Articles from 1917
The exclusion of the word obey from the traditional wedding vow has been happening for a good while, and it seems to have pre-dated the 1960s; however in the following case, the presiding official at one wedding would only do so for a fee.
Just as the American poet Walt Whitman once remarked concerning the American Civil War – that the real war will never make it into books, so goes the thinking of the ink-stained wretch who penned the attached column regarding the efforts of the Official War Artists during W.W. I – who attempted to render accurately the horrors of war. Such genuine indecency could never allow itself to be duplicated into a two or three dimensional format.
An illustrated article about the American sculptor Jo Davidson (1883 – 1952) and his creation, FRANCE AROUSED. The Davidson piece, a colossal depiction of France as an outraged warrior queen, was intended for the French village of Senlis to serve as a memorial to that remarkable day in September, 1914, when the German drive on Paris was stopped and driven back. It was at Senlis where the earlier successes of the German Army were reversed.
To those in America and Europe who believed in the new doctrine of political equality, it was the most thrilling day in her history.
When France in wrath
Her giant – limbs
upreared,
And with that oath,
Which smote air,
Earth and sea
Stamped her strong
foot and said she
Would be free.
The statue, which is twenty feet high, was made in the sculptor’s studio in McDougal Alley (NYC), where it was photographed for the pages of VANITY FAIR.
In 1919, Jo Davidson would endeavor to create a number of busts depicting the various entente statesmen who participated in the Peace Treaty.
Three hundred and fifty French artists, among whom are painters, sculptors, engravers, and architects, have paid the extreme price of their devotion to country and are counted with the dead.
A color illustration of the U.S. Army rank insignia worn by the American Army of World War I. Insignia noted are officer’s bronzed collar and shoulder devices as well as the sleeve chevrons and enlisted-men specialty badges. Excluded are enlisted men’s collar and cap devices. Please bare in mind that this insignia chart was not produced by the army but by civilians; we could only correct the errors that we were able to recognize.
A color illustration of the U.S. Army rank insignia worn by the American Army of World War I. Insignia noted are officer’s bronzed collar and shoulder devices as well as the sleeve chevrons and enlisted-men specialty badges. Excluded are enlisted men’s collar and cap devices. Please bare in mind that this insignia chart was not produced by the army but by civilians; we could only correct the errors that we were able to recognize.
Last year New York State carried its Woman Suffrage Amendment by a majority of one hundred thousand. The Suffrage Party, instead of turning its headquarters to a tea room or a new Tammany Hall, decided to remain in existence, for educational purposes only, until it was assured that each new voter knew who she was, and what she was going to do about it.
The problem of educating the feminine voter has as little to do with the telephone directory as it has with the Social Register. For the average addition to the voter’s lists, strange as it may seem, is quite below the financial level recognized by the switchboard operator…
Click here to read articles about the American women of W.W. II.
The full text of the telegram to German Ambassador Von Eckhardt from Dr. Alfred Zimmermann outlining the plan to form a military alliance with the nation of Mexico. Should the United States declare war on Germany and Austria, Mexico, in turn, was to attack the American South-West and reclaim her lost colonies.
A VANITY FAIR article covering the social and patriotic transformation of New York City just eight months after The U.S. entered the First World War:
Already the greatest manufacturing center in the world, our coming into the War made New York the money center, the distributing center, the very hub of the universe as far as resources were concerned. London and Paris sank to the level of mere distributing points….
An additional event took place in 1917: Congress granted full U.S. citizenship rights to the citizens of Puerto Rico – but they didn’t move to New York until the Fifties. Click here to read about their integration.
Literacy tests were used to exclude immigrants even during the uncertain period of war with Germany and Austria. Rather than rely on immigrant labor from Italy or Mexico, steps were taken to reduce the number of available foreign workers. So great was the need for labor in agriculture and industry that the daily wage rose quickly in the month following Wilson’s call to arms.
These two columns recall the structure and requirements of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps and how sincerely appreciative the French were for these young American volunteers.
Upon learning that the Woman Suffrage Amendment passed the New York legislature quite handily, the Suffrage Party lost no time in solidifying their base and quickly set to work locating additional voters for future state elections. They discovered that there were five hundred thousand new voters in New York City alone; two hundred thousand of them were foreign-born women.
This VOGUE article is a fun read for a number of reasons, the first one being that it seems that nothing ever really changes in America and the second reason is because this article was written by a pampered patrician of the first order and when you read between the lines you get the sense that she would rather not breathe the same air as Italian and Jewish Immigrants:
As well-born American women, we can never out-vote the immigrant; we must make her an all-American citizen and voter.
The melting pot in this sense is applied to the race-conscious study of forensic anthropology. This article concerns the work of Dr. Ales Hrdlika (1869-1943) of the National Museum of Washington, and the records that he maintained regarding the physical features of the earliest European settlers compared to the Americans of the early Twentieth Century (read: Jews and Italians), following so many generations of immigration and intermarriage.
What is amusing is the illustration of The American Face
…the diagram drawn to scale from Dr. Hrdlicka’s data… shows the mean man of the old American stock. It is pointed out that the most conspicuous peculiarities of the type are the oblong outline of the face and the well-developed forehead.
J.M Studebaker (1833 – 1917) was a pioneer in vehicle building and lived to see the change in locomotion from oxcarts to automobiles. He had been engaged
in the manufacture of vehicles for sixty-five years.
This is a very quick and interesting read, highlighting the key events in the life of this automotive engineer whose name is so readily recognized some eighty-five years after his death.
A short notice reporting on the 1917 death of Count Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Von Zeppelin (b. 1838). The count is reported to have died a sad and broken man over the failure of his airships to hasten a decisive ending to the First World War and remorseful that his name would forever be associated with the first air raids on civilian targets.
An editorial cartoon made to illustrate that some of the combatant nations across the sea had taken measures to discourage liquor consumption and with the recent U.S. Declaration of war, America would be doing the same thing (only on a far more radical level)…
There are canine sentries on duty on both sides in the Great War, and dogs that are dispatch-bearers. Marquis, a French dog, fell from a bullet-wound almost at the feet of a group of French soldiers to whom he bore a message across a shell-raked stretch of country. But the message was delivered!
There are canine sentries on duty on both sides in the Great War, and dogs that are dispatch-bearers. Marquis, a French dog, fell from a bullet-wound almost at the feet of a group of French soldiers to whom he bore a message across a shell-raked stretch of country. But the message was delivered!
