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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book
A GoodReads Reader's Choice
In One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.
The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days--a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true "talking picture," Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer , was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.
All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa on December 8, 1951. In 1973, he went backpacking in England, where he eventually decided to settle. He wrote for the English newspapers The Times and The Independent, as well as supplementing his income by writing travel articles.
He moved back to the United States in 1995. His first travel book, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, was published in 1989. His other books include I'm a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, Made in America, The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson's African Diary, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Walk About, and Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, the Genius of the Royal Society. A Walk in the Woods was adapted into a movie starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.
Bryson's titles, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, Notes from a Small Island and Neither Here Nor There made the New York Times bestseller list in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"People in 1920s America were unusually drawn to spectacle," states Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) in his prologue-an unusual claim that his latest, a sprawling account of a brief period in a singular year in that decade, seems to want to substantiate. Whether or not the claim is objectively true, Bryson himself is captivated by the events of summer, 1927. And why not? They included Charles Lindbergh's solo flight over the Atlantic, Sacco and Vanzetti's execution, Gutzon Borglum's start on the sculpting of Mt. Rushmore, the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, and Babe Ruth's 60 home runs-all of which Bryson covers in characteristically sparkling prose. These notable happenings are worth relating and recalling, but others have done so, and more authoritatively and fully. Here, there's not much connection between them; a string of coincidents (and there are many of those each day) hardly justify a book. So this isn't history, nor is it really a story with a start, finish, and thematic spine. No analysis, only narrative-it's diverting but slight. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* On May 21, 1927, when Charles Lindbergh set off to be the first man to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane, he profoundly changed the culture and commerce of America and its image abroad. Add to that Babe Ruth's efforts to break the home-run record he set, Henry Ford's retooling of the Model T into the Model A, the execution of accused anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and Al Jolson appearing in the first talkie, and 1927 became the pivot point when the U.S. began to dominate the world in virtually everything military, culture, commerce, and technology. Bryson's inimitable wit and exuberance are on full display in this wide-ranging look at the major events in an exciting summer in America. Bryson makes fascinating interconnections: a quirky Chicago judge and Prohibition defender leaves the bench to become baseball commissioner following the White Sox scandal, likely leaving Chicago open for gangster Al Capone; the thrill-hungry tabloids and a growing cult of celebrity watchers dog Lindbergh's every move and chronicle Ruth's every peccadillo. Among the other events in a frenzied summer: record flooding of the Mississippi River and the ominous beginnings of the Great Depression. Bryson offers delicious detail and breathtaking suspense about events whose outcomes are already known. A glorious look at one summer in America. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Bryson is the author of such best-selling books as A Walk in the Woods (1998) and A Short History of Nearly Everything (2008) and is sure to make a repeat appearance on the best-seller lists with his newest work.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOMETIMES, ONE MAGNIFICENT season can define an era. At least, that's the view in trade publishing of late, where "year" books have become something of a mania: "19 : The Year Our World Changed/ Began/Ended/Learned to Love the Macarena." But it's not hard to argue that the apogee of the wild ride America took in the 1920s came in the summer of 1927. It was the summer - if one allows "summer" to occasionally include parts of both spring and fall - that Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, much of the country was engulfed by a catastrophic flood, Jack Dempsey lost the famous "long count" fight to Gene Tunney, Calvin Coolidge announced he wouldn't run for another term, the world's leading bankers made the policy adjustment that would do so much to bring down Wall Street in 1929, "The Jazz Singer" was released, radio and tabloid culture came into their own, an American audience got its first public demonstration of television, work started on Mount Rushmore, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and Henry Ford stopped making Model T's. And oh, yes, most of the world went mad over a 25-year-old prodigy named Charles Lindbergh, who flew a flimsy plane to Paris from New York. This isn't to mention all the other fascinating characters Bill Bryson brings splendidly to life in "One Summer" - people like Al Capone and Dorothy Parker; Philo T. Farnsworth, the young man who played a critical role in inventing the television; and the New York Times reporter Richards Vidmer, who married a rajah's daughter and was "also perhaps the most memorably dreadful sportswriter ever." The author of more than a dozen previous books, including "A Short History of Nearly Everything," Bryson writes in a style as effervescent as the time itself. Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was "little more than a flying gas tank," and piloting it for his landmark flight "would have been rather like crossing the ocean in a tent." Before 1920, pitchers might apply spit or "at least two dozen other globulous additives" to a baseball, and the habit of drying out ball fields by lighting gasoline fires on them was "hardly conducive to a fine, delicate tilth." No one is immune to Bryson's irreverence. Ty Cobb was "only a degree or two removed from clinical psychopathy." When the wife of the Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick died, "he had her buried with full military honors, a distinction to which she was not remotely entitled (or very probably desirous)." And "there was almost nothing Henry Ford did that didn't have some bad in it somewhere." Warren Harding "fell considerably short of mediocre" and, when it came to women, "truly was a bit of a dog." Coolidge's sense of humor "was that of a slightly backward schoolboy," while Herbert Hoover proved "there was no matter too small to escape his numbing pomposity." Inanimate objects are sent up just as delightfully. We meet a railroad that "wandered confusedly around the upper Midwest, as if looking for a lost item," while in a Chicago movie palace, "the marbled lobby was said to be an almost exact copy of the king's chapel at Versailles except presumably for the smell of popcorn." This makes for a wonderful romp, though the hyperbole of the age frequently runs away with Bryson. Great as Babe Ruth was, he does not still hold the record for shutouts by a left-handed pitcher in a season, and he did not hit three home runs in his last game, or compile 26 outfield assists in 1919 (the correct number is 14). The cartoonist Tad Dorgan did not invent the name "hot dog"; someone in Al Capone's "camp" did not coin the phrase "Vote early and vote often" ; and it was not true that Lindbergh "would no longer be anybody's hero" by "the time America was ready to take to the air properly." The advent of the talking picture in 1927 was not the "last hurrah" for Broadway, and Hoover did not win the presidency in 1928 with "nearly two-thirds of the popular vote." A little more seriously, Bryson makes the wild charge that Hoover "illegally bought chemicals from Germany" during World War I "as part of his business operations," thus engaging in "an act that could have led to his being taken outside, stood against a wall and shot." I'm unaware that Hoover was engaged in any business during the war beyond feeding starving Belgian and French citizens, and working as the United States Food Administrator. A few, histrionic accusations of this sort were flung at him by a disgruntled employee and a couple of political opponents - and thoroughly discredited by a British court of inquiry at the time. Bryson is best at deflating our nostalgia for the era, even as he upholds its importance. The America of the 1920s, with its laissez-faire economics, rugged individualism, and relentless public piety and patriotism, was a Tea Party utopia. I find the period's allure understandable. The country was rich and loaded with miraculous new things: the car, the radio, the refrigerator. Every big city had its proud new skyscraper, and we had just pioneered the mall and the planned suburb. We added more phones every year than Britain had in toto, and Kansas had more automobiles than France. We held half the world's gold and made almost half its goods, and seemed to churn out a similarly abundant supply of heroic young daredevils. We were, at the same time, a curiously dysfunctional nation, one where twothirds of the murders went unsolved, and the average homicide rate was exponentially higher than it is now in much of the country. We were barely able to build a road or a functional airfield, or to efficiently coordinate our extensive rail system. When the Mississippi overflowed in the worst flood in its history - inundating 16.5 million acres, costing over 1,000 fives ("and perhaps several times that," Bryson writes; the human tallies "weren't more scrupulous because, alas, so many of the victims were poor and black") and resulting in up to $1 billion in losses - Coolidge, anointed earlier this year in a biography by Amity Shlaes as the model of a modern right-wing president, refused to provide even an autographed picture to be auctioned off for flood relief. Aid was provided largely by the private sector and charitable organizations, which managed all of $20 per victim in loans. "There may never have been another time in the nation's history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason," Bryson writes, referring to the era as "the Age of Loathing." He has a point. Americans in the 1920s flocked to join the Ku Klux Klan and rushed to embrace the new pseudoscience of eugenics. The Supreme Court backed these extremists, upholding the "right" of states to forcibly sterilize tens of thousands of supposed "imbeciles," who were in fact often just poor, black or unmarried women. There seemed, everywhere, to be an undercurrent of malicious madness that could be glimpsed in the hysteria surrounding celebrities and scandalous murder cases. Having created the modern mobster, we then refused to prosecute him, turning state power instead on dissidents and unions, while enforcing Prohibition by lacing alcohol with poisons. There was even a school massacre in 1927, perpetrated by an anti-tax maniac. Disappointed in the world, we had refused to join the League of Nations and slammed the golden door shut to immigrants. Nonetheless, we reached out despite ourselves, with our ideas and our culture, riding the air and the airwaves. Every time you turned around, it seemed, Americans were starting another magazine, newspaper or bold new publishing house, or developing a musical form. The capper was the moving picture. We produced 80 percent of the world's movies by 1927, and the rise of the "talkies" would popularize, as Bryson notes, not only American speech but "American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world." KEVIN BAKER'S new novel is "The Big Crowd."
