By 1921 the city of Los Angeles began to seriously grow, and the expansion was not simply due to the arrival of performers and extras and all manner of craftsmen that are required to launch a film production - but the city was also bringing in the sorts necessary to support a wealthy urban environment. Every thriving city needs a support system, and Hollywood imported tailors, milliners, chefs, architects and various other tastemakers who in turn attracted realtors, contractors, merchants and entrepreneurs.
In the attached article, Metropolitan Opera diva Geraldine Farrar (1882 - 1967) relays her experiences as a film actress in "The Hell Cat" (1918) and "The Turn of the Wheel" (1918), and boldly declares that there is a big difference between acting in an opera and acting for the screen (who knew?).
"There are a hundred intimate expressions of the eyes, the mouth, the hands, that can only be transmitted through the camera, and the strong and sometimes merciless light of the projection machine. And this is what the motion picture actress must clearly and everlastingly keep in mind: she is acting for an audience which is near enough to detect any insincerity of feeling or any sham in make-up."
Click here to read about physical perfection during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The following is an excerpt from the review of the New York production of the 1921 play, "A Bill of Divorcement" by Clemence Dane (born Winifred Ashton 1888 - 1965). With much enthusiasm, the reviewer wrote:
"We know of no better expression of the creed of the new generation than that which Clemence Dane has drawn up...".
What followed was a very short soliloquy which beautifully summed up not only the philosophy of the modern woman, but the philosophy of much the Twentieth Century.
These days the Bush family is not much in vogue, but that was not always the case.
Attached is a small notice from a 1921 issue of VOGUE MAGAZINE announcing the marriage of George Herbert Walker's daughter, Dorthy, to a Mr. Prescott Sheldon Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine. From this union would spring two U.S. Presidents, one Florida governor, and one Chief Executive of the Municipal Opera Association.
Contained within the confines of the attached PDF is an excerpt from the review of the New York production of the 1921 play, A Bill of Divorcement by Clemence Dane (born Winifred Ashton 1888-1965) - with much enthusiasm, the reviewer wrote:
"We know of no better expression of the creed of the new generation than that which Clemence Dane has drawn up...".
What followed was a very short soliloquy which beautifully summed up not only the philosophy of the modern woman, but the philosophy of much the Twentieth Century.
The attached essay reviews a colossal history written by a veteran of the U.S. First Infantry Division, Captain Shipley Thomas: The History of the A. E. F.
- for those who are looking for some knowledge concerning what the American Army was up to during the last six months of the War (it was bloodiest period) the review makes for a good read.
Click here to read about the high desertion rate within the U.S. Army of 1910.
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
One hundred years ago the U.S. Government processed immigrants through a quota system - entry would be granted if the applicants arrived before the quota amount arriving from their country had not been reached - and if they passed their physical examination. The immigration agents did not accept one nationality for citizenship officially while permitting hundreds of thousands from this same country to reside illegally, as is the practice today. The attached column pertains to how unfair the quota system was and how it tended to break-up families. President Harding's response to this issue is quoted.
"...many would-be immigrants arriving at the port of New York had been refused admission and been sent home again, because they had happened to arrive a few hours after their country's legal quota for the month..."
Attached is a 1921 account of the Hampton Institute; it's past, present and future is entirely outlined in this magazine article that was written by a celebrated journalist of the time, Mr. Talcott Williams (1849 - 1928).
When the smoke cleared following the close of that dreadful unpleasantness that spanned the years 1914 to 1918, there remained much work to do; bodies to be buried, cities to be rebuilt. Men and nations prepared to face the new realities that came with the new social structure; many weighty subjects had to be addressed that had been ignored for so long a time. The most pressing of these topics was deciding which was the proper combination of white waistcoat and dinner jacket? In an age of industrial slaughter, which was more suitable: double-breasted or single-breasted? and what of ties, shoes and overcoats?
Even as early as 1921 the world was noticing that in the U.S., that old Yankee mantra about "avoiding foreign entanglements" (a distortion of Washington's Farewell Address) was being updated with a disclaimer: "avoid foreign entanglements except when oil is involved".
Having put the Prussians in their place three years earlier, oil had become the new peace-time obsession for the Americans and their British ally - but it was to be the bane in their relationship: "the Anglo-American irritant" as Sydney Brooks remarked in FORTNIGHT REVIEW. With car manufacturers filling orders to placate a booming consumer market, the Brits pumped oil in Mesopotamia, the Americans in Texas while the oil companies from both locals vied for the rights to explore Latin America and the Caribbean.
The excitement that was 1920's Harlem can clearly be felt in this article by the journalist and Congregational minister, Rollin Lynde Hartt:
"Greatest Negro city in the world, it boasts magnificent Negro churches, luxurious Negro apartment houses, vast Negro wealth, and a Negro population of 130,000..."
Whether Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey (1871 - 1948) was overwhelmed by a sense of humanity or whether he simply wished to reduce the northern flow of African-Americans from his state in the Great Migration - we'll never know, but the fact stands that in late April, 1921, the Governor stood before the State Committe on Race Relations and spoke of 135 instances in which Black citizens were unjustly treated by White Georgians (The Georgia Government document pertaining to his address can be read here).
