One Summer: America, 1927

happy.
    Borglum and Coolidge got along fine. Borglum intended to include beneath the heads of the presidents a vast inscription, called ‘The Entablature’, which would encapsulate in 500 words the history of the United States, carved in letters so large that they could be read three miles away. At the dedication ceremony, Borglum impulsively offered the task of drafting it to Coolidge, who accepted with uncustomary enthusiasm.
    Coolidge gave the matter much thought and effort over the following months, but when at last he submitted his compositions they proved to be embarrassingly unusable. Most read more like preparatory notes than considered text. Here was Coolidge on the Constitution: ‘The constitution – charter of perpetual union of free people of sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers – under an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality and justice under the law.’ The Entablature proposal was quietly dropped, to Coolidge’s supreme annoyance. But in the summer of 1927 all that was in the future, too, and the president and Borglum parted great friends.
    Back at the game lodge, waiting on Coolidge’s desk on his return from Mount Rushmore was an appeal for clemency for Sacco and Vanzetti. He ignored it.
     
    Charles Lindbergh’s tour continued. On 10 August, he flew into Detroit, where Henry and Edsel Ford took time off from designing and testing the new Model A to go up for short spins in the Spirit of St Louis – an honour accorded few others. Although the Ford company manufactured planes, neither Henry nor Edsel had ever been up in an aeroplane before. Because there wasn’t a passenger seat, Henry Ford, like all passengers, had to sit on the armrest, more or less doubled up. Back on the ground, Henry boasted that he had ‘handled the stick’ for a while, and looked awfully pleased with himself. Asked by newsmen about progress on the secret new car, Edsel said that things were going so well that it was ready to go into production. It isn’t clear if he was being optimistic or deluded, but in either case he was quite wrong. Production was still some months off.
    After a day off in Detroit, spent mostly with his mother, Lindbergh continued west across Michigan and onwards to Illinois on 13 August. Among those who may well have turned out to watch him pass over, and possibly even joined the crowds at Benton Harbor where Lindbergh made a brief stop, were the Anti-Saloon League’s Wayne B. Wheeler and his wife and her father, who were vacationing together at the Wheelers’ lakeside cottage at Little Sable Point on Lake Michigan.
    What is known is that that evening, while Mrs Wheeler was preparing to cook dinner at the cottage, her oil stove exploded as she lit it and she was drenched from head to toe in flaming oil. Mrs Wheeler’s 81-year-old father rushed in from a neighbouring room and suffered a fatal heart attack at the sight of his daughter in flames. Wayne Wheeler, who had been resting upstairs, arrived a moment later. He stifled the blaze with a blanket and summoned an ambulance, but his wife’s burns were too severe and she died thatnight in hospital. The shock of the incident was more than Wheeler could bear. Three weeks later, he suffered a heart attack of his own and died.
    With Wheeler gone, Prohibition lost its spirit and momentum, as well as its chief fundraiser. Within three years, the Anti-Saloon League would be so hard up that it would have to cancel the newspaper subscription at its Washington office. Within six years, Prohibition was dead.
     
    On 18 August, an act more important than anyone at the time appreciated, both in symbolic terms and practical ones, took place in Cleveland, Ohio, when the last piece of steel framework was hoisted into place on the massive new Union Terminal project. There had never been anything quite like it. As well as a spanking new railway station, the complex incorporated a hotel, post office, department store, shops, restaurants and a fifty-two-storey office building, the tallest building erected in America that year (and second tallest anywhere until the Chrysler Building went up). All the component parts of the project were physically interlinked, something that had never been done before.
    Union Terminal was as notable for who built it as for what it was. The developers were brothers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen. Of all the business