One Summer: America, 1927 (31 page)

The four bankers concluded their meeting on July 7 and immediately traveled to Washington to inform selected members of the Federal Reserve Board of their decision. It was breathtakingly audacious of Strong to presume to instruct the Federal Reserve on how to conduct itself, and four of the reserve banks—in Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia—refused to go along, partly in petulance no doubt, but also in the legitimate belief that it was madness to encourage more borrowing with market values so high already. But the Federal Reserve Board, in an unprecedented action, overruled the disobedient banks and instructed them to fall into line.

The cut in interest rates had an incendiary effect—it was “the spark that lit the forest fire,” in the words of the writer and economist Liaquat Ahamed. The result was the Great Market Bubble of 1928. Over the next year, stocks would more than double from already irrational heights, and the volume of brokers’ loans to investors would rise by more than $1 billion to a tottering and unsound $4.5 billion—all fueled by the patently deluded belief that stocks could keep on rising forever.

For the moment, however, few outside the banking system saw any cause for worry. Among politicians, only Herbert Hoover was immediately exercised—and he was furious. He called Strong “a mental annex to Europe” (and would later accuse him of “crimes worse than murder”) and wrote to the Federal Reserve Board predicting that the rash cut in interest rates could well precipitate a depression. Separately, he urged Coolidge to do something to reverse the action. Coolidge declined in the belief that the market was doing fine—his trusted treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, had recently assured the world: “The stock market seems to be going on in very orderly fashion, and I see no evidence of
over-speculation”—and anyway the Federal Reserve was an independent body whose judgments were not his to overrule. And so, as usual, Coolidge did nothing, and instead returned to the happy business of catching trout. The Great Depression would be for someone else to deal with.

*
In fact, the mantra as Coué gave it in his book was “Every day in every
respect
I am getting better and better.” It was Coué’s clients in America who autosuggested their way to the snappier version.

16

At last the nation was warming up and drying out. In New York, the temperature rose toward 80 degrees as the long Fourth of July weekend began. The first heat wave of summer was under way.

Heat transformed city life. It created an air of shared misery that sparked conversations between strangers. For once everyone had something to talk about. Life became communal in ways that the world has mostly forgotten. People sat on stoops. Barbers brought chairs outside and shaved their customers beneath a shady tree or awning. Windows everywhere were lifted wide—in offices, apartments, hotels, libraries, hospitals, schools—so all the noises of the city drifted through wherever you were. The ocean roar of distant traffic, the cries of children at play, an argument in the next building—all these and a million other sounds played over you as you worked or read or tried fitfully to sleep. Today we go indoors to escape the commotion of the city. In the 1920s much of it came inside with you.

Because the Fourth of July fell on a Monday, many workers enjoyed a three-day weekend, a marvelous novelty at a time when most people were still getting used to the idea of having
any
kind of weekend. The average workweek in America had fallen from sixty hours at the start of the decade to forty-eight hours in 1927, so there was much more leisure
time to be had, but the prospect of a three-day break was still rare enough to be thrilling. Nearly everyone seemed determined to try to make the most of it. By Friday, all trains were packed and Pullman reservations were sold out for days ahead. Two million people were forecast to enter or leave New York during the July 4 period, the
Times
reported. The Pennsylvania Railroad laid on an extra 235 trains to help move the throngs, and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad promised to make similar efforts for those heading north to Cape Cod and Maine.

Closer to home, Coney Island reported a million visitors on July 3, the highest number ever recorded there, and the beaches of the Rockaways and Staten Island absorbed perhaps half a million more—though oddly, officials reported, Staten Island’s own residents were mostly boarding ferries for New Jersey, where Asbury Park, Long Beach, and Atlantic City all said they had larger crowds than they had ever seen before. At Atlantic City, the Boardwalk was solid with people from early morning to late night on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Those who couldn’t get out of the city did what they could to stay cool. Many went to picture houses that were pleasantly air-conditioned—though
air-conditioned
as a word didn’t quite exist yet. It would make its first recorded appearance, in the Reno, Nevada,
Evening Gazette
, the following month. For the moment, buildings that were artificially freshened were air-cooled, not air-conditioned.

