One Summer

Under the leadership of a flabby junior high school dropout named David C. Stephenson, the Klan especially thrived in Indiana. The state boasted 350,000 members; in some communities up to half the white men were fee-paying Klansmen. Fired up by Stephenson and his minions, Hoosiers became peculiarly receptive to wild anti-Catholic rumors. Many in th

they built a new town from scratch and called it Shaker Heights. Shaker Heights was the first planned dormitory community in America, and as such it became the model on which nearly all other suburbs were built.

The race was scheduled for August but was overtaken by events considerably before then. On June 29, two army fliers successfully flew in a Fokker from Oakland to Oahu in twenty-six hours. It was an extraordinary achievement—hitting Hawaii was a real feat of navigation—and the two pilots, Lieutenant Lester J. Maitland and Lieutenant Albert F. Hegenb

When the war was over, Borglum persuaded the United Daughters of the Confederacy to let him carve a tableau four hundred feet high and a quarter of a mile long into the face of Stone

At a time when gold reserves were the basic marker of national wealth, America held half the world’s supply, or as much as all the rest of the world put together. No other country in history had ever been this affluent,

exactly the moment that Commander Byrd and his team were splashing down at Ver-sur-Mer. Two weeks after the Maitland-Hegenberger flight, two more pilots, Ernest Smith and Emory Bronte, also flew from Oakland to Hawaii—though only just. Virtually out of fuel, they crash-landed into a tree on Molokai but somehow emerged unscathed. They had beaten Mai

Nonetheless, when given the new Stanford version of the Binet-Simon test, which eventually became the modern IQ test (and it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are, but how stupid),

When students at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago (named for Robert McCormick’s grandfather) were asked in 1927 to name the ten most outstanding people in the world, they chose Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, the golfer Bobby Jo

“We are fighting three enemies—Germany, Austria and Drink,” asserted Kellogg’s, the cornflakes company, in a patriotic ad that ran just after America joined the war.