One Summer: America, 1927 (2013) by Bill Bryson

Despite my love of popular history, Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America 1927” likely would have escaped my notice had it not been given to me as a Christmas gift. Moreover, I only decided to read it (I literally have stacks of unread books all over my house) because I was taking a long flight and wanted something breezy to pass the time and keep me away from watching some inane new movie release. Alas, “One Summer” was far more engaging, although not much intellectually deeper, than I had anticipated.

So what made the summer of 1927 so special? In short: “Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash [by lowering interest rates]. 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 open ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.” Phew! And Bryson presents probably another dozen anecdotal side dishes to go along with that heaping plateful of consequential events.

At one point in the book, Bryson notes that the 1920s are known today by many colorful labels: “the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Ballyhoo, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense.” The author suggests a less endearing term, the Age of Loathing, in reference to the period’s bigotry, which was, he says, “casual, reflexive, and well-nigh universal.” This reviewer found that the term might also most accurately capture the author’s view of his main historical protagonists.

In Bryson’s witty, often caustic, yet rarely footnoted telling of each person’s story, Herbert Hoover comes off as a dour, soulless and self-absorbed power player; Calvin Coolidge an amiable sluggard; Charles Lindbergh an odd, distant and one-dimensional jerk; Babe Ruth a licentious, cuckolding, alcoholic anti-hero; Lou Gehrig a milquetoast, mama’s boy; Benjamin Strong a terribly uninformed, misguided and tragic figure; and Henry Ford a soy bean-loving, anti-Semitic crackpot who also happened to make cars, and lots of them. If Jesus Christ had decided to make a dramatic return in the summer of 1927, Bryson likely would have described Him as “some second rate Jewish carpenter who didn’t know how to swim.” The only truly sympathetic characters to emerge from the summer of 1927, according to the grumpy author, may be the executed (and, frankly, likely guilty) anarchist Bart Vanzetti and the surprisingly bookish heavy weight champion Gene Tunney.

What I really loved about the book was learning about the more forgotten characters of the period, such as Wayne Wheeler, the puritanical and political genius behind the Prohibition movement; Philo Farnsworth, the oddball inventor of television; Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s unbalanced first commissioner; Robert Elliott, a virtuoso in the new art of electrical execution; Mabel Willebrandt, the woman responsible for developing the “tax evasion” angle in taking down Al Capone and other mobsters; Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen, “two of the oddest business titans America has ever produced”; Gutzon Berglum, the eccentric visionary that created Mount Rushmore; and the hapless murdering (and eventually executed by aforementioned Robert Elliott) couple, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray.

In closing, I have plenty of reservations about the historical bona fides of “One Summer,” but I must give it a solid four-star rating because it was just so hard to put down.