Chapter 14
In This Chapter
● Pushing for the League of Nations
● Terrorizing minorities and turning immigrants away
● Electing Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover
● Making the rich richer and the poor poorer
● Creating a thriving popular culture
● Experimenting with Prohibition
● Looking to the stars and heroes of the 1920s
With World War I over, America turned its attention back toward itself — and it was kind of uneasy about what it saw. Things seemed to be happening at too fast a pace. Young people were challenging old ways, an attempt to make the country more moral with a prohibition on liquor had the opposite effect, and the economy was making some Americans rich (and causing a lot more to spend like they were).
In this chapter, the heroes and villains of the 1920s are visited, along with the rise of the mass media and their impact on the country. It was only a decade-long trip, but it was a helluva ride.
Wilson Goes Out of His League for Peace
Nearly a year before World War I was over, Pres. Woodrow Wilson had already come up with a plan of “14 Points,” in which he outlined his version of a peace treaty. Leaders of America’s allies viewed it as both simplistic and overly optimistic. The French prime minister even sneered that because mankind couldn’t keep God’s Ten Commandments, it was unlikely that folks could keep Wilson’s 14 Points.
But so eager was Wilson to play a major role in the making of peace that he did something no other American president had ever done: He left the country while in office. In December 1918, a month after the fighting ended, Wilson went to Paris to meet with the leaders of France, England, and Italy. The “Big Four” (which soon became the Big Three after the minister from Italy left in a snit) soon drafted a peace treaty that included almost nothing that Wilson wanted.
Instead, the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to accept the blame for the war, pay $15 billion to the winning countries, give up most of its colonies, and limit the future size of its military forces. But it did include something Wilson really wanted: The formation of a League of Nations, whose members would promise to respect each others’ rights and settle their differences through the League.
Wilson brought the treaty and the idea of the League back to America and presented them to the U.S. Senate for its constitutionally required approval. But the Democratic president was facing a Senate dominated by Republicans and led by Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Lodge, California Sen. Hiram Johnson, and some other “isolationist” senators were adamantly against the idea of “foreign entanglements” like the League. Lodge used his position to both stall consideration of the treaty and offer amendments to it that would have watered it down somewhat. If Wilson had agreed to go along with a few changes, he may have gained the two-thirds approval he needed. But Wilson stubbornly refused to negotiate. Each side dug in and launched thunderous attacks on the other. Wilson made more than 40 speeches in three weeks on an 8,000-mile journey around the country.
In the end, Wilson’s valiant effort proved politically futile and personally tragic. In early October, he had a stroke. The next month, the Senate resoundingly rejected the League and the peace treaty. The Senate rejected it again in March 1920 when Democratic senators brought it back for reconsideration. America would go it alone for another generation, or until the next world war.
Peace plan now, or war later
"I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it."
— Woodrow Wilson, during his tour to drum up support for the League of Nations, September 1917.
Restricting Immigration and Challenging the Natives
One of the reasons many Americans opposed joining a league of nations was because they connected foreigners with domestic economic problems, even when there was little or no real connection. A 1919 economic miniboom created high inflation, which meant higher prices, which meant labor strife as millions of workers struck for higher wages. In 1919 alone, more than 3,500 strikes involving more than 4 million workers took place. Then the economy dropped sharply, unemployment soared, and Americans looked for someone to blame.
They found plenty of targets. One group was the communists. The Russian Revolution scared many Americans by demonstrating how an uprising by a small group of radicals could overthrow the government of a mighty nation. Actually, there were relatively few communists in America, and they wielded relatively little clout. But nearly every labor strike was denounced as communist-inspired. A series of bombs mailed to leading American capitalists like J.P. Morgan and John Rockefeller also alarmed the country, even though none of the explosives reached their targets. It all added to what became known as the “Red Scare.”
The chief Red-hunter was U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who had hopes of becoming president. In August 1919, Palmer created the General Intelligence Division within the Justice Department and put an ardent young anti-communist named J. Edgar Hoover in charge of it. On January 2, 1920, Palmer’s agents arrested about 6,000 people — many of whom were U.S. citizens — in 33 cities. Some were held for weeks without bail. Many were beaten and some were forced to sign confessions. But only 556 were eventually deported. When a gigantic communist uprising predicted by Palmer failed to materialize, the Red Scare, and his presidential hopes, deflated.