Guardian Review
In a humorous "short autobiography" of his drinking life that F Scott Fitzgerald wrote for the New Yorker, he remembered the year 1927 as one of "delicious California 'Burgundy-type' wine The beer I made Cases of dim, cut, unsatisfactory whiskey " In prohibition America, this was the best that one could hope for. Although no one knew it yet, seven years in, prohibition had passed its halfway point, and would be repealed in 1933. It is at this halfway point that Bill Bryson has chosen to pause and survey the landscape of America. The memorable summer of 1927 began with Charles Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic and ended with the release of The Jazz Singer, which ushered in sound cinema, and Babe Ruth's record-setting 60 home runs for the New York Yankees. In between came the notorious Ruth Snyder murder case (inspiring the film Double Indemnity); the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti; the great Mississippi flood, which lasted longer than any other American natural catastrophe; the Dempsey-Tunney fight; Henry Ford beginning to develop the Model A; and the starting of work on Mount Rushmore by the improbably named Gutzon Borglum. These milestones mark Bryson's landscape, but his guided tour takes in myriad detours: back to the origins of prohibition, through the presidency of Warren G Harding, around Lindbergh's fellow flyers from Italy to France to Newfoundland, through Henry Ford's preposterous "Fordlandia" settlement in Brazil, with a great deal about baseball, boxing, aeroplanes, cars, radios, films and televisions along the way. In fact, if Bryson were any less entertaining, this would be a book by a quintessential pub bore; instead, it's a series of loosely interconnected anecdotes rattled off by a gifted raconteur. Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth are the nearest the book has to protagonists, the anchors past which Bryson's torrents of information stream. The flamboyant, lovable Ruth, who had a difficult childhood, bought a bicycle with his first baseball paycheck at the age of 19, and amused himself in hotels by riding the lifts. But Lindbergh was the more significant of the two men, his isolationism and antisemitism now a flashpoint for America's understanding of its own social history. The excitement that Lindbergh's flight generated is difficult to fathom today; as a point of comparison, Bryson tells us that 155 tons of debris were cleaned from Manhattan streets after the armistice parade of 1918, but so much ticker-tape was thrown for Lindbergh in 1927 that they cleared 1,800 tons. The book is filled with eccentric, flamboyant characters and memorable stories: Lindbergh's parents never embraced, instead shaking hands when they said goodnight. A close associate of President Herbert Hoover's said that in 30 years of working with him he never once heard Hoover laugh; his predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, worked an average of four hours a day, and napped more than any other US president. Jacob Ruppert, who owned the New York Yankees, kept a shrine to his mother by furnishing a room with everything she would need were she to come back to life. "This may go some way towards explaining why he never married," Bryson quips. He makes a similar jest about Al Jolson, the immensely popular but personally repellant star of The Jazz Singer: Jolson apparently amused himself by urinating on people, which, Bryson conjectures, might explain why he had four wives. Some might think it raises the question of how Jolson found four women who would marry him. Along the way, Bryson also peers down some darker alleys: it wasn't all jazz, cocktails, flagpole-sitting (one of the decade's more aberrant pastimes), and dancing the charleston. America in the 1920s was a violent and dangerous place for much of its population, including the estimated 60,000 people who were forcibly sterilised thanks to the popularity of eugenicist theories. 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Chicago in 1927 was de facto controlled by Al Capone, and only nominally by its mayor, Big Bill Thompson, who was evidently elected on the promise of saving Chicago from the threat of annexation by Britain's George V: Thompson promised to punch King George "in the snoot" if he were elected, which seems to have done the trick. Amid all the fun, a few errors creep in, some more noteworthy than others. The magazine the Smart Set was founded not in 1924, but in 1900 (in 1922 it published Scott Fitzgerald's great satire of American capitalism, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"). The Ku Klux Klan did not have its heyday in the "antebellum years" (which in American usage refers to the period before the US civil war) but rather in the postbellum reconstruction, as Southerners responded with violence to the perceived loss of their racial prerogatives. Bryson tells us that the Klan's "downfall was