One Summer: America, 1927

by Bryson, Bill

  Bernt Balchen, the unsung hero of the America adventure, accompanied Byrd on his South Pole flight. He went on to become a colonel in the U.S. Air Force and had a distinguished career, though, as was noted earlier, he fell foul of the Byrd family because of suggestions in his autobiography that Byrd had not reached the North Pole in 1926 as claimed. Balchen died in 1973. George Noville accompanied Byrd on his second expedition. Noville Peninsula and Mount Noville, Antarctica, are both named for him. Noville died in 1963 in California. Little beyond that is known. Bert Acosta, the fourth member of the 1927 America crew, did not fare so well. He became severely alcoholic and spent several spells in jail for vagrancy and for failing to maintain alimony payments. Seized with a burst of idealism during the 1930s, he pulled himself together enough to go to Spain and fly combat missions for the anti-Fascist republicans, but after the war he returned to the United States and slipped back into dissolute habits. He died, more or less a derelict, in 1954.

  Also moving relentlessly downhill was the strange and enigmatic Charles A. Levine. In October 1927, after almost five months away, Levine came home. He was given a parade up Fifth Avenue, but almost no one turned up. At a luncheon at the Hotel Astor, Mayor Jimmy Walker made a direct reference to the poor treatment Levine had been given.

  It subsequently became clear why Levine had lingered in Europe. The Justice Department was after him for up to $500,000 in unpaid taxes. This turned out to be the first in a lifetime of troubles for Levine. In 1931, police issued a warrant for him on charges of grand larceny after he failed to appear for questioning over irregularities concerning a $25,000 bank loan. Soon afterward he was arrested in Austria and charged with planning to counterfeit money and casino gambling chips. Those charges were later dropped. In 1932, Levine received a suspended sentence for violating the Workmen’s Compensation Law, and in 1933 he was charged with attempting to pass counterfeit money in New Jersey, though that charge, too, was later dropped. In 1937, he was convicted of smuggling two thousand pounds of tungsten powder into the United States from Canada; he served eighteen months in Lewisburg Penitentiary. In 1942, he was sentenced to 150 days in jail for helping to smuggle an illegal alien into the United States from Mexico. The fellow was a Jewish refugee, so it would seem to have been a reasonably humanitarian act, but the court, for whatever reason, did not see it so.

  After that, Levine dropped from sight. In 1971, when American Heritage ran an article about the flight of the Columbia, Levine was listed as missing and of unknown whereabouts. In fact, he was living in impoverished obscurity. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1991 at the age of ninety-four.

  Levine’s flying companion, Clarence Chamberlin, lived almost half a century after the summer of 1927 but without doing anything of particular note. He worked as an aviation consultant and for a time managed the new Floyd Bennett Field (named for the luckless airman) in Brooklyn, New York’s first public airport, opened in 1930. He died in Connecticut in 1976 just before his eighty-third birthday.

  Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig finished off the autumn of 1927 with a barnstorming tour. Barnstorming—putting together a touring team of big leaguers to play exhibition games—was highly lucrative. In a tour of twenty-one games, Ruth and Gehrig both made sums equal to their annual salaries as players.

  Barnstorming matches tended to be good-natured but chaotic. Fans frequently ran onto the field to chase down grounders that reached the outfield, and an outfielder might very well find himself competing with a clutch of eager spectators to catch a fly ball. Thirteen of the twenty-one games in 1927 had to be abandoned early because the crowds were out of control. In Sioux City, Iowa, two thousand fans rushed onto the field at one point, and Lou Gehrig was credited with saving the life of a man who was being trampled.