Closing the gate
The bad taste left by World War I also showed itself in anti-immigration feelings. Immigration increased from 110,000 in 1919 to 430,000 in 1920 and 805,000 in 1921, so a fear that war-torn Europe would flood America led to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. The act limited immigration from any one country to 3 percent of the number from that country already in the United States.
And we look stupid, too
"We are a movement of plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership . . . . It lays us open to the charge of being 'hicks' and 'rubes' and 'drivers of second-hand Fords.' We admit it."
— Hiram Evans, "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, 1926.
Later, in 1924, the quotas were cut to 2 percent, and all Japanese immigration was banned, an action that deeply humiliated and angered Japan. In 1929, Congress limited total immigration to no more than 150,000 per year. The fire under America’s “melting pot” had cooled off considerably.
Return of the Klan
Xenophobia — the fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners — also showed itself in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s. The Klan had all but died out by 1880, but it was revived in 1915 in Georgia and spread around the country. By 1924, it probably had 4.5 million members, many of them in the Midwest. Approximately 40,000 Klansmen marched in Washington, D.C., in August 1925. Both major political parties felt the organization’s influence in local, state, and even national elections.
The new Klan targeted not only African Americans, but also Latinos, Jews, Roman Catholics, socialists, and anyone else who didn’t embrace the Klan’s views of what was moral and patriotic.
In 1925, an Indiana Klan leader was convicted of abducting and assaulting a young girl, who subsequently killed herself. The widely publicized scandal, coupled with exposes about how some Klan leaders had siphoned off funds from the group, led to a demise in its popularity. The klowns of the KKK never again approached their earlier influence.
Darwin versus God
The Klan’s greatest influence developed in smaller cities and in rural areas. The repressive attitudes it catered to were also quick to embrace fundamentalism, or the idea that everything in the Bible was literally true. In 1925, fundamentalists pushed through the Tennessee Legislature a law prohibiting the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools.
Aimee Semple McPherson
Aimee Semple McPherson preached glory-and-salvation instead of fire-and-brimstone, thought heaven would look like a cross between Washington, D.C., and Pasadena, California, and was adored by millions as "Sister."
McPherson was born in 1890 in Canada. With her first husband, she became a missionary and toured the world, but when her husband died in China, she returned to America and married an accountant. That marriage fell apart, however, when McPherson refused to give up her evangelical career.
In 1921, she showed up in Los Angeles and started the Foursquare Gospel Mission. She opened the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles's Echo Park in 1923 and used brass bands, massive choirs, and fancy sets to draw nightly crowds in the thousands. She became a national figure, and people came from all over the country to hear her preach and to be "healed" by her touch.
While swimming at a local beach in 1926, McPherson disappeared. Thirty-seven days later, she reappeared with a story about being kidnapped and held in the Arizona desert before escaping. The story was a sensation, at first for its own sake and then when skeptical reporters suggested she had really been on a month-long tryst with a married man.
McPherson's popularity waned in the 1930s, but she continued to preach until 1944, when she died at the age of 53 from a possible accidental overdose of sleeping pills. The church she founded still uses Angelus Temple as its headquarters and claims a worldwide membership of more than 2 million.
When a young high school teacher named John Scopes decided to challenge the law, America had the show trial of the decade (and the basis for the play Inherit the Wind). Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, a great trial lawyer and a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union. William Jennings Bryan, the aging thrice-defeated Democratic presidential candidate and famous orator, joined the prosecution.
Bryan repeatedly ridiculed the idea that man could be descended from apes. But he made a big mistake when he took the stand himself to defend the Bible. Under shrewd questioning by Darrow, Bryan admitted that parts of the Bible couldn’t logically be interpreted literally. Scopes was found guilty anyway and fined $100, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. The trial took the wind out of the fundamentalist sails for awhile, but debate on the issue has never fully left the American scene.
Warren, Cal, and Herbert: Republicans in the White House
Three Republicans succeeded Wilson as president in the 1920s — Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover — and all three were firmly in favor of the status quo, or at least what the status quo was before the war.
Harding was a handsome, affable newspaper publisher and politician from Ohio. His record as a state legislator and U.S. senator was almost entirely without distinction, but he was a popular guy anyway — especially with newly enfranchised women voters — and was easily elected in 1920.
