by Bryson, Bill
Chapter 7
The mania surrounding Lindbergh’s successful flight is especially well captured in Kenneth S. Davis’s The Hero. Other details are taken from “Columbus of the Air,” The North American Review, September–October 1927; “Lindbergh’s Return to Minnesota, 1927,” Minnesota History, Winter 1970; and “My Own Mind and Pen,” Minnesota History, Spring 2002, and from various contemporary newspapers in New York and London. Details of Lindbergh’s reception in London come from various editions of The Times (London) and from The Illustrated London News, June 4, 1927.
Chapter 8
Though not remotely reliable on many private matters, the most interesting and obviously personal account of Babe Ruth’s life is The Babe Ruth Story, by Ruth himself, with the help of the sportswriter Bob Considine. Also of note are The House That Ruth Built by Robert Weintraub, The Big Bam by Leigh Montville, Babe Ruth: Launching the Legend by Jim Reisler, and The Life That Ruth Built by Marshall Smelser. For details on Baltimore at the time of Ruth’s upbringing, see Baltimore: The Building of an American City by Sherry Olson.
Chapter 9
One of the most fascinating books on America’s national pastime is Robert K. Adair’s The Physics of Baseball and one of the most delightful is Lawrence S. Ritter’s oral history, The Glory of Their Times. Also providing much useful detail were The Baseball by Zack Hample, Spitballers by C. F. and R. B. Faber, Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward (with Ken Burns), Total Baseball by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, The Complete History of the Home Run by Mark Ribowsky, and Past Time: Baseball as History by Jules Tygiel.
Chapter 10
The flight of the Columbia and personality quirks of Charles A. Levine are well captured by Clarence D. Chamberlin in his autobiography, Record Flights, published in 1942 but still very readable. Other details of the flight and its aftermath come principally from the New York Times. A fascinating perspective on why there are no surviving copies of the movie Babe Comes Home is supplied by “The Legion of the Condemned: Why American Silent Films Perished” by David Pierce, Film History, vol. 9, no. 1, 1997.
Chapter 11
The idiosyncrasies of Dwight Morrow were examined by The New Yorker in a profile in the edition of October 15, 1927. Additional details can be found in The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow. The refurbishments to the White House in the summer of 1927 are discussed in The White House: The History of an American Idea by William Seale. The anecdote concerning President Coolidge’s seasickness is from The New Yorker, June 25, 1927. A good survey of radio in the period is provided by “Radio Grows Up,” American Heritage, August–September 1983. Details on city life in America come from Downtown: Its Rise and Fall by Robert M. Fogelson. Gertrude Ederle and the craze for swimming the English Channel are discussed in The Great Swim by Gavin Mortimer.
Chapter 12
Two excellent studies of Prohibition are Daniel Okrent’s Last Call and Michael Lerner’s Dry Manhattan. Other details are taken from Texas Guinan: Queen of the Night Clubs by Louise Berliner and The Night Club Era by Stanley Walker. Many other details are taken from various issues of The New Yorker, which had an all-but-obsessive interest in alcohol and drinking throughout the thirteen years of Prohibition.
Chapter 13
Richard Byrd’s version of the flight of the America and associated events is related in his book Skyward, first published in 1928. He also wrote a long article titled “Our Transatlantic Flight,” published in National Geographic in September 1927. Sharply contrasting views by men who knew Byrd well are Anthony Fokker’s Flying Dutchman and Bernt Balchen’s Come North with Me. Additional perspective is provided by Oceans, Poles and Airmen by Richard Montague and The Last Explorer by Edwin Hoyt. The more sullen side of Charles Lindbergh’s character was explored in a pair of profiles in The New Yorker on September 20 and 27, 1930.
Chapter 14
Though obviously biased and selective, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. published in 1929, provides a clear, unvarnished account of the events of Coolidge’s life. Other details come from Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President by Donald R. McCoy and from the 2013 book Coolidge by Amity Shlaes. The latter provides an interesting revisionist view not just of Coolidge but also of Warren G. Harding. For a contrasting view of Harding, see The President’s Daughter by Nan Britton, which remains breathtaking even today. An insider’s account of Coolidge’s foibles is found in “Aide to Four Presidents,” American Heritage, February 1955. Coolidge’s mental state is interestingly dissected in “Psychological Pain and the Presidency” by Robert E. Gilbert in Political Psychology, March 1998. Also of note is the essay “Too Silent” in The Review of Politics, Spring 1999. More of Coolidge’s odd disengagement from executive commitment is seen in “Coolidge Refuses to Issue Proclamation Calling for Observance of Education Week,” New York Times, October 18, 1927.
Chapter 15
The story of the meeting of the four central bankers on Long Island in the summer of 1927 is well told in Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. Additional details come from Once in Golconda by John Brooks; Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 by Barry Eichengreen; and A History of the Federal Reserve by Allan H. Meltzer. Also very good, if a bit dated, is The Lords of Creation: The Story of the Great Age of American Finance by Frederick Lewis Allen. The rise and fall of Long Island’s Gold Coast is interestingly surveyed in Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened by Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, and the story of America’s addiction to consumer credit is well told by Louis Hyman in Debtor Nation.
