One Summer: America, 1927 (22 page)

Through the happy din a radio broadcaster named Graham McNamee kept up a steady patter. McNamee was himself making history. His broadcast was being carried by fifty stations across the nation by the new National Broadcasting Company (NBC), America’s (and indeed the world’s) first radio network. Twelve thousand miles of AT&T telephone cables were pressed into service to give America its first coast-to-coast broadcast. It was believed that virtually every radio set in the nation was tuned in. No person in history had spoken to so many people at one time as Graham McNamee did now.

McNamee’s position as America’s most trusted voice was entirely an accident. A Minnesotan like Lindbergh, he had moved to New York as a young man to pursue a career as a singer in both light and serious opera. In 1923, while walking along lower Broadway, he passed the offices of radio station WEAF. Knowing that radio stations sometimes aired recitals, he asked if there was any chance of an audition. The station manager, Samuel L. Ross, thought McNamee had the perfect voice for radio—warm and clear—so he hired him on the spot to introduce programs, read news bulletins, and occasionally sing. That autumn WEAF had the rights to broadcast the World Series between the Yankees and Giants—the first time the series had been broadcast to a mass audience. W. O. McGeehan of the
Tribune
was employed to provide play-by-play, and McNamee was sent along to assist him. McGeehan had no talent for broadcasting. He spoke in a flat tone and made no effort to fill the dead space between plays. During the fourth inning of the third game, he told McNamee he didn’t want to do it anymore and left. McNamee had no choice but to take over, which was something of a challenge since he knew very little about professional baseball.

He was, however, a born broadcaster. McNamee described the crowds, the weather, the air of excitement that was rippling through the park. He picked out celebrities. He made the listeners feel present and welcome, like old friends. People loved his broadcasts even if he didn’t always entirely grasp what was happening on the field. Sports columnist and author Ring Lardner wrote on one occasion: “I don’t know which game to write about, the one I saw today or the one I heard Graham McNamee announce as I sat next to him at the Polo Grounds.” Soon
McNamee’s was the best-known voice in America, and not just for World Series games but for every kind of important gathering—championship prize fights, political conventions, Rose Bowls, and the arrival home of Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh Day in Washington was in many ways the day that radio came of age. It takes some effort of imagination to appreciate how novel radio was in the 1920s. It was the wonder of the age. By the time of Lindbergh’s flight, one-third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios. Stations sprouted everywhere. In a single day in 1922, the number of American radio stations went from 28 to 570. Anyone could start one. Nushawg Poultry Farm in New Lebanon, Ohio, had its own station. So did many department stores, banks, hardware stores, churches, newspapers, utilities, and schools. Productions at even the larger stations tended to be more than slightly amateurish. When Norman Brokenshire, a broadcaster for WHN in New York, found himself with a long lull to fill and nothing more to say, he announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you the sounds of New York City,” and thrust the microphone out the window.

Not everyone was captivated by the new technology. Many believed that all the invisible energy flying through the air must be dangerous. One widespread belief was that birds found dead on the ground were there because they had been struck by radio waves. But on the whole people were enchanted. The ability to sit in one’s own living room and listen to a live event in some distant place was approximately as miraculous as teleportation. When an advertiser wrote, “Radio Leaps the Barriers of Time and Distance!” it was as much an expression of wonder as of fact. For many, the broadcast of Lindbergh’s arrival was nearly as notable and exciting as the arrival itself.

“Here comes the boy!” McNamee cried now as Lindbergh appeared on the deck of the
Memphis
. “He stands quiet, unassuming.… He looks very serious and
awfully
nice. A darn nice boy!” An estimated thirty million enraptured listeners hung on his every word that day. What none of them could see were the tears of joy running down McNamee’s cheeks.

Among the welcoming shore party were the secretaries of the navy
and of war, and a phalanx of naval officials, including Commander Richard E. Byrd, dressed in dazzling whites and still strangely and conspicuously earthbound. People were wondering if Byrd was ever going to leave for Europe. It was not a matter he and Lindbergh could discuss now, for Lindbergh was hustled into an open-top Pierce-Arrow with his mother to proceed under cavalry escort to the Washington Monument.

