The times they were a changin’

Date

November 2, 2013

Michael Lallo

Entertainment reporter

Bill Bryson’s new book focuses on a pivotal year in the history of the US.

Illustration: John Spooner.

It is widely known Henry Ford had a problem with Jews. But, as Bill Bryson discovered when researching his new book, One Summer: America 1927, the breadth of Ford’s bigotry was extraordinary. Among the many things the founder of the Ford Motor Company abhorred were: bankers, doctors, Catholics, fat people, books, reading, college graduates, experts of any kind and pasteurised milk. He also feared the proliferation of skyscrapers, worried that the earth could not support the weight of these new buildings and that cities would eventually collapse in on themselves.

Engineer after engineer patiently explained to him that a typical skyscraper weighs about 60,000 tons while the rock and dirt excavated for the foundations weighs about 100,000 tons. Therefore, skyscrapers reduce the burden on the ground beneath them. Ford, however, could not be swayed.

At one point, he bought a dying newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and turned it into a general-interest magazine. Although close to functionally illiterate, Ford meddled with it extensively. Generally, its articles were interminably dull – except those that were accusing Jews of manipulating the stock market, trying to overthrow Christianity or using jazz music to encourage the wearing of short skirts. The Dearborn Independent failed and Ford was forced to close it at a huge loss.

 

”His anti-semitism took a very strange but powerful form,” Bryson says. ”It genuinely seems that if you were a Jewish person, like his neighbour, he had nothing against you. He didn’t hate Jews for being Jewish. Yet he did believe there was a global conspiracy somehow being managed by the world’s Jews. They became his scapegoat and he blamed them for absolutely everything.”

Clearly, Ford was no fool. He founded what was once the world’s biggest automotive company and revolutionised motoring in the US, making cars affordable to the masses. But he was never short of eccentric or ill-conceived ideas.

Perhaps the oddest of them all was his scheme, conceived in the summer of 1927, to build a model American community in the jungles of Brazil. From there, he would run the biggest rubber-producing plant in the world, allowing him to make his own tyres and ditch the external suppliers he hated being reliant upon.

He christened this town ”Fordlandia”. From the beginning, it was a disaster. His Brazilian workers hated the American food, paltry wages and Ford’s bizarre insistence they observe a prohibition on alcohol. One night, they rioted, forcing the managers to hide in the viper-infested jungle until things settled.

Saw blades designed for Michigan softwoods were useless against Brazilian hardwoods. Bags of cement absorbed the humid air and grew solid before they were opened. Worst of all, the rubber trees were devoured by swarms of insects.

American workers, meanwhile, fell victim to a raft of tropical diseases and parasites. One manager’s maid even had her arm bitten off by a caiman while bathing in a river.

The calamities were so numerous (and frequently comical) that Bryson devotes an entire chapter to the doomed Fordlandia.

Perhaps more than any of his previous books, One Summer turned out quite differently from what the best-selling author imagined. Intended as a dual biography of Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth, it evolved into a rollicking, humorous account of the summer of 1927 in the US.

”I’d always been vaguely fascinated that these two events happened in tandem: Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hitting 60 home runs,” Bryson says.

”Only when I started doing the research did I discover they were part of this amazingly eventful summer.”

It was the period in which television was invented, for instance. Radio came of age and the first ”talking movie” was filmed. The great Mississippi floods were happening, a mad sculptor was carving four presidential heads into Mount Rushmore and gangster Al Capone was at the peak of his powers.

President Calvin Coolidge worked just four hours a day, spending much of his free time napping, while future president Herbert Hoover achieved great humanitarian feats without seeming to actually care much about people. And there were headline-grabbing court trials, from a murder case sparked by a tawdry affair to one potentially involving a grave miscarriage of justice, in which two Italian anarchists were sent to the electric chair.

”The rest of the world was pretty quiet in those months,” Bryson says, ”but America suddenly had these outbursts of activity and a lot of it was quite consequential for the future of the planet.”

None more so, it seems, than Lindbergh’s historic flight from New York to Paris. By any measure, it was a monumental achievement – which is why it is already the subject of countless books and documentaries. But, in Bryson’s capable hands, it becomes a cracking yarn.

We learn, for example, that Lindbergh was not the affable boy next door the media so desperately wanted him to be. ”He came from a completely undemonstrative family, so that probably accounts for a lot of his solitary nature,” Bryson explains.

Indeed, he discovered Lindbergh’s mother shook her son’s hand at bedtime, instead of giving the boy a hug. After his flight, she reluctantly accompanied Lindbergh to his public appearances. Still, the pair refused to show any warmth, despite photographers’ pleas for them to smile or embrace.

Everywhere he went, Lindbergh provoked mass hysteria. Crowds surged and pawed at his aircraft. People screamed and fainted. Even in France, the locals lost their minds. One unfortunate American named Harry Wheeler, who bore a resemblance to Lindbergh, was mistaken for the famous aviator and set upon. Grabbing what they could, a mob of crazed Parisians made off with his coat, belt, tie, one shoe and half his shirt. Such pandemonium would not be seen again until Elvis and the Beatles found fame more than three decades later.

”The world just went beserk,” Bryson says. ”There was serious talk about grooming him for the presidency on the basis of flying an airplane across an ocean. People were treating him as if he were some kind of saviour who had dropped from heaven.”

Reading One Summer, one is struck by how baseless nostalgia for ”the good old days” often is. As Bryson demonstrates, there was no scarcity of crime or scandal in 1927. Then, as now, the public had a strong appetite for sleazy tabloid gossip. Political corruption and judicial injustice were probably worse. Indeed, one could be a respectable public figure and still subscribe to the appallingly racist theory of eugenics.

”There was at least as much ugliness of mood then, as in almost any other period,” Bryson says. ”It was no time at all to be black or Jewish, or a member of any sort of minority.”

One thing he found during his research shocked him more than anything else: a New Yorker cartoon that used the word ”nigger”.

”This is the most sophisticated publication in America, then or now!” he says. ”And you think, ‘God, they could just use that word so casually and jokingly then’.”

In March, Bryson, who grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and now lives in Britain, will tour Australia in March to promote his book. A frequent visitor to our shores, he became a virtual household name with the release in 2000 of his travelogue Down Under.

His travel writing – centred on Britain, the US and Europe – has made him one of the world’s most popular authors. Over the past decade, however, his books have focused on other matters such as science and history.

Many fans wonder if he’ll release another travel book – and why he doesn’t explore, say, the many parts of Asia. But Bryson’s style is to uncover a country’s foibles and give it a good-natured ribbing. Is this approach tricky to apply to developing nations?

”That’s exactly right,” he says. ”I can come to Australia and make jokes about cricket. You’re a big, grown-up country and you can take a bit of teasing. If I started doing that in some Third World country where people are starving, it just sounds brutal.”

Even wealthy nations such as Japan are difficult because of the language barrier. ”The whole book would be about me being mystified by everything and it would become a one-track joke.”

Still, there are English-speaking nations yet to receive the Bryson treatment: Ireland, Canada and New Zealand, to name a few.

”Any of those countries, I’d love to do,” he says.

”I’ve been to New Zealand a number of times, but I’ve never really seen it. When you do a book tour, all you see are airport terminals and radio stations. I want to spend six or eight weeks driving all around New Zealand.

”I might be limited in the sort of places I can write about now, but there’s no question: I’d love to do that sort of thing again.”

■ One Summer: America 1927 is published by Doubleday