sudden", in 1925, and although it's true that the Klan declined from its peak membership and was increasingly marginalised, it clearly remained a force of murderous terror for much of the 20th century. And it is highly arguable to assert that Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs "were certainly the two most popular authors on the planet in the 20th century". Bestsellers are notoriously difficult to track accurately; Margaret Mitchell and JK Rowling, among others, might well give Grey and Burroughs a run for their money. Nor is it very noteworthy that Burroughs and Grey out-earned Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the 1920s; the same can be said of virtually any popular and "literary" authors in any decade. It is certainly not the case, as Bryson asserts, that Fitzgerald wasn't famous in 1927: he had been a celebrity since 1920, and in 1926, the false rumour that he was hospitalised in Paris was newsworthy enough to be reported in the New York Times. Breezily written, conversational and humorous, One Summer also includes sentences such as "Then things went eerily quiet avationwise," which is positively painful prosewise. Such lapses are offset by characteristically vivid turns of phrase, as when Bryson notes that Philo Farnsworth, who invented television only to have the idea stolen from him, became so embittered that "even his hair looked angry". In the end, despite its almost 500 pages, One Summer seems curiously slight; Bryson has little interest in analysis beyond the jocular aside, and his connections are narrative, rather than thematic or critical. The effect is rather like reading a highly amusing encyclopedia: many interesting starts, but few conclusions. Sarah Churchwell's Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby is published by Virago.
Kirkus Review
A popular chronicler of life and lore vividly charts a particularly pivotal season in American history. Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life, 2010, etc.) reanimates the events and principal players across five key months in 1927. He establishes an early-20th-century, trial-and-error chronology of aviation evolution cresting with Charles Lindbergh, a lean man with a dream, natural-born skills and the unparalleled motivation to design an aircraft capable of traversing the Atlantic. Braided into Lindbergh's saga are profiles of cultural icons like ambitious "colossus" Herbert Hoover, famed gangster Al Capone, and baseball players Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, whose domination of America's "National Game" captured the country's attention. Recounted with brio and diligent detailing yet perhaps lacking the author's better-known witty dynamism, Bryson honorably captures the spirit of the era, a golden age of newspapers, skyscrapers, patriotism, Broadway plays and baseball. The author enthusiastically draws on the heroic lives of tight-lipped President Calvin Coolidge and boxing great Jack Dempsey and artfully interweaves into Lindbergh's meteoric rise the pitfalls of Prohibition, the splendor of Henry Ford's Model T (and the horrors of constructing "Fordlandia" in the Amazon rain forest), the demise of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and a noteworthy comparison between popular long-standing authors Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Collectively, what Bryson offers is a creatively written regeneration of historical facts; the revelations, while few, appear in the form of eccentric personal factoids (i.e., Coolidge liked his head rubbed with Vaseline, Grey was excessively libidinous) demarcating that scrutinized summer of dreamers and innovators. While he may be an expatriate residing in England, Bryson's American pride saturates this rewarding book. A distinctively drawn time capsule from a definitive epoch.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Bryson's (At Home) prismatic look at America's coming of age during five pivotal months in 1927, emphasis is placed on the meteoric rise of Charles Lindbergh, who quickly became a victim of his fame after his solo Atlantic crossing. The author also touches upon many other historical events, however. Party boy Babe Ruth and mama's boy Lou Gehrig are presented as avatars for America's love affair with baseball. The Snyder-Grey murder trial is depicted as an early tabloid sensation. Bryson suggests that anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti might not have been as guilty as accused but were not as innocent as they claimed. The Mississippi flood and the handling of it by publicity-mad Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover get pages, along with factoids about Big Bill Tilden, Mount Rushmore, negative eugenics, libidinous Zane Grey, Prohibition and denatured alcohol, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon's machinations with the IRS, talking motion pictures, Jack Dempsey and big boxing, David Sarnoff's ruthless domination of radio, and more. The author's excellent narration adds nuance to this recording. Resources at the end of the print book were not recorded. VERDICT Recommend to lovers of American studies and those who enjoyed David Traxel's 1898 and Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday. ["The book's strength is in showing the overlap of significant events and the interaction of personalities. But the author's approach keeps the reader from gaining a real sense of the landscape; this is more a spatter painting," read the review of the Doubleday hc, LJ 9/1/13.