One Summer: America 1927

 

Book type: History

Summary: Bill Bryson’s newest book One Summer: America 1927 is a wandering, yet structured, account of the major events of the summer of 1927 and of their impact on the wider world and on years–indeed, decades–to follow. Perhaps the best way to summarize the book is in Bryson’s own words, though if you know nothing about this period of American history, I suppose a spoiler alert for the following quote is necessary:

So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. 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. Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.

So now that we know what we’re dealing with, let’s see what we can learn from that momentous summer.

 

Lessons:

1. You can change who you are, but you can’t change karma. Many of you may be thinking to yourselves, ‘Well I don’t believe in karma anyway, so this lesson is pointless,’ and I hear you. If you don’t believe in karma or fate, just read this story for the ouch factor. Let’s start off by stating for the record that Charles Lindbergh wasn’t Charles Lindbergh at all. His grandfather was an intense Swedish guy by the name of Ola Månsson who was a member of the Swedish parliament and had a wife and eight kids. That is until he took up with a young mistress, had a child out of wedlock (yep, Charlie’s dad was technically a bastard), was implicated in a loan scandal, and then fled Sweden for–of all places–rural Minnesota. When he got there he changed his name and thought everything was nice and settled. Then fate stepped in: “While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed–one witness claimed he could see the poor man’s beating heart–and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew” (40). Now, that being said, he did manage to get fixed up and live another thirty years. Maybe he had a lesson of his own to learn from the experience.
2. Sometimes you need to be a Hoover. Obviously not a sucking, filthy vacuum cleaner, but like the president, Herbert. (I wonder if anyone ever called him Herbie?) The point being, Hoover was an expert at a couple things: “Two things accounted for Hoover’s glorious reputation: he executed his duties with tireless efficiency and dispatch, and he made sure that no one anywhere was ever unaware of his accomplishments” (55-56). This is easier said than done since wandering around work or school telling everyone how awesome you are rarely serves to convince people of your awesomeness.
   
   Yeah, if you consider wearing that on a t-shirt, prepare to be punched in the face by those you encounter. What you can do, though, is make yourself useful to those around you, and more importantly, ask for favors. For some reason asking people to do you favors can make them like you more. More in fact, than if you had done the favor for them. So be like Hoover and do your duties efficiently and thoroughly, and convince people you’re awesome by asking for help and then thanking them profusely for it.
3. Don’t be a jerk and don’t wear a cowboy outfit if you’re not a cowboy (or a child). According to Bryson, Calvin Coolidge was one of our laziest presidents (195), and also one of the most un-empathetic. After the Mississippi River flooded in 1927, “He declined to visit the flooded areas. He declined to make any federal funds available or to call a special session of Congress. He declined to make a national radio broadcast appealing for private donations. He declined to provide the humorist Will Rogers with a message of hope and goodwill that he could read out as part of a national broadcast. He declined to supply twelve signed photographs to be auctioned off for the relief of flood victims” (61). Imagine what Kanye West could’ve said during a telethon about him. Also, he was a grown man who wore the outfit below as often as he possibly could. On a cooler note, he did have a pet raccoon named Rebecca that traveled with him, his family, and his two collies (174).
   

   In case you don’t have your glasses on–yes, that’s his name embroidered on his cowboy chaps. You know, in case he got them mixed up with the vice president’s pair.

4. No matter how rich and fancy some people are, they still wonder about the same shit we do. (Literally.) When Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic non-stop all by himself in 1927 he was hailed as a hero by the French upon landing. He was mobbed by fans everywhere he went and everyone loved him, but he was pretty awkward and didn’t know how to handle all the attention he got. At one point he traveled over to merry old England and got to meet with none other than the King himself, who was perplexed about some elements of Lindbergh’s journey and was determined to find answers to his questions.
   

   …The king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose. The king, not to be deflected from a full understanding of this aspect of his flight, asked how many times Lindbergh had employed it. Coming from the family he did, Lindbergh may never before in his life have discussed his evacuations with anyone, and now here he was doing it with the king of England (103).

   Maybe Alan Bennett should make another installment to The Uncommon Reader titled The Uncommon Evacuator, featuring His Majesty, King George V. (On a side note, if you’re curious about who else from the British Isles was interested–albeit in a sexual way–about bodily functions, look no further than James Joyce.)