No one knows how many people lined the streets of Washington that day, but it was universally agreed that it was the largest gathering the capital had ever seen. As his motorcade proceeded toward the Mall, Lindbergh waved occasionally but mostly stared opaquely at the crowds. Many of those lining the sidewalks wept as he passed—“they knew not just why,” reported the writer and explorer Fitzhugh Green (who was also editor of Lindbergh’s 1927 book,
We
). At the Washington Monument, a sea of heads covered the entire visible landscape and young boys filled the nearby trees like Christmas ornaments. At the foot of the monument stood a canopied platform on which President Coolidge and all the members of the cabinet but one were gathered. The lone missing figure was Herbert Hoover. He was stuck in Gulfport, Mississippi, still dealing with the Mississippi flood, which was as bad as ever but almost completely forgotten now by those who weren’t directly affected by it. Even Hoover’s tireless PR operatives couldn’t keep it on the front pages with Lindbergh in the country.

When at last Lindbergh reached the speaking platform, he nodded to those present and accepted the cheers of the crowd. President Coolidge made a short speech of welcome, pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on his lapel, and with a gesture invited Lindbergh to speak. Lindbergh leaned into the microphone, for it was set a little low for him, expressed pleasure at being present, said a very few words of thanks, and stepped back. A moment of eerie stillness followed as it dawned on the watching throngs, most of whom had been standing in the hot sun for hours, that they were in the presence of two of the most taciturn men in America and that this ceremony was over. But then, recovering their sense of occasion, the people burst into riotous applause and “clapped until their hands were numb.” Many wept here, too.

And then began Charles Lindbergh’s new life as a public figure. From now on, his every waking moment would be an endless round of banquets, speeches, and handshakes. In just over thirty-six hours in Washington, Colonel Lindbergh (as he now became) would attend three banquets, make several (short) speeches, visit sick soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and visit the Capitol. Everywhere he went people lined the streets to cheer him as he passed. It was a touching display of adulation, but it was only the faintest prelude to what awaited him in New York.

In the 1920s America became a high-rise nation. By 1927, the country boasted some five thousand tall buildings—most of the world’s stock. Even Beaumont, Texas, had six buildings of ten stories or higher, which was more than Paris, London, Berlin, or any other European city. The J. L. Hudson Company of Detroit in 1927 opened the world’s tallest department store, at more than twenty stories, and Cleveland saw the topping out of the fifty-two-story Union Terminal Building, the second-tallest building in the world. Los Angeles instituted strict limits on building heights—which is partly why LA sprawls so today—but still allowed the city hall to rise to twenty-eight stories in violation of its own ordinances. It was as if the country couldn’t stop itself from building ever upward.

As buildings grew taller, the number of workers pouring into city centers grew and grew. Boston by 1927 had 825,000 people a day coming into its downtown—or more than the entire population of the city. Pittsburgh absorbed 355,000 workers every day; Los Angeles and San Francisco 500,000 each; Chicago and Philadelphia over 750,000 apiece; and New York, superlative in everything, took in a whopping daily load of 3 million.

In 1927, New York had just overtaken London as the world’s largest city, and it was easily the most cosmopolitan. A quarter of its eight million residents had been born abroad; it had more foreign-born residents than Philadelphia had people. Native-born Americans were flocking to it, too. Two hundred thousand southern blacks had moved to New York
since the end of the First World War, and now the Mississippi flood was sending tens of thousands more.

As well as being the headquarters of many of America’s principal service industries—banking, stockbroking, publishing, advertising, most of the arts—New York was still also the nation’s largest industrial center. It was home to thirty thousand factories. One-tenth of all that America produced originated in the city. More than 40 percent of the nation’s overseas trade went through the Port of New York, as did the overwhelming share of international passenger traffic. As many as twelve thousand passengers sailed from piers on the west side of Manhattan every day, and something on the order of twenty-five thousand went to see them off. Such was the density of people around the docks that traffic was gridlocked daily for blocks around, from eight in the morning to one in the afternoon.