The first Soviet famine lasted from 1919 through 1923; some historians have placed the death toll as high as five million:
"[Lenin] is held responsible for the policy which has brought about a consumption of so great a proportion of the seed wheat that the fields cannot be sown. For the first time since Bolsheviki gained power, says the Berlin "Lokalanzeiger", Lenin is a cipher."
Click here to read about the blackmail and extortion tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression...
"Old Dame Nature abhors war as much as we do. When the troops left the battlefields, she covered them over with stuble, poppies and weeds... There were no trenches and certainly no shell holes... Two years have passed and now the battlefields are harvest lands once more."
A similar article about touring the old trench line can be read here.
This article is made up of the musings of various editors, university presidents and social reformers discussing the cultural relevance of the Flapper and the cultural changes she has brought forth.
A magazine review of the classic American World War One novel, Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos.
"This book is vivid, but not sentimental. It does not contain a description of a single battle. What it does describe is the transformation of minds and bodies under the stress of war."
Attached is an illustrated magazine advertisement from a polite, middle class American periodical which depicts two trim bucks in the full flower of youth wearing their under-lovelies so that all the internet gawkers can get a sense of how wildly uncomfortable men's underwear used to be.
Click here to read about the introduction of the T shirt to the world of fashion.
H.L. Mencken's (1880 - 1956) short review of Joseph Conrad's (1882 - 1941) collection of essays, entitled Notes on Life and Letters . The book contained Conrad's thoughts on such subjects as the sinking of 'Titanic' to the writings of Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Daudet and Ivan Turgenev were all touched upon in this collection of essays.
"'The public school system will become a vast political machine.' And this machine, it is charged, 'will give a Federal Administration the opportunity of creating an educational autocracy, really endangering the liberty of thought and information, which is a basic right of the people.'"
This article pertains to a bill that was before the Congress one hundred years ago that proposed the creation of a "Department of Education". The bill was defeated. The proposed legislation was enthusiastically supported by the National Education Association.
"No liberty of the press exists in Russia and so none but a poet recognized by the Government can get his verses published... In justice to Russian letters it must be said that all talented Russian authors have abstained from writing, or at any rate, from publishing their works during the rule of the proletariat, so that only the official poets, the literati hired by the Government, have their say."
The only Soviet-approved poet they single out for derision is Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930), who is quoted liberally.
As many of the readers in the OldMagazineArticles.com audience have figured out, the purpose of this site is to allow the past to represent itself -- warts and all, and few articles make manifest this policy better than this 1921 article which reported on the efforts of an appropriately forgotten scientist from the University of Virginia, Dr. George Oscar Ferguson. Ferguson was the author of a project that somehow measured the intelligence of African Americans and White Americans and concluded that his:
"psychological study of the Negro indicates that he will never be the mental equal of the white race."
The fashion editors who presided over the very young VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE made an effort to keep pace with the dramatic changes taking place in the design of ladies hats and wraps for 1921. The attached article is a case in point.
"Ten million people a day go to the movies in the United States, but how many of them know who made the first movie? The Noes have it. The man who made the first motion-picture, as we know it today, is C. Francis Jenkins (1867 - 1934). Many [actresses] who have not been 'in pictures' a month are better known."
C. Francis Jenkins was also one of the brainiacs who contributed his talent to the invention of television.
In 1921 a Kyoto Bible school was challenged by a neighboring Buddhist temple. The confrontation did not involve the finer points of theology (not openly, anyway) but which of the two tribes was superior at baseball. It was a Hell of a game.
The uncredited foreign correspondent made it known within the opening paragraphs that the Kyoto Buddhists were irked by the spread of Christianity in that region of Japan and chose to deploy any means at their disposal to gain some sort of advantage.
Three years into the Soviet experiment, the ruling Bolsheviks were finding it difficult to win the 'hearts and minds' of the proletarian masses they so deeply loved (but refused to feed).
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.
Attached is a 1921 account of the anti-colonial struggles waged by the forty-eight year old Mahatma Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi (1869 - 1948). This well-illustrated article from THE INDEPENDENT touched on Gandhi's popularity among the Indian people of all faiths, his various boycotts and acts of non-cooperation as well as comments made by his admiring British adversaries.
After the slaughter of the First World War, the Christian Churches were under heavy scrutiny for essentially serving as "enablers" in each of the individual combatant nations - failing utterly to bring an end to the violence. In their monthly collaboration, "Repition Generale", George Jean Nathan (1882 - 1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956) launched a broadside at the Christian Bishops for their elite, "bullet-proof" status in the world.
At 11:00 a.m., November 11, 1918, an American woman volunteer was toiling away at her Service of Supply base in Tours when peace broke out all over the place. When she was asked to recall that moment three years later for the editors of THE AMERICAN LEGION WEEKLY - she wrote down the attached verses -
When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation's first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print. He wasn't blathering on about the proletariat or the bourgeoisie but rather musing about his pastimes and dreams for the future.
"On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. 'Do you really read it?' I asked. 'I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,' he said.'Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn't know where to find them.'"
