Articles from 1915
An interesting article by photojournalist James Hare (1856 – 1946) who told us his impressions as to how patriots and recruiting officers prowl about Hampstead Heath in search of volunteers. He was dumbstruck by the high number of men who simply shrugged when reminded of the national emergency.
William B. Wilson (1862 – 1834) was the first to be appointed Secretary of Labor, and in this article he weighs the needs of Europe for fighting men and the needs of the United States for laborers. It is a very dry article and difficult to get through, but, happily, the most interesting factoids can be found in the opening paragraphs when he explains how many new immigrants chose to leave the United States in order to fight for their old countries in Europe.
During the Spring of 1915 Mme. Parisienne had decided that it was time to add some gaiety into her wardrobe. Since August of the previous summer there had been such bad news and although the rationing of fabric continued, there was still much available for the asking.
Click to read about the U.S. fabric rationing during W.W. II.
Originally appearing in the Berlin Tageblatt, this dispatch, written by Bernhard Kellerman (1879 – 1951), was later translated and printed in the The N.Y. Times magazine, Current History. It reported on the hardships and morale of German infantry serving in Flanders during the second year of the war.
An excerpt from a British tailoring journal which explains what the garment is and is not. The illustrations show a long forgotten pattern with billows pockets and excessively long cuffs, which were intended to be gathered by wrist straps. You will also note that the trench coat is bereft of D rings and gas flaps and other fantasy elements of military-tailoring.
Attached is a Vanity Fair article printed a few months after the Lusitania sinking in which the journalist listed the many and myriad explanations as to why this event was such a departure from the traditions of naval warfare set in place by John Paul Jones, Admirals Nelson and Dewey.
Click here to read read a 1919 German condemnation of Admiral Von Tirpitz.
Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), said to be the birth mother of Modern Dance, is profiled in the attached VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE article written by Arthur Hazlitt Perry:
She is truly a remarkable woman. She never dances, acts, dresses, or thinks like anybody else. She is essentially the child of another age, a Twentieth Century exponent of a by-gone civilization. She missed her cue to come on, by twenty-three hundred years.
Horace M. Kallen (1888 – 1974) was a deep thinker who questioned the practice of Americanization (ie. assimilation). In this 1915 article, Kallen contended that although immigrants to American shores are required to develop allegiances to certain self-evident beliefs that are embraced throughout our republic – but outside of that, there is no reason that immigrants should not be able to maintain their own ethnic and cultural identities. In the Eighties, those who embraced this line of thinking preferred to call America a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot.
Attached is one American journalist’s view of the Great War as it is waged on the home-front by the British people. He was impressed with the resolve of the population to win the war and he found that everyone, regardless of age or infirmity, was pursuing war work with a surprising earnestness.
The outward evidences of a nation at war are plentiful in London. Soldiers are everywhere. Columns of armed men and columns of recruits still in civilian clothes march through the streets. Drilling goes on in the parks and other places all day and every day.
Read about how the First World War effected life on the campus of Eton College.
One year prior to being elected as the 25th governor of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (1876 – 1935), while serving as the chairman of the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, submitted his opinion regarding racial segregation in the Annual Report that he had written for that organization. Dr. Brough, who at the time was a professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Arkansas, condemned the Jim Crow laws that had separated Whites from Blacks, believing that no good could ever spring from it:
In my humble opinion, it is better to admit the negro to all the stimulus and the inspiration of the white’s social heritage, so far as it applies to economic equality of opportunity given through industrial education, in so far as it does not endanger the integrity of the social heritage itself, than to encourage an ignorant and debased citizenship by his neglect and repression.
Sporting terms used as a metaphors for war are very common and come naturally to those who tend to think about matters military on a regular basis; yet this article uses the expression, playing the game more as a character trait that was unique to the British. The author, Austin Harrison, writing in 1915 (the year of grim determination) believed that the English have always played the game as a matter of course; they have always maintained good form, and yet:
Playing the game is only half the battle in war [and]…it will be the finest game we ever have played.
Here is a numeric account, estimated by the Germans, indicating how much of Europe was conquered and occupied by their army on the first anniversary of World War One. The report also accounts for the amount of land being occupied by the Entente powers, and the number of Allied prisoners, machine guns and artillery pieces taken by the central powers within this same time frame. The report was interpreted by the Berlin-based American Association of Commerce before being filed in its entirety by the Associated Press.
A short column from the front page of The New York Times dated May 6, 1915 in which one of the Lusitania survivors recalled that famous submarine attack and it’s immediate aftermath:
…Immediately we both saw the track of a torpedo followed almost instantly by an explosion. Portions of splintered hull were sent flying into the air, and then another torpedo struck. The ship began to list to starboard.
In 2008 Mr. Gregg Bemis, the American who is the owner of Lusitania, and sole possessor of all salvaging rights, examined the remains of the great ship where it rested some eight miles off Ireland’s South-West coast and provided proof-positive that the ship was indeed hauling armaments.
– from Amazon:
Attached is a two column article pertaining to neutral states and the international laws of war as agreed upon at the Hague Convention of 1899.
This piece appeared three months prior to the infamous submarine attack on the ship and alludes to a little known matter involving Lusitania and the masquerade of flying the flags of non-combatant nations while crossing the Atlantic.
The ruse by which the Lusitania escaped the possible danger of submarines, the use of the American flag, has been resorted to over and over again in modern naval wars.
French novelist Pierre Loti (né Julien Viaud: 1850 – 1923) filed this dispatch from a forward aid station in the the French sector where he witnessed the suffering of the earliest gas attack casualties:
A place of horror which one would think Dante had imagined. The air is heavy, stifling; two or three little night lamps, which look as if they were afraid of giving too much light, hardly pierce the hot, smoky darkness which smells of fever and sweat. Busy people are whispering anxiously. But you hear, more than all, agonized gasping. These gaspings escape from a number of little beds drawn up close together on which are distinguished human forms, above all, chests, chests that are heaving too strongly, too rapidly, and that raise the sheets as if the hour of the death rattle had already come.
Click here to read about the new rules for warfare that were written as a result of the First World War – none of them pertain to poison gas.
A small column from a 1915 issue of Vanity Fair in which the correspondent praised the virtues of Howard Copeland (an American psychologist and ambulance volunteer working in Frabce), Gertrude Aldrich (author of an Atlantic Magazine essay titled, Little House on the Marne), Cardinal Mercier (author of the Great Belgian Pastoral) and W.F. Bailey (authored a paper concerning the war in Northeastern Europe). These writers are preferred to the usually celebrated ink-slingers like Hellaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, and Arnold Bennett who are all compared to amateur recruiting sergeants in support of the War.
This image file is poorly scanned: we recommend that you print it for greater legibility.
A thoughtful look at all that stage productions have had to learn while competing for audiences with the early (and exciting) Hollywood film industry:
There is no doubt that the moving picture was responsible for the disappearance of the second-class theatre devoted to traveling companies, giving lurid melodramas and plays of obvious sentiment [but] instead of taking a lesson from the history of this form of amusement, which it helped to kill, the moving picture theatre imitated one of it’s very worst features.
Printed during the seventh month of the First World War, this is a collection of assorted musings that first appeared in The London Times involving what was known for sure regarding the subject of German zeppelins. In an attempt to understand the true speed, range and fuel capacity of a zeppelin, the author refers to a number of previous voyages that the airships were known to have made during the pre-war years. Concerns regarding the amount of ammunition that could have been carried is also mentioned.