  Barnstorming proved to be the undoing of Gehrig and Ruth’s friendship. To widespread astonishment, Gehrig in 1932 started going out with a young woman named Eleanor Twitchell. They were married the following year. In 1934, Eleanor accompanied Lou and several of his teammates on a postseason tour of Japan. On the ocean crossing, Eleanor disappeared for some time one afternoon. Lou, frantic that she might have fallen overboard, searched everywhere for her. Eventually, he found her in Ruth’s cabin. Eleanor and Ruth had been drinking. She was decidedly tipsy. Whatever else may have been going on in there is unknown, but for years rumors persisted that it was considerably more than conversational. When Yankees catcher Bill Dickey was asked about it years later, he acknowledged that “something happened,” but would be drawn no further. “I don’t want to tell you about it” is all he would say. What is known is that communication between Gehrig and Ruth ceased more or less completely from that day.

  In early 1939, after playing nearly fourteen full seasons without missing a game, something went wrong with Lou Gehrig. He became clumsy and seemed to have no strength. After eight games, he asked to be benched, ending his streak at 2,130 games, a record that would stand for half a century, and went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. There it was discovered that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a gradually fatal condition. His career was over.

  Shortly after his diagnosis was made public, the Yankees held a Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. Awards were presented and tributes paid. Joe McCarthy, the Yankees new manager, wept as he described Gehrig’s virtues. Gehrig wasn’t expected to speak—he was petrified of crowds—but he stepped to the microphone and made what has long been considered to be the most moving speech ever given in a sporting context in America. He began:

  Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them even for one day?

  He spoke for no more than a minute, mostly to praise his teammates and family. It wasn’t the words so much as the sincerity that moistened every eye in the park. When he finished he received an ovation greater and more heartfelt than any given before or since in Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth stepped forward, whispered something in his ear, and embraced him. It was the first time they had spoken in nearly six years. Just under two years later, on June 2, 1941, Gehrig was dead. He was thirty-seven years old.

  Ruth had retired in 1935. He had wanted to be made manager of the Yankees, but Jacob Ruppert dismissed the idea out of hand. “You can’t even manage yourself,” he said woundingly. Ruth instead was traded to the Boston Braves, one of the worst teams in baseball. He played just twenty-eight games there, but finished with a Ruthian flourish. In his last game, against the Pirates on May 25, 1935, he hit three home runs. At the time he retired, he held fifty-six major league records.

  On June 13, 1948, Babe Ruth made a farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium not unlike Gehrig’s nine years earlier. He was dying of cancer and looked unmistakably frail. He wore a Yankees uniform that hung loosely on his much-reduced frame. He said a few words of thanks into a microphone set up at home plate, but his cancer made it difficult for him to speak.

  He died two months later at age fifty-three. Harry Hooper, his old teammate, said Ruth was “a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since.” Waite Hoyt put it more simply: “God, we liked that big son of a bitch. He was a constant source of joy.”

  Henry Ford at last produced his long-awaited Model A automobile in early December. To make sure that no one was unaware of this milestone event, the company placed full-page ads in two thousand daily newspapers.

  People flocked to showrooms to gaze in wonder at the novelty of a Ford that came in a range of exotic colors—Arabian Sand, Rose Beige, Gunmetal Blue, Niagara Blue, and Andalusite Blue—and was reasonably stylish, well appointed, and comfortable, for a price between $385 and $1,400, depending on features. In every city, Ford showrooms could be recognized at
once by the crowds gathered around them. At least ten million people were estimated to have viewed the car in its first thirty-six hours on sale.

  The initial reaction was highly favorable. Some four hundred thousand Model A’s were ordered in the first two weeks of December. What Ford didn’t tell eager buyers was that production was still only running at about a hundred cars a day. So dealers, who had had no customers for months, now found they had plenty of customers but almost no cars to give them. The loss of goodwill was immense.

  Ultimately, the Model A was no more than a modest success. It was discontinued after four years, as it became evident that American car buyers now wanted annual model changes. In the 1930s, Ford dropped to third place in market share, with barely half the sales of General Motors and less even than Chrysler. Its payroll fell from over 170,000 in 1929 to just 46,000 in 1932, and total production at Ford plants dropped from 1.5 million vehicles to just over 230,000. The company survived, of course, and has remained one of America’s most important manufacturing concerns, but it would never again be the dominant force it once was.

