Articles from 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.
The Earliest Mid-Flight Refueling (Time Magazine, 1923) Read More »
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.
Colonel House: His Right Hand Man (Time Magazine, 1923) Read More »
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 German Atrocities that Never Were (The Nation, 1923) Read More »
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.
The Pessimism That Followed W.W. I (Atlantic Monthly, 1923) Read More »
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?
For Want of Assimilation (Reader’s Digest, 1923) Read More »
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…
Benito Mussolini And His Followers (American Legion Weekly, 1923) Read More »
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.
New Rules of Warfare (Time Magazine, 1923) Read More »
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.’
The French Army Moves into the Ruhr Valley (Literary Digest, 1923) Read More »
KEY WORDS: Admiral Alexey Mikhailovich Schastny purged by Trotsky 1923,Red Justice by Sergey Kobyakov McClure’s Magazine April 1918
Their Nascent Justice System (Reader’s Digest, 1923) Read More »
