One Summer: America, 1927 (73 page)

Albert B. Fall, former secretary of the interior, and Edward Doheny, an oil tycoon, outside the Washington, D.C., courtroom where they stood trial in 1927 for their roles in the Teapot Dome bribery and corruption scandal
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photo credit 36
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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
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photo credit 37
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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
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photo credit 38
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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 twelve days in June of 1927
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photo credit 39
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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
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photo credit 40
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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.”
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photo credit 41
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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
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photo credit 42
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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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photo credit 43
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Automotive titan and anti-Semitic crackpot Henry Ford. His efforts to replace his company’s fabled Model T with a new Model A in 1927 dealt Ford Motor Company a setback from which it never fully recovered
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photo credit 44
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Charles Lindbergh stopped on his cross-country barnstorming tour on August 11 to meet with Henry Ford, who flew with Lindbergh on a short flight in the
Spirit of St. Louis,
claiming to have “handled the stick.”
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photo credit 45
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Henry Ford’s most ambitious, and ultimately foolish, project was Fordlandia, a model American community built in the jungles of Brazil to produce the rubber his cars required reliably and cheaply. The incompetence of his managers and the harsh conditions of the Amazon eventually doomed the venture
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photo credit 46
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