W.E.B. DuBois on Black Labor
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)
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1923
Articles from 1923
Flaming Youth
(Time Magazine, 1923)
Here is an entirely unsympathetic Time Magazine review of the 1922 film, Flaming Youth starring Colleen Moore and Milton Sills. The uncredited reviewer really wasn’t buying any of it and was not at all impressed with the morality of Flappers. Today, Flaming Youth has deteriorated to just just a few feet of film and rests in the vaults of the Library of Congress; the reviewer probably would be pleased to know that.
The Eight World War One American Cemeteries
(Literary Digest, 1923)
Written five years after the Armistice, this is an article about the eight U.S. W.W. I cemeteries that were erected in Europe (with the help of German P.O.W. labor) and the money that was set aside by the veterans of The American Legion to aid in the upkeep of these memorials:
The American flag is still in Europe, even tho the last Doughboy has left the Rhine. It floats over eight cemeteries, six in France, one in Belgium and one in England…It is the high honor of the American Legion to represent the American people in the fulfillment of the sacred national obligation of decorating the graves of our soldiers abroad on Memorial Day. The Legion pledges itself always to remember and honor our dead on foreign soil on the day when the heart of all Americans is thrilling with reverence for them.
The Utopian GBS
(Time Magazine, 1923)
IF we were to have a favorite socialist it might be the silver-tongued playwright and all around-wit, George Bernard Shaw (even though in the attached film clip he blathers-on gleefully in favor of a government that kills the non-productive elements of society). In this article, Shaw muses about how the ideal society would operate – regardless of the flaws inherit in human nature (which Marx also ignored).
Click here to read a few Shavian witticisms.
The Earliest Mid-Flight Refueling
(Time Magazine, 1923)
A quartet of Army officers succeeded in passing a fresh supply of gasoline from one plane to another flying forty feet below at the same speed of 90 miles per hour.
Colonel House: His Right Hand Man
(Time Magazine, 1923)
What Harry Hopkins was to FDR, Edward Mandell House (1858 – 1938) was to Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) – senior advisor and close confidant. When this article was on the newsstands Wilson had been out of the White House for three years, yet House was still seen as a shrewd observer of the political landscape. In this piece from Time Magazine, we gat to read about some of his doings during the Post-W.W. I era.
The German Atrocities that Never Were
(The Nation, 1923)
The post war period was the time when the press had to start figuring out what was true and what was false in all matters involving the reports that their assorted papers and magazines had printed during the conflict. Admiral Sims of the U.S. Navy caused a stir when he went on record announcing that a particularly odious policy observed by the Germans, widely believed to have been true, was in fact, a falsehood:
I stated…that barring the case of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle I did not know of any case where a German submarine commander had fired upon the boats of a torpedoed vessel…
The Pessimism That Followed W.W. I
(Atlantic Monthly, 1923)
A few years after the Great War reached it’s bloody conclusion, literary critic Helen McAfee discovered that a careful reading of the prominent authors and poets writing between 1918 and 1923 revealed that each of them shared a newfound sense of malaise – a despairing, pessimistic voice that was not found in their pre-war predecessors.
Certainly the most striking dramatization of this depth of confusion and bitterness is Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As if by flashes of lightening it reveals the wreck of the storm… The poem is written in the Expressionist manner – a manner peculiarly adapted to the present temper… It is mood more than idea that gives the poem its unity. And the mood is black. It is bitter as gall; not only with a personal bitterness, but also with the bitterness of a man facing a world devastated by a war for a peace without ideals.
If you would like to read another 1920s article about the disillusioned post-war spirit, click here.
For Want of Assimilation
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)
If Facebook existed in 1923, their über censor meisters would see to it that the uncharitable opinions of U.S. Representative French Strother (1868 – 1930) would never appear upon their fair pages. Strother’s thoughts on the failure of the immigration system were shared by many of his countrymen and in this column he lists many examples illustrating the collapse of America’s ability to assimilate the new-comers:
In fairness to the aliens, be it said that some of them have brought rich gifts to our civilization. But what shall profit a nation if it gain the whole world, and lose it’s own soul?
Benito Mussolini And His Followers
(American Legion Weekly, 1923)
A 1923 article about the earliest days of Mussolini and the Italian Black Shirts; their discomfort with neighboring Yugoslavia, their love of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863 – 1938) and their post-war struggle against the Italian Communists:
When the Communists virtually ruled over Italy in 1920 and 1921, they set up a detestable tyranny. Railways could not carry troops. Officers were forbidden wear sidearms, and men with war medals were spat on and beaten.
Mussolini changed all that.
You can read about his violent death here…
New Rules of Warfare
(Time Magazine, 1923)
The International Commission of Jurists of the World Court under the Presidency of Professor John Bassett Moore of Columbia University, New York, drew up at The Hague new ‘rules of warfare’… Chief among the rules for aircraft in warfare are provisions against bombing private property not of a military character and against attacking non-combatants.
The French Army Moves into the Ruhr Valley
(Literary Digest, 1923)
When Germany’s post-war government failed to remit a portion of the 33 billion dollars it owed under it’s obligations agreed to in the Versailles Treaty, France lost little time deploying her army into the coal rich regions of the Ruhr Valley. This article, illustrated with cartoons and maps, offers a collection of assorted observations and editorial opinions gathered from from across Europe concerning the event:
Premiere Poincare remarked, ‘the French troops will remain in the Ruhr as long as may be necessary to assure the payment of reparations, but not a single day longer.’
Sun Yat-sen is Returned to Power
(Literary Digest, 1923)
A magazine article about a political leader who is considered the founder of modern China: Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925):
The return of Sun Yat-sen to power in South China is much more than a mere personal triumph, who are assured by his adherents, who say that it is ‘a sign of the times which merits the thoughtful consideration of the Great Powers in their roles of guardians of the Far East.
The Lure of College Atheism…(The Literary Digest, 1923)
They enter college as Christians and graduate as atheists or agnostics’, say some whose sons and daughters come home with a sheepskin showing proficiency in the arts and sciences and little, or none at all, in religion. The college is repeatedly blamed for this vital lack, and is not infrequently defended of the charge of failing to establish a religious background for the student.
Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era
The Military Police in France
(American Legion Weekly, 1923)
A genuinely funny reminiscence written by an anonymous Doughboy recalling his days as an M.P. in war-torn France during the First World War:
Now that it is all over I wonder what did I gain from my experiences as an M.P. in the great Army of Newton Baker’s Best?…Watching the dawn coming rosily up over snow-clad barracks roofs and rows of tents; informing careless privates, sergeants, lieutenants and even majors to ‘button that there button’; listening to the dull bang-slamming of artillery barrages on crossroads; jotting down the names of high-spirited young men found in cafés at the wrong hours -such things aren’t of much lasting value.
Click here to read an article about the sexually-transmitted diseases among the American Army of W.W. I – and the M.P.s in particular…
Remembering the American Dead
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1923)
Always stationed to the most forward field hospitals during America’s five major campaigns, a former W.W. I nurse penned this moving reminiscence that recalled her experiences tending to the soldiers who slowly died in the army hospitals. Haunted by the memories of these dying boys, she asked her readers as to whether they feel the world has kept the promises made to those who sacrificed so much: is the France they died to protect a better place? is the country that demanded they fight a better place?
Click here for clip art depicting the nurses of World War One.