Harding’s administration was ripe with scandal, much of it involving buddies he appointed to various offices. The worst was called “Teapot Dome,” and involved the secret leasing of public oil reserves to private companies by Harding’s Secretary of Interior Albert B. Fall, in return for $400,000 in interest-free “loans.”
Harding himself was never implicated in any of the scandals, but he suffered nevertheless. “I have no trouble with my enemies,” he told a reporter, “but my damned friends . . . they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights.”
Harding died of a heart attack while visiting San Francisco in August 1923 and was succeeded by Coolidge, his vice president. “Silent Cal,” as he was called, was actually a fairly witty guy from Vermont who liked to have his picture taken wearing silly headgear. After finishing out Harding’s term, Coolidge was easily elected to his own term in 1924. His winning platform was that government should do what it could to promote private enterprise and then get out of the way.
“The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” Coolidge pronounced. “The man who works there worships there.” Coolidge fit the times perfectly. His philosophy was that not doing anything was the best course nine times out of ten. Most of the voting public didn’t want or need anything from the federal government other than a military in time of war and someone to deliver the mail. Even though he wasn’t exactly overworked in the job, Coolidge decided he had had enough in 1928 and chose not to run again.
In 1928, the country elected Hoover as president. He was an Iowa farm boy turned civil engineer who had won international kudos for organizing massive food programs for Europe after World War I. Hoover easily defeated New York Gov. Al Smith, extending Republican control of the White House. Like Harding and Coolidge, Hoover was a firm believer that America was on the right track economically.
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica, lived in New York and England, and wanted to go to Africa and take all of black America with him. The youngest of 11 children, Garvey moved to New York in 1916, started a newspaper, and organized a back-to-Africa movement he had begun in Jamaica, called the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Garvey believed African Americans would never get a fair chance in America and should therefore go to Africa — a philosophy that, ironically, was enthusiastically supported by the Ku Klux Klan. He was openly contemptuous of whites, opposed interracial marriages, and denounced efforts by some African Americans to "look white" by using skin lighteners and hair straighteners.
Some black leaders thought Garvey — who liked to wear outlandish military-style uniforms in public — was a demagogue, but his appeal to black pride earned his efforts a large following. By the early 1920s, Garvey had more than 2 million followers. He used their financial support to start more than 30 black-owned businesses, including a steamship company that he hoped would help take African Americans to Liberia. But those plans fell apart when Liberia's government, fearful of a possible Garvey-led revolution, refused to deal with him.
In 1925, Garvey was convicted on what quite possibly were trumped up federal mail fraud charges. He served two years of his prison sentence, and then he was deported to Jamaica on orders of President Coolidge. When Garvey died in 1940 in England, he was largely forgotten. But his efforts helped form the roots of black pride and black nationalism that flourished later in the twentieth century.
“We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land,” Hoover said. “We shall with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation.” As it turned out, he was wrong.
Good Times (Or Were They?)
One of the overriding themes sung by Harding and echoed by Coolidge and Hoover was “a return to normalcy,” and nothing was more normal, as far as they were concerned, than the pursuit of financial wealth. So their administrations established policies that were designed to help that pursuit.
Rich, or feeling like it
"You can't lick this prosperity thing. Even the fellow that hasn't got any is all excited over the idea."
— Will Rogers, American humorist, 1928.
Helping the rich
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all reduced the national debt by cutting spending on government programs. They increased tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturing from foreign competition. They also cut taxes for the wealthy, arguing it would help create incentives for the rich to invest more, which would create more jobs, more products, and more wealth for everyone. And the Federal Reserve Board kept interest rates low so that those who weren’t wealthy could borrow money to invest.
These tactics seemed to work. Businesses became more productive by using new techniques that made workers and machinery more efficient. Chemical processes, for example, tripled the amount of gasoline that could be extracted from crude oil. Advances in electricity transmission sped development of larger manufacturing plants. U.S. manufacturing output rose 60 percent in the 1920s. And greater efficiency and productivity naturally translated to more profit for business owners.
Increasing American spending habits
The 1920s saw the rise of two elements that are still both banes and blessings to the American consumer: advertising and installment buying. Advertising was spurred by the development of national media, such as radio and popular magazines, which made it possible to reach audiences from coast to coast. It became a $1.25 billion-a-year industry by 1925.
