One Summer: America, 1927

beats and flapping of limbs, had a hint of sexual frenzy that many an anxious elder found alarming. Worse was a popular dance called the Black Bottom, which involved hopping forward and backward and slapping the rump – an act of scandalous abandon focused on a body part that many would rather didn’t exist at all. Even the hesitation waltz was deemed to contain some element of sultriness that made it tantamount to musical foreplay. Worst of all was jazz, which was widely held to be a springboard for drug-taking and promiscuity. ‘Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?’ asked an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal . You bet it does was the answer. An editorial in the New York American called jazz ‘a pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music’.
    Many were dismayed to realize that America now had the highest divorce rate in the world after the Soviet Union. (To cash in on this, Nevada in 1927 slashed the residency requirement for divorce in the state to three months, and in so doing became the home of the ‘quickie’ divorce.)
    Concern was greatest for young women, who seemed everywhere to have abandoned themselves to sordid habits. They smoked, drank, rouged their shining faces, bobbed their hair (which is to say cut it short and of even length all the way round), and clad themselves in silken dresses of breathtaking skimpiness. The amount of fabric in the average dress, it was calculated, fell from almost twenty yards before the war to a wispy seven after. The generic term of the day for women of lively and liberal dispositionwas ‘flapper’ – a word that originated in England in the late nineteenth century and originally signified a prostitute. (It was an offshoot of that other avian term for females, still in use in England today: ‘bird’.)
    The movies deftly caught, and often actively inflamed, the spirit of abandon that characterized the times. One film, according to its poster, offered its slavering audiences ‘beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp’. Another had ‘neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers’. It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to discern a direct-line connection between the wanton behaviour of the modern woman and the murderous instincts of a Ruth Snyder. It was often noted in newspaper accounts that the wicked Mrs Snyder before her downfall had been a great one for going to hot movies.
    In desperation, lawmakers tried to legislate probity. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offence for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes. In Utah, the state legislature considered sending women to prison – not fining them, but imprisoning them – if their skirts showed more than three inches of leg above the ankle. In Seattle, a group called the Clean Books League even tried to get banned the travel books of the adventurer Richard Halliburton on the grounds that they ‘excited to wanderlust’. Regulations of a moral nature were introduced all over the nation, and nearly everywhere were, like Prohibition itself, ignored. Among people of a conservative temperament, it was a time of despair.
    So when the Spirit of St Louis landed on Long Island and from it stepped a young man who seemed to represent everything that was modest and virtuous and good, a very large part of the nation stirred hopefully and took notice.
     
    Up to this point Lindbergh had seemed ‘a far-away and vague rival’,as Clarence Chamberlin recalled later. Most people outside aviation had not even heard of him. But he now rapidly became the public favourite. As a New York Times reporter observed just twenty-four hours after his arrival: ‘Lindbergh has won the hearts of New Yorkers by his bashful smile, his indomitable pluck and his impetuous flight here from the Pacific.’ Large crowds came to the airfields to see the person the papers were calling (to his extreme irritation) ‘Lucky Lindy’. On the Sunday after his arrival, thirty thousand people – as many as would go to a Yankees game – turned up at Curtiss Field just in the hope of catching sight of the young aviator as he talked with his mechanics and worked on his plane. So many climbed on to the roof of a small paint shop next to the Spirit of St Louis hangar that the building collapsed under their weight. Luckily, no one was inside at the