Written in a playful spirit, an anonymous Doughboy tells the tale of his return to the old trench lines in order to conduct tours of the A.E.F. battlefields for that morbid class of souls we know call "death tourists".
A second article on trench tours of the Twenties can be read here
Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn't possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.
This article from THE SMART SET was published at a time when America was marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan arrival at Cape Cod and written by H.L. Mencken with his characteristic sense of hopelessness, this small piece remarks that (up to that point in time) immigrants to America were all cut from the same Puritan cloth. The Puritan has been a reoccurring figure in America
"and will not die out...until the delusion of moral perfection is lost and forgotten".
Although this VOGUE MAGAZINE article was written long before the need was ever created to discuss "e-mail etiquette" or "the proper application for Velcro in custom tailoring", many of these tribal maxims in Social Washington (both official and non) are still adhered to, especially in so far as White House functions are concerned. This article summarizes in a mere three columns the social conventions of Washington D.C. in 1921 and it covers the rules that the First Lady and the Vice-President's wife were expected to abide by as well as the proper manner of accepting White House invitations.
"The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is not invited to dine with an Ambassador, or a foreign Minister, or the Secretary of State, because their relative rank has never been established."
The article reads much like any rule book, but it will introduce you to a local deity whom the idolatresses of "The Washington Social Register" have long prostrated before: the Washington Hostess.
Click here to read an article about social Washington during the Depression.
A former American prisoner of war recalled the American flag that he and his fellow prisoners had fashioned from Bull Durham and Lucky Strike bags the day they heard that the Germans had quit.
A report on the California Supreme Court of 1921 which saw fit to overturn a piece of legislation that mandated an alien poll tax.
The tax had been passed into law just one year earlier and was found to be in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Attached is a 1921 account of the Hampton Institute; it's past, present and future is entirely outlined in this magazine article that was written by a celebrated journalist of the time, Mr. Talcott Williams (1849 - 1928).
This is a brief editorial from 1921 that pointed out how amazing and promising pre-war Germany once was and then remarks how far off the mark the nation had fallen since the war ended:
• Her empire dismantled.
• Occupied by alien armies.
• Worthless currency.
• Widespread despair.
Click here to read about Anti-Semitism in W.W. I Germany.
Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.
A 1921 report on the state that would not go dry: New York.
"When New York wants Prohibition it will have it. So long as New York doesn't want Prohibition there will be wholesale lawbreaking to avoid it."
- The New York World
It was estimated that there were as many as two million empty seats around the collective family dinner tables in Post World War One Britain. Such an absence of young men could not help but lead to a new social arrangement:
"England is the great human laboratory of our generation - England with her surplus of two million women, her restless, well-equipped, unsatisfied women".
The deans who presided over Literary Digest made this article their lead piece, so urgent was the sensation that an onslaught of vengeful modernist women, so fleet of foot and irreverently unhampered by hanging hems and confining corsets, were approaching their New York offices as their first act in disassembling the patriarchy.
Attached is a book review of what was described as the first book of it's kind: a compilation of assorted recollections by Imperial German officers of their years spent in captivity at the officer's prisoner of war camp at Skipton in Yorkshire.
Click here to learn how U.S. Army intelligence interrogated German POWs.
"Sir Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934), the noted composer, recently presided at the opening of the new headquarters of a gramophone company in London. Elgar is a great believer in the mechanical reproduction of music, and always conducts for records of his own works."
"What musicians want," he said, "is more listeners."
An unnamed art critic writing for the British magazine SPECTATOR gave his back-hand to Wyndham Lewis, the father of Vorticism. Prefering the artist's drawings to his paintings, the ink-stained wretch opined:
"The point might also be raised whether Mr. Wyndham Lewis should ever use oil paint. It is a medium which he seems to have little capacity and no sympathy..."
American journalist Frederick Palmer (1873 - 1958) began his career as a correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish War (1896 - 1897); by the time the First World War flared up his stock was at it's very peak and and was selected by the British Government to serve as the sole American reporter to cover the efforts of the B.E.F.. In the Spring of 1917, when the U.S. entered the war, Palmer was recruited by the American Army to serve as the press liaison officer for General Pershing. A good deal of Palmer's experiences can be gleaned from this article, which was written as a review of his wartime memoirs, The Folly of Nations (1921).
This writer, Banjamin B. Hampton (1875 - 1932), having heard so much hokum about Hollywood, decided to write an article about all he knew about the place - he was a film director and a producer, so he knew plenty. He was especially irked by the number of young women who arrived at the dream factory each month only to be bamboozled and find themselves on the street before too long.
George Jean Nathan (1882 - 1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956) surmised that as the Europeans bury their many dead among the damp, depressing ruins of World War One, America is neither admired or liked very much: "the English owe us money", "the Germans smart under their defeat", "the French lament that they are no longer able to rob and debauch our infantry".
To mark the 1921 anniversary of Armistice Day, the editors put the word out to all their readers that they wanted to hear from them concerning where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that "la guerre was fini" - they received many answers, from both veterans and civilians alike.
