Bill Bryson\u2019s \u201cOne Summer: America, 1927\u201d is a once-over-lightly look at several watershed events of 1927, when one achievement after another convinced Americans that the future was bright.<\/p>\n
\u2018One Summer: America, 1927\u2019
Bill Bryson
Doubleday, 527 pp., $28.95
\nAmerica had one heck of a summer in 1927. Charles Lindbergh became the first person to cross the Atlantic by plane. Babe Ruth shattered baseball records.
Al Capone was at the height of his power. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney in one of the most celebrated and controversial boxing matches of all time. Television was created. Radio came of age. And the entire country celebrated the remarkable stock market, blissfully unaware of the coming economic apocalypse.
In \u201cOne Summer: America, 1927,\u201d Bill Bryson, author of numerous popular works of nonfiction (\u201cAt Home,\u201d \u201cA Walk in the Woods\u201d), surveys America at a turning point. Although the Wright Brothers might have launched the first flight, it was the European countries who first commercialized aviation.
When the Orteig Prize was announced for the first nonstop transatlantic flight, it was anything but clear that an American pilot would win the prize. Yet Charles Lindbergh, an unknown kid from Minnesota, did precisely that, piloting an astonishingly flimsy \u201cairplane,\u201d largely covered in fabric, to land at Le Bourget Field, near Paris. He was greeted with a hysterical reception from the more than 100,000 Parisians who met his plane, and fame that far surpassed anything he could have imagined.
Babe Ruth, meanwhile, smashed no fewer than 60 home runs that year, in a duel with his teammate Lou Gehrig. Gehrig briefly pulled ahead of Ruth during the season but stalled at 47 homers (no small feat in itself) while Ruth set a legendary record that stood unmatched until Roger Maris, another Yankee outfielder, broke it in 1961. The duel, and Ruth\u2019s astonishing power, changed baseball forever.
Off the field, though, Ruth enjoyed his celebrity and all that it brought him \u2014 sleeping with innumerable young women and feasting with few limits. It was an era when private indiscretions remained private.
The Mississippi flooded in 1927, in an enormous human disaster, with federal-disaster relief coordinated by the capable but impossibly pompous Herbert Hoover. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who had been convicted of a double murder during an armed robbery in Boston, finally went to their death in August 1927. The controversial trial outraged civil libertarians and made Americans highly unpopular throughout Europe.
But in America, the seemingly unstoppable stock market fueled everyone\u2019s optimism. Investors borrowed capital to invest in the stock market \u201con the margin,\u201d never imagining that a market crash might require them to repay the losses. At the time, the only unreasonable position was not investing at all.
But, of course, nothing lasts forever. Ruth\u2019s record was eventually eclipsed. Lindbergh\u2019s fame vanished overnight with his pro-Nazi speeches. And the market crashed in 1929, launching the Great Depression. \u201cNearly nine decades have passed since the summer of 1927, and not a great deal survives,\u201d Bryson writes. \u201cSo it is worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened by that summer.\u201d
It\u2019s hard not to be captivated by this compelling portrait of America at a crossroads. But Bryson\u2019s writing is sadly incomplete. There\u2019s a lot that could have been said about the summer of 1927 \u2014 the launching of an aviation industry that would dominate the world to come, the blindness that stock-market mania seems to induce, or the difference between steroid-induced \u201csluggers\u201d and the real thing.
But unfortunately Bryson explores few larger lessons, instead weaving together these vignettes with little more than quick transitions. Bryson\u2019s lightweight history is certainly amusing, but little more.
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