In addition, the idea of buying on time — paying a little each week or month, plus interest — became more and more popular. Between 1920 and 1929, installment buying increased 500 percent. By 1929, more than 60 percent of American cars, large appliances, and pianos were being purchased on time.
The drive to sell government bonds during World War I made the average American more confident in buying securities like stocks and more willing to invest money rather than save it. The increased availability of capital enabled industries and retailers to expand, which in some cases meant lower prices. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain grew from 515 stores in 1920 to 2,500 in 1929; A&P grew from 4,621 stores to more than 15,000.
Bruce Barton
Bruce Barton, who was born in Tennessee in 1886, successfully sold syrup at the age of 16, invented Betty Crocker, wrote one of the bestselling books of the 1920s, and proclaimed that "advertising is the very essence of democracy," even though he privately had doubts about its worth.
Barton graduated from Amherst College in 1907 and had trouble finding a job. After a mediocre career as a writer and editor, Barton started a New York City advertising firm that eventually became Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, one of the largest such companies in the world. It was a perfect 1920s fit: Barton had a genius for catchy phrases, and America had a big thirst for buying stuff. In addition to creating the ultimate housewife character in Betty Crocker, Barton ran campaigns for U.S. Steel, General Electric, and Lever Brothers, among others.
A deeply religious man, Barton also wrote books designed to renew the public's enthusiasm for religion. In 1925, he published The Man Nobody Knows, which portrayed Jesus Christ as a super salesman and a role model for businessmen. The book sold a stunning 700,000 copies in two years.
Even though he spent most of his life in advertising, Barton privately expressed misgivings as to whether much of it was wasteful and dishonest. Perhaps fittingly for a consummate pitchman, he spent two terms as a congressman from New York City. Barton died in 1967 at the age of 80.
Making it difficult on the poor
Below the veneer of prosperity, there were indications of trouble. More and more wealth was being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and government did far more for the rich than the poor. It was estimated, for example, that federal tax cuts saved the hugely wealthy financier Andrew Mellon (who also happened to be Hoover’s treasury secretary) almost as much money as was saved by all the taxpayers in the entire state of Nebraska.
Supreme Court decisions struck down minimum wage laws for women and children and made it easier for big businesses to swallow up smaller ones and become de facto monopolies. And union membership declined as organized labor was unable to compete with the aura of good times.
Probably worst off were American farmers. They had expanded production during World War I to feed the troops, and when demand and prices faded after the war, they were hit hard. Farm income dropped by 50 percent during the 1920s, and more than 3 million farmers left their farms for towns and cities.
Let's eat
"Bell's Sunday Dinner, 12 noon to 9 p.m.: Radishes, olives, green onions, sliced tomatoes and mayonnaise, vegetable salad, rice and cocoanut fritters with vanilla sauce, roast young turkey with dressing and jelly, chicken fricassee with egg dumplings, fried Belgian hare and country gravy, prime ribs of beef, mashed potatoes, fresh string beans, fresh peach pudding, layer cake, assorted pies, coffee, tea, milk or buttermilk: 75 cents."
— from a newspaper ad for a Sacramento, California, restaurant in 1925.
The affection Republican administrations felt for business didn’t extend to agriculture. Coolidge twice vetoed bills that would have created government-guaranteed minimum prices for some farm goods; an idea called parity. “Farmers have never made money,” he explained. “I don’t believe we can do much about it.”
Ain't We Got Fun?
A lot of people think the “roaring twenties” was a decade in which everyone spent a huge amount of time dancing the “Charleston” and drinking. That, of course, wasn’t true. They also went to the movies, listened to the radio, read, and played games. The decade, in fact, was marked by an explosion of popular culture, pushed by the development of mass media, which was pushed by post-war advances in technology.
Going to the movies
By the mid-1920s, movie-making was one of the top five industries in the country in terms of capital investment. A former farm community in California called Hollywood recently had become the film capital of the world. By 1928, America had 20,000 movie theaters, and movie houses that looked like ornate palaces and seated thousands of patrons were built in every major city.
Millions of Americans flocked each week to see stars like Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino on the silent screen. In 1927, with the release of The Jazz Singer, the screen was no longer silent, and “talkies” made the movies even more popular.
