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The popular view of the decade is a melange of flappers, gangsters, federal agents, flaming youth and athletic heroes, all set to a jazz beat. The Jazz era peaked in 1927: the stock market was hotter than ever, minting new millionaires almost daily; the wealth of America was as large as Europe combined; furniture and electric appliances sold more than ever thanks to the enormous popularity of the installment plan. Most households had a radio and over half owned an automobile. Movies began to talk and drew record crowds. The Yankees dominated baseball, with Babe Ruth smacking an unheard of 60 home runs. Tennis, golf, and even polo enjoyed a boom in popularity. 270 shows opened that year of Broadway, a record that still stands. English language daily newspapers enjoyed a circulation of 38 million, thanks in large part to the development of the tabloid. The tabloid publicized the more lurid aspects of the day's news, providing a fitting companion to the two most popular magazines of the day, "True Stories" and "Confessions." Thanks to the force of the media, celebrity was celebrated like never before. The world thrilled to the exploits of "Lucky Lindy" and his spirit of St. Louis. Jack Dempsey dominated boxing, until Gene Tunney took the heavyweight championship away from him that year. John Gilbert and Greta Garbo ruled the silver screen. And gangster Al Capone was practically a household word.
Women had the right to vote; they wore their skirts short, bobbed their hair like movie idol Clara Bow, and smoked and drank bootleg whiskey in public. More American than ever were getting high school degrees and moving on to college. African Americans, after enduring decades of Jim Crow, seemed finally to be making progress, as witnessed by the Harlem Renaissance.
But on closer inspection, a dark side emerged that would culminate in the Great Depression a little under two years later. (Hindsight is always 20/20.) Calvin Coolidge shook public confidence when he announced he would not seek another term. The income gap between rich and poor grew; many rural residents abandoned their farms to head to the cities and the promise of jobs. More and more money was being spent on education, yet teachers were drastically underpaid. In rural areas, some teachers barely had an elementary school degree. Lynching was still widespread, especially in the South, and the neo-apartheid policy of "separate but equal" still held the country in a tight grip when it came to race relations. Religious intolerance was the rule with an undeclared war against science, competing for the minds in America's schools. And America was caught up in a rather nasty jungle war against Sandino rebels in Nicaragua.
If this all sounds somewhat familiar, it is probably no accident. Leinwand's insights keep the reader interested and his judicious use of them help the book to flow like a well-tuned novel. Add a lively writing style and we have a perfect book for the days of Summer.
One added bonus is a chapter listing preductions of the future made in 1927 by such notables as H.G.Wells, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Keyserling, and even H.L. Mencken. Of course, they were all wrong, and it's a lot of fun to see Leinwand point out their errors. Highly recommended.
Leinwand carefully organizes his material within a chronological framework which extends from New York's celebration of the arrival of 1927 (in Chapter 1) to December 17th when an entire submarine crew perished (in Chapter 12). The easiest way to understand Leinwand's strategy is to imagine that, on the reader's behalf, he has poured over all of the editions in 1927 of the nation's major newspapers, collecting information which best reveals those people, forces, events, and themes which most accurately define that year. With circumspection as well as precision, he also suggests correlations between and among the people and circumstances selected. His book is, in that sense, a literary pageant with a rock-solid foundation of historical fact. Leinwand answers three questions of greatest interest to me: First, what was it like to live in the United States in 1927? Next, what sets this year apart from any other in that nation's history? Finally, what were the nature and extent of 1927's impact (both positive and negative) on generations to come? For me at least, he successfully answers all three questions and does so with style and grace as well as with precision and conviction.
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