5. Freedom fries weren’t the first time Americans embarrassingly renamed foreign foods. After the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 by German forces, Americans were so pissed that they took it out on German foods (and people, too): “Restaurants stopped serving German food or gave it non-German names: sauerkraut famously became liberty cabbage” (165). I’m sure folks were lining up around the block to get some good old liberty cabbage for their sandwiches, because…’merica.
6. Possibly the worst athlete name in history was a player for the Yankees in the ’20s named Urban Shocker.
   
   

   “Hey, my name is Urban Shocker. Now are you ready for one, babe?”

    

7. Be afraid of the American government. We’ve all heard about how the websites we frequent and our phone calls and emails–not to mention our body scans at airports–are probably being wanked to by some creepy pervert in a government office somewhere, but if you think that’s bad, you don’t know the half of it. You probably know about the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II and all the terrible things that American Indians were put through by the U.S. government, not to mention slavery. But did you know the government poisoned people intentionally during Prohibition? “…Because Prohibition wasn’t working very well…Wheeler and his supporters insisted that the government poison industrial alcohol. Other denaturants such as soap or detergents would have worked just as well at making drinks unpalatable, but hard-core drys weren’t satisfied with that. Wheeler sincerely believed that people who drank poisoned alcohol got what they deserved. It was, in his view, ‘deliberate suicide'” (173). We’re not talking about the government glossing over how bad pesticides on your fruit might be, we’re talking about the government deliberately killing people for wanting a drink. Oh, and this: “At the peak of the [eugenics] movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today” (370). It would be a bad enough breach of freedom if they sterilized people like Charles Manson, but the government sterilized people they thought were just dumb. In fact, IQ tests were created to determine how dumb someone was, not how smart (368).  And in twenty states, this could theoretically still happen. Where’s the MoveOn.org petition for that?

 

A final review/recommendation:

I haven’t met a Bill Bryson book I didn’t like yet. Granted, I haven’t read all of his books at this point (he has a lot), but I have read several, and his writing style is always clean and composed, witty and engaging. If you like reading non-fiction full of random trivia (like the fact that a New York Times reporter once witnessed President Warren G. Harding get up in the middle of a conversation and pee into a White House fireplace [190]), then you will love Bill Bryson and this book. He is an excellent writer and One Summer proves this yet again. If you’re interested in checking him out, but aren’t sure if U.S. history in 1927 is your cup of tea, he has books on the history of the universe and the history of the home as well as several travel memoirs, among other topics. Happy reading!

 

Photo credits:
Book cover: http://img2.imagesbn.com/p/9780385537827_p0_v3_s260x420.JPG
Being Awesome: http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-cause-i-m-awesome-3.png
Cowboy Cal: http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/8/1/5/152815.jpg?v=1
The Shocker: http://www.stevesteinberg.net/photos/personalities_UrbanShocker1.jpg

 

The Johnstown Flood

Book type: History

Summary: Before he wrote 1776  and before he won the Pulitzer Prize for Truman or for John Adams (which HBO famously made into a mini series), David McCullough wrote The Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating Disasters America Has Ever Known. In fact, he wrote The Johnstown Flood before he wrote anything else. This very first book of his, originally published in 1968, tells the story of what happened to a handful of communities in the mountains of Pennsylvania–communities who lived in the shadow of a large lake held back by an earthen dam, a dam which burst just after Memorial Day in 1889. What is surprising to learn about the Johnstown flood, is that it really wasn’t a huge surprise at all. It had broken several times before the final blow amid constant rain in the spring of 1889, and it even became “something of a local joke,” something that everyone kept waiting for and then never happened; until it did (66). Here are some lessons we can all take away from the tragedy that devastated a Pennsylvania valley and that gripped a nation over a century ago.

Lessons:

1. If you’re going to go about changing the natural order of things, you’d better know what you’re doing. The South Fork dam was a manmade construction, and ultimately it failed because the men who owned the property it was on failed to heed warnings and make necessary repairs that could have saved thousands of lives. The water that broke loose from the dam “charged into the valley at a velocity and depth comparable to that of the Niagara River as it reaches Niagara Falls. Or to put it another way, the bursting of the South Fork dam was about like turning Niagara Falls into the valley for thirty-six minutes” (102) and by the time it was over–an extremely brief amount of time at that–over two thousand people would be dead, and the bodies of many would never be recovered. After the flood, many writers “took up the old line that if God had meant for there to be such a thing as dams, He would have built them himself. The point, of course, was not that dams, or any of man’s efforts to alter or improve the world about him, were mistakes in themselves. The point was that if man, for any reason, drastically alters the natural order, setting in motion whole series of chain reactions, then he had better know what he is doing” (262). Frankly, much of the time, man has no conception of what the possible outcomes may be. Countless times throughout history humans have made alterations to an ecosystem just to find that their brilliant idea wasn’t so smart after all. Whether it’s introducing new species to an area or decimating a species to help with something else, too often we make things worse by trying to make things in nature better. Be careful how you play with the Earth, my friends.
2. Don’t assume that you’re safe in the hands of others. The South Fork dam was owned by a group of businessmen from Pittsburgh who liked to visit their manmade lake for fishing and “roughing it” in comfy cottages. These businessmen were almost all millionaires of the steel industry, and the people who lived in the valley all year round made the mistake of thinking that the rich people who owned the dam wouldn’t let it fall into disrepair. After all, why would they want to run the risk of the dam breaking on them too? Unfortunately, these men weren’t engineers and they never consulted experts to weigh in on the safety level of the dam. Because the people in the valley assumed the rich guys knew what they were doing, they didn’t press them about potential safety hazards or necessary repairs, and when the dam finally broke for good, many of them didn’t even know what hit them. Literally. The floodwaters tore down trees, telegraph poles, houses, barns, and anything else along the path down the mountain, such that when the flood was nearly upon residents in the various cities, they couldn’t even see the water. All they saw was the debris. Many people heard the devastation coming but didn’t see it was a flood. (Of course several knew the rains were probably the cause, or may have known that the dam had broken, but all they saw was the wreckage straight at them.)
   

   This stone bridge caught much of the debris (human as well as timber) when the flood made its way down the mountain. The same night as the flood, the wreckage caught fire and several people were trapped inside. Eventually, it would take a large amount of dynamite to break it all loose.

    

3. Don’t jump to conclusions. So often we’re tempted to provide our own theories of how a tragedy has come to pass without having all the facts, and the days after the Johnstown flood definitely illustrated this principle. Some argued that it was the start of the Final Judgment and everyone else should prepare for what was to come, while others blamed the rich guys for not maintaining the dam properly, and still others said that clearly it was God showing his displeasure with the sins of Johnstown, a judgment in line with the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
   

   It was a line of reasoning which many people were quick to accept, for at least it made some sense of the disaster. But it was a line of reasoning which met with much amusement in Johnstown, where, as anyone knew who knew his way about could readily see, Lizzie Thompson’s house [a brothel] and several rival establishments on Green Hill had not only survived the disaster, but were going stronger than ever before. “If punishment was God’s purpose,” said one survivor, “He sure had bad aim” (252-253).

4.  Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good. Several people survived the disaster out of pure luck (or providence, depending on your point of view), when seemingly everyone else around them died. As a train car full of people fled for the hills when the water was almost upon them, the baggage master J.W. Grove, hopped on top of a train engine nearby instead of following everyone else to the hill. “Every other loose engine in East Conemaugh was dumped over, driven into the hillside, or swept off with the flood, except the one he picked” (124). Additionally, all of Johnstown’s three or four blind people survived the flood, while around them, “Ninety-nine whole families had been wiped out. Three hundred ninety-six children aged ten years or less had been killed. Ninety-eight children lost both parents. One hundred and twenty-four women were left widows; 198 men lost their wives” (195). There was no sense in who died and who was spared, most of it was pure dumb luck, like the family of six who survived having their house thrown on its side and impaled by an oak tree. Sometimes you can’t know what you should do in a given situation and have to hope and pray you just make it out. As one of the steel mill owners said in a speech to the community during their first church service after the flood, “‘Think how much worse it could’ve been. Give thanks for the great stone bridge that saved hundreds of lives. Give thanks that it did not come in the night. Trust in God'” (236).

 

The most amazing fact is that the house is still mostly in one piece, unlike almost every other house in the town.

 

A final review/recommendation:

McCullough’s book is a captivating look into a historical tragedy that dominated all the important newspapers of the time for several days (it was the front page story for the New York Times for five straight days) and yet one that most Americans have probably never heard of. It’s a story of death, but also of rebuilding and community, of people losing their families, but also helping to save others, and it offers several insights that are just as true for us now as they were for the residents of the cities in the shadow of the South Fork dam in 1889. For those who are history fans and for those who are not, it’s a heart-wrenching story and it’s worth checking out.

 

Photo credits:

Book cover: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_hY-4lomJSGs/STd5INqgYuI/AAAAAAAAAwo/dxFdjDgggWU/s1600-h/Johnstown%2BFlood.jpg
Stone Bridge: http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/5johnstown/5images/5img3bl.jpg
Treehouse: http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/dam/rg/di/lindariesphotoguide/johnstown%20tree%20in%20house.jpg