Bill Bryson and the remarkable summer of almost a century ago
I spent some lovely time this month with Bill Bryson’s wonderful One Summer: America, 1927. Bryson finished the book 13 years ago, and I read it just a year before the centennial of the period he so richly describes.
Bryson had a different thought in mind when he set out on the project: to write a dual biography of Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth, who both made history in 1927. Lindbergh, who came out of nowhere in the race to fly from New York to Paris with what people assumed was a suicide mission, hated celebrity and fame. Ruth, who hit 60 home runs that summer, loved the attention.
But as Bryson dug into the book, he realized there was something else worth writing about: that single summer was filled with other narratives, events and characters. It was an era of enormous social change.
One Summer weaves together multiple threads: the massive flooding in Louisana, which remain the most damaging natural disaster in U.S. history; the making of The Jazz Singer and the advent of sound in movies (which prompted an exodus of talent from New York’s theatre world); the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti; the start of Mount Rushmore; and on and on.
There’s a murder case that inspired both Double Indemnity and the Postman Always Rings Twice; Henry Ford and his transition to the Model A car; the vagaries of politics, including the surprise decision of President Calvin Coolidge to not seek a second term; the love affair with radio; the evil of the eugenics movement. It was all going on, all at once.
Bryson captures the fizziness of the era, especially in terms of the U.S.’s sense of itself. In an interview with Diane Rehm in 2013, Bryson said the U.S. was in a state of euphoria, with the Lindbergh flight becoming an overnight symbol.
“It wasn’t anything like the dominant player in the world that we know now,” Bryson told Rehm. “As Americans, we didn’t have the confidence that we’ve got now. It was — Americans didn’t expect to come first at anything, which is part of the reason why Lindbergh was so exciting.”
There was also an obliviousness; almost no one at the time saw that the overhyped stock market and freewheeling tycoonery of the era were all steps to the crash and Great Depression that were just around the corner.
I found that Bryson’s focus on one season in one year becomes a bit of a fulcrum: he spins back and forward in time, describing the backstory of each character and event, and of course what happened thereafter.
With Lindbergh, the innocent aviator became a dark figure in American politics, cozying up to Nazi values just on the doorstep of the Second World War. Ford’s vicious antisemitism made him a hero to Hitler. The eugenics movement made white nationalism attractive to intellectuals.
Apart from being an excellent storyteller, Bryson is also a careful researcher. His chapters on aviation include attention to John Alcock and Arthur Brown, the British aviators who flew from St. John’s to Ireland in 1919, becoming the first to fly the Atlantic. That story is of course well known here, but has been obscured. One of Bryson’s points is that even in England, the story is neglected; he was the first in years, he notes, to borrow a library book on them in London.
Bryson is one of my favourite authors: his books always enlighten and amuse. I’m still hoping that his pandemic-inspired retirement will not take.