-Ed.]-David -Faucheux, Louisiana Audio Information & Reading Svc., Lafayette (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition 1 Ten days before he became so famous that crowds would form around any building that contained him and waiters would fight over a corncob left on his dinner plate, no one had heard of Charles Lindbergh. The New York Times had mentioned him once, in the context of the coming Atlantic flights. It had misspelled his name. The news that transfixed the nation as spring gave way to summer in 1927 was a gruesome murder in a modest family home on Long Island, coincidentally quite close to Roosevelt Field, where the Atlantic fliers were now gathering. The newspapers, much excited, called it the Sash Weight Murder Case. The story was this: Late on the night of March 20, 1927, as Mr. and Mrs. Albert Snyder slept side by side in twin beds in their house on 222nd Street in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Queens Village, Mrs. Snyder heard noises in the upstairs hallway. Going to investigate, she found a large man--a "giant," she told police--just outside her bedroom door. He was speaking in a foreign accent to another man, whom she could not see. Before Mrs. Snyder could react, the giant seized her and beat her so roughly that she was left unconscious for six hours. Then he and his confederate went to Mr. Snyder's bed, strangled the poor man with picture wire, and stove in his head with a sash weight. It was the sash weight that fired the public's imagination and gave the case its name. The two villains then turned out drawers all over the house and fled with Mrs. Snyder's jewels, but they left a clue to their identity in the form of an Italian-language newspaper on a table downstairs. The New York Times the next day was fascinated but confused. In a big page-one headline it reported: Art Editor Is Slain in Bed; Wife Tied, Home Searched; Motive Mystifies Police The story noted that a Dr. Vincent Juster from St. Mary Immaculate Hospital had examined Mrs. Snyder and couldn't find any bump on her that would explain her six hours of unconsciousness. Indeed, he couldn't find any injuries on her at all. Perhaps, he suggested tentatively, it was the trauma of the event rather than actual injury that accounted for her prolonged collapse. Police detectives by this time, however, were more suspicious than confused. For one thing, the Snyder house showed no sign of forced entry, and in any case it was an oddly modest target for murderous jewel thieves. The detectives found it curious, too, that Albert Snyder had slept through a violent scuffle just outside his door. The Snyders' nine-year-old daughter, Lorraine, in a room across the hall, had also heard nothing. It also seemed strange that burglars would break into a house and evidently pause to read an anarchist newspaper before placing it neatly on a table and proceeding upstairs. Oddest of all, Mrs. Snyder's bed--the one from which she had arisen to investigate the noise in the hallway--was tidily made, as if it had not been slept in. She was unable to account for this, citing her concussion. As the detectives puzzled over these anomalies, one of them idly lifted a corner of mattress on Mrs. Snyder's bed and there revealed the jewels that she had reported stolen. All eyes turned to Ruth. She met the detectives' gazes uncertainly, then broke down and confessed the crime--but blamed it all on a brute named Judd Gray, her secret lover. Ruth Snyder was placed under arrest, a search was begun for Judd Gray, and the newspaper-reading public of America was about to become uncommonly excited. The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether--very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild. Both were immediately successful. Authors were venerated in a way that seems scarcely possible now. When Sinclair Lewis returned home to Minnesota to work on his novel Elmer Gantry (published in the spring of 1927), people came from miles around just to look at him. Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader's Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential. Founded by two former Yale classmates, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, it was very popular but wildly inaccurate. It described Charles Nungesser, for instance, as having "lost an arm, a leg, a chin" during the war, which was not merely incorrect in all particulars but visibly so since Nungesser could be seen every day in newspaper photographs with a full set of limbs and an incontestably bechinned face. Time was noted for its repetitious devotion to certain words--swart, nimble, gimlet-eyed--and to squashed neologisms like cinemaddict and cinemactress. It also had a fondness for odd, distorted phrases, so that "in the nick of time" became, without embarrassment, "in time's nick." Above all, it had a curious Germanic affection for inverting normal word order and packing as many nouns, adjectives, and adverbs as possible into a sentence before bringing in a verb--or as Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind." Despite their up-to-the-minute swagger, Luce and Hadden were deeply conservative. They would not, for instance, employ women for any job above the level of secretary or office assistant. Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day--or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three. More than this, in many cities readers could get their news from a new, revolutionary type of publication that completely changed people's expectations of what daily news should be--the tabloid. Tabloids focused on crime, sports, and celebrity gossip, and in so doing gave all three an importance considerably beyond any they had enjoyed before. A study in 1927 showed that tabloids devoted between a quarter and a third of their space to crime reports, up to ten times more than the serious papers did. It was because of their influence that the quiet but messy murder of a man like Albert Snyder could become national news. The tabloid, both as a format and as a way of distilling news down to its salacious essence, had been around for a quarter of a century in England, but no one had thought to try it in the United States until two young members of the Chicago Tribune publishing family, Robert R. McCormick and his cousin Joseph Patterson, saw London's Daily Mirror while serving in England during World War I and decided to offer something similar at home when peace came. The result was the Illustrated Daily News, launched in New York in June 1919, price 2 cents. The concept was not an immediate hit--circulation at one point was just eleven thousand--but gradually the Daily News built a devoted following and by the mid-1920s it was far and away the best-selling newspaper in the country, with a circulation of one million, more than double that of the New York Times. Such success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the New York Daily Mirror from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months later by the wondrously dreadful Evening Graphic. The Graphic was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden, who had started life rather more prosaically some fifty years earlier as a Missouri farmboy named Bernard MacFadden. Macfadden, as he now styled himself, was a man of strong and exotic beliefs. He didn't like doctors, lawyers, or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to bodybuilding, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and his wife frequently bemused their neighbors in Englewood, New Jersey--among them Dwight Morrow, a figure of some centrality to this story, as will become apparent--by exercising naked on the lawn. Macfadden's commitment to healthfulness was so total that when one of his daughters died of a heart condition he remarked: "It's better she's gone. She'd only have disgraced me." Well into his eighties he could be seen walking around Manhattan carrying a forty-pound bag of sand on his back as a way of keeping fit. He lived to be eighty-seven. As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated his life to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned no idea is too stupid. He built three separate fortunes. The first was as the inventor of a cult science he called Physcultopathy, which featured strict adherence to his principles of vegetarianism and strength through bodybuilding, with forays into nakedness for those who dared. The movement produced a chain of successful health farms and related publications. In 1919, as an outgrowth of the latter, Macfadden came up with an even more inspired invention: the confession magazine. True Story, the flagship of this side of his operations, soon had monthly sales of 2.2 million. All the stories in True Story were candid and juicy, with "a yeasty undercurrent of sexual excitation," in the words of one satisfied observer. It was Macfadden's proud boast that not a word in True Story was fabricated. This claim caused Macfadden a certain amount of financial discomfort when a piece in 1927 called "The Revealing Kiss," set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, turned out, by unfortunate chance, to contain the names of eight respectable citizens of that fair city. They sued, and Macfadden was forced to admit that True