One Summer: America, 1927

Broadway attracted an enraptured crowd of between four and five million on 13 June 1927. Eighteen hundred tons of debris had to be cleaned up afterwards.
     

The famed (and vainglorious) explorer Richard Byrd ( second from left ) with his crew ( from the left ) Bert Acosta, George Noville and Bernt Balchen in front of their huge trimotor plane, the America . They took off from Roosevelt Field for Paris on 29 June . . .
     

. . . but 43 hours later were forced to ditch the plane in the waters off Ver-sur-Mer, France. All survived.
     

Among other intrepid aviators attempting to cross the Atlantic that summer were the French aces Charles Nungesser ( left ) and François Coli. They took off from Paris in L’Oiseau Blanc on 8 May for New York City and were never seen again.
     

Clarence Chamberlin ( right ), the pilot of the Columbia , and its owner, the businessman and publicity hound Charles Levine ( second from right ), landed in a field near Eisleben, Germany, after a remarkable (if crooked) flight of 3,905 miles and 43 hours’ duration. Their reception in Berlin, when they finally arrived on 8 June, rivalled that of Lindbergh in Paris.
     

Francesco de Pinedo ( left ), the barnstorming aviator and hero of fascist Italy, with the Italian ambassador in Washington, DC, on 20 April 1927. He crossed the Atlantic flying westward in a seaplane (although not non-stop) and then toured America on a victory lap that stirred up great political controversy.
     

The titanically talented slugger Babe Ruth. As a teammate later recalled, ‘God, we liked that big son of a bitch. He was a constant source of joy.
     

The instrument of Ruth’s greatness was his heavy bat, of 54 ounces, which he used to clobber more homers than any baseball player – any team – had ever hit before.
     

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth posing for a photo in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The two home run rivals on the Yankees were unlikely friends, despite vast differences in temperament and habits. For a while in summer 1927 it seemed as if Gehrig would emerge the home run champion.
     

The Great Mississippi Flood: after weeks of torrential rain, 500 miles of the river flooded from Illinois to New Orleans, putting an area the size of Scotland under water.
     

President Calvin Coolidge appointed Herbert Hoover ( left ), whom he referred to derisively as ‘Wonder Boy’, to manage the relief efforts for the human calamity of the flood – a task he performed ably and with a notable absence of warmth.
     

On 18 May in Bath, Michigan, the maniac Andrew Kehoe, protesting about high taxes on his farm, killed his wife and blew up the local elementary school with 500 pounds of dynamite. Thirty-seven children and seven adults died that day – still the largest and most cold-blooded slaughter of children in American history.
     

Nan Britton, the mistress of Warren G. Harding, and the child she had by him. Her sizzlingly tell-all memoir of their affair, including multiple trysts in a White House cupboard, created a sensation.
     

Calvin Coolidge fled his none-too-taxing job as President of the United States (four hours a day, tops) for a three-month extended vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Here he is with his wife, in his full cowboy regalia, a get-up he wore that summer on every possible occasion.
     

( From left: ) Hjalmar Schacht, head of the German Reichsbank; Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Sir Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England; Charles Rist, deputy governor of the Banque de France. At a secret meeting on a Long Island estate in June 1927 these four lords of finance made a fateful decision to lower interest rates. This action further inflated the stock market bubble and led indirectly to the disastrous crash of 1929.
     

Wayne B. Wheeler, fanatical head of the Anti-Saloon League and the single most forceful advocate behind the insane social experiment that was Prohibition.
     

In order to prevent industrial alcohol being used as a beverage, Wheelerites insisted that it be ‘denatured’ and thus rendered poisonous. Those who drank it and died, they reckoned, simply got what they deserved.
     

Dwight Morrow, a J. P. Morgan banker, US Ambassador to Mexico, pioneer in the development of the American aviation industry and eventual father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh.
     

The sculptor Gutzon Borglum views a model for his presidential sculptures on Mount Rushmore – a monumental and seemingly