Articles from 1922
Although the steel tennis racket would not know true glory until Jimmy Connors used his Wilson T2000 in the 1970s, a big splash was made by William A. Larned (1872 – 1926; seven times champion of the U.S. Open) when he designed the Dayton Steel Racket in 1922. It wasn’t the first steel racket, but it was an improvement on the existing ones.
Aside from baring an uncanny resemblance to an actor who wouldn’t be born until 1958 (Kevin Bacon), Confederate General E.M. Law (1836 – 1920) would be remembered for taking charge of Hood’s division after that commander was wounded at Gettysburg.
Attached is a Gettysburg reminiscence by one W.T. White, veteran of the First Texas Regiment
As a result of their charge up Little Round Top, the boys of the Twentieth Maine sent the First Texas Infantry to the bottom of the hill leaving 25 dead, 20 missing and 48 wounded.
Attached is a 1922 report from THE LITERARY DIGEST regarding how remarkably close two KKK candidates for governor came to winning their respective state primaries. The two political contests in question, Oregon and Texas, caught national attention and became popular subjects for concern across the United States:
The closeness of the vote ought to be a warning…If the Ku Klux Klan insists on entering politics, good citizens must show it the way out.
Originally writing for the Forrest Park Review, Flapper advocate Myrtle Heilman (1895 – 1973) opined that the Flapper was the one and only topic of the day worth thinking about:
Analyze her dress. It’s the most sensible thing since Eve. She wears rolled socks and why shouldn’t she? They are extremely cool and comfortable. Her toddle pumps are fairly low-heeled and she doesn’t try to squeeze into a Cinderella. Her skirts are short because it’s the fashion. Her bobbed hair is cool, sensible and sanitary. There is a twinkle in her eye and she has a saucy cock-sureness. And why shouldn’t she?
She does respect her parents and she obeys them, just as well as her grandmother did hers, but she has common sense and she knows when it’s time to use her own judgment and exercise her own authority.
Although Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) enjoyed a lengthy tenure as the president of Harvard University (1909 – 1933), his reign there was not entirely free from controversy. One of the more unpleasant policies associated with his term was one in which he stated that Jewish enrollment to the university should be confined to an admissions quota that should not exceed the 15-percent mark.
This is an article about Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) who attempted to avoid the topic concerning his deep desire to admit Jews by quota and keep their numbers limited to a particularly low proportion.
In 1923 President Lowell came up with a politically palatable solution: he limited the size of the incoming class to one thousand, which meant incorporating an evaluation of each candidate’s non-academic qualities into the admissions decision. How manly was the candidate, for instance? How congenial and clubbable? What promise, what potential for future leadership?
Over time meritocracy won out – until Asians began applying in large numbers…
At the very peak of bourgeois respectability, one of the high priests of art and culture, Gilbert Seldes (1893 – 1970), sat comfortably on his woolsack atop Mount Parnasus and piled the praises high and deep for one of the lowest of the commercial arts. The beneficiary was the cartoonist George Herriman (1880 – 1944), creator of Ignatz Mouse and all other absurd creations that appeared in his syndicated comic strip, Krazy Kat (1913-1944):
His strange unnerving distorted trees, his totally unlivable houses, his magic carpets, his faery foam, are items in a composition which is incredibly with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.
A much admired theatrical set designer was the author of this column – he was devoted to his craft and believed deeply that movies could only lead society to the lowest place:
The Drama in the Cinema is held to be made ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ It is really made by the new school of the same old tyrants, to enslave the mind of the people.
Here is a very brief study of U.S. congressional anti-lynching legislation spanning the years from 1901 through 1922.
Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.
The African-American comedian Bert Williams (1874 – 1922) was a funny fellow who ascended to great heights in his life; he performed in the great theaters of Europe and was adored by many of the foreign potentates of his time. Yet despite all his international glory, he never received acceptance in his own country. Like many African-Americans at the time, Williams simply came to accept the myopic views of race as it was understood by the majority of his countrymen, and learned to do without the appreciation he so craved. Bert Williams died in 1922. One of his more memorable lines:
Being a Negro is not a bad thing, it’s just terribly inconvenient.
A 1922 magazine article concerning the dangers of black market liquor in the United States during the Prohibition period (1919 – 1933):
When you drink bootleg the chances are better than nine out of ten that you are drinking rank poison.
This is not the statement issued either by Prohibitionists to discourage drinking, or by a Anti-Prohibitionist to show what Prohibition has brought us to. It is the conclusion of a large newspaper service, which had it’s men in various parts of the country buy the ‘ordinary mine-run of bootleg liquor’, and then had the samples analyzed to get an idea of what a man’s chances are of getting poisonous booze.
Click here to read about President Woodrow Wilson and his wish to re-write the post-war Prohibition restrictions.
An article which discusses the growing number of state legislatures given the task to vote up or down on the issue as to whether or not to allow the Darwin theory of evolution to stand as a legitimate topic for discussion and instruction in their respective school systems. Mentioned in the article was one of the major players leading the charge on behalf of creationism: William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925).
Three years following the publication of this magazine article, Bryan would be standing in defense of Christian faith during the famous Tennessee Scopes Trial.
Attached is an article filed during the closing days of the Greco-Turkish War (1919 – 1922) which takes into account that seven years after the 1915 Armenian slaughter in Asia Minor, the victorious governments of the West had never dolled out any punitive measures whatever, and the murder of Christians was continuing under cover of the Greek military withdrawal from that region.
…the Christian population is flying, like herds of frightened sheep, and the fate of those who lag behind is death.
Heresy Hunters are on the war-path again, we are told, their latest attack being directed against Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick…who is charged with rejecting the four great doctrines of Christianity -the virgin birth, the inspiration of scriptures, the atonement of Jesus, and Christ’s second coming…
Flapper Magazine crowned itself the
official organ of the national flapper’s flock
If nothing else, this verbiage simply spells out that the editors took themselves very, very seriously indeed and it was in that same spirit they gleefully went to work disemboweling a movie that they saw as anti-flapper to its very core. The film in question was
Nice People (Paramount, 1922) starring Bebe Daniels and Wallace Reid. Produced by Willam C. deMille (1878 – 1955), elder brother of Cecil, the film makers were clearly intimating that nice people will always keep their flapper daughters in line; it is at that point in the flick when the reviewer dipped her pen in the ink:
This is one of the themes that ‘old fogies‘ usually delight in; the ‘reformation’ of the flapper… The picture is replete with pithy subtitles, such as ‘the smart girl of today removes the rouge from her lips only to kiss and make up.’
By the time this piece appeared in The Chicago Daily News (prior to being picked up by the fast crowd at Flapper Magazine) Colleen Moore was all of twenty-one years of age with fourteen Hollywood films to her credit. This interview was conducted over lunch by the polished Hollywood reporter Gladys Hall, who we’re sure picked up the check; on that day Miss Moore wanted to talk about flappers, a flock she was proud to be numbered among (and a subject she seemed to know well).
By the time this piece first appeared in THE CHICAGO DAILY NEWS (prior to being picked up by the fast crowd at FLAPPER MAGAZINE) Colleen Moore was all of twenty-one years of age with fourteen Hollywood films to her credit. This interview was conducted over lunch by the polished Hollywood reporter Gladys Hall, who no doubt, picked up the check; on that day Miss Moore wanted to talk about flappers.
The wise elders of Hollywood were perfectly fine about casting flappers to play in various movies, but they didn’t always produce films that were sympathetic to their causes; for example, the editors of FLAPPER MAGAZINE hated this movie.
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