Stories' stories were not in fact true at all and never had been. When tabloids became the rage, Macfadden launched the Evening Graphic. Its most distinguishing feature was that it had almost no attachment to truth or even, often, a recognizable reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them. When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, it produced a series of articles by him from beyond the grave. The Graphic became famous for a form of illustration of its own invention called the composograph, in which the faces of newsworthy figures were superimposed on the bodies of models who had been posed on sets to create arresting tableaux. The most celebrated of these visual creations came during annulment proceedings, earlier in 1927, between Edward W. "Daddy" Browning and his young and dazzlingly erratic bride, affectionately known to all as Peaches, when the Graphic ran a photo showing (without any real attempt at plausibility) Peaches standing naked in the witness box. The Graphic sold an extra 250,000 copies that day. The New Yorker called the Graphic a "grotesque fungus," but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By 1927, its circulation was nearing six hundred thousand. For conventional newspapers, these were serious and worrying numbers. Most responded by becoming conspicuously more like tabloids themselves, in spirit if not presentation. Even the New York Times, though still devotedly solemn and gray, found room for plenty of juicy stories throughout the decade and covered them with prose that was often nearly as feverish. So now when a murder like that of Albert Snyder came along, the result across all newspapers was something like a frenzy. It hardly mattered that the perpetrators were spectacularly inept--so much so that the writer Damon Runyon dubbed it the Dumbbell Murder Case--or that they were not particularly attractive or imaginative. It was enough that the case involved lust, infidelity, a heartless woman, and a sash weight. These were the things that sold newspapers. The Snyder-Gray case received more column inches of coverage than any other crime of the era, and was not exceeded for column inches until the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby in 1935. In terms of its effect on popular culture, even the Lindbergh kidnapping couldn't touch it. Trials in 1920s America were often amazingly speedy. Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder were arraigned, indicted by a grand jury, and in the dock barely a month after their arrest. A carnival atmosphere descended on the Queens County Courthouse, a building of classical grandeur in Long Island City. A hundred and thirty newspapers from across the nation and as far afield as Norway sent reporters. Western Union installed the biggest switchboard it had ever built--bigger than any used for a presidential convention or World Series. Outside the courthouse, lunch wagons set up along the curb and souvenir sellers sold stickpins in the shape of sash weights for ten cents each. Throngs of people turned up daily hoping to get seats inside. Those who failed seemed content to stand outside and stare at the building knowing that important matters that they could not see or hear were being decided within. People of wealth and fashion turned up, too, among them the Marquess of Queensberry and the unidentified wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Those fortunate enough to get seats inside were allowed to come forward at the conclusion of proceedings each day and inspect the venerated exhibits in the case--the sash weight, picture wire, and bottle of chloroform that featured in the evil deed. The News and Mirror ran as many as eight articles a day on the trial. If any especially riveting disclosures emerged during the day--that, for instance, Ruth Snyder on the night of the murder had received Judd Gray in a blood-red kimono--special editions were rushed into print, as if war had been declared. For those too eager or overcome to focus on the words, the Mirror provided 160 photographs, diagrams, and other illustrations during the three weeks of the trial, the Daily News nearer 200. For a short while, one of Gray's lawyers was one Edward Reilly, who would later gain notoriety by defending Bruno Richard Hauptmann in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial, but Reilly, who was a hopeless drunk, was fired or resigned at an early stage. Each day for three weeks, jurors, reporters, and audience listened in rapt silence as the tragic arc of Albert Snyder's mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown. She was thirteen years his junior and not notably attracted to him, but when, after their third or fourth date, he offered her a gumball-sized engagement ring her modest defenses crumbled. "I just couldn't give up that ring," she explained helplessly to a friend. Excerpted from One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
