Key Events of 1927: Lindbergh, Lindy Hop, and the Year Everything Happened

The year 1927 is, by almost any measure, the most concentrated year of the Roaring Twenties. In a single twelve-month span, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, The Jazz Singer ended the silent film era, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, the Ford Model T was retired, and the Mississippi River flooded 27,000 square miles. The pace of news was so relentless that 1927 has been the subject of several whole books. To see the larger pattern, see the timeline of the 1920s; to compare with the other pivotal years, and the major events of 1925.

Lindbergh Crosses the Atlantic

The single most famous event of the year was the transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh. On the morning of May 20, 1927, the 25-year-old airmail pilot took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island in a single-engine Ryan-built monoplane called the Spirit of St. Louis, bound for Paris. He had no radio, no parachute, and a single compass; he carried five sandwiches, two canteens of water, and 451 gallons of fuel. Lindbergh flew through the night, navigating by dead reckoning, and encountered fog, ice, and exhaustion — at one point he climbed out of his open cockpit onto the wing to clear a build-up of ice. He landed at Le Bourget Aerodrome outside Paris at 10:22 p.m. local time on May 21, 33 hours and 30 minutes after takeoff, in front of a crowd of an estimated 150,000 people. He had flown 3,610 miles, alone and nonstop.

The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man in the world overnight. He received the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Orteig Prize of $25,000 that had been offered in 1919 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. The transatlantic flight inaugurated the age of commercial aviation in the 1920s, and within a generation ocean-crossing air travel had become a normal feature of international life.

The Jazz Singer Ends the Silent Era

On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, premiered at the Warner Theatre on Broadway. The film starred Al Jolson, the most famous entertainer in America, as a cantor’s son who defies his father to become a jazz singer. The film included a few minutes of synchronized dialogue and several musical numbers, and the audience response was ecstatic. The Jazz Singer was the highest-grossing film in America up to that point and won the first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1929. The film’s release set off a panic in Hollywood: within two years the silent film was essentially dead, and the motion picture industry in the 1920s was completely rewritten. The full transition is the subject of our Golden Age of Hollywood page.

Babe Ruth Hits 60

In the 1927 season, the most famous baseball player in America had his greatest year. George Herman “Babe” Ruth, the 32-year-old outfielder for the New York Yankees, hit 60 home runs — breaking his own record of 59, set in 1921, and establishing a mark that would stand as the major-league record until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. The 1927 Yankees, called “Murderers’ Row”, are widely considered the greatest baseball team in history. The lineup included Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel, Earle Combs, and Tony Lazzeri, and the pitching staff was led by Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock. The Yankees won 110 games and swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series, establishing the dynasty that would dominate baseball for the next two decades. The full story is in our Babe Ruth and the Golden Age of Baseball page.

The Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti

On August 23, 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed by electrocution at Charlestown State Prison in Boston, ending one of the most controversial cases in American legal history. The two Italian immigrants and self-described anarchists had been convicted in 1921 of the murder of a paymaster and his guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in April 1920. The case had attracted international protest; Albert Einstein, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, and Arturo Toscanini were among those who publicly opposed the verdict. A committee headed by Felix Frankfurter published a 1927 report arguing that the trial had been unfair. The executions produced international outrage, and a Massachusetts governor officially declared them wrongfully convicted in 1977.

The Lindy Hop

In 1927, a new dance was born at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, the most famous dance hall in America. The dance was called the Lindy Hop, named (according to one account) after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, which was in the news at the time. The Lindy Hop combined elements of the breakaway with the Charleston and the foxtrot, and it required both partners to be athletic, inventive, and able to improvise. The dance quickly spread from Harlem to ballrooms across the country, and it remains one of the most popular swing dances in the world. The Lindy Hop was a product of the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age music scene.

The Ford Model T Retires

On May 26, 1927, the Ford Motor Company produced the last Model T, ending the longest production run in American automotive history. The first Model T had been built in 1908, and over the next nineteen years more than 15 million had been sold — a record that would not be broken until the Volkswagen Beetle in 1972. The car that Henry Ford had promised to build — “a motor car for the great multitude” — had transformed American life. The Model T was replaced by the Model A, which Ford announced on December 2, 1927. The retirement of the Model T marked the end of an era for the American automobile industry and the beginning of a new one.

Mount Rushmore and the Mississippi Flood

On October 4, 1927, Gutzon Borglum began drilling into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The monument, which would depict the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, would not be completed until 1941 and remains one of the most visited tourist sites in the United States.

The same year, the most destructive river flood in American history began in the summer of 1927, when heavy rains in the central Mississippi Valley caused the river and its tributaries to overflow. The flood submerged 27,000 square miles of land across seven states, displaced roughly 630,000 people, and killed more than 250. The flooding was particularly severe in the Mississippi Delta, where African American sharecroppers were the most affected. The flood produced one of the largest relief operations in American history to that point, and it led to the Flood Control Act of 1928. The displacement of Black sharecroppers also accelerated the Great Migration to the urban North.

Television, the Academy, and the Transatlantic Phone

On April 7, 1927, Herbert Hoover — then the Secretary of Commerce and soon-to-be President — became the first person to be televised over a long-distance telephone line, in a demonstration by AT&T Bell Labs that transmitted his image from Washington, D.C., to New York. The transmission was crude but proved that television was technically feasible; commercial television would not become widespread until after the Second World War. On May 11, 1927, Louis B. Mayer and 36 other Hollywood figures founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which would begin handing out the Academy Awards the following year. And on January 7, 1927, the first commercial transatlantic telephone call was placed between New York and London — a major step in the integration of international communications.

A Year That Held the Whole Decade

The year 1927 was, in a sense, the Roaring Twenties in concentrated form: a year of triumph and tragedy, of technological breakthrough and human failure, of celebrity and mass culture. The events of 1927 were also the last great moments of the decade. The stock market would peak in September 1929, the economy would enter a long depression, and the country would be transformed again. But 1927 is the year that holds the Jazz Age in amber.