Every four years the city grew by the equivalent of a Boston or St. Louis. Developers couldn’t keep up. At one point in 1926, more than a thousand new office buildings were being constructed or rebuilt. To try to reduce the crowding, the City of New York enacted tough new ordinances, restricting tall buildings to big lots and forcing architects to design them with setbacks to allow more air to flow between them and more light to reach the ground. The unintended effect of this was actually to accelerate the pace of growth, since big lots required giant structures if they were to offer an economic return. It also encouraged skyscrapers to march northward up Manhattan. By 1927, New York City had half the nation’s skyscrapers, and half of those were in Midtown.
^*
The canyonlike streets and spiky skyline that we associate with New York is largely a 1920s phenomenon.

Many of the new buildings added enormously to pressure on the city’s stretched infrastructure. When the colossal Graybar Building, the world’s largest office building, opened in early 1927 at 420 Lexington
Avenue, it brought twelve thousand office workers to one site. A single block in Manhattan now could easily contain fifty thousand people. All this high-rise density made New York the most breathtakingly packed and challenging city in the world in which to live and move about, but it also provided the most exhilarating and perfect backdrop for a ticker tape parade, and it was now about to have the biggest one ever seen.

On Monday, June 13, Charles Lindbergh flew himself in a borrowed navy airplane to Mitchel Field on Long Island, where he was immediately transferred to a waiting amphibious plane for the short trip onward to the city. He could not possibly have been prepared—no human could have been—for what awaited him. What he saw as he came into New York Harbor was perhaps the most extraordinary sight ever accorded an individual: an entire city, the greatest in the world, standing ready to receive him.

The harbor was a mosaic of boats; beyond, from the bottom of Manhattan to Central Park, people thronged every sidewalk and filled every rooftop and office window. No one can possibly say how many people witnessed the parade. Most estimates put the number at between four and five million. It may well have been the biggest crowd ever assembled anywhere to pay tribute to a single person.

Lindbergh was met in the harbor by the mayoral yacht (a gift to the city from Rodman Wanamaker) for transfer to the Battery and the beginning of his parade. A buffet lunch had been laid on, but it turned out that the newspapermen and photographers who had gotten there first had eaten every bit of it, so Lindbergh had to face the festivities on an empty stomach.

An estimated three hundred thousand people were waiting for him at Battery Park, where he climbed into an open-topped Packard and perched on the backseat beside Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was dressed, a little anachronistically, in a top hat. Lindbergh, as always, stayed bare-headed. They proceeded up Broadway through a blizzard of ticker tape and drifting confetti so dense that at times Lindbergh and Walker were all but invisible to those lining the route. The scale of the occasion
was without precedent. After the Armistice parade in 1918, street sweepers cleared 155 tons of debris. For the Lindbergh parade, it was 1,800 tons. Some spectators in their excitement emptied whole wastebaskets out their office windows without always considering whether they might contain heavy objects. Among the detritus collected the next day were phone books and business directories that had been dropped or joyously flung from lofty windows but had miraculously hurt no one.

One person standing anonymously among the onlookers was a young woman named Gertrude Ederle, who may well have qualified as the most forgotten person in America. The daughter of German immigrants—her father owned a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue—Ederle was the finest swimmer, of either sex, America had ever produced. In a single day in 1922, she broke six national records. She was also as strong as an ox and capable of swimming vast distances. In August 1926, she not only became the first woman to swim the English Channel but did it faster than any man ever had. This feat so impressed and excited her fellow Americans that she, too, was given a great ticker tape parade and was for a while so famous that crowds followed her everywhere.

At the brief height of her celebrity, Ederle received commercial offers worth $900,000, but her manager believed she was worth more than that and wouldn’t let her sign any of them. Unfortunately, the world simultaneously noticed that when out of the water Trudie Ederle was not terribly interesting or attractive. She was a little stocky and not overly blessed with charisma. She was also very hard of hearing, which made her seem irritable and impatient during press interviews. Just after her arrival home, another woman, a Danish-born American named Mille Gade, swam the Channel, too, which made Ederle’s achievement suddenly seem slightly ordinary. The world speedily lost interest in Gertrude Ederle, and indeed in Channel swimming generally. In the end, Ederle made just $19,793 in personal appearance fees. By the time of Lindbergh’s parade she was earning $50 a week as a swimming instructor and was able to walk through the city without attracting notice. When she was mentioned at all it was as an example of the fate that no doubt awaited Charles Lindbergh.