This is a news article that first appeared in 1921 concerning the continuing clash of civilizations in British Palestine:
"There are in Palestine about half a million Muslems, about 62,500 Christians and 65,300 Jews. The aspiration for a Jewish State encounters the opposition not only of all Moslems and Christians but of many Orthodox Jews residing in Palestine. ...The Zionist leaders, erroneously classifying the present inhabitants as Arabs, expect them to "silently steal away", as Zangwill puts it, and leave the Jews free to rule."
"Second only to the part played by Canada on the battlefields of Europe is the magnificent spirit in which the dominion has dealt with the returned soldier and with the fallen soldier and his dependents. From the time the war ended to the present, Canada has led the rest of the world in looking after ex-service men."
"When the men of the Dominion returned from Europe they originally got three months' post-discharge pay at their discharge rank. On second thought this was changed early in 1919 to a war gratuity basis, as follows: For one year's overseas service or more, four months' pay and allowances; for three years' service or more, six months' pay and allowances. From these amounts deducted any sum paid out under the post-discharge system which had earlier prevailed. The men who had seen service in Canada only were not forgotten and received checks for one month's pay and allowances for each complete year of service in the army."
H.L. Mencken rarely passed up an opportunity to impugn the sincerity of his fellow Americans; in this small piece he expressed his doubt as to whether they really embraced the concept of full equality as it was written in the constitution.
Here is a perfectly charming fashion illustration of a young man wearing a raccoon coat while abusing a tobacco product; this class of man was also prone to sitting on top of flag poles, concealing flasks and dancing the Charleston.
Click here to read about the 1956 college revival of the raccoon coat.
H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, editors of The Smart Set, surmised that as the Europeans bury their many dead among the damp, depressing ruins of 1920s Europe, America is neither admired or liked very much:
"...the English owe us money, the Germans smart under their defeat, the French lament that they are no longer able to rob and debauch our infantry."
The following book review is for all of you who toss and turn all night concerning the damaged reputation that was thrust upon the British Fifth Army General Hubert Gough (1870 - 1963) as a result of the German offensive that was launched during March of 1918.
There were many social changes following the First World War which men had to struggle to understand; among them was the "Modern Woman". The Italian novelist and lexicographer Alfredo Panzini (1863-1939) attempted to do just that for the editors of Vanity Fair.
"She will be a stenographer, a school teacher, a movie actress. But She will not cook for you. She will not do your washing. She will not knit her own stockings."
"Now our golfing cousins from the land of the Thistle and Rose are sending another pair, who might well be christened the New Mandarins of Golf. One is is George Duncan of Scotland. The other is Abe Mitchell of England. And in addition to giving battle in our in our Open Championship at Columbia, Washington, D.C., they will display their wares in exhibition matches before 250,000 of our golfing citizens in another one of those extended tours that bring in a lot of kale and almost as many blisters."
A short paragraph from 1921 in which the editors of The Nation leveled a charge at the admission departments for both New York University and Columbia for having taken steps that would reduce the number of Jewish students admitted each year.
"Tobacco is not food. It is a drug. A healthy human being can get along without it. One who has never used it is better off, his health has a surer foundation and his life expectancy is greater than in the case of one who is a habitual user."
The cautionary paragraph posted above was written in the early Twenties, and this article points out that the health advocates of the that era were not delusional or ill-informed in matters involving tobacco and health care. Tobacco's ability to harm was understood so well that an effort was afoot in the U.S. Congress to make the weed illegal. Needless to say, that effort did not get very far.
What was keenly felt in the Great Britain of the 1920s was the distinct absence of two million men as a result of the First World War. This short article points out clearly that this was fertile ground for suffrage advancements, as well as any number of other social changes.
"England is the great human laboratory of our generation - England with her surplus of two million women, her restless, well-equipped, unsatisfied women".
"Communist uprisings in Germany are blamed on Moscow by a practically unanimous Berlin press, and some newspapers flatly accuse the Russian official representative in Berlin, a Mr. Kopp, and his staff, of being the instigators of these disturbances, and so demand their expulsion."
"Soldier poets are the true historians of the war. Unlike the host of professional versifiers who sat up day and night on Parnassus, pouring out their patriotic zeal in allegorical rhymes of battles and batteries with more than Aesopian facility, the soldier poets have given to life and literature a genuine interpretation of warfare stripped bare of artificialty"
A collection of twelve fashion illustrations depicting the variety of sleeve treatments available during the winter of 1921. Some of the details offered were created by the House of Worth, Captain Molyneux, Martial et Armand and Madeleine and Madeleine.
Nine months after the Soviet Union signed a good-will agreement respecting the autonomy and independence of its Black Sea neighbor, Vladimir Lenin's Red Army quickly overran the borders of the Democratic Republic of Georgia on February 16, 1921; seizing the Georgian capital nine days later, Russian General Anatoli Ilyich Gekker declared the establishment of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.
Reviewed herein is the W.W. memoir of General von Josef Graf Sturgkh (1859 - 1916) memoir recalling his days in Berlin serving as the Austrian Army delegate to the German military's "Great Headquarters" (1915 - 1916):
"Graf Sturgkh drops several hints about the very heavy losses incurred by the Germans in the very first weeks of the war..."
