1921 – Page 6 – Old Magazine Articles

1921 Saw Many Single European Women Moving to the U.S.
(Literary Digest, 1921)

The death and disfigurement of over four million young men during the course of the First World War (1914 – 1918) created an enormous problem for the women of Europe:

A French statesman recently estimated that in his country there are now 1,000,000 women for whom there are no mates, while similar conditions exist also in England, Italy, Germany and Austria.

This article makes clear that in a quest for husbands, half a million women had arrived in the U.S. following the end of hostilities and it was further believed that by the close of 1921 another half million will have landed.

Educating the Negro
(The Independent, 1921)

Attached is a 1921 account of the Hampton Institute; it’s past, present and future is entirely outlined in this magazine article that was written by a celebrated journalist of the time, Mr. Talcott Williams (1849 – 1928).

Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.

George Duncan and Abe Mitchell at the Columbia Country Club
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Now our golfing cousins from the land of the Thistle and Rose are sending another pair, who might well be christened the New Mandarins of Golf. One is is George Duncan of Scotland. The other is Abe Mitchell of England. And in addition to giving battle in our in our Open Championship at Columbia, Washington, D.C., they will display their wares in exhibition matches before 250,000 of our golfing citizens in another one of those extended tours that bring in a lot of kale and almost as many blisters.

Man at His Best: The Raccoon Coat
(Magazine Advertisement, 1921)

Here is a perfectly charming fashion illustration of a young man wearing a raccoon coat while abusing a tobacco product; this class of man was also prone to sitting on top of flag poles, concealing flasks and dancing the Charleston.

Click here to read about the 1956 college revival of the raccoon coat.

The Post-War Change in Women
(Vanity Fair, 1921)

There were many social changes following the First World War which men had to struggle to understand; among them was the Modern Woman. The Italian novelist and lexicographer Alfredo Panzini (1863-1939) attempted to do just that for the editors of Vanity Fair.

She will be a stenographer, a school teacher, a movie actress. But She will not cook for you. She will not do your washing. She will not knit her own stockings.

Moratorium
(The Independent, 1921)

A single column from 1921 reported on a proposal before the U.S. Congress to drastically reduce the numbers of immigrants who were entering the United States at that time.
The bill passed.

H.L. Mencken on American English
(The Smart Set, 1921)

Culture critic H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956; author of The American Language reviewed American English by Gilbert M. Tucker.

The fact is, of course, that American English is noticeably superior to British English in several important respects, and that not the least of these superiorities lies in the learned department of spelling. Here even the more intelligent Englishmen are against their own rules, and in favor of the American rules, and every year one notices a greater tendency among them to spell wagon with one g instead of two…The English -our ending, the main hallmark of English spelling, dies harder.

Charlie Chaplin and His Popularity
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

The Irish playwright St John Ervine (1883 – 1971) wrote this article for VANITY FAIR in an attempt to understand Charlie Chaplin’s broad appeal; rich and poor, highbrow and lowbrow, all enjoyed his movies.

Mr. Chaplin is the small boy realizing his ambitions.

Scrambling for Oil
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Even as early as 1921 the world was noticing that in the U.S., that old Yankee mantra about avoiding foreign entanglements (a distortion of Washington’s Farewell Address) was being updated with a disclaimer: avoid foreign entanglements except when oil is involved.

Having put the Prussians in their place three years earlier, oil had become the new peace-time obsession for the Americans and their British ally – but it was to be the bane in their relationship: the Anglo-American irritant as Sydney Brooks remarked in FORTNIGHT REVIEW. With car manufacturers filling orders to placate a booming consumer market, the Brits pumped oil in Mesopotamia, the Americans in Texas while the oil companies from both locals vied for the rights to explore Latin America and the Caribbean.

H.L. Mencken on Immigration
(The Smart Set, 1921)

This article from THE SMART SET was published at a time when America was marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan arrival at Cape Cod and written by H.L. Mencken with his characteristic sense of hopelessness, this small piece remarks that (up to that point in time) immigrants to America were all cut from the same Puritan cloth. The Puritan has been a reoccurring figure in America

and will not die out…until the delusion of moral perfection is lost and forgotten.

A Profile of Mahatma Gandhi
(The Independent, 1921)

Attached is a 1921 account of the anti-colonial struggles waged by the forty-eight year old Mahatma Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi (1869 – 1948). This well-illustrated article from THE INDEPENDENT touched on Gandhi’s popularity among the Indian people of all faiths, his various boycotts and acts of non-cooperation as well as comments made by his admiring British adversaries.

A Profile of Mahatma Gandhi
(The Independent, 1921)

Jewish Population Growth in New York
(The Independent, 1921)

Attached is a spirited article that gives an account of the Jewish population surge in 1920s New York. Even as early as 1921, nearly half of the Jews in all of North America lived in that city and every fourth New Yorker was a Jew.

Click here to read about the Jewish population growth in the Unites States during the 1920s.

Much Talk of White Waistcoats, Shoes and Shirts
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

When the smoke cleared following the close of that dreadful unpleasantness that spanned the years 1914 to 1918, there remained much work to do; bodies to be buried, cities to be rebuilt. Men and nations prepared to face the new realities that came with the new social structure; many weighty subjects had to be addressed that had been ignored for so long a time. The most pressing of these topics was deciding which was the proper combination of white waistcoat and dinner jacket? In an age of industrial slaughter, which was more suitable: double-breasted or single-breasted? and what of ties, shoes and overcoats?

A Briton on American Prohibition
(Current Opinion, 1921)

Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865 – 1922) was an influential soul back in the day who owned a string of widely-read newspapers. Just months prior to his death, he spent some time stateside and drew some conclusions regarding American Prohibition which were noteworthy:

While in our midst he made up his mind about Prohibition. In his opinion it is a failure… His reasons seem to be that he saw plenty of liquor everywhere he was entertained; that Prohibition encourages hypocrisy in the vision of the law, and that he did not like it anyhow… But America has taken it’s stand and will stick to it.

The Well Dressed Man in Winter
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Illustrations of fashion’s offering from the Fall of 1921: great coats, semi-great coats, overcoats and ulsters; raglan and otherwise.

An Austrian at the German Supreme Headquarters
(Times Literary Supplement, 1921)

Reviewed herein is the W.W. memoir of General von Josef Graf Sturgkh (1859 – 1916) memoir recalling his days in Berlin serving as the Austrian Army delegate to the German military’s Great Headquarters (1915 – 1916):

Graf Sturgkh drops several hints about the very heavy losses incurred by the Germans in the very first weeks of the war…

The Art of the Insane Looks Like German Expressionism
(Current Opinion, 1921)

The attached article is about a 1921 exhibition displaying the art of the mentally ill; it was organized under the direction of the psychiatric department of Heidelberg University. The exhibition made quite an impact on a number of modernists at the time and it is said that a few of the pieces from the show were later displayed in the 1938 Degenerate Art exhibit that the Nazis launched in an effort to discredit modernism.