One Summer: America, 1927

hare-brained project dedicated in summer 1927 and only completed 14 years later.
     

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish vendor ( left ), and Nicola Sacco, shoemaker – two Italian immigrants whose convictions for murder and death sentences made them an international cause célèbre . Their guilt or innocence is still a matter of dispute.
     

Robert G. Elliott, America’s top executioner and a master of the difficult art of administering death by electrocution. He would execute, among many others, Sacco and Vanzetti in the summer of 1927, and the next year Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray.
     

On 29 August, following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, their funeral procession through Boston attracted many thousands of viewers – quite a different gathering from the ones greeting Lindbergh.
     

Nineteen twenty-seven was a great year for movies. One of the best was William Wellman’s Wings , a thrilling and technically groundbreaking epic about First World War air combat that won the first Academy Award and featured the famed ‘It Girl’ Clara Bow.
     

While it was by no means the first ‘talking picture’, The Jazz Singer , starring the singer Al Jolson, was the production that made sound movies real to a mass audience and ended the silent era – in the process saving Hollywood from financial ruin.
     

Cinemas that showed those films were constructed on the scale of palaces, as this interior shot of New York’s famed Roxy Theatre demonstrates. Its opening in 1927 was so momentous an occasion that President Coolidge sent a telegram of congratulations to its builder.
     

Two of the oddest business titans America ever produced were the brothers Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen . . .
     

. . . Inseparable and reclusive, they made a fortune in railways and property and built Shaker Heights, the first planned suburban community, and Cleveland’s Union Terminal (above), at the time the second tallest building in America.
     

Al Capone, the famed Chicago gangster. In 1927 his murderous mob flourished in the most politically corrupt city in the country and grossed more than $100 million.
     

Capone’s eventual downfall came at the hands of Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the chief federal Prohibition prosecutor who developed the novel theory that he could be prosecuted for evading taxes.
     

The 1920s was a decade justly noted for financial chicanery. Dapper Charles Ponzi’s famed ‘scheme’ involved postal reply coupons. By 1927 he resided in Charlestown Prison with his fellow Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti.
     

Albert B. Fall ( left ), former secretary of the interior, and Edward Doheny, an oil tycoon, outside the Washington, DC, courtroom where they stood trial in 1927 for their roles in the Teapot Dome bribery and corruption scandal.
     

Texas Guinan, the premier nightclub hostess of the era, being led into a paddy wagon after a police raid on one of her many speakeasies. Her genial expression here speaks volumes about the trivial and temporary nature of her arrest.
     

Perhaps the nuttiest pastime in an era of nutty fads was the ‘sport’ of flagpole-sitting. Its undisputed champion was ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly, seen here atop the St Francis Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, where he remained for 12 days in June 1927.
     

The archetypal figure of the era was the flapper – style-conscious women who flouted conventional mores to smoke, drink, consort with the opposite sex and dance the Charleston just about anywhere.
     

For people who liked music with their illegal booze, Harlem was the place to go. Its premier establishment was the famed Cotton Club, where such black musical geniuses as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller performed for a whites-only clientele.
     

The memorably named Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge in Chicago who became commissioner of baseball after the famed ‘Black Sox’ series-fixing scandal of 1919 and who may or may not have ‘saved baseball’.
     

Nineteen twenty-seven saw the first primitive television broadcasts, but the real ‘father of television’ was the lone and luckless inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who in September of that year perfected the cathode ray tube system that eventually made television a practical reality.
     

Alas for Farnsworth, his eventual 165 patents could not prevent the radio pioneer David Sarnoff, founder of the Radio Corporation of America, from stealing his ideas and making television a commercially viable product.
     

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