For the more thrifty, open-sided trolleys ran on Broadway, and for a nickel people could ride them for as long as they liked. Hundreds did. At night, many people lugged mattresses onto fire escapes or rooftops and slept there. Large numbers went to Central Park with blankets and pillows and camped beneath the stars. The playwright Arthur Miller, then an eleven-year-old boy growing up on 110th Street, years later recalled the surreal experience of walking through an open-air dormitory: “With a couple of other kids, I would go across to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, beside their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh by the lake.”

Those who couldn’t sleep often went for long walks, or for drives if they had a car. On the night of July 3, ten people from a boardinghouse in South Orange, New Jersey—six adults and four children—packed into a car and went out for a drive “just to cool off,” in the words of the car’s owner, James De Cicco. One of the passengers, Mrs. Catherine Damiano, was just learning to drive and asked if she could take the wheel to practice. De Cicco readily yielded it to her. Unfortunately Mrs. Damiano stalled the car on railroad tracks just as a train from the Pennsylvania Railroad—one of those being hurried to the city to help shift all the extra travelers—barreled through. The train struck the car at 40 miles an hour. Mrs. Damiano and all four of her children were killed instantly. Two other adults also perished. Two more were seriously injured. Only Mr. De Cicco managed to jump clear. The seven deaths were thought to be the most ever in a one-car accident. Mrs. Damiano’s unfortunate husband, who had a night job and didn’t know that his wife and children had gone out, learned the next morning that he had lost his entire family.

All this, it is worth noting, was with the nighttime temperature in the seventies. Before the month was out, both temperature and humidity would climb to far more punishing heights over much of the country, and many more would die.

The warm weather and holiday spirits brought huge crowds to Yankee Stadium on Monday for a Fourth of July doubleheader between the Yankees and the Washington Senators. Seventy-four thousand people—more than had ever attended a regular season baseball game anywhere—packed into the stadium, and thousands more had to be turned away.

The weeks of bad weather that had caused so many flight postponements at Roosevelt Field wrought similar havoc with baseball schedules that summer. The Yankees played 18 doubleheaders in 1927—4 in six days in June alone—but none would be more important than this Fourth of July matchup. The Yankees had hit their stride in June, going 21 and 6 for the month and opening up a lead of 9½ games over the
rest of the league, but now the Senators were heating up, too. They were hitting the ball well—five of their starting lineup were batting over .300—and had just won ten straight to move into second place ahead of the White Sox. They arrived in New York in a buoyant mood, confident that the series could be a turning point in their season. It was—but in the wrong direction.

The Yankees killed them. In the most humblingly lopsided doubleheader defeat ever meted out, New York won 12–1 and 21–1. The Yankees hit as if at batting practice, smacking 9 doubles, 4 triples, and 5 home runs—37 hits and 69 total bases in all. The team batting average for the day was .468. Every Yankee batter but one, pitchers included, got at least one hit, and six had four or more. Even the light-hitting, seldom-used rookie Julie Wera, who played in only 43 games in two short seasons in the major leagues, hit a two-run home run—the only one of his career. (“Julie,” incidentally, was short for Julian.) The only player who didn’t hit was pitcher Wilcy Moore, who was widely held to be the very worst hitter in baseball. He went 0-for-4 in the second game, but compensated by pitching nine complete innings, scattering ten hits and giving up one run. This followed a similarly assured performance by George Pipgras, who gave up one run on nine hits in a complete game in the opener—but who also went 2-for-4 at the plate. It was a good day for every player in pinstripes.

“Never have pennant challengers been so completely shot to pieces,” observed the
New York World
. “I wish the season was over,” said the Senators’ first baseman, Joe Judge. In fact, in any meaningful sense it was. The Yankees extended their lead to 11½ games with the two victories. They would beat the Senators again the next day and in six of their seven remaining games after that. No other team would come close to threatening the Yankees again.

