One Summer: America, 1927. By Bill Bryson. New York: Doubleday, 2013. ISBN: 978-0767919401.
This review originally appeared on the Website nepca.wordpress.com but is reprinted here because the book is of general interest.
Travel, science, humor, language, memoir, history–in the
past thirty years few writers have matched Bill Bryson’s observational skills,
acerbic wit, sense of wonder, or appreciation for irony. For his twenty-second
book, Bryson takes an in-depth look at the summer of 1927 when,
… Babe Ruth hit sixty homeruns.
The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash.
Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age.
Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work
began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A
madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst
slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model
T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an
ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before. (Chapter
30, Location 38 of 39)
That’s extraordinary by any measure, yet it’s shocking how
many scholars have rendered it prosaic under a mountain of turgid prose. Not
Bryson–his account surpasses even Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic Only Yesterday (1931) as an accessible,
lively account of the 1920s. He does so by putting the story back into history. Bryson skillfully weaves a cogent
narrative of events rooted in biography, drama and melodrama–often using the
figures above (and others) as the vehicle for unveiling the period. He’s aware
that historical forces precipitate social change more than individuals, but
what could be more appropriate than putting hyped heroes at the center of a
study of the 1920s? As Warren Susman reminded us in his path breaking Culture as History (1984), the 1920s was
when American culture began to value personality over character. The bigger
that personality the better–the Roaring Twenties has long been configured as
the Age of Ballyhoo.
Bryson appropriately opens a book about excess with the
lionization of Charles Lindbergh. His May solo flight across the Atlantic has
become so legendary that it’s easy to overlook just how dangerous and audacious
it was. He was indeed “Lucky Lindy,” as both sides of the Atlantic were
littered with the bodies of those who sought the $25,000 Orteig Prize and
vanished without a trace. Just 24 years had passed since the Wright brothers,
plane bodies were still made of fabric, no one had yet invented an accurate
fuel gauge, and most pilots–Lindbergh included–were dubbed “experienced” by
virtue of having survived numerous crashes. Lindbergh couldn’t even see where
he was going without leaning over the side of the fuselage. If nothing else,
Bryson’s account is a superb short history of aviation.
As Bryson also shows, though, with the possible exception of
President Calvin Coolidge, one could hardly have picked a less likely hero than
Lindbergh. Bryson refuses to fall prey to hype. He honors Lindbergh’s bravery
and pities the ordeal the agoraphobic Minnesotan was forced to endure, but he
also explores Lindbergh’s misanthropy, authoritarian tendencies, and his
vicious anti-Semitism. These two sides of the coin make up a subtheme of One Summer. The same month Lindbergh
crossed the Atlantic witnessed the trial of Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder for the
garroting death of Snyder’s husband. Likewise, the same summer that saw Babe
Ruth slug 60 home runs and Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney slug each other, also
saw anarchists plant bombs, Al Capone be hailed as a civic model, Ku Klux Klan
members elected to Congress, eugenics classes taught in American universities,
and all manner of bigotry thrive–especially in rural America, the last bastion
of Prohibition believers.
Bryson’s nuanced view of 1927 is one of the book’s many
pleasures. Another is his attention to small details such as Coolidge’s 4 ½
hour naps, the final hours of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the delicious comment
(from John Reed) that baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had the
“face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.” Bryson also excels at summary–his
epilogue manages to extrapolate the future implications of all that happened
during the summer of 1927 into twenty-eight pages: Lindbergh’s fall from grace,
Philo Farnsworth’s redemption, Herbert Hoover’s hubris, the collapse of
prosperity walls built upon hope and sand….
It’s rare to find a book that’s at once historically sound,
witty, and fun to read. One Summer is
now available in paperback and e-text. It’s one of
the better books on American politics and culture that I’ve read in some time.
Robert E. Weir
Smith College
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