"Professor Albert Einstein, whose theories on space, light and infinity have made his name familiar throughout the world, thinks this small planet on which we live is suffering from narrowness in its point of view. Too much nationalism - that is Professor Einstein's definition of the 'disease from which mankind is suffering today.'"
An energetic and wonderful four page article which gives an account of the Jewish growth of New York. Even as early as 1921 "nearly half of the Jews of North America lived there" and every fourth New Yorker was a Jew.
Click here to read about the Jewish population growth in the Unites States during the 1920s.
The Irish playwright St John Ervine (1883 - 1971) wrote this article for VANITY FAIR in an attempt to understand Charlie Chaplin's broad appeal; rich and poor, highbrow and lowbrow, all enjoyed his movies.
"Mr. Chaplin is the small boy realizing his ambitions."
To read this 100-year-old article is to understand that the inhumane conditions of today's alien detention centers on the Southwest border are a part of a larger continuum in American history. This article addressed the atrocious conditions and brutality that was the norm on Ellis Island in the Twenties.
"But it is not the stupidity of the literacy test alone that is to be condemned. It is its inhumanity."
"'A 3 percent remedy' for our immigration ills, real or fancied, will restrict the admission of aliens from May of this year to June, 1922, to 3 percent of the total of each nationality in this country when the Federal census was taken in 1910. As passed by the house, and expected to pass the Senate, the new measure, except for the time limit, is identical with the Johnson Bill passed in the last session of Congress and killed by pocket-veto of President Wilson."
"But the Johnson Bill does not set up a permanent restrictive policy; it is intended merely to protect this country for the next fourteen months from a horde of Europe's most objectionable classes."
Attached herein is a photographic study of the British golf champion Cecil Leitch (1891 - 1977) snapped with a high-speed, stop-motion camera. In nine black and white images depicting her drive from start to finish, we are able to gain an understand as to how she was able to win three British driving championships up until that time. She left the game after having won a total of twelve national titles; at the time of this printing, she was writing her first book: Golf (1922).
"The war that Germany began and lost cost the Allies, according to a recent estimate, the stupendous total of $177,000,000,000. The Reparations Commission has named a principal sum of about $32,000,000,000 as the damages for which reparations by Germany is due under the Treaty of Versailles. The Supreme Council of the Allies, sitting at Paris in January, placed the amount to be paid by Germany at a present value of $21,000,000,000, which when paid with interest and in installments covering forty-two years, would amount to about $55,000,000,000."
"One thing is absolutely certain- Europe is economizing. It must. Everything in the motor world points to an enormous increase in the number of 10 h.p., four cylinder cars and in the even smaller 7-8 h.p. two cylinder machines."
Teutonic film producers must have gotten a good guffaw upon reading the attached article that announced how insecure Hollywood producers felt when faced with the filmmakers of Germany. These intimidated studio heads and distributors believed that the Germans had a leg-up on Hollywood due to the high quantity of well-trained actors, crew and writers who had benefited from the traditions set forth generations earlier in German theater - so much so that they beseeched the law givers in Washington to protect them from these Germans...
Clive Bell (1869 - 1964) was an art critic who is remembered in our day as one of the most devoted champions of modern abstract art. In this 1921 review for The New Republic, Bell explained why he held that the paintings of the André Derain (1880-1954) were so significant - writing that the Frenchman was "best painter in all of France" (reserving for Picasso the roll of the "most influential painter in all of Europe").
In the early Twenties there were a good many social changes which men had to struggle to understand; among them was the Modern Woman. The Italian novelist and lexicographer Alfredo Panzini (1863 - 1939) attempted to do just that for the editors of Vanity Fair.
"'Don't expect us', she says to you, disconsolate male, 'don't expect us to be like the old-fashioned girls who went to church, and did the laundry, and looked up to their husbands as to their God.'"
Attached is a spirited article that gives an account of the Jewish population surge in 1920s New York. Even as early as 1921, nearly half of the Jews in all of North America lived in that city and every fourth New Yorker was a Jew.
Click here to read about the Jewish population growth in the Unites States during the 1920s.
Screen director D.W. Griffith declared in this article that youthful, energetic performers and writers are needed in the young and vigorous film industry of the Twenties:
"We need youth because the most successful screen stars are not harassed by the technique of the older stage and the requirements of the newer art are very largely different. So a new kind of actor has come to be—the screen actor—just as a new kind of writer is coming to be—the screen-writer. But that isn’t all!... An audience loves a sweet and kindly face on the screen as in life. The surest guide in the world to lead us out of our daily troubles is a little star who is sweet and gentle and kind, like youth with all its yearnings and simplicity."
A review of Harold Nicolson's 1921 biography, "Paul Verlaine". Numerous aspects of Verlaine's life and poetry are discussed as are the roots of French Symbolism.
"Mesopotamia should be placed in the same file as Gallipoli, along with all the other various assorted fantasies conceived by his Lordship. Mr. Churchill hopes to avert any fresh rising by setting up an Arab Government. The people are to elect a National Assembly this summer, and the Assembly is to choose a ruler...Mr. Churchill admits that that he does not know whether the people of [Iraq], who are rent with tribal, sectarian, racial, and economic feuds, will choose the Emir Feisul."
