1922 – Old Magazine Articles

The First two Years of Prohibition
(N.Y. Times Book Review, 1922)

After living under Prohibition for two years a journalist for The New York Times collected numerous facts and concerns on the matter of Prohibition and the political battles between Wets and Drys..

“Prohibition is undoubtedly the most drastic of all sumptuary laws. I have found it hard to believe that the men who drafted the Constitution ever supposed that it would contain a clause like the Eighteenth Amendment, which, when once inserted in the document, is practically irreversible.”

What Flappers Stood For
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)

Here is a page listing everything that the Flappers adored and found worth getting up in the morning to pursue.

‘A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents”
(The Outlook, 1922)

If one judges by appearances, I suppose I am a flapper. I am within the age limit, I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright colored sweaters, and scarves and waists with Peter Pan collars and low-heeled ‘finale hopper’ shoes. I adore to dance… But then there are many degrees of a flapper. There is the semi-flapper, the flapper, the super-flapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.

The Black-Shirt Revolution
(The Nation, 1922)

A report by Carleton Beals on Italy’s new order:

The strong state has arrived in Italy. It has been on the road ever since the failure of the factory seizures in September, 1920.

Ode to Feminine Knees
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)

When the skirt hems began to rise in the Twenties, it was widely understood that the vision of a woman’s leg was a rare treat for both man and boy; a spectacle that had not been enjoyed since the days of Adam (married men excluded). The flappers certainly knew this, and they generally believed that suffering the dizzying enthusiasm of the male of the species was a small price to pay in order to secure some element of liberty. The flappers liked their hem-lengths just where they were and, thank you very much, they were not about to drop them. Attached are some verses by an anonymous flapper who expressed her reaction regarding all that undeserved male attention her knees were generating.

Review of Kaiser Welhelm’s Memoir
(The Spectator, 1922)

Surprisingly, a British magazine published a terribly dry and unsympathetic review of My Memoirs by Kaiser Welhelm II (1859 – 1941).

Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.

Review of Kaiser Welhelm’s Memoir
(The Spectator, 1922)

Surprisingly, a British magazine published a terribly dry and unsympathetic review of My Memoirs by Kaiser Welhelm II (1859 – 1941).

Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.

A Review of the Memoir by the Crown Prince
(The New Republic, 1922)

The book reviewer for The New Republic, by Sidney B. Fay, summed-up his reading of the dethroned Crown Prince’s (1882 – 1951) post-war memoir in this way:

This is a remarkable book in at least three respects: it’s literary cleverness, it’s revelation of a new Crown Prince chastened by adversity, and it’s vivid pictures of men and events.

The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
(Life Magazine, 1922)

This is a short, pithy review of E.E. Cummings’ (1894 – 1962) novel, The Enormous Room I1922), which was based upon his experience as an American volunteer ambulance driver and his subsequent incarceration in a French jail for having admitted to pacifist sympathies. The reviewer believed that the book provided:

the last word in realistically detailed horrors.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked:

Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives – The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings.

H.L. Mencken Reviewed Two Novels Dealing the War and Disillusionment
(The Smart Set, 1922)

In Three Soldiers, John Dos Passos exhibited the disillusionment of the soldiers in the field; The Last Mile by Frank Macallister exposes the disillusionment of the soldier come home. The reviewer remarked that both men had been bamboozled by Woodrow and company.

Golf Goes Yankee
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

The attached golf article first appeared in a 1922 Vanity Fair titled The Royal and Ancient Game. Penned by golf legend Charles Chick Evans, Jr. (1890 – 1979) it traces the birth of the game and its migration across the sea where the game was heartily welcomed:

Golf seemed a gift from an high. Across the water it came and our best people took it up. They had discovered it in their travels abroad. It is true that poor people played it in Britain, but it seemed very sure that they would not do so in America…

Click here to read about the American cars of 1922.

A Cartoon that Lampooned Balfour, Churchill, the Whole Iraq Adventure
(Punch Magazine, 1922)

A 1920s cartoon from a well-known British humor magazine depicted the doomed British adventure in Iraq as a result of an unbridled lust for oil and nothing else.

Click here to read about Punch Magazine.

Another piece about Churchill and Iraq can be read here.

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The Emergence of a New World Power
(The New Republic, 1922)

Having studied the global power structure that came into place following the carnage of the First World War, British philosopher Bertrand Russel (1872 – 1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) was surprised to find that the most dominate nation left standing was not one of the European polities that had fought the war from start to finish – but rather the United States: a nation that had participated in only the last nineteen months of the war.

Wilson’s Secretary of State and the Versailles Treaty
(Current Opinion, 1922)

Attached is the 1922 book review of Robert Lansing’s (1864 – 1928) book, Big Four, and Others of the Peace Conference. In this, Lansing’s follow-up to his earlier book, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative, the author
shows us Clemenceau dominating the conference by sheer force of mind; Wilson outmaneuvered; Lloyd George clever, alert, but not very deep; and Orlando precise and lawyer like. This book confirms the popular belief that the general scheme of the treaty was worked out by the British and French delegations without material aid from the Americans. As a consequence, the American delegation lost prestige.

America’s First Brush With Multiculturalism
(American Legion Weekly, 1922)

Like many Americans in the Twenties, the journalist who penned the attached article was totally irked by the concept of an American territory – bound for statehood – having a majority Asian population. He wrote at a time when the nation was deeply concerned about assimilating America’s immigrants and his indignation can clearly be sensed.

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America’s First Brush With Multiculturalism
(American Legion Weekly, 1922)

Like many Americans in the Twenties, the journalist who penned the attached article was totally irked by the concept of an American territory – bound for statehood – having a majority Asian population. He wrote at a time when the nation was deeply concerned about assimilating America’s immigrants and his indignation can clearly be sensed.

America’s First Brush With Multiculturalism

(American Legion Weekly, 1922)

Like many Americans in the Twenties, the journalist who penned the attached article was totally irked by the concept of an American territory – bound for statehood – having a majority Asian population. He wrote at a time when the nation was deeply concerned about assimilating America’s immigrants and his indignation can clearly be sensed.

TRENCH RAID!
(The American Legion Weekly, 1922)

This is an eyewitness account of the very first trench raid to have been suffered by the U.S. Army in France; like most first time engagements in American military history, it didn’t go well and resulted in three dead, five wounded, and eleven Americans taken as prisoner. Historians have recorded this event to have taken place on the morning of November 3, 1917, but this participant stated that it all began at

3:00 a.m. on November 2, after a forty-five minute artillery barrage was followed by the hasty arrival of 240 German soldiers, two wearing American uniforms, jumped into their trench and began making quick work out of the Americans within.

The U.S. Army would not launch their own trench raid for another four months.

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