Chapter 16
The most thorough (and enthusiastic) account of the 1927 Yankees is Harvey Frommer’s Five O’Clock Lightning: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the Greatest Baseball Team in History, the 1927 New York Yankees. Conclusions on Lou Gehrig’s character are drawn from Jonathan Eig’s Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and from profiles of Gehrig in The New Yorker, August 10, 1929, and Liberty, August 19, 1933, as well as all of the other baseball books already cited. Very little has been written on the life of Jacob Ruppert, but a good profile can be found in The New Yorker, September 24, 1932.
Chapter 17
The story of Henry Ford’s life and business is exhaustively covered in the two-volume Ford by Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, and more succinctly in Robert Lacey’s Ford: The Men and the Machine. Neil Baldwin’s Henry Ford and the Jews gives a scholarly take on Henry Ford’s singular brand of anti-Semitism. An affectionate appraisal of the charms and idiosyncrasies of early Ford cars can be found in Henry’s Wonderful Model T by Floyd Clymer. A more technical assessment is provided by Terry Smith in Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America. Perspective from men who knew Ford well is found in Charles E. Sorensen’s Forty Years with Ford and Edwin G. Pipp’s Henry Ford: Both Sides of Him.
Chapter 18
An indispensable account of the Ford Motor Company’s adventures in Amazonia is Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. For the story of rubber generally, Henry Hobhouse’s Seeds of Wealth and Joe Jackson’s The Thief at the End of the World are both good. For an absorbing account of Henry Fawcett’s ill-judged jungle explorations, see The Lost City of Z by David Grann and Man Hunting in the Jungle: The Search for Colonel Fawcett by George M. Dyott.
Chapter 19
The Florida property boom and bust is extensively considered in Some Kind of Paradise by Mark Derr and two American Heritage articles, “Bubble in the Sun,” August 1965, and “The Man Who Invented Florida,” December 1975. The details of Jack Dempsey and his fights come principally from A Flame of Pure Fire by Roger Kahn, and from an occasional series in The New Yorker called “That Was Pugilism,” in particular from the issues of November 19, 1949, and November 4, 1950. Other details come from “A Sporting Life,” The New Yorker, October 2, 1999, and “Destruction of a Giant,” American Heritage, April 1977. The best account of Charles Lindbergh’s tour around America is “Seeing Americ
a with Lindbergh,” National Geographic, January 1928. Details of the sesquicentennial exposition in Philadelphia come from Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, edited by Russell F. Weigley.
Chapter 20
Scores of books have been written on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. For general background, Francis Russell’s Tragedy in Dedham and Sacco & Vanzetti: The Case Resolved are both excellent. For understanding the politics and motivations of the two anarchists, Paul Avrich’s 1991 study, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, is without compare. For an understanding of the mood of the nation in the post–World War I years, see Ethnic Americans by Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, and Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920, by Robert K. Murray.
Chapter 21
The Carving of Mount Rushmore by Rex Alan Smith not only tells the story of Gutzon Borglum and his great monument, but also provides quite a lot of interesting detail on Calvin Coolidge’s summer in South Dakota. The carving is also discussed in “Mt. Rushmore” in the Smithsonian, May 2006, and in “Carving the American Colossus,” American Heritage, June 1977. The effect on President Coolidge of his son’s death is discussed in “Psychological Pain and the Presidency,” March 1998, and in “The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 1999. The lives of the magnificently eccentric Van Sweringen brothers are comprehensively examined in Invisible Giants by Herbert H. Harwood Jr.
Chapter 22
The New York Times ran perhaps five hundred stories on long-distance flights in the summer of 1927, and the facts in this chapter are almost exclusively culled from those. Edward R. Armstrong’s plans to build a string of floating platforms across the Atlantic Ocean are discussed in “Airports Across the Ocean,” American Heritage Invention & Technology, Summer 2001. The pleasures and perils of ocean travel in the period are entertainingly considered in The Only Way to Cross by John Maxtone-Graham. A long account of Charles Lindbergh’s visit to Springfield, Illinois, can be found in the October 1927 issue of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.
Chapter 23
An excellent discussion of the filming of Wings can be found in Robert Wohl’s The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950. Details of Clara Bow’s busy young life come from the aptly named Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild by David Stenn. Additional details on Bow in 1927 can be found in Cinema Journal, “Making ‘It’ in Hollywood,” Summer 2003. Books on silent film and the transition to sound pictures are almost numberless, but of particular usefulness to this book were American Silent Film by William K. Everson, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930 by Scott Eyman, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz, and Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies by Robert Sklar. The workings of Lee De Forest’s triode detector were comprehensively explained in the March 1965 edition of Scientific American.
