Michael: In 1927, the most popular author in America, a man who earned nearly ten times more than F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a dentist from Ohio who kept coded journals of his sexual escapades. That wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened that summer. Kevin: Wait, a dentist-turned-author with secret journals? And he was bigger than Fitzgerald? That sounds like a wild story in itself. Where does that even come from? Michael: That bizarre detail comes from Bill Bryson's incredible book, One Summer: America, 1927. Bryson is a master of making history feel alive, and he argues this single summer was one of the most pivotal in American history, a moment when modernity truly arrived, with all its chaos and brilliance. Kevin: And it's a book that gets rave reviews for being wildly entertaining. I've seen readers praise it for making history sparkle. But some critics also argue it's more a collection of fascinating trivia than a cohesive history. I'm excited to see where we land on that. Michael: Exactly. Bryson’s whole approach is to show how these seemingly disconnected events—from sports to crime to technology—all weave together. And that summer was really defined by the birth of two new American gods: Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth.

Kevin: Okay, Lindbergh and Ruth. They feel like they exist in two completely different universes. One is this clean-cut, almost saintly figure, and the other is... well, Babe Ruth. Michael: They are perfect opposites, which is why they perfectly capture the dual personality of 1920s America. Let's start with Lindbergh. It's hard for us to grasp the scale of his fame. Before his flight, American aviation was a mess. It was a high-risk, unregulated field. Europe had established airlines, but in America, the number of scheduled passenger services was zero. Pilots were dying in preventable accidents all the time. Kevin: So when Lindbergh decides he's going to fly solo across the Atlantic, people must have thought he was completely insane. Michael: Absolutely. His competitors were well-funded teams with multi-engine planes. Richard Byrd had a team of forty people. Lindbergh shows up with this tiny, single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, which he'd helped design himself. It had no front windshield—he had to use a periscope to see forward. He had no radio, no sextant, just a compass and the stars. Newspapermen literally tried to talk him out of it, calling it a suicide mission. Kevin: That's incredible. We see the famous photo of him smiling by the plane, but we don't think about the reality of it—just a guy in a wicker chair, flying over a freezing ocean with sandwiches he couldn't even reach. Michael: And when he lands in Paris after 33 and a half hours, the world just explodes. He becomes the most famous person on the planet overnight. When he returned to the U.S., the celebrations were on a scale never seen before. In New York City, they dropped 1,800 tons of ticker tape on his parade. That's more than they dropped for the Apollo 11 astronauts decades later. He was this symbol of clean, modest, American courage. Kevin: A hero the nation desperately needed, especially with Prohibition being such a disaster and all the scandals of the Harding administration still fresh in people's minds. But at the exact same time, you have this completely opposite figure in Babe Ruth. How did he fit into this picture of American heroism? Michael: If Lindbergh was the hero America aspired to be, Babe Ruth was the hero America secretly wished it could be. He was the complete opposite of Lindbergh's quiet stoicism. Ruth had this incredibly rough childhood. He said himself, "I was a bad kid." He grew up in a saloon in Baltimore, was sent to a reform school, and was basically a force of nature unleashed on the world. Kevin: And his appetites were legendary, right? For food, for women, for life in general. Michael: Absolutely. There are stories of him eating eighteen hot dogs in one sitting. A teammate said that when Ruth was let out of St. Mary's school, it was "like turning a wild animal out of a cage." Yet, in that summer of 1927, he was chasing the most iconic record in American sports: his own home run record. Kevin: The famous 60 home run season. Michael: The very one. And he did it with such theatrical flair. As the season was ending, he hit his 60th home run on the second-to-last day. He trotted around the bases, and as he crossed home plate, he supposedly looked at his teammates and roared, "Let's see some son of a bitch try and top that one!" Kevin: You can't imagine Lindbergh ever saying that! It’s fascinating. So one was the 'Lone Eagle,' the symbol of solitary, disciplined achievement, and the other was the 'Sultan of Swat,' the embodiment of raw, untamed, joyful excess. Michael: Exactly. And America in 1927 embraced both. They needed both. They needed the reassurance of Lindbergh's virtue and the vicarious thrill of Ruth's indulgence. It was a nation full of contradictions.