All this was quite unexpected. Nearly everyone forecast the Philadelphia Athletics to win the American League pennant in 1927. The Yankees, all agreed, were past their best. Ruth, for a start, was thirty-two years old and demonstrably paunchy, and the pitching staff was even older. Dutch Ruether and Herb Pennock were both thirty-three. Bob Shawkey
and Urban Shocker were thirty-six. The average age of the team was over twenty-eight. Only five of the players on the roster had been born in the twentieth century. Shocker was in such bad shape that he would actually die before the end of the next season.

Yet the 1927 Yankees would prove to be one of the greatest teams of all time—possibly the very greatest. Seven members (counting manager Miller Huggins) would be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an extraordinary proportion for one team. Rarely has a team had such depth.

It is generally futile and foolish to compare athletic performances across decades, but what can be said is that when such rash assessments have been ventured the baseball team that most often comes out on top is the ’27 Yankees. It is certainly fair to say that they were an exceptional bunch, both as players and as people. Among the more memorable were the following:

Waite Hoyt
, a right-handed pitcher, was called “Schoolboy” because he’d come to the big leagues when he was just seventeen. He was now in his tenth season in the majors, and he was having one of his best ever years. He would finish the season with a record of 22 and 7, and would be at or near the top of the league in five categories for pitching—wins, winning percentage, earned-run average (ERA), complete games, and innings pitched.

Hoyt’s private life was no less memorable. He was the son of a well-known vaudeville performer, and was a talented singer and performer in his own right—good enough to have made a living on the stage had he chosen to. Hoyt’s father-in-law owned a funeral parlor in New Jersey, and Hoyt helped him out by fetching bodies from morgues in Manhattan and bringing them back to New Jersey to be prepared for burial. Sometimes, it appears, he would leave a cadaver in his car at Yankee Stadium during a game, then complete the delivery afterward. Hoyt himself was studying in the off-season to be a mortician.

Urban Shocker
, also a pitcher, had been born Urbain Jacques Shockcor to a French Canadian family living in Cleveland. He was something of a drunkard, but then many ballplayers in those days were. He had a permanent crook in one of the fingers of his throwing hand, owing to an injury in his younger years, which gave him an unusual grip and greatly improved his slow curveball. He was also one of the seventeen pitchers allowed to continue throwing a spitball after 1919. He was the third-highest-salaried player on the team, after Ruth and Pennock, at $13,500.

Shocker pitched thirteen years in the major leagues and never had a losing season. In 1927 he had a record of 18 wins and 6 losses. He had the second-best-winning percentage in the league, second-fewest walks per batter faced, and third-best ERA. What is truly extraordinary about all this is that he was dying as he did it. Shocker lived with a heart condition so severe that he had to sleep sitting up. (Some books say standing up, but that seems unlikely.) Photographs of him from 1927 show an ashen figure looking at least ten years more than his age. By the early fall, he would be too ill to keep his place in the starting rotation. Within a year he would be dead.

Herb Pennock
, pitcher, came from a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia and was known to his teammates as the Squire of Kennett Square. In the off-season he hunted foxes, bred chrysanthemums, and collected antiques. A left-hander, he spent twenty-two years in baseball, but by 1927 he was coming to the end of his career. After a game, he was often so sore that he couldn’t raise his arm to comb his own hair. In 1927, Pennock was the second-highest-paid player on the team, with a salary of $17,500. He was later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Wilcy Moore
, pitcher, was the most cheerfully improbable member of the team. A rookie, he was at least thirty years old, though
possibly considerably older: no one knew, and he wouldn’t say. A farmboy from Hollis, Oklahoma, he had been a journeyman pitcher in the minor leagues for years, but in 1925 he broke his wrist and that somehow changed his delivery for the better. Although he occasionally started (as on the Fourth of July), he served mostly as the team “fireman”—a relief pitcher who came in and closed down the opposition with men on base and the situation precarious. The team called him Doc because he specialized “in treating ailing ball games,” as one reporter put it. In 1927 he was brilliant at it, with an ERA of 2.28 in 213 innings. He never had another year like it.