Chapter 24
The story of the career of Robert G. Elliott comes mostly from his 1940 memoir (written with Albert R. Beatty), Agent of Death: The Memoirs of an Executioner. The anger of the newspaperman Heywood Broun over the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti is taken from Heywood Broun: A Biographical Portrait by Dale Kramer. For Charles Ponzi, many interesting details, not found elsewhere, are given in a profile in The New Yorker, May 8, 1937. Details on the rioting in Europe come mostly from the New York Times, but also from the London Times of that week and the Illustrated London News of September 3, 1927.
Chapter 25
The Ansonia and other apartment hotels of the period are discussed in Elegant New York by John Tauranac and New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869–1930) by Elizabeth Hawes. The literature on American rail travel in the first decades of the twentieth century is surprisingly sparse. Two books that capture something of the romance, as well as the tedium, of rail travel then are Railroads and the American People, written by Roger H. Grant, and We Took the Train, edited by Grant. Also little written about was the Yankees’ manager Miller Huggins. Much of the information here was drawn from a New Yorker profile in the October 2, 1927, issue. Charles Lindbergh’s homecoming is well covered in “Lindbergh’s Return to Minnesota,” Minnesota History, Winter 1970.
Chapter 26
America’s peculiar affection for negative eugenics is particularly well treated in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black and Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics 1870–1940 by Anne Maxwell. Also of interest, though focused on the following decade, is Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell. The history of the Ku Klux Klan is covered in The Fiery Cross by Wyn Craig Wade; additional details were taken from “Hooded Populism,” Reviews in American History, December 1994. Not in My Neighborhood by Antero Pietila is very good on restrictive covenants. Other aspects of race hatred in America are dealt with in Hollywood and Anti-Semitism by Steven Alan Carr, and Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone. The unhappy outcome of eugenics in Germany is surveyed in Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials by Paul Julian Weindling. The case of Buck v. Bell is the subject of an excellent chapter in The Flamingo’s Smile by Stephen Jay Gould.
Chapter 27
Two outstanding books on the invention of television are The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit and the Birth of Television by Evan I. Schwartz and Tube: The Invention of Television by David E. and Marshall Jon Fisher. The sad end of Philo T. Farnsworth is well treated in “A Critic at Large,” The New Yorker, May 27, 2002. John Logie Baird receives a sympathetic hearing in John Logie Baird: A Life by Antony Kamm and Malcolm Baird. Other details, particularly with respect to public demonstrations of television in the summer of 1927, come mostly from the New York Times.
Chapter 28
Two books by Allen Churchill, The Literary Decade and The Theatrical 20’s, provide an excellent introduction to the worlds of books and theater in the 1920s. Also offering good details and much insight on life in New York in the period is About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made by Ben Yagoda. Show Boat is especially well treated in Jerome Kern: His Life and Music by Gerald M. Bordman and Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim by Geoffrey Block. The life stories of America’s two most popular authors of the period are recounted in Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan by John Taliaferro, and Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women by Thomas H. Pauly. Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright by Tom Dardis is illuminating both on the publisher himself and on the literary firmament through which he moved.
Chapter 29
After decades of neglect, Kenesaw Mountain Landis finally received the recognition of a biography with David Pietrusza’s excellent Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1998. Some additional technical details come from A Court That Shaped America: Chicago’s Federal District Court from Abe Lincoln to Abbie Hoffman by Richard Cahan. Chicago’s greatest criminal is treated in Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone by John Kobler; Capone: The Man and the Era by Laurence Bergreen; and Get Capone by Jonathan Eig. The life of Robert R. McCormick is the subject of The Colonel by Richard Norton Smith and features prominently in The Magnificent Medills by Megan McKinney. The boorish mayor Bill Thompson is anatomized at length in “The Private Wars of Chicago’s Big Bill Thompson” in the Journal of Library History, Summer 1980. More general histories are Kenneth Allsop’s The Bootleggers, John Landesco’s Organized Crime in Chicago, and Dominic A. Pacyga’s Chicago: A Biography.
Chapter 30
Descriptions of the last month of the 1927 baseball season are taken principally from the New York Times and from the baseball books already cited. Of additional importance to this chapter was Henry W. Thomas’s splendid and moving biography, Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train.
Epilogue
A full survey
of life in Nazi Germany, including the shocking events of Kristallnacht, can be found in Hitlerland by Andrew Nagorski. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s comments appear in The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1936–1939. The news of Charles Lindbergh’s serial infidelities from 1957 to sometime shortly before his death were widely reported in 2003 after one of his German children took a DNA test that proved Lindbergh’s paternity.
Bibliography
Aberdare, Lord. The Story of Tennis. London: Stanley Paul, 1959.
Adair, Robert K. The Physics of Baseball. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.
Ahamed, Liaquat. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. London: William Heinemann, 2009.
Allaz, Camille. The History of Air Cargo and Air Mail from the Eighteenth Century. London: Christopher Foyle Publishing, 2004.