51 pages • 1 hour read
Bill BrysonOne Summer: America, 1927
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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Index of Terms
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BetaPart 5-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “September: Summer’s End”
Chapters 26-27 Summary
Bryson expands on the dark side of American culture in the 1920s before returning to discussions of technological innovations and points of interest in society.
Bryson claims that of all the nicknames for the 1920s, an accurate description would be “the Age of Loathing.” He explains, “There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason” (359). He specifically mentions sexism, antisemitism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted Black Americans and many others. According to Bryson, eugenics was not a fringe movement, but one that persuaded many American academics and politicians as well as the mainstream population. “Eugenics,” he explains, “was used to justify enforced deportations, the introduction of restrictive covenants on where people could live, the suspension of civil liberties, and the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of innocent people” (363). The case Buck v. Bell, decided in 1927, expanded the state’s ability to force sterilization. It wouldn’t be until the following decade that public opinion would reverse regarding eugenics.
The following chapter is about early television. As early as the 1920s, several inventors were approaching approximations of modern television. Bryson discusses some of the various technologies with which inventors experimented but also notes, “For all the effort and anticipation, no one knew quite what television would be good for” (373). No one yet imagined the great commercial value of television, although radio experienced a similar developmental process from a new, unknown entity into a hugely popular commercial enterprise because of advertising. Television would not catch up during the 1920s, but people were hard at work to transform it.
Chapters 28-30 Summary
Chapter 28 discusses authors of the 1920s. Many authors writing in that era have become some of the most famous American writers of all time, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bryson notes, however, that neither Hemingway nor Fitzgerald produced a book in 1927, and they were nowhere near the bestselling authors of their time. He lists several other authors, some well-known in the 21st century and some forgotten, who were prolific and widely read in 1927. He says Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs, two very successful writers by 1927, “were by almost any measure pretty terrible writers” (385). Part of the reason so many books were bad was the conservativism and prejudice that characterized American publishers. That was beginning to change in the late 1920s, opening the industry for more interesting work from more diverse authors.
Chapter 29 is about Chicago. Most of the book centers on New York as the main urban locale of interest, but Chicago was “the most resplendently corrupt and lawless [city] in the nation” at the outset of the 1920s (403). The famous gangster Al Capone operated out of Chicago. Bryson provides background on the man, calling him “one of America’s great success stories” (405). His bootlegging operation was a booming business and made fantastic profits. He was also “the world’s favorite gangster” and regarded as a respected public figure (409). Though 1927 was a profitable year for Capone, “time was about to run out for him” (409).
Chapter 30 first follows up on the end of the professional baseball season. Gehrig’s mother, with whom he was very close, fell ill, and his playing suffered. Ruth continued his momentum and had the most incredible September that a baseball player had ever had (410). Ruth finished the season with 60 home runs, a new record (that broke his own previous record) and a number that beat most teams’ total. The Yankees were utterly dominant in the postseason.
Sports fans also focused on a boxing match in Chicago between Dempsey and a rival. Al Capone went to watch the match, along with 150,000 other spectators. Dempsey lost to Gene Tunney in a match that has been reviewed and analyzed ever since.
Lindbergh’s tour lost steam as it came to an end. Bryson characterizes him as “still just a kid” at the culmination of his wild summer (426).
Epilogue Summary
Bryson becomes a character in the epilogue. He visits the Smithsonian Institution to see Charles Lindbergh’s plane, The Spirit of St. Louis. He reflects on Lindbergh’s impact on aviation and American culture. Bryson extends the Lindbergh story beyond 1927 to talk about his enduring fame and slowly fading legacy. He recounts Lindbergh’s marriage to a woman named Anne Morrow and the capture and murder of their infant son in 1932. The couple moved to Europe to escape the constant media attention and danger. In Europe, he became a Nazi sympathizer and even considered moving to Germany in the 1930s. Public opinion in the US turned against him as people observed his antisemitism and devotion to white supremacy in action. Eventually, “Even Little Falls, his hometown, painted out Lindbergh’s name on its water tower” (440). Though he “supported the American cause wholeheartedly” during World War II, “It was too late. His reputation would never recover” (441). It has emerged in research since his lifetime that he also had several secret families.
