by Bryson, Bill
The taciturn president Calvin Coolidge appointed Herbert Hoover (left), whom he referred to derisively as Wonder Boy, to manage the relief efforts for the human calamity of the flood—a task he performed ably and with a notable absence of warmth. (photo credit 16)
On May 18 in Bath, Michigan, the maniac Andrew Kehoe, protesting high taxes on his farm, killed his wife and blew up the local elementary school with five hundred pounds of dynamite. In all, forty-four people (including Kehoe) died that day, thirty-seven children and seven adults—still the largest and most cold-blooded slaughter of children in our history. (photo credit 17)
Nan Britton, the mistress of Warren G. Harding, and the child she had by him in 1919, Elizabeth Ann. Her sizzlingly tell-all memoir of their affair, including multiple trysts in the confined space of a White House closet, created a sensation and further depressed the deceased Harding’s already low reputation. (photo credit 18)
Beginning in 1927, Calvin Coolidge fled his none-too-taxing job as president of the United States (four hours a day, tops) for a three-month extended vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Here he is with his wife in his full cowboy regalia, a getup he wore that summer on every possible occasion. (photo credit 19)
Hjalmar Schacht, head of the German Reichsbank; Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Sir Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England; Charles Rist, deputy governor of the Banque de France. At a secret meeting on a Long Island estate in June of 1927, these four lords of finance made a fateful decision to lower interest rates that further inflated the stock market bubble and led indirectly to the disastrous crash of 1929. (photo credit 20)
Wayne B. Wheeler, fanatical head of the Anti-Saloon League and the single most driving force behind the insane social experiment that was Prohibition. In order to prevent industrial alcohol to be used as a beverage, Wheelerites insisted that it be “denatured” and thus rendered poisonous. Those who drank it and died simply got what they deserved. (photo credit 21) (photo credit 22)
Dwight Morrow, a J. P. Morgan banker, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, pioneer in the development of the American aviation industry, and eventual father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh. (photo credit 23)
Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth posing for a photo during an exhibition game in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The two home run rivals on the Yankees were unlikely friends despite vast differences in temperament and habits. For a while in the summer of 1927, it seemed as if Gehrig would emerge the home run champion. (photo credit 24)
The sculptor Gutzon Borglum views a model for his presidential sculptures on Mount Rushmore—a monumental and seemingly harebrained project dedicated in the summer of 1927 and only completed fourteen years later. (photo credit 25)
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish vendor, and Nicola Sacco, shoemaker—two Italian immigrants whose convictions for murder and death sentences made them an international cause célèbre. Their guilt or innocence is still a matter of dispute. (photo credit 26)
The funeral procession through Boston for Sacco and Vanzetti on August 29 following their execution attracted many thousands of viewers—quite a different gathering from the ones greeting Lindbergh. (photo credit 27)
Robert G. Elliott, America’s top executioner and a master of the difficult art of administering death by electrocution. He would execute, among many others, Sacco and Vanzetti in the summer of 1927, and the next year Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray at Sing Sing Prison. (photo credit 28)
Nineteen twenty-seven was a great year for movies. One of the best was William Wellman’s Wings, a thrilling and technically groundbreaking epic about World War I air combat that won the first Academy Award and featured the famed “It Girl” Clara Bow. (photo credit 29)
While it was by no means the first “talking picture,” The Jazz Singer, starring the singer Al Jolson in his first film role, was the production that made sound movies real to a mass audience and ended the silent era—in the process saving Hollywood from financial ruin. (photo credit 30)
Movie theaters that showed those films were constructed on the scale of palaces, as this interior shot of New York’s famed Roxy Theatre demonstrates. Its opening in 1927 was so momentous an occasion that President Coolidge sent a telegram of congratulations to its builder, Samuel Rothafel. (photo credit 31)
Two of the oddest business titans America ever produced were the brothers Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen. Inseparable and reclusive, they made a fortune in railroads and real estate and built Shaker Heights, the first planned suburban community, and Cleveland’s Union Terminal, at the time the tallest building in America. (photo credit 32)
Al Capone, the famed Chicago gangster and one of the most successful men in America. In 1927 his murderous mob flourished in the most politically corrupt city in the country and grossed more than $100 million. (photo credit 33)
Capone’s eventual downfall came at the hands of Mabel Willebrandt, the chief federal Prohibition prosecutor, who developed the novel theory that he could be prosecuted for evading taxes on that $100 million. (photo credit 34)
The 1920s was a decade justly noted for financial chicanery. Dapper Charles Ponzi’s famed “scheme” involved postal reply coupons. By 1927 he resided in Charlestown Prison with his fellow Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti. (photo credit 35)
Albert B. Fall, former secretary of the interior, and Edward Doheny, an oil tycoon, outside the Washington, D.C., courtroom where they stood trial in 1927 for their roles in the Teapot Dome bribery and corruption scandal. (photo credit 36)
Texas Guinan, the premier nightclub hostess of the era, being led into a paddy wagon after a police raid on one of her many speakeasies. Her genial expression here speaks volumes about the trivial and temporary nature of her arrest. (photo credit 37)
The archetypal figure of the era was the flapper-style-conscious women who flouted conventional mores to smoke, drink, consort with the opposite sex, and dance the Charleston just about anywhere. (photo credit 38)
Perhaps the nuttiest pastime in an era of nutty fads was the “sport” of flagpole sitting. Its undisputed champion was “Shipwreck” Kelly, seen here atop the St. Francis Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, where he remained for twelve days in June of 1927. (photo credit 39)
For people who liked music with their illegal booze, Harlem was the place to go. Its premier establishment was the famed Cotton Club, where such black musical geniuses as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Fats Waller performed for a whites-only clientele (photo credit 40).
The memorably named Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge in Chicago who became commissioner of baseball after the famed “Black Sox” Series–fixing scandal of 1919 and who may or may not have “saved baseball.” (photo credit 41)
Nineteen twenty-seven saw the first primitive television broadcasts, but the real “father of television” was the lone and luckless inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who in September of that year perfected the cathode ray tube system that eventually made television a practical reality. (photo credit 42)
Alas, for Farnsworth, his eventual 165 patents could not prevent the radio pioneer David Sarnoff, founder of the Radio Corporation of America, from stealing his ideas and making television a commercially viable product. (photo credit 43)
Automotive titan and anti-Semitic crackpot Henry Ford. His efforts to replace his company’s fabled Model T with a new Model A in 1927 dealt Ford Motor Company a setback from which it never fully recovered. (photo credit 44)
Charles Lindbergh stopped on his cross-country barnstorming tour on August 11 to meet with Henry Ford, who flew with Lindbergh on a short flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, claiming to have “handled the stick.” (photo credit 45)
Henry Ford’s most ambitious, and ultimately foolish, project was Fordlandia, a model American community built in the jungles of Brazil to produce the rubber his cars required reliably and cheaply. The incompetence of his managers and the harsh conditions of the Amazon eventually doomed the venture. (photo credit 46)
Perhaps t
he most sensational sporting event of 1927 was the heavyweight title bout between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney at Chicago’s Soldier Field on September 27 before 150,000 people. Here Dempsey, having knocked down Tunney, finally makes it to a neutral corner during the still-controversial “long count.” (photo credit 47)
Also available from the New York Times bestselling author BILL BRYSON
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
A Short History of Nearly Everything
In a Sunburned Country
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
BDWY
Available wherever books are sold