THE front pages of many U.S. newspapers carried a reproduction of a handwritten note from President Calvin Coolidge addressed to the American people. "Christmas," announced the President solemnly, "is not a time or a season but a state of mind." The rest of the news that final week of 1927 was scarcely more exciting. Warren Gamaliel Harding and his wife Florence were reburied in a marble tomb in Marion, Ohio. Mussolini was forced to revalue the Italian lira. Salvage work on the submarine 54, sunk off Provincetown, was delayed by winter storms.
The editors...