  Edsel Ford died of stomach cancer in 1943 at the early age of forty-nine, never having had much chance to get out from under his father’s shadow. Henry Ford, growing rapidly senile, followed four years later, at eighty-three. He never made it to Fordlandia, his rubber enterprise in Brazil.

  Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray met their fate at Sing Sing in January 1928, one month after the Model A made its debut. Their executioner was the lethally ubiquitous Robert G. Elliott.

  Snyder was sent to the chair first. “When her eyes fell upon the instrument of death she almost collapsed,” Elliott recorded in his memoirs. “The matrons tenderly assisted her to the chair, and, as she was placed in it, she broke down and wept. ‘Jesus, have mercy on me, for I have sinned,’ she prayed between sobs.” Elliott gently attached electrodes to her right leg and the nape of her neck and lowered a cloth bag over her head. For reasons unstated, she was spared the usual leather football helmet. Then Elliott stepped back and threw the switch. Two minutes later Ruth Snyder was dead. It was the first electrocution anywhere of a woman.

  Gray immediately followed and walked to the chair with a curious businesslike briskness, as if this were a visit to the dentist. He wore a look of calm resolve and politely cooperated as he was strapped in and wired up. “He was one of the bravest men I have ever seen go to death by law,” Elliott wrote. “I felt extremely sorry for this man who had forsaken his wife and daughter for the woman who lay dead a short distance away. I believe nearly everyone in the room did.” Two minutes later, Gray was dead, too.

  The next morning, readers of the New York Daily News were greeted with a sensational image. Filling the whole of the front page under the single word “DEAD!” was a slightly blurred photograph of Ruth Snyder at the time of execution. Her head is covered, and she is obviously strapped in place, but otherwise she looks reasonably comfortable. The photo was taken by a Daily News reporter named Tom Howard, who was present as an official witness and had sneaked in a miniature camera strapped to his shin. At the right moment, he had discreetly lifted up his pant leg and activated the shutter by means of a wire running to his jacket pocket. The edition sold out within minutes of hitting the streets. Inside, the paper provided 289 inches of coverage on the execution. Even the Times gave the story 63½ inches—over 5 feet—of detailed attention.

  Two months after the executions, Robert G. Elliott and his wife were slumbering peacefully in their home in Richmond Hill in Queens when they were blown out of bed by a tremendous explosion. Bombers—presumably Sacco and Vanzetti sympathizers—had left an explosive device on their front porch. The upward force of the blast blew the roof more than thirty feet across the lawn, but remarkably the Elliotts were not injured. The house, however, had to be completely rebuilt. No one was ever caught for the bombing. Elliott lived on till October 1939, when he died of a heart attack at age sixty-five.

  Herbert Hoover suffered a couple of frights on his road to the White House. In the autumn of 1927 his opponents, of whom there were many, began floating the notion that Hoover couldn’t legally run because he hadn’t been resident in America for the preceding fourteen years, as the Constitution required. (The stipulation was put there by the founding fathers to make sure that the office could be held only by those who had remained loyally at home during the Revolutionary War.) Rumors also circulated that Hoover had once applied for British citizenship. (He hadn’t.)

  In the end, no one pursued the challenge and on November 4, 1928, on the first occasion in his life in which he ran for office, Hoover was elected president of the United States by a record margin. He received nearly two-thirds of the popular vote and over 80 percent of electoral votes. Among those endorsing him was Charles Lindbergh.

  Hoover took office in March 1929, and in October the stock market crashed. Hoover never recovered from that blow. In the three years following the crash, America’s unemployment rate rose from 3 percent to 25 percent, while average household earnings fell by 33 percent, industrial production by almost 50 percent, and the stock market by 90 percent. Eleven thousand banks failed.

  Hoover did quite a lot to try to stimulate the economy. He spent $3.5 billion on public works, including several projects for which we may thank him yet—notably the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. He even donated his own salary to charity. An aide to President Roosevelt once confessed, “Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” But nothing could overcome his absence of lovability. At the 1931 World Series, he was “lustily” booed—the first time that that had ever happened to a president at a World Series game.