Kevin: But while these two heroes were dominating the front pages, the real obsession for many Americans was something much darker, right? Something involving a sash weight? Michael: Oh, yes. While Lindbergh was preparing his flight, the story that truly gripped the nation was the "Sash Weight Murder," or as the writer Damon Runyon called it, the "Dumbbell Murder Case." And it is a story of almost comical ineptitude. Kevin: Dumbbell murder? That doesn't sound very sophisticated. Michael: It wasn't. It involved a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her lover, a corset salesman named Judd Gray. Ruth was unhappy in her marriage and tricked her husband, Albert, into signing a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause. Then she tried to kill him. Repeatedly. Kevin: How do you mean, repeatedly? Michael: First, she tried poisoning his whiskey. It didn't work. She tried putting sleeping pills in his prune whip. He just got sleepy. She even tried gassing him in his sleep. Nothing. Finally, she gets her lover, Judd, to come help. Their master plan? To bash Albert's head in with a sash weight—one of those heavy iron weights from old windows. Kevin: This sounds like a terrible movie plot. How did they possibly get caught? Michael: Their incompetence was their downfall. After they finally managed to kill Albert—it took both of them, a sash weight, chloroform, and picture wire—they staged the scene to look like a burglary. They tied Ruth up, but not very well. They scattered things around but didn't take anything of real value. And for the finishing touch, they left an Italian-language newspaper at the scene to suggest it was, and I quote, "alien subversives." Kevin: You cannot be serious. The police must have seen through that in about five seconds. Michael: About that, yes. The detectives noticed her bed was perfectly made, which was odd for someone who claimed to have been knocked unconscious for six hours. They found the "stolen" jewels hidden under her mattress. Judd Gray's alibi fell apart because a taxi driver remembered his paltry tip. They both confessed immediately, each blaming the other. Kevin: And the media just ate this up? Michael: They devoured it. This was the golden age of the tabloid. Newspapers like the New York Daily News and the truly wild Evening Graphic devoted up to a third of their space to crime. The Snyder-Gray case had it all: lust, betrayal, a "heartless" woman. The Evening Graphic even created something called a "composograph." Kevin: Hold on, a 'composograph'? What on earth is that? You have to explain this tabloid trick. Michael: It was basically 1920s photoshop. They would stage scenes with actors, take photos, and then superimpose the real faces of the people in the story onto the actors' bodies. They created a fake, sensational image of Ruth Snyder on the witness stand. It was completely fabricated, and it sold an extra quarter-million papers. Kevin: That's wild. So this one lurid, badly-executed murder case, this 'Dumbbell Murder,' got more press than Lindbergh at times? Michael: It did. It received more column inches of coverage than any other crime of the era. It tells you so much about the 1920s. On one hand, you have this soaring optimism and heroism with Lindbergh. On the other, you have this deep, insatiable public appetite for scandal, sex, and crime, fed by a new, ruthless form of media. It was a nation looking to the heavens and the gutter at the same time.

Michael: And this is what's so brilliant about Bryson's book. While all this public drama is unfolding—the heroes and the villains—there are these quiet, almost invisible events happening that will shape the future even more profoundly. Kevin: Events that weren't on the front page next to Lindbergh or Ruth Snyder. Michael: Exactly. Let's talk about another American giant of the time: Henry Ford. In 1927, Ford was arguably the most famous industrialist in the world. He had put America on wheels with the Model T. But he was a walking paradox. Kevin: How so? He's seen as this great innovator. Michael: He was, but he was also, in many ways, a profound ignoramus. He once sued the Chicago Tribune for calling him an "ignorant idealist." During the trial, the newspaper's lawyers cross-examined him. They asked him basic questions about American history. He couldn't identify Benedict Arnold. He thought the American Revolution happened in 1812. He had no idea what a "chili con carne" was. Kevin: That's staggering. The man who built modern manufacturing didn't know who Benedict Arnold was? It's a chilling reminder that genius in one area doesn't preclude terrible ideas or ignorance in another. Michael: And he had some truly terrible ideas. He was a virulent anti-Semite, publishing hateful tracts in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. He even embarked on a disastrous project called Fordlandia, trying to build a utopian American city and rubber plantation in the middle of the Amazon. It was a complete failure, a testament to his hubris. Kevin: So you have this deeply flawed man who, despite his ignorance and prejudice, fundamentally changed the world. Michael: Precisely. The Model T, for all its simplicity, was revolutionary. And his moving assembly line, which he perfected, cut the time to build a car from twelve hours to just ninety minutes. He made the automobile a universal appliance. But Ford's story, as big as it is, wasn't the most impactful invisible event of that summer. Kevin: Okay, now I'm intrigued. What could be more impactful than Henry Ford? Michael: A secret meeting. In the summer of 1927, the four most powerful central bankers in the world—from the U.S., Britain, Germany, and France—met quietly at a mansion on Long Island. They were led by Benjamin Strong, the governor of the New York Federal Reserve. They were trying to solve a global economic problem: America had too much of the world's gold, and Europe's economies were struggling. Kevin: A secret meeting of bankers. That already sounds ominous. Michael: Their solution seemed logical at the time. Strong decided to lower U.S. interest rates. The idea was to make it less attractive for gold to be in America, encouraging it to flow back to Europe and stabilize their economies. Kevin: That makes sense on the surface. But I have a feeling there's a catch. Michael: A massive one. The rate cut had an unintended and catastrophic consequence. It made money cheap in America. It unleashed a torrent of easy credit that flowed directly into the stock market. It fueled a speculative frenzy. One economist later called that decision "the spark that lit the forest fire." Kevin: The fire being the stock market crash of 1929. Michael: Exactly. That quiet, well-intentioned decision made in a Long Island mansion in the summer of 1927 set the stage for the Great Depression. While everyone was watching Babe Ruth hit home runs and Lindbergh fly across the ocean, the real story of the next decade was being written in secret by a handful of men.

Michael: So that's the summer of 1927. It wasn't just one thing. It was this chaotic, brilliant, contradictory explosion of the future. You have the birth of modern celebrity, fueled by mass media. You have the rise of that same media feeding a hunger for sensationalism and crime. And underneath it all, you have the quiet, world-altering decisions being made by flawed geniuses and powerful bankers. Kevin: It's the moment America truly becomes... well, modern America. With all the good and the bad that comes with it. The book really makes you feel the energy of that moment, the sense that anything was possible, for better or for worse. Michael: And it shows how history is so often a mix of the spectacular and the subtle. The events that capture our attention aren't always the ones that have the most lasting impact. Lindbergh's flight accelerated aviation, no doubt. But Strong's interest rate cut reshaped the global economy for a generation. Kevin: It makes you wonder what quiet, seemingly small events are happening right now that will define our world in a few years. What are we all watching on the front page, and what are we missing in the background? Michael: A great question to ponder. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What from 1927 feels the most resonant to you today? The celebrity worship, the media frenzies, the economic anxieties? Let us know on our social channels. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.