Channel for a $5,000 prize when in fact she had mostly ridden across in the support vessel. That seems to have marked an end both to Channel swimming and to stunts generally. In Detroit, Henry Ford began hiring again as the company geared up for production of the new Model A.
Charles Lindbergh finished his long tour at last. In the final month he dashed through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania before finally landing at Mitchel Field on Long Island on October 23. In three months he had flown 22,350 miles, visited 82 cities, delivered 147 speeches, ridden 1,285 miles in parades, and been seen by an estimated 30 million people, about one-quarter of the American populace. His last official engagement was a dinner in Manhattan in honor of Raymond Orteig.
And then—it must have seemed like a miracle—he was free. After five months of unceasing attention, it was all over. Except of course that it wasn’t. It was never going to be over. Lindbergh was now attached to a fame that he could never get away from. He had little idea what he would do next. How he would fill the rest of his life was a problem that would, as it were, fill the rest of his life.
On October 27, Lindbergh turned up unexpectedly at Curtiss Field, saying that he had “not done much flying lately”—a curious declaration coming just four days after the finish of a 22,350-mile trip. The Spirit of St. Louis was being serviced after the long tour, so Lindbergh asked if he could borrow a plane. The Curtiss ground crew gladly provided one, and Lindbergh spent a blissful hour alone and at peace in the sky.
Upon landing he found awaiting him the most terrifying experience of the summer. Twenty chorus girls had just arrived at the airfield for a photo shoot. Their visit was entirely coincidental and had nothing to do with him, but they were naturally excited to learn that the world’s most eligible bachelor was just the other side of a hangar door, and they gleefully laid siege to the building, peering through the grimy windows and calling through cracks in the door, beseeching him to come out so that they could tousle his hair and drape themselves over him. Lindbergh seriously looked as if he might die. Seeing his a
nguish, the airfield manager had a car brought around to the hangar’s back door. Relieved and grateful, Lindbergh leaped in and sped off, narrowly averting an unendurable encounter with twenty cheerfully adoring young women.
It would probably have done no good to remind Lindbergh that he had just spent the summer meeting presidents and kings, addressing crowds so large that they filled whole landscapes, receiving tributes on a scale never before accorded a human being. At the end of it all the most famous man in the world was, it seems, still just a kid.
A reasonable question to ask, if not such an easy one to answer, is what was it about Charles Lindbergh and his 1927 flight to Paris that so transfixed the world? In good measure, clearly, it was Lindbergh himself—the fact that he was boyish and wholesome, that he did it alone, that he behaved with such modesty and aplomb in the immediate aftermath of the flight. To this could be added the pure enchantment of knowing that an ocean could now be crossed. The thought that an airplane could leave New York and reappear hours later in Paris or Los Angeles or Havana, as if rematerializing from thin air, seemed almost the stuff of science fiction.
For Americans, there was also the gratifying novelty of coming first at something. It is a little hard to imagine now, but Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in nearly every field—in popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology. The center of gravity for the planet was moving to the other side of the world, and Charles Lindbergh’s flight somehow became the culminating expression of that.
None of this, of course, explains a hundred thousand Parisians streaming across the grass at Le Bourget to greet the taxiing Spirit of St. Louis, or four million turning out in New York, or all the renamed mountains and beacons and boulevards. All that can be said is that for some unknowable reason Lindbergh’s flight brought the world a moment of sublime, spontaneous, unifying joy on a scale never before seen. Charles Lindbergh would forevermore be the touchstone for that feeling. It was of course an impossible obligation.
Nearly nine decades have passed since the summer of 1927, and not a great deal survives. The airfields of Long Island are long gone. Roosevelt Field closed in 1951. Today it is a 110-acre shopping center, the biggest in New York State. The spot where Lindbergh and the others took off is marked by a plaque underneath an escalator near the Disney store. A statue called Spirit commemorating Lindbergh’s flight stands, forlornly, on a traffic island in the parking lot.
Not even much survives as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer—Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh—are rarely encountered now, and most of the others are never heard at all. So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: 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. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. 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.
Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.
EPILOGUE
The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.
—CALVIN COOLIDGE
in his last State of the Union address, December 1928
On April 30, 1928, almost exactly one year after his first test flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh delivered his treasured plane—his ship, as he always called it—to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. In its year’s career, it had made 175 flights and been in the air for 489 hours and 28 minutes. It went on display in the Arts and Industries Building on the Mall on May 13, one week before the first anniversary of the historic flight. Lindbergh insisted that the Spirit of St. Louis never be exhibited elsewhere. It has never left the Smithsonian’s care.
“I don’t know why he was so insistent about that,” Dr. Alex M. Spencer, a cheerful senior curator, tells me one day in 2011 when I visit. “I don’t imagine anybody asked him.”