Movies, and their stars, had a huge impact on the culture of the ’20s. They influenced fashion, hairstyles, speech patterns, and sexual mores — and reinforced cultural and racial stereotypes and prejudices.
Clara Bow
One producer said Clara Bow "danced even while she was standing still," and the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald called her "someone to stir every pulse in the nation." She was the movies' first true female sex symbol.
Bow was born in 1905 in Brooklyn to an alcoholic father and a mother so unbalanced she tried to cut Bow's throat when she learned her daughter was going into movies. By the time she was 25, Bow had already starred in almost 50 films and was making as much as $7,500 a week. Moreover, she was the ultimate 1920s flapper: the "It Girl" ("it" referring to sex appeal) who did what she wanted when she wanted with whom she wanted.
Personal scandals and the coming of sound to movies (she had a thick Brooklyn accent) marked the end of Bow's career by 1933. She married a cowboy star named Rex Bell (who later became lieutenant governor of Nevada) and was in and out of mental institutions until her death in 1965. Like many of her successors, it's questionable how much Bow really liked the role of femme fatale. "The more I see of men," she once observed, "the more I like dogs."
Listening to the radio
At the beginning of the 1920s, radio was entirely for amateurs. “Ham” operators listened mostly to messages from ships at sea over homemade sets.
But in 1920, the Westinghouse Company in Pittsburgh established the first commercial radio station, KDKA. Almost overnight, stations sprang up all over the country. By 1924, there were more than 500 stations, and by 1927 the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had organized a 19-station National Broadcast Company (NBC).
Radio brought major sporting events and election returns “live” into American homes. It also encouraged the makers of soap, the sellers of life insurance, and the purveyors of corn flakes to reach out to consumers over the airwaves. U.S. business had its first true national medium for advertising, and Americans accepted that the price of “free” radio was commercials. By 1929, more than 12 million American families had radio sets.
Listening to music and writing literature
Radio, along with the increasing popularity of the phonograph, made popular music even more, well, popular. The hottest sound was called jazz, which stressed improvisation and rhythm as well as melody. This sound had its roots deep in the musical traditions of African Americans. Its stars included Bessie Smith, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, and Louis Armstrong, and it was a key part of what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance,” a confluence of African American genius in the arts that flourished in the 1920s in New York City. Jazz became wildly popular in other parts of the world, as well, and was recognized as the first truly unique form of American music.
Literature, on the other hand, was most heavily influenced by writers who were disillusioned with post-war America or who chose to satirize Americans’ seeming penchant for conformity. These writers included the following: novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925), Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, 1922), and Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, 1929); playwright Eugene O’Neill (Strange Interlude, 1928); and poets e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes.
Playing games
When it wasn’t being entertained, America was seemingly entertaining itself in the 1920s, so much so that one contemporary observer called it “the age of play.” Shorter workdays and weeks and more disposable income (or at least what seemed like more disposable income) gave Americans more time and money to enjoy themselves. Sports like golf and tennis boomed. Public playgrounds for kids became popular. Crossword puzzles and a game called Mah Jong were all the rage. (See the nearby sidebar “Tiled out” for more on this popular game.)
Tiled out
Parlor games have come and gone in American culture, but the Mah Jong craze of the 1920s may have been the only one to require costumes. An ancient Chinese game played with a set of 144 colored tiles, Mah Jong hit the West Coast in 1922 and soon became immensely fashionable across the nation. Many women refused to play, however, unless they were suitably attired in elaborate Oriental robes.
So many Mah Jong sets were being produced at the height of the craze that Chinese manufacturers ran out of the traditional calf shins they made the tiles from. As a result, they were forced to ask Chicago slaughterhouses for cow bones. The fad faded after about five years of wild popularity. One possible reason was ennui created by confusion: By mid-decade, more than 20 different sets of rules for the game had been published.
Drying Out America: Prohibition Begins
Even before the country’s inception, Americans had been a hard-drinking bunch, and the social and private costs they paid for it had been high. But on January 16, 1920, the nation undertook a “noble experiment” to rid itself of the effects of Demon Rum. It was called Prohibition, and it was a spectacular failure.
There is some statistical evidence that Americans drank less after Prohibition began than they did before. But overall, the ban on booze was a bad idea. For one thing, it encouraged otherwise law-abiding citizens to visit speak-easies where alcohol was sold illegally. The number of “speaks” in New York City at the end of the decade, for example, was probably double the number of legal saloons at the beginning.
