The Heat

Since mid-June, the heat—humid, tropical, inescapable—had pressed down on great areas of the U.S. In the region around the Great Lakes, in New England and the middle Atlantic coast, the hottest summer on record was in the making. It had been equally hot or hotter in the South and parts of the Southwest, where such weather is more normal, but not more bearable. Last week, temperatures pushed even higher.

The burning days & nights tried the tempers of millions. In Detroit during the week, 45,000 automobile workers walked off the job because of "heat strikes." In Philadelphia, gangs of young hoodlums drove the water department crazy by smashing hydrant couplings and thus assuring themselves continuous shower baths. Across the hot belts scores died from heat exhaustion and drowning.

The crowded inhabitants of big cities tried to live cannily. They avoided hot subway gratings and steaming manholes as martens avoid traps; when walking they tried to route themselves past the doors of air-conditioned movies, where they could breath in a little coolness. The touch of a barber's hot towel, or the simple process of swallowing hot coffee, was enough to make a shirt go limp or a woman's make-up shine greasily. In the packed and airless slums, tens of thousands slept on rooftops or fire escapes. The heat seemed even more pitiless out across the farm states, where farmers often worked from sunup to sundown, sweating in the fields or jolting behind the oven-like engine of a tractor.

At week's end, miraculously, there was a respite. A cold air mass from Canada moved across the Northeast, cooling off—at least for a few days—both farm houses and city tenements.