Click here to read about Churchill's other folly: the Battle of Gallipoli.
When Capitol Hill rejected the Versailles Treaty in 1919, Paris and London found themselves having to rely upon each other in ways they weren't expecting.
This is one of the editorials written by U.S. Army General Billy Mitchell (1879 – 1936) that only served to annoy the senior army leadership and their civilian overlords in Washington. On these pages General Mitchell made his case for the creation of a unique branch of the military confined entirely to air power that was distinct and independent of the Army. He points out that numerous armies are doing just this and the U.S. would be wise to do the same. He was particularly keen on seeing to it that everyone know that that the Imperial Japanese Army was doing the same thing.
"Sharp encounters between Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders took place when Trotsky tried to take Warsaw in 1920 and the majority of the committee antagonized his policy, we learn from a letter written by a Bolshevik adherents in Russia, who is 'presumably' high up in the Soviet hierarchy and a partisan of Trotsky."
A magazine interview highlighting the tennis career of Suzanne Lenglen (1899 – 1938) up to the summer of 1921.
Mille. Lenglen was a remarkable French tennis player who won 31 Grand Slam titles from 1914 through 1926. She is remembered as the the first high-profile European woman tennis star to go professional: in 1912 she was paid $50,000.00 to play a series of matches against Mary K. Browne (1891 - 1971). This article concentrates on her supreme confidence and overwhelming determination to win.
"When prest as to whether she liked a tonic, or say just a
little wine, before her matches, Mile. Lenglen admitted that she
did and that she had been promised that it would be obtained
for her in the United States. Despite the fact that she is in an
arid land Suzanne praised the effect of this stimulant on her
game."
"'Nothing," she said, "is so fine for the nerve, for the strength,
for the morale. A little wine tones up the system just right.
One can not always be serious. There must be some sparkle, too.'"
Attached is an editorial that was co-authored by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken from their reoccurring column in The Smart Set: "Répétition Générale". This brief column sought to expose the damages inflicted upon the country by the "guardians of the national virtue" and their bastard children, Prohibition and the Volstead Act, which will primarily serve to promote the wide (though illegal) distribution of all the poorest distilled spirits concocted in the most "remote frontiers of civilization".
Confronting the issue of growing unrest in British Palestine, Winston Churchill cautioned the British colonial administrators to soothe the tempers of the Arabs in Palestine by limiting the growth of the Jewish population.
The death and disfigurement of over four million young men during the course of the First World War (1914 - 1918) created an enormous problem for the women of Europe:
"A French statesman recently estimated that in his country there are now 1,000,000 women for whom there are no mates, while similar conditions exist also in England, Italy, Germany and Austria."
This article makes clear that in a quest for husbands, half a million women had arrived in the U.S. following the end of hostilities and it was further believed that by the close of 1921 another half million will have landed.
Culture critic H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956) reviewed American English by Gilbert M. Tucker:
"The fact is, of course, that American English is noticeably superior to British English in several important respects, and that not the least of these superiorities lies in the learned department of spelling. Here even the more intelligent Englishmen are against their own rules, and in favor of the American rules, and every year one notices a greater tendency among them to spell "wagon" with one "g" instead of two...The English "- our" ending, the main hallmark of English spelling, dies harder."
A single column from 1921 reported on a proposal before the U.S. Congress to drastically reduce the numbers of immigrants who were entering the United States at that time. The bill passed.
Irish author, critic and dramatist, St. John Greer Ervine (1883 - 1971), believed that some of the dramatic characters populating the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) were reoccurring characters who could be counted upon to appear again and again. He had a fine time illustrating this point and thinks nothing of stooping to compare Shaw with Shakespeare:
"Shakespeare primarily was interested in people. Mr. Shaw primarily is interested in doctrine..."
Thirty-five years later St. John Ervine would be awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of George Bernard Shaw.
Click here to read various witty remarks by George Bernard Shaw.
Here is an article that deals with the money aspect of the First World War. Illustrated with two tables, the journalist explains that the United States laid out far more money than any of the combatant nations. Albeit the funds extended were in the form of loans to the Entente powers rather than the creation of their own military, in the end the U.S. ended up being the one nation that invested the most in the war.
One of the special correspondents writing for VANITY FAIR on the subject of motoring was the British novelist Gerald Biss (1876 - 1922), who contributed similar pieces to THE STRAND, TATLER, DAILY MAIL and EVENING STANDARD. In this review, Biss gave his drink-deprived American readers the straight dope as to what they can expect to see from the European car manufacturers of 1921. References are made to the products of the Voisin and Vauxhall Companies and there was some lose talk about electric starters and high-grade twelve-cylinder cars.
A 1921 article from The Independent reported on the accident that doomed the dirigible Z-R2 in the skies over the British town of Hull. This British-built R-38 class airship was to be handed-over to the U.S. Navy and had a mixed crew composed of both Yanks and Brits; five of whom survived. Among the dead was Air-Commodore E.M. Maitland (b. 1880).
