One Summer: America, 1927

Before air travel became available to the masses, pilots had limited options to exercise their skills outside of the context of war. Many delivered mail or performed stunts for crowds. These stunt performances were called barnstorms. Barnstorming included stunts such as loops, stalls, and even pilots leaving their seats to do things like walk across their plane’s wings and wave to crowds below. These were demonstrations of both the skills of the pilots as well as the reliability of the planes themselves. Many famous pilots performed in this way, especially in the early 1920s. Barnstorming was common at events like county or agricultural fairs or special events dedicated wholly to aviation.

As more professions opened for pilots—namely increased mail delivery and eventually commercial flying—barnstorming declined in popularity. Another contribution to the pastime’s decline was the accident rate. Increasingly dangerous stunts performed solely for entertainment meant increased rates of highly publicized and visible accidents that often ended in crashes and deaths. Its heyday was the 1920s, but barnstorming had mostly ceased by the mid 1930s. It is an important aspect of the One Summer narrative because, in 1927, it was at its height of popularity. For aviators like Lindbergh, barnstorming was one of the only viable uses of their skills. The culture of barnstorming—the feats and their celebrity—indicates why Lindbergh and his contemporaries would have been willing to attempt cross-continental flights.

Eugenics is the study and practice of manipulating human gene pools for optimal offspring breeding. It is essentially strategic mating for humans. What qualifies as superior and inferior traits, however, is subjective. Eugenicists—those interested in or committed to developing and implementing eugenics practices—identified desirable traits without scientific backing. In the US, a bigoted ruling class valued white (Anglo-Saxon or “Nordic”), able-bodied, Protestant people above all others. Racism, classism, and anti-immigrant sentiment shaped eugenics in the United States, but it remained very popular in the mainstream and in academic circles until the Holocaust revealed the logical extremes of eugenicist policies.

Some of the most devastating impacts of the eugenics movement that surface in the book came from implementation efforts. Thousands of women—disproportionately poor women or women of color—suffered forced sterilization because a state official or doctor deemed them unworthy of parenthood. Many women did not even know they had undergone sterilization procedures because they were performed under the guise of unrelated operations. Eugenics became a way to promote white supremacy and control non-white bodies. Bryson’s coverage of eugenics underscores the more troubling aspects of a decade usually regarded with romanticism.