Read One Summer: America, 1927 for Free Online

bed and there revealed the jewels that she had reported stolen.
    All eyes turned to Mrs Snyder. She met their gazes uncertainly, then broke down and confessed the crime – but blamed it all on a brute named Judd Gray, her secret lover. Mrs Snyder was placed under arrest, a search was begun for Judd Gray, and the newspaper-reading public of America was about to become uncommonly excited.
     
    The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether – very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained for most people the principal method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than ten thousand separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild. Both were immediately successful. Authors were venerated in a way that seems scarcely possible now. When Sinclair Lewis returned home to Minnesota to work on his novel Elmer Gantry (published in the spring of 1927), people came from miles around just to look at him.
    Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leapt 500 per cent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, the New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential. Founded by two former Yale classmates, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, it was very popular but wildly inaccurate. It described Charles Nungesser, for instance, as having ‘lost an arm, a leg, a chin’ during the war, which was not merely incorrect in all particulars but visibly so since Nungesser could be seen every day in newspaper photographs with a full set of limbs and an incontestably bechinned face. Time wasnoted for its repetitious devotion to certain words – ‘swart’, ‘nimble’, ‘gimlet-eyed’ – and to squashed neologisms like ‘cinemaddict’ and ‘cinemactress’. It also had a fondness for odd, distorted phrases, so that ‘in the nick of time’ became, without embarrassment, ‘in time’s nick’. In particular it had a curious Germanic affection for inverting normal word order and packing as many nouns, adjectives and adverbs as possible into a sentence before bringing in a verb – or as Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, ‘Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.’ Despite all their up-to-the-minute swagger, Luce and Hadden were deeply conservative. They would not, for instance, employ women for any job above the level of secretary or office assistant.
    Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day – or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three. More than this, in many cities readers could now get their news from a new, revolutionary type of publication that completely changed people’s expectations of what daily news should be – the tabloid. Tabloids focused on crime, sport and celebrity gossip, and in so doing gave all three an importance considerably beyond any they had enjoyed before. A study in 1927 showed that tabloids devoted between a quarter and a third of their space to crime reports, up to ten times more than the serious papers did. It was because of their influence that the quiet but messy murder of a man like Albert Snyder could become national news.
    The tabloid, both as a format and as a way of distilling news down to its salacious essence, had been around for a quarter of a century in England, but no one had thought to try it in the United States until two