One Summer: America, 1927

opponents, of whom there were many, began floating the notion that Hoover couldn’t legally run because he hadn’t been resident in America for the preceding fourteen years as the Constitution required. (The stipulation was put there by the founding fathers to make sure that the office could be held only by those who had remained loyally at home during the revolution.) Rumours also circulated that Hoover had once applied for British citizenship. (He hadn’t.)
    In the end, no one pursued the challenge and on 4 November 1928, on the first occasion in his life in which he ran for office, Hoover was elected President of the United States by a record margin. He received nearly two thirds of the popular vote and over 80 per cent of electoral votes. Among those endorsing him was Charles Lindbergh.
    He took office in March 1929, and in October the stock market crashed. Hoover never recovered from that blow. In the three years following the crash, America’s unemployment rate rose from 3 per cent to 25 per cent, while average household earnings fell by 33 per cent, industrial production by almost 50 per cent and the stock market by 90 per cent. Eleven thousand banks failed.
    Hoover did quite a lot to try to stimulate the economy. He spent $3.5 billion on public works, including several projects for which we may thank him yet – notably the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. He even donated his own salary to charity. As an aide to President Roosevelt once confessed, ‘practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started’. But nothing could overcome his absence of lovability. At the 1931 World Series, he was ‘lustily’ booed – the first time that that had ever happened to a president at a World Series game.
    Having won the 1928 election by a record margin, Hoover lostthe 1932 race by another record margin. He continued to work as hard after his presidency as during it. At one point, he wrote four books simultaneously, keeping a separate desk for each. He died in 1964 aged ninety and was buried at West Branch, Iowa, even though he had not lived there for more than eighty years. Today the Hoover presidential library at West Branch includes an excellent museum which houses, among much else, the television equipment on which he made his famous broadcast in April 1927.
     
    Upon completion of his term, Calvin Coolidge retired with Grace to a rented house in Northampton, Massachusetts. He became a member of the board of the New York Life Insurance Company and faithfully attended the monthly board meetings in New York for a fee of $50 and reimbursement of his expenses. He also wrote his autobiography and a syndicated newspaper column. One afternoon just after New Year 1933, he went upstairs to shave. Grace found him on the floor of their bathroom dead of a heart attack. He was sixty years old. Most of his papers were destroyed soon after his death at his own request.
     
    Benjamin Strong , governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the man who arguably gave the world the stock market crash and all the economic chaos that followed, didn’t live to see any of it. He died in October 1928 at the age of fifty-five, overwhelmed by tuberculosis. Also not long surviving the summer of 1927 was Myron Herrick , US ambassador in Paris. He caught a chill while standing in the rain during the funeral of the French war hero Marshal Ferdinand Foch in March 1929 and died a few days later. He was seventy-four.
     
    Six months after Herrick died, Miller Huggins , the Yankees’ manager, developed a blotch under his eye and began to feel feverish. He went to St Vincent’s Hospital in New York, and almost at once his condition grew critical. He was suffering from a skin infection callederysipelas (more commonly known as St Anthony’s fire), which nowadays can be treated with antibiotics. In 1929, there were no effective treatments. Huggins died on 25 September 1929, aged fifty.
     
    Dwight Morrow stepped down as ambassador to Mexico after three years in the job and came home to run for the Senate as a Republican from New Jersey. He stood on a platform opposing Prohibition and won by a landslide, but died suddenly in his sleep from a stroke on 5 October 1931, soon after taking office. He was fifty-eight years old. Five months later, his grandson was kidnapped.
     
    Six months after the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping, Judge Webster Thayer returned briefly to the news when his home was bombed, presumably by