51 pages • 1 hour read
One Summer: America, 1927
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BetaPart 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “July: The President”
Chapters 14-15 Summary
Part 3 opens with discussions of President Warren G. Harding and President Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the presidency after Harding’s death in 1923. Harding was popular during his lifetime, but by 1927, Americans hated him. Bryson explains, “Few people have undergone a more rapid and comprehensively negative reappraisal than America’s twenty-ninth president” (189). This shift in public perception was due to the exposure of Harding’s corruption and infidelity. He had partaken in such illicit activities in the White House, and a woman with whom he had an illegitimate daughter—the woman was named Nan Britton—wrote a tell-all book about his scandals.
Partly because Harding had initially been well-liked, Coolidge was not. Though he grew in popularity while he was in power, Bryson explains that his strategy was “doing as little as possible” (192). Indeed, the president does not do much of consequence in this section of the book, which Bryson named for him. He spent most of the summer of 1927 operating the executive office from a vacation spot in South Dakota, where he regularly dressed like a cowboy. The reader sees how idiosyncratic and incompetent the men who held the top political office in the country were in the 1920s.
Chapter 15 shifts the focus from American politics to the American economy. Bryson introduces four international financial figures: Benjamin Strong on the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, Sir Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank in Germany, and Charles Rist of the Banque de France. Bryson introduces them as they conferenced secretly on Long Island. Though it was not their intention, they “were quietly laying the groundwork for the collapse of the stock market and the Great Depression that followed” (201). Bryson provides brief biographies on each man. Strong had tuberculosis and suffered family tragedies. His financial career, by contrast, was a huge success: He became head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank when it was founded in 1913. Norman, a good friend of Strong’s, was eccentric and prone “to extravagant nervous breakdowns” that interfered with his work (204). Schacht became an ardent Nazi when Hitler came to power in Germany, though he was beloved in 1927 for helping his country emerge from its post-WWI economic crisis. Rist was “bald and grave” and “very much the outsider at the meeting” (207).
The quartet was primarily concerned with boosting world trade and coping with the vast economic discrepancy between Western Europe and the United States. Their plan was to cut return rates on investments slightly within the US so American investors would bolster European economies. As Bryson implies by linking this meeting to the Great Depression, the men miscalculated.
Chapters 16-17 Summary
Bryson provides more detail on the 1927 Yankees team. He offers short biographies on several players besides Ruth, the most notable being Lou Gehrig, another all-time great player with whom Ruth was initially very good friends. Gehrig and Ruth engaged in Major League Baseball’s first home run race to determine the League’s best home run hitter at season’s end.
Bryson again returns to Charles Lindbergh, who was conducting a victory tour and writing an autobiography after he disapproved of the ghostwritten version. His own version “was mostly about barnstorming and delivering airmail,” but “people couldn’t get enough of anything Lindbergh did,” and the book was immediately popular (229). Bryson also hints that there is danger to come for Lindbergh due to this unmatched popularity.
Chapter 17 shifts to a new character—one who, like so many others in the book, remains very well known in the century since they lived. Henry Ford built his automotive company and revolutionized American working-class travel with his Model-T after the turn of the 20th century. He was also misinformed and ignorant about history, science, and other topics. Bryson refers to “the shallow waters of Ford’s mind” (231). Chapter 17 offers some biographical information on Ford and discusses the success of the Model-T as an immensely popular and affordable car. Bryson also notes Ford’s tyrant-like control over his employees as they worked on the assembly line, which designated repetitive tasks to workers who had to complete them at the fastest pace possible, without breaks or errors.
By 1927, however, other car companies were outselling Ford, Ford had revealed himself as an antisemite, and he was dabbling in other business ventures like industrial uses for soybeans. Ford apologized for the antisemitism he had voiced in a magazine he ran (The Independent), but Bryson does not regard this as a genuine apology.
Chapters 18-19 Summary
The scope of the book’s geography and analysis extends significantly in these chapters. Chapter 18 details Henry Ford’s disastrous attempt to recreate an American suburb and lucrative rubber tree farm in Brazil (rubber was in high demand in the automobile industry). The venture failed for numerous reasons. Dangerous parasites and animals hurt the workers, who were underpaid and always uncomfortable. Clearing the jungle for new planting was arduous, and a collection of rubber trees like the one Ford envisioned could not grow in the exposure to sun that isolating the plants created. The operation frequently changed management, but no one was able to make it productive or lucrative.
Ford had also ceased production of the Model-T in Detroit before designing a replacement model. He hated experts and purposefully did not take their advice on virtually any subject. By 1927, Ford’s enterprises were doomed to fail because of his obstinance and ignorance.
Chapter 19 discusses other business ventures. Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees, had planned an extravagant Ruppert Beach in Florida, but a hurricane in 1926 destroyed the site. He then turned to boxing, hoping to promote the increasingly popular sport by staging matches in Yankee Stadium. (Yankee Stadium could support unprecedently large crowds for matches.) He did so by booking Jack Dempsey, a talented boxer who had taken a hiatus from the sport for several years before returning in the autumn of 1926. Ruppert’s success with the Yankees and professional boxing illustrates the big business of American sports, which emerged at the time in which the book takes place.
Part 3 Analysis
This section of the book is named for a president that is perhaps most notable for his aloofness, silence, and prolonged absence from Washington, DC, in the summer of 1927. In fact, he appears only infrequently in the running narrative of the section, and his absence in the book mirrors his absence in government. His big undertaking in July was his relocation to South Dakota. Originally from Vermont, Coolidge maintained his pull toward rural life, even though so many of the important events Bryson chronicles depended on urban conditions and large crowds. By highlighting his affection for an agrarian life, Bryson demonstrates further how disconnected Coolidge was from his position and his people.
In addition to Coolidge’s, the stories of two other presidents are important in Bryson’s narrative: Harding’s and Hoover’s. Hoover only appears on the periphery of the section, though Bryson depicts Harding’s downfall in the American public imagination. Harding preceded Coolidge, and Hoover would follow him in office. By highlighting Coolidge, a rather innocuous figure who stands in contrast to the presidents who preceded and followed him, Bryson again indicates that this period of time was relatively peaceful and anodyne compared to the periods that came before and after it. Government in the 1920s operated very differently from government in the post-Depression era; it did not have as much overarching power as it would later attain.
A big shaper of politics in 1927 was the economy. The American economy grew as Europe’s struggled in the wake of World War I. Bryson explains how the US economy operated. Buying products in installments became popular during that decade. Consumers adapted to purchasing more goods, and investors enjoyed high returns on their investments. Bryson says that in the 1920s, “America [became] the consumer paradise it has remained ever since” (210), though he does not go into detail about how systems of credit, debt, and stock speculation hurt consumers in this apparent paradise. Bryson does, however, flag the approaching economic Depression.
These chapters demonstrate how both American politics and the American economy differed so severely in the 1920s from these entities at the time of the book’s publication in the 21st century. Coolidge was hands-off and credited with the successful economy, and that economy was the strongest in the world. During the Great Depression, Americans would come to hate their president (Herbert Hoover) and suffer severe economic collapse.
The presidents as well as historical figures like the bankers and Henry Ford complicate the role of public figures and the concept of celebrity so far presented in the book. With the continued updates on Charles Lindbergh and the public’s ever-increasing love and adoration for him, the reader is reminded that Americans took eager interest in people—usually men—who achieved new feats. The leaders of companies and the country could be either heroes or villains, even though they sometimes did very little governing.
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