Bryson then offers the comparably “tame and anticlimactic” stories of the other main characters (441). The close friendship between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig dissolved in the early 1930s. Gehrig developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (now known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”) and died in 1941. Ruth retired from baseball in 1935 and died at the age of 53 from cancer. Herbert Hoover ran for office in 1928 and began his presidency in 1929, months before the stock market crash. Coolidge retired to Massachusetts. Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, a clever tactic devised by a female lawyer named Mabel Willebrandt.
There are follow-ups for even minor characters, as well, even if just a brief note about death dates.
Part 5-Epilogue Analysis
The book both opens and closes with an emphasis on aviation. Bryson does not say outright that the topic ranks of the highest importance in history or his book, but it was the most consistent narrative focus of One Summer. Part of the reason for this approach is the continual drama and strangeness of the Lindbergh story. He was an odd character but even stranger after the 1920s, when he apparently secretly started multiple families with different women, some of whom were related. His story is also somewhat mysterious and hard to fully understand. Bryson says, “For some unknowable reason Lindbergh’s flight brought the world a moment of sublime, spontaneous, unifying joy on a scale never before seen” (427). Just as Lindbergh held his audience enthralled in 1927, Bryson deploys his story to captivate his own audience in the modern day.
Bryson can more easily wrap up and explain the other storylines in the book. The final chapter features small details that revisit many of the major and minor topics of One Summer in order to bring the narrative full-circle. For example, at the Chicago boxing match, Al Capone is in attendance and, “The National Broadcasting Company linked eighty-two stations to form a national broadcast” that utilized its incredible technology to reach an audience of 50 million (414). Calvin Coolidge waves to Charles Lindbergh’s plane as the pilot flew over South Dakota (418). These scenes are the final reminders that the many topics and concepts Bryson discusses in One Summer occurred simultaneously and even intersected. Analyzing the moment requires breaking it down into constituent parts, but experiencing the summer of 1927 in real time involved seeing everything play out side-by-side.
Bryson traces only a few major points beyond 1927. He explains the downfall of Charles Lindbergh in the Epilogue, for example. He also discusses the political rise and late career of Herbert Hoover. These were developments of the late 1920s and 1930s. In most cases, Bryson provides only short notes that explain characters’ lives (and deaths) after 1927. These short follow-ups reinforce that the summer of 1927 was a type of apex in American history of greater importance than other identifiable moments.
During this final section of the book, Bryson adds chapters on various other famous people and influential industries of the 1920s—publishing, Al Capone and organized crime, television technology, etc. These additions, though peripheral to his main storylines, continue to illustrate the relevant historical context of the 1920s and reckon with the legacies that outlived it. Bryson offers some correctives to myths about the decade. For example, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald is now one of the most highly regarded and widely read American authors; his name comes to mind for many Americans when tasked with recalling details about the 1920s. Bryson explains that Fitzgerald did not produce any books in 1927, failed at screenwriting the same year, and never saw the success of his most famous work, The Great Gatsby. He died “broke and all but forgotten” until “the world [rediscovered] him” a decade later (390). These revelations drive Bryson’s argument that our perception of 1927 and the decade in which it was situated may be far removed from the reality of the era.
By the end of the book, the reader has learned a little bit about a lot of topics and a lot about the main topics. There is significant biographical material on Charles Lindbergh in particular, but also on Calvin Coolidge and Babe Ruth. Bryson never directly makes a case that a similar book could not be written about another single year or season in US history, but through a breadth of examples and explication of intersecting important developments, he reveals that the summer of 1927 was a distinguishable and impactful moment for Americans and even for the world.
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