Gangsters like “Scarface” Al Capone and George “Bugs” Moran made fortunes selling bootleg booze, and they became celebrities doing it, despite the violence that was their normal business tool. Capone’s Chicago mob took in $60 million a year at its peak — and murdered more than 300 people while doing it. But bullets weren’t the gangsters’ only tools. They also bought off or bullied scores of federal, state, and local officials to look the other way, which only added to public disrespect for law and government.
Part of the disrespect for government was well deserved. Even though Congress and a string of presidents paid lip service to the idea of Prohibition to make the anti-liquor lobby happy, many of the politicians were regular customers for the bootleggers. Congress provided only 1,550 federal agents to enforce the ban throughout the entire country, and criminal penalties for bootlegging were relatively light.
Changing Morals
At the time, many observers saw Americans’ unenthusiastic support of Prohibition as an example of the country’s slipping morals. So was the behavior of young people. Perhaps more than any generation before them, the youth of the 1920s embraced their own music, fashion, and speech. The automobile gave them a way to get away from home, at least temporarily, and also a place to be sexually intimate.
Other things contributed to the shifting moral patterns of the times: the sexy images from Hollywood flappers, the growing availability of birth control devices, the use of sex by advertisers to sell everything from cars to toothpaste, and the growing emancipation of women.
There was no question, however, that the inequities between the sexes continued. Women made less than men in the same jobs and were still subject to a double standard that their place was in the home with the kids. But women now had the right to vote, and more and more of them were entering the workplace — from 8.4 million in 1920 to 10.6 million in 1930. The more relaxed state of things allowed women to dress more comfortably. They could smoke and drink and go out with men alone without the certainty of being called “loose.” And perhaps most important, fewer of them cared if they were.
An Age of Heroes
If there was one thing the 1920s had a lot of, it was heroes. The advent of radio and the increasing popularity of national magazines and tabloid newspapers provided an arena for stars to shine. And armies of public relations agents pushed and shoved their clients into the spotlight.
There were movie stars. Clara Bow reportedly got 45,000 fan letters a week (see the “Clara Bow” sidebar for more info on her). When screen heartthrob Rudolph Valentino died of a perforated ulcer in 1926, several women reportedly committed suicide. More than 30,000 mourners filed past his $10,000 casket, which had a glass plate above his face so they could have one last look. There were also vaudeville stars like magician Harry Houdini and humorist Will Rogers.
Every sport had its own gods or goddesses: In swimming, there were Gertrude Ederle and Johnny Weismuller; in football, Red Grange and Knute Rockne; in boxing, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney; in golf, Bobby Jones; and in tennis, Bill Tilden.
And in baseball, there was the moon-faced son of a Baltimore saloonkeeper. His name was George Herman Ruth, but everyone called him “Babe.” For most of the decade, Ruth was perhaps the most photographed man in the world. A fine pitcher, he became the greatest slugger in history and almost single-handedly restored baseball as the national pastime after a fixed World Series in 1919 had threatened to ruin it. Ruth was so popular that when his team, the Yankees, moved into a new stadium in New York, it was dubbed “the house that Ruth built.”
But as big as Babe Ruth was, he may have been second to a tall, thin, and modest airmail pilot from Detroit named Charles A. Lindbergh. On May 20, 1927, Lindbergh lifted off alone from a New York airfield in a $6,000 plane laden with gasoline and sandwiches. When reporters asked him if sandwiches were all he was taking to eat, Lindy replied “If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t, I won’t need any more either.” Lindbergh headed over the Atlantic, and 33 1/2 hours later he landed in Paris. He was named the first man to fly nonstop between the two continents.
The world went nuts. Lindbergh was mobbed everywhere he went. He stayed an American hero the rest of his life, despite his pre-World War II enthusiasm for Hitler’s Germany. And his flight was a giant shot in the arm for aviation.
Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” wasn’t the only thing in the air as the 1920s came to a close. The economy continued to hum along at a frenetic pace, as well. “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” said Yale economics professor Irving Fisher on October 16, 1929. Eight days later, the plateau collapsed. An overinflated stock market crashed, costing investors $15 billion in a week. America was plunged into an economic mess the likes of which it had never seen before.