One Summer: America, 1927

for aprice between $385 and $1,400 depending on features. In every city, Ford showrooms could be recognized at once by the crowds gathered around them. At least ten million people were estimated to have viewed the car in its first thirty-six hours on sale.
    The initial reaction was highly favourable. Some 400,000 Model As were ordered in the first two weeks of December. What Ford didn’t tell eager buyers was that production was still only running at about a hundred cars a day. So dealers, who had had no customers for months, now found they had plenty of customers but almost no cars to give them. The loss of goodwill was immense.
    Ultimately, the Model A was no more than a modest success. It was discontinued after four years as it became evident that American car buyers now wanted annual model changes. In the 1930s Ford dropped to third place in market share, with barely half the sales of General Motors and less even than Chrysler. Its payroll fell from over 170,000 in 1929 to just 46,000 in 1932, and total production at Ford plants dropped from 1.5 million vehicles to just over 230,000. The company survived, of course, and has remained one of America’s most important manufacturing concerns, but it would never again be the dominant force it once was.
    Edsel Ford died of stomach cancer in 1943 at the early age of forty-nine, never having had much chance to get out from under his father’s shadow. Henry Ford, growing rapidly senile, followed four years later, aged eighty-three. He never made it to Fordlandia, his rubber enterprise in Brazil.
     
    Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray met their fate at Sing Sing in January 1928, one month after the Model A made its debut. Their executioner was the lethally ubiquitous Robert G. Elliott .
    Snyder was sent to the chair first. ‘When her eyes fell upon the instrument of death she almost collapsed,’ Elliott recorded in his memoirs. ‘The matrons tenderly assisted her to the chair, and, as she was placed in it, she broke down and wept. “Jesus, have mercy on me, for I have sinned,” she prayed between sobs.’ Elliott gentlyattached electrodes to her right leg and the nape of her neck and lowered a cloth bag over her head. For reasons unstated, she was spared the usual leather football helmet. Then Elliott stepped back and threw the switch. Two minutes later Ruth Snyder was dead. It was the first electrocution anywhere of a woman.
    Gray immediately followed and walked to the chair with a businesslike briskness, as if this were a visit to the dentist. He wore a look of calm resolve and politely cooperated as he was strapped in and wired up. ‘He was one of the bravest men I have ever seen go to death by law,’ Elliott wrote. ‘I felt extremely sorry for this man who had forsaken his wife and daughter for the woman who lay dead a short distance away. I believe nearly everyone in the room did.’ Two minutes later, Gray was dead, too.
    The next morning, readers of the New York Daily News were greeted with a sensational image. Filling the whole of the front page under the single word ‘DEAD!’ was a slightly blurred photograph of Ruth Snyder at the time of execution. Her head is covered, and she is obviously strapped in place, but otherwise looks reasonably comfortable. The photo was taken by a Daily News reporter named Tom Howard, who was present as an official witness and had sneaked in a miniature camera strapped to his shin. At the right moment, he had discreetly lifted up his trouser leg and activated the shutter by means of a wire running to his jacket pocket. The edition sold out within minutes of hitting the streets. Inside, the paper provided 289 inches of coverage on the execution. Even the New York Times gave the story 63½ inches – over five feet – of coverage.
    Two months after the executions, Robert G. Elliott and his wife were slumbering peacefully in their home in Richmond Hill in Queens when they were blown out of bed by a tremendous explosion. Bombers – presumably Sacco and Vanzetti sympathizers – had left an explosive device on their front porch. The upward force of the blast blew the roof more than thirty feet across the lawn, but remarkably the Elliotts were not injured. The house, however, had to be completely rebuilt. No one was ever caught for the bombing.Elliott lived on till October 1939, when he died of a heart attack aged sixty-five.
     
    Herbert Hoover suffered a couple of frights on his road to the White House. In the autumn of 1927 his