Spencer and I are standing on a mezzanine overlooking the spacious entrance hall of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Directly before us, frozen forever in imagined flight, the Spirit of St. Louis hangs from the ceiling on thin wires. It looks small and unnervingly insubstantial. The absence of forward visibility is striking. It is hard to imagine Lindbergh folding himself into such a cramped space—even harder to imagine him squeezing in passengers like Henry Ford. It would have been an extremely snug experience. At close range, it is also clear that the plane is covered in thin fabric, adding to its air of frailty. It is little wonder that Lindbergh fretted over people touching his beloved machine.
I have come to the museum to ask Spencer what difference, if any, Lindbergh’s flight made to the history of aviation. “Oh, lots!” he responds emphatically, and guides me to a neighboring gallery, “America in the Air,” a vast cube of a room filled to a point just shy of crowdedness with gleaming vintage airplanes. To the uninstructed eye, the planes don’t seem to have a great deal in common, but in fact they have been chosen for display with care. “If you consider them in the order in which they were built, they tell quite a remarkable story,” says Spencer.
He points first to a Ford Tri-Motor dating from 1928. Gray and boxy, made of sheets of corrugated aluminum, it looks almost as if it might have been built in a home workshop by someone who didn’t entirely understand aerodynamics. It is perhaps telling that Henry Ford declined ever to go up in one of his own machines.
“Now compare that with this plane,” Spencer says, and moves us along to a Boeing 247-D. The Boeing is larger and strikingly sleeker. Every surface is attractively streamlined. The cantilevered wings are free of wires and struts, the engine cylinder heads are hidden beneath shiny cowlings, the engines themselves are built into the wings rather than just bolted on. This is clearly a plane from a new, more stylish era.
“And then came this,” says Spencer proudly, presenting his pièce de résistance, the Douglas DC-3. Created in 1935, launched in 1936, the DC-3 was the first truly modern airliner. It had 21 seats, could fly almost 1,500 miles, and cruise at nearly 200 miles an hour. A passenger could board a DC-3 at 4:00 p.m. in New York and arrive in Los Angeles for breakfast the next morning. The age of modern air travel had truly begun.
“And this all happened in less than a decade,” Spencer says, indicating the full range of marvels around us. “That’s what Lindbergh’s flight achieved.”
“But wouldn’t it have happened anyway?” I ask.
“Sure,” Spencer agrees. “But it wouldn’t have happened so fast, and it wouldn’t have been so overwhelmingly American.”
Lindbergh’s flight, it has been calculated, spurred as much as $100 million in aviation investments in America. In the mid-1920s, Boeing, a small manufacturer of airplanes in Seattle, had so little work that it sometimes built furniture just to keep going. Within a year of Lindbergh’s flight it employed a thousand people. Aviation became to the 1930s what radio was to the 1920s. Lindbergh himself was tireless in his promotion of the industry. Barely had he finished his national tour than Dwight Morrow, newly installed as American ambassador in Mexico, asked him if he would make a goodwill visit to the country. It was an audacious request. Mexico was on the edge of revolution. Bandits had recently attacked a train traveling from Mexico City to Los Angeles and killed several passengers, including a young American schoolteacher named Florence Anderson. Morrow and his wife traveled in armored vehicles. This was no place in which to have a lost airman come
down.
Lindbergh accepted the invitation without hesitation, however, and immediately laid plans for a tour of Central America and the Caribbean that was nearly as ambitious, and often would prove even more hair-raising, than his trip around America. Remarkably, he would fund the trip himself.
On December 13, just six weeks after finishing the U.S. tour, Lindbergh took off from Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., bound for Mexico City. The flight, though only two-thirds the distance of his Paris trip, was nonetheless epic. Unable to find a good map of Mexico, he flew with one that was little better than a page torn from a high school geography book. So long as he kept to the Gulf Coast, he could hold his bearings, but once he turned inland at Tampico he had nothing to guide him but instinct. The only town he passed was not shown on his map, and the scattered rail lines he encountered didn’t lead him anywhere productive. Eventually, he happened on a lonely eminence that he took to be Mount Toluca, and realized that he had gone considerably past his target. By the time he turned around and found his way to Valbuena Airfield, he had been in the air for 27 hours and 15 minutes and was hours late.
When Lindbergh’s plane touched down at 2:30 p.m., a crowd of 150,000 rushed forward in such jubilation that it picked up the plane and carried it to the hangar. Dwight Morrow, who had been waiting on a dais with President Plutarco Calles and an assortment of dignitaries since eight in the morning, was the most relieved man in the Western Hemisphere.
For the next two months, Lindbergh toured the region, often flying through wild weather or landing at dangerously inadequate airfields. Everywhere he was greeted by throngs and hailed as a hero. Roads and schools and rivers and cocktails and vast numbers of children were named after him. He visited Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone, but he spent Christmas in Mexico City with the Morrows. Also there for the holidays was the Morrows’ daughter Anne. She was a senior at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts—coincidentally, Calvin Coolidge’s hometown. Anne was shy, attractive, smart, and wonderfully self-contained. Lindbergh was smitten. He had his first girlfriend. Soon they would be engaged. In sixteen months they would be married.