  Having won the 1928 election by a record margin, Hoover lost the 1932 race by another record margin. He continued to work as hard after his presidency as during it. At one point, he wrote four books simultaneously, keeping a separate desk for each. He died in 1964 at age ninety and was buried at West Branch, Iowa, even though he had not lived there for more than eighty years. Today the Hoover presidential library at West Branch includes an excellent museum that houses, among much else, the television equipment on which he made his famous broadcast in April 1927.

  Upon completion of his term, Calvin Coolidge retired with Grace Coolidge to a rented house in Northampton, Massachusetts. He became a member of the board of the New York Life Insurance Company and faithfully attended the monthly board meetings in New York for a fee of $50 and reimbursement of his expenses. He also wrote his autobiography and a syndicated newspaper column. One afternoon just after New Year’s 1933, he went upstairs to shave. Grace found him on the floor of their bathroom dead of a heart attack. He was sixty years old. Most of his papers were destroyed soon after his death at his own request.

  Benjamin Strong, the man who arguably gave the world the stock market crash and all the economic chaos that followed, didn’t live to see any of it. He died in October 1928 at the age of fifty-five, overwhelmed by his tuberculosis. Also not long surviving the summer of 1927 was Myron Herrick. He caught a chill while standing in the rain during the funeral of the French war hero Marshal Ferdinand Foch in March 1929, and died a few days later. He was seventy-four.

  Six months after Herrick died, Miller Huggins, the Yankees manager, developed a blotch under his eye and began to feel feverish. He went to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, and almost at once his condition grew critical. He was suffering from a skin infection called erysipelas (more commonly known as St. Anthony’s fire), which nowadays can be treated with antibiotics. In 1929, there were no effective treatments. Huggins died on September 25, 1929, at age fifty.

  Dwight Morrow stepped down as ambassador to Mexico after three years in the job and came home to run for the Senate as a Republican from New Jersey. He stood on a platform opposing Prohibition and won by a landslide, but he died suddenly in his sleep from a stroke on October 5, 1931, soon after taking office. He was fifty-eight years old. Five months later, his grandson was kidnapped.

>   Six months after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Judge Webster Thayer returned briefly to the news when his home was bombed, presumably by Sacco and Vanzetti supporters. Thayer spent the rest of his life living under police guard at his Boston club, though in fact he didn’t have a great deal of life left. He died a little over six months later at age seventy-five. Alvan Fuller, the other principal figure in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, retired as governor of Massachusetts in 1929 but lived under police guard for some years. After Myron Herrick’s death, Fuller was considered for the position of ambassador to France, but the appointment was effectively vetoed by the French, who said they couldn’t guarantee his safety. Instead he devoted the remaining twenty-nine years of his life to business and philanthropy. He died of a heart attack at a Boston movie theater in 1958.

  Jack Dempsey lost most of his fortune in the Wall Street crash. In 1935 he opened a restaurant on Broadway that was a New York institution for almost forty years before closing in 1974. Dempsey himself lived until 1983, when he died at the age of eighty-seven.

  Gene Tunney married an heiress from the Carnegie family, Polly Lauder, in 1929. She had never seen him fight. They honeymooned on the Adriatic island of Brioni, where Tunney “walked, swam and talked” with George Bernard Shaw. Presumably he spent a little time with his bride as well. Tunney wrote some reminiscences, served on the boards of several large companies, and became “a speaker of overwhelming authority and composure on any subject at all,” as John Lardner recorded just a touch acidly in a New Yorker profile in 1950. His son John served as U.S. senator from California from 1965 to 1971. Tunney died in 1978 at age eighty-one. The most successful of the 1920s boxers, however, was the wild bull Luis Firpo. Having arrived in America penniless, Firpo went home $1 million richer after six years in the ring. He invested his fortune wisely and built up a business and ranching empire that eventually extended to an estate of over two hundred thousand acres. He was worth about $5 million when he died in 1960 at age sixty-five.