So as July dawned in America—in the week that Richard Byrd and his team splashed down in France, that New York suffered its first heat wave, that Calvin Coolidge celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday by donning cowboy apparel, that Charles Lindbergh took off for Ottawa, that Henry Ford’s minions prepared his apology to Jews, and that the world’s

Though the espionage and sedition laws were intended only as wartime measures, matters actually worsened with peace. The return home of two million job-seeking soldiers and the simultaneous dismantling of the wartime economy gave America a severe recession. Racial tensions erupted into riots in two dozen cities where blacks had moved in search of

Almost thirty years after his death, in 2003, it emerged that Lindbergh had had a far more complicated private life than previously thought.

His first action on reelection was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theater owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the city’s institutions of any works that were less than “100 percent American.” Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to

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.

According to further reports, Lindbergh also had simultaneous relationships with Brigitte Hesshaimer’s sister, Marietta, by whom he had two more children, and with a German secretary, identified only as Valeska, with whom he had yet two more children.

The national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced.

Several cities elected Klan mayors. Oklahoma and Oregon had Klan governors. In Oregon the Klan nearly succeeded in getting Catholic schools outlawed, and in many places Catholics were forbidden membership on school or hospital boards, and Catholic-owned businesses were boycotted.

The Klan