1921 – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

Restraining The Terror In Georgia
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Whether Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey (1871 – 1948) was overwhelmed by a sense of humanity or whether he simply wished to reduce the northern flow of African-Americans from his state in the Great Migration – we’ll never know, but the fact stands that in late April, 1921, the Governor stood before the State Committe on Race Relations and spoke of 135 instances in which Black citizens were unjustly treated by White Georgians (The Georgia Government document pertaining to his address can be read here).

The Most Rebellious State
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

A 1921 report on the state that would not go dry: New York.

When New York wants Prohibition it will have it. So long as New York doesn’t want Prohibition there will be wholesale lawbreaking to avoid it.
– The New York World

They Used to Call It the Front
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Old Dame Nature abhors war as much as we do. When the troops left the battlefields, she covered them over with stuble, poppies and weeds… There were no trenches and certainly no shell holes… Two years have passed and now the battlefields are harvest lands once more.

A similar article about touring the old trench line can be read here.

Touring The Trenches
(American Legion Weekly, 1921)

Written in a playful spirit, an anonymous Doughboy tells the tale of his return to the old trench lines in order to conduct tours of the A.E.F. battlefields for that morbid class of souls we know call death tourists.

A second article on trench tours of the Twenties can be read here

How Canada’s Veterans are Fairing
(American Legion Weekly, 1921)

Second only to the part played by Canada on the battlefields of Europe is the magnificent spirit in which the dominion has dealt with the returned soldier and with the fallen soldier and his dependents. From the time the war ended to the present, Canada has led the rest of the world in looking after ex-service men.

When the men of the Dominion returned from Europe they originally got three months’ post-discharge pay at their discharge rank. On second thought this was changed early in 1919 to a war gratuity basis, as follows: For one year’s overseas service or more, four months’ pay and allowances; for three years’ service or more, six months’ pay and allowances. From these amounts deducted any sum paid out under the post-discharge system which had earlier prevailed. The men who had seen service in Canada only were not forgotten and received checks for one month’s pay and allowances for each complete year of service in the army.

Communists in Germany
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Communist uprisings in Germany are blamed on Moscow by a practically unanimous Berlin press, and some newspapers flatly accuse the Russian official representative in Berlin, a Mr. Kopp, and his staff, of being the instigators of these disturbances, and so demand their expulsion.

Einstein Comes to America
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Professor Albert Einstein, whose theories on space, light and infinity have made his name familiar throughout the world, thinks this small planet on which we live is suffering from narrowness in its point of view. Too much nationalism – that is Professor Einstein’s definition of the ‘disease from which mankind is suffering today.’

‘Is the Younger Generation in Peril?”
(Literary Digest, 1921)

The deans who presided over Literary Digest made this article their lead piece, so urgent was the sensation that an onslaught of vengeful modernist women, so fleet of foot and irreverently unhampered by hanging hems and confining corsets, were approaching their New York offices as their first act in disassembling the patriarchy.

The Lynching of African-Americans in France
(NY Times, 1921)

This disturbing article from 1921 reported on a series of lynchings that took place between the years 1917 through 1919 by U.S. Army personnel serving in France during the First World War. The journalist quoted witness after witness who appeared before the Senate Committee regarding the lynchings they had seen:

Altogether…I saw ten Negroes and two white men hanged at Is-Sur-Tille. Twenty-eight other members of my command also witnessed these hangings and if necessary, I can produce them.

Read about racism in the U.S. Army of W.W. I

Post-War Germany Struggled Under the Versailles Treaty
(The Independent, 1921)

A 1921 column that clearly pointed out all the hardships created for Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.

The framers of that agreement could never have envisioned that the post-war landscape they designed for Germany would be pock-marked with such a myriad of frustrations – such as the border skirmishes between Germany and Poland, inflation, famine, the Salzburg Plebiscite and such harsh reparation payments that, when combined with all the other afflictions, simply served to create the kind of Germany that made Hitler’s rise a reality.

Another article about the despondency in 1920s Germany can be read here…

Erik Satie and Les Six
(Vanity Fair, 1921)

This article was written by Erik Satie as a salute to six unique French composers who had been working in Montparnasse during the previous years.

To me, the New Spirit seems a return to classic form with an admixture of modern sensibility. This modern sensibility you will discover in certain ones of the Six -George Autic (1899 – 1983), Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963), Darius Milhaud (1892 – 1974)…

Where Were You When You Heard of The Armistice?
(American Legion Weekly, 1921)

To mark the 1921 anniversary of Armistice Day, the editors put the word out to all their readers that they wanted to hear from them concerning where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that la guerre was fini – they received many answers, from both veterans and civilians alike.

It All Began With Madame Curie
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn’t possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.

The Conversational Lenin
(Literary Digest, 1921)

When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print. He wasn’t blathering on about the proletariat or the bourgeoisie but rather musing about his pastimes and dreams for the future.

On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. ‘Do you really read it?’ I asked. ‘I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,’ he said.’Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to find them.’

German Officers Recall Their Days as P.O.W.s
(Times Literary Supplement, 1921)

Attached is a book review of what was described as the first book of it’s kind: a compilation of assorted recollections by Imperial German officers of their years spent in captivity at the officer’s prisoner of war camp at Skipton in Yorkshire.

Bogus Science and the Intelligence of African-Americans
(Current Opinion, 1921)

As many of the readers in the OldMagazineArticles.com audience have figured out, the purpose of this site is to allow the past to represent itself — warts and all, and few articles make manifest this policy better than this 1921 article which reported on the efforts of an appropriately forgotten scientist from the University of Virginia, Dr. George Oscar Ferguson. Ferguson was the author of a project that somehow measured the intelligence of African Americans and White Americans and concluded that his:

psychological study of the Negro indicates that he will never be the mental equal of the white race.

Shall Tobacco Be Prohibited, Too?
(Current Opinion, 1921)

Tobacco is not food. It is a drug. A healthy human being can get along without it. One who has never used it is better off, his health has a surer foundation and his life expectancy is greater than in the case of one who is a habitual user.

The cautionary paragraph posted above was written in the early Twenties, and this article points out that the health advocates of the that era were not delusional or ill-informed in matters involving tobacco and health care. Tobacco’s ability to harm was understood so well that an effort was afoot in the U.S. Congress to make the weed illegal. Needless to say, that effort did not get very far.

In the 1950s, some people questioned whether cigarettes were truly dangerous – click here to read about it…

H.L. Mencken Admonishes Catholic Hierarchy
(The Smart Set, 1921)

After the slaughter of the First World War, the Christian Churches were under heavy scrutiny for essentially serving as enablers in each of the individual combatant nations – failing utterly to bring an end to the violence. In their monthly collaboration, Repition Generale, George Jean Nathan (1882 – 1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) launched a broadside at the Christian Bishops for their elite, bullet-proof status in the world.

In 1900 people wanted to know why men didn’t like going to church…