1923

Articles from 1923

The Spirit of Disobedience
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

During the Jazz Age, there were a number of opinion pieces published concerning the general feeling of malaise and disillusionment that was experienced throughout most of the Western nations. In this article, written by a well known Protestant theologian of the time, it is stated that a new day has come to America – one that shows itself with a blatant disrespect for law and order.

Our most obvious lawlessness is the breaking of the prohibition laws… The shame of the present situation is that the law is not being chiefly outraged by poor people; it is mainly the men of means, prestige and influence, who ought to know better. Obviously there has been a breakdown of authority in the state and the rise of a rampant and selfish individualism.

The Resistance
(Time Magazine, 1923)

The opposite number of the Anti-Saloon League (established 1893) was The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (1918 – 1933). As the name implied, it was organized for the purpose of repealing Prohibition in the United States and sought to achieve this end by printing pamphlets and articles and engaging lecturers. This short notice announced that the Association was setting up the Face the Facts conference in the Nation’s Capital – to be convened immediately after the League had closed their own conference. Many elected officials would be in attendance.


– from Amazon:


The Anti-prohibition Manual: A Summary of Facts and Figures Dealing With Prohibition

The ”Popularity” of Prohibition
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

It is said that the Eighteenth Amendment would never have come into being without the efforts of one Wayne Bidwel Wheeler (1869 – 1927), and who are we to doubt it. In this column, the father of Prohibition recalls the numerous times throughout American history in which those who held minority opinions bit the bullet and acquiesced to will of the majority – all but one faction, the liquor interests. Time and again, he points out, this was the one tribe that wouldn’t budge.

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The Anti-Saloon League Convenes
(Time Magazine, 1923)

During the summer of 1923, 40 state superintendents of the Anti-Saloon League convened in Westerville, Ohio in order that they might assess the changes wrought by Prohibition and draw-up plans for the coming year.

On comparing notes, they agreed that the Atlantic states are not more than 50% dry and the country as a whole not more than 70% dry…

Upper-Class Bootleggers Arrested
(Literary Digest, 1923)

When the four brothers La Montagne were arrested for violating the Volstead Act in 1922, the social butterflies of New York society were shocked; not simply because some of their own had been roughed-up by the police, but shocked because they had no idea as to where they were to acquire their illegal hooch in the future.

The plea for leniency made by several well-known lawyers, on the grounds of social prominence of the accused, was ‘pitiable and foolish’, in the opinion of the New York Globe.

In summing up his case…the United States District Attorney said:

‘To allow these defendants to escape with a fine, it seems to me, would…justify the belief that men of great wealth or influence or power are above the law.’

Miscegenation
(Time Magazine, 1923)

The Crackers of old hated miscegenation (i.e.race-mixing). Sadly, they seemed to have removed the concept of love from the equation – and happily this article reminds us that not everyone felt the same way in 1923. The attached column concerns U.S. Senator Arthur Capper (1865 – 1951) and all the hot water he got into when he sponsored a bill that would have, among other things, criminalized race-mixing.

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‘Should the Color Line Go?”
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

Robert Watson Winston (1860 – 1944) was, in every sense, a man of his age. A Democratic politician from the state of North Carolina, he penned this highly prejudiced article about segregation (he liked it). He packed his column with all sorts of fifty cent words like miscegenation, quadroons and octoroon. He was yet one more white Southerner who feared race blending and the sharing of political power with African-Americans. He was delighted that so many of them were headed to the more industrialized states in the North.

Flaming Youth
(Time Magazine, 1923)

Here is an entirely unsympathetic Time Magazine review of the 1922 film, Flaming Youth starring Colleen Moore and Milton Sills. The uncredited reviewer really wasn’t buying any of it and was not at all impressed with the morality of Flappers. Today, Flaming Youth has deteriorated to just just a few feet of film and rests in the vaults of the Library of Congress; the reviewer probably would be pleased to know that.

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The Eight World War One American Cemeteries
(Literary Digest, 1923)

Written five years after the Armistice, this is an article about the eight U.S. W.W. I cemeteries that were erected in Europe (with the help of German P.O.W. labor) and the money that was set aside by the veterans of The American Legion to aid in the upkeep of these memorials:

The American flag is still in Europe, even tho the last Doughboy has left the Rhine. It floats over eight cemeteries, six in France, one in Belgium and one in England…It is the high honor of the American Legion to represent the American people in the fulfillment of the sacred national obligation of decorating the graves of our soldiers abroad on Memorial Day. The Legion pledges itself always to remember and honor our dead on foreign soil on the day when the heart of all Americans is thrilling with reverence for them.

The Utopian GBS
(Time Magazine, 1923)

IF we were to have a favorite socialist it might be the silver-tongued playwright and all around-wit, George Bernard Shaw (even though in the attached film clip he blathers-on gleefully in favor of a government that kills the non-productive elements of society). In this article, Shaw muses about how the ideal society would operate – regardless of the flaws inherit in human nature (which Marx also ignored).


Click here to read a few Shavian witticisms.

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Colonel House: His Right Hand Man
(Time Magazine, 1923)

What Harry Hopkins was to FDR, Edward Mandell House (1858 – 1938) was to Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) – senior advisor and close confidant. When this article was on the newsstands Wilson had been out of the White House for three years, yet House was still seen as a shrewd observer of the political landscape. In this piece from Time Magazine, we gat to read about some of his doings during the Post-W.W. I era.

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The German Atrocities that Never Were
(The Nation, 1923)

The post war period was the time when the press had to start figuring out what was true and what was false in all matters involving the reports that their assorted papers and magazines had printed during the conflict. Admiral Sims of the U.S. Navy caused a stir when he went on record announcing that a particularly odious policy observed by the Germans, widely believed to have been true, was in fact, a falsehood:

I stated…that barring the case of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle I did not know of any case where a German submarine commander had fired upon the boats of a torpedoed vessel…

The Pessimism That Followed W.W. I
(Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

A few years after the Great War reached it’s bloody conclusion, literary critic Helen McAfee discovered that a careful reading of the prominent authors and poets writing between 1918 and 1923 revealed that each of them shared a newfound sense of malaise – a despairing, pessimistic voice that was not found in their pre-war predecessors.

Certainly the most striking dramatization of this depth of confusion and bitterness is Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As if by flashes of lightening it reveals the wreck of the storm… The poem is written in the Expressionist manner – a manner peculiarly adapted to the present temper… It is mood more than idea that gives the poem its unity. And the mood is black. It is bitter as gall; not only with a personal bitterness, but also with the bitterness of a man facing a world devastated by a war for a peace without ideals.


If you would like to read another 1920s article about the disillusioned post-war spirit, click here.

For Want of Assimilation
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

If Facebook existed in 1923, their über censor meisters would see to it that the uncharitable opinions of U.S. Representative French Strother (1868 – 1930) would never appear upon