"There have been other 'Fasci' before the present, for the word, derived from Latin 'fascia' (a bandage), means any league or association. Thus, the association of laborers and sulfur-workers, that caused the agrarian agitation in Sicily in 1892, were called Fasci... the essence of the word being the close union of different elements in a common cause that binds them all together. Each 'Fascio' possesses so-called 'squadre de azione' (squadrons of action), composed of young men who have mostly served in the war. Each of these 'squadrons' has a commandant, named by the directing council of the particular Fascio."
In Milan there existed a general committee that supervised all these yahoos, but by enlarge, each local Fascio was free to do as they saw fit within their own domains. The earliest 'Fasci di Combattimento' were created in 1919 by Mussolini, who at the time enjoyed some popularity as the editor of the Il Popolo d'Italia. The Fascists saw the destruction of Italian socialism as their primary job.
This article was written by Erik Satie as a salute to six unique French composers who had been working in Montparnasse during the previous years.
"To me, the New Spirit seems a return to classic form with an admixture of modern sensibility. This modern sensibility you will discover in certain ones of the "Six" -George Autic (1899 - 1983), Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963), Darius Milhaud (1892 - 1974)..."
"Motor camping is in it's infancy", observed the shrewd and sure-footed motoring journalist George W. Sutton in this 1921 VANITY FAIR report regarding the evolution of campers. To further illuminate his readers, he provided black and white plans illustrating the interior of two campers mounted on the back of Ford chassis (during the 1920s, Ford Model Ts were by far the most common make of automobile). Although there were a handful of camper-shell manufacturers at the time, the two featured here were custom made.
This article is very broad in it's appeal; the fashion journalist did not simply cover the summer suit options available to the Well-Dressed Man of 1921 but also the tennis apparel, equestrian attire and the apropriate togs for slacking off at your favorite homo-phobic, sexist, anti-semetic and racist club.
A tight little essay that clarifies the force behind Italian fascism. This was an editorial penned by Dr. Frank Crane, a pastor who appeared regularly in the pages of Current Opinion.
"The Fascisti is a name given to a political party in Italy. Political parties, and indeed almost all organizations, as has often been pointed out, hold together and get their strength by hating something. The Fascisti hate the Bolshevists, Communists and the like."
Click here to read about those who resisted Mussolini.
There is no doubt about the fact that in the 1920s, there lived a great number of men who left the world a far richer place for their having walked the earth when they did; fellows like Pablo Picasso and Bertrand Russel, to name only two. The shallow editors at OldMagazineArticles.com think that is all just ducky, but what we really want to know is how did these men keep their shirts tucked in? How could such fellows as these look so presentable when so many men before them have failed?
We did some digging around and this is what we discovered...
Read this article and you will soon get a sense of what busy bees they must have been over at the United States Department of War within that year and a half following the close of World War One. General Amos A. Fries and the lads attached to the Chemical Warfare Service had been applying much cranium power to all matters involving mustard gas, tear gas, Lewisite and White Phosphorus. Much of the post-war dollar was devoted to making ships impervious to gas attacks, masks and uniforms suited to withstand nerve agents and offensive aircraft capable of deploying chemical bombs.
"As to the effectiveness of phosphorous and thermit against machine-gun nests, there is no recorded instance where our gas troops failed to silence German machine-gun nests once they were located...In the next war, no matter how soon it may occur, a deadly composition called Lewisite will be used with far more devastating effect than that of mustard gas."
An uncredited column by an American journalist who seemed to hold that the British Empire could do no wrong in their rule over the colony of India, and that the man who most vociferously opposed this governance, Gandhi, was an old-fashioned, eccentric "monk" with Bolshevik leanings...
Three cheers for the late Earl S. Parker, long-suffering secretary of the now-defunct American League of Justice (California) who recognized the tyranny inherit in the California Alien Land Bill of 1921! Seeing that the Japanese immigrants had been dealt enough cruelty by being denied citizenship, he was quick to point out that it was wrong to deny them real estate as well.
Click here to read about the Yellow Peril in Canada.
A glance at the 1921 wardrobe enjoyed by those fashionable fellows who were part and parcel of that Wall Street clique who might today be called "the one percent".
The reviewer also devoted some column space to classic fox hunting attire and Chesterfield overcoats,hunting tweeds,wing collars and men's suit from the early Twenties.
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865 - 1922) was an influential soul back in the day who owned a string of widely-read newspapers. Just months prior to his death, he spent some time stateside and drew some conclusions regarding American Prohibition which were noteworthy:
"While in our midst he made up his mind about Prohibition. In his opinion it is a failure... His reasons seem to be that he saw plenty of liquor everywhere he was entertained; that Prohibition encourages hypocrisy in the vision of the law, and that he did not like it anyhow... But America has taken it's stand and will stick to it."
There is little doubt that the French Composer Eric Satie had wished that the bellyaching dilettantes who were charged with the task of writing music reviews for the Paris papers had spent more time in school in order that they might show greater erudition in their writings. However, Satie recognized that we can't change the past and so he took his critics out to the woodshed with this column.
Celebrated columnist Walter Lippmann (1889 - 1974) wrote this piece to mark the end of the Wilson administration (1912 - 1920) and usher-in that of Warren G. Harding (1865 – 1923).
