1921

Articles from 1921

‘Making the Immigrant Unwelcome” (Literary Digest, 1921)

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.

‘Making the Immigrant Unwelcome” (Literary Digest, 1921) Read More »

The Damage of Prohibition (The Smart Set, 1921)

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.

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Another War Correspondent Remembers With Anger (Current Opinion, 1921)

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).


Another Frederick Palmer article can be read here…

Another War Correspondent Remembers With Anger (Current Opinion, 1921) Read More »

Another War Correspondent Remembers With Anger (Current Opinion, 1921)

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).


Another Frederick Palmer article can be read here…

Another War Correspondent Remembers With Anger (Current Opinion, 1921) Read More »

‘Movies & Myths As Seen by an Insider” (Literary Digest, 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.

‘Movies & Myths As Seen by an Insider” (Literary Digest, 1921) Read More »

The Black Dress Arrives (The New Republic, 1921)

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

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Georgia Invaded (Literary Digest, 1921)

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.

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Should the Federal Government Fund Schools at All? (Literary Digest, 1921)

‘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.

Should the Federal Government Fund Schools at All? (Literary Digest, 1921) Read More »

Should the Federal Government Fund Schools at All? (Literary Digest, 1921)

‘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.

Should the Federal Government Fund Schools at All? (Literary Digest, 1921) Read More »