Unlike the ink-slingers in ages to come, Lippmann had pleasant remarks to make regarding his presidency:
"And I firmly believe that the historian who examines the state papers of Wilson up to November, 1918, will say, not only that they are in an unbroken line from Washington's Farewell Address, but that it required something very like genius under the pressure and in the fog of a world war, to keep that line intact."
Click here to read about a dream that President Lincoln had, a dream that anticipated his violent death.
Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.
This piece reminds me of what my son's history teacher so wisely passed on to them one day in sixth grade: "History can be found anywhere". How right she was, and in this case, a seldom remembered but perhaps widely practiced method of escorting German prisoners to the rear was rendered by a cartoonist in a 1921 magazine advertisement for a firm that manufactured men's accessories [underwear]:
"Remember that big attack? You couldn't spare a whole squad to escort your prisoners back to the cages; you needed every man in front. You got around the difficulty by cutting off the Boches' trousers. That made them helpless. They couldn't run and they couldn't fight. You parked the skipper's dog robber on their flank with a warped rifle and ran'em back."
Click here to read an article about the American POW experience during the Korean War.
The attached article is about a 1921 exhibition displaying the art of the mentally ill; it was organized under the direction of the psychiatric department of Heidelberg University. The exhibition made quite an impact on a number of modernists at the time and it is said that a few of the pieces from the show were later displayed in the 1938 "Degenerate Art" exhibit that the Nazis launched in an effort to discredit modernism.
A 1921 column that clearly pointed out all the hardships created for Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
The framers of that agreement could never have envisioned that the post-war landscape they designed for Germany would be pock-marked with such a myriad of frustrations - such as the border skirmishes between Germany and Poland, inflation, famine, the Salzburg Plebiscite and such harsh reparation payments that, when combined with all the other afflictions, simply served to create the kind of Germany that made Hitler's rise a reality.
(The article can be read here)
This article from 1921 reported on a disturbing series of lynchings that took place between the years 1917 through 1919 by U.S. Army personnel serving in France during the First World War. The journalist quotes witness after witness who appeared before a Senate Committee regarding the lynchings they had seen:
"Altogether...I saw ten Negroes and two white men hanged at Is-Sur-Tille. Twenty-eight other members of my command also witnessed these hangings and if necessary, I can produce them."
It was alleged that the murders were committed under the authority of American officers who willingly acted outside the law.
If you would like to read more about African-American service during W.W. I you may click here.
Rebecca West
(born Regina Miriam Bloch: 1892 – 1983) became a fixture on the literary landscape just prior to the First World War when she was recognized as a young, thought-provoking writer with much to say on many matters. The article serves as an interesting profile of the woman by compiling various remarks made during the course of her early career.
Attached is a review of The American Era by H.H. Powers. The reviewer disputes the author's argument that the First World War made Britain a weaker nation:
"Mr. Powers' interpretation of the war and it's squeals is that the Anglo-Saxon idea, having triumphed, will set the tone for the whole world. He also believes that the real depository and expositor of this idea in the future must be America. Britain, he thinks,in spite of her great geographical gains from the war-- he considerately exaggerates these, has sung her swan song of leadership."
This disturbing article from 1921 reported on a series of lynchings that took place between the years 1917 through 1919 by U.S. Army personnel serving in France during the First World War. The journalist quoted witness after witness who appeared before the Senate Committee regarding the lynchings they had seen:
"Altogether...I saw ten Negroes and two white men hanged at Is-Sur-Tille. Twenty-eight other members of my command also witnessed these hangings and if necessary, I can produce them."
The attached article is by an unidentified, pointy-headed male, and regardless of the fact that it was written over 100 years ago, many of his reflections regarding fashion and those who are enslaved by it are still relevant in our own time. It all started for this fellow when he felt the urge to understand why such a broad variety of New York women should take to wearing black for each and every occasion and so he polished-up the ol' cranium, rolled up his sleeves and began to think hard about the nature of fashion. He concluded that the lot of the female fashion victim
"is not the ordinary story of women's victimization, her subjection in a man-made world. She, after all, accepts of herself this silent "decree of fashion" and rushes to it. It is woman-made, this particular enslavement
- for those who are looking for some knowledge concerning what the American Army was up to during the last six months of the War (it was bloodiest period) the review makes for a good read. 
, F. Scott Fitzgerald's (1896 - 1940) 
, the father of Vorticism. Prefering the artist's drawings to his paintings, the ink-stained wretch opined:
(1880 - 1956) surmised that as the Europeans bury their many dead among the damp, depressing ruins of World War One, America is neither admired or liked very much: "the English owe us money", "the Germans smart under their defeat", "the French lament that they are no longer able to rob and debauch our infantry".
(1899 – 1938) up to the summer of 1921.
. The Fascists saw the destruction of Italian socialism as their primary job.
(born Regina Miriam Bloch: 1892 – 1983) became a fixture on the literary landscape just prior to the First World War when she was recognized as a young, thought-provoking writer with much to say on many matters. The article serves as an interesting profile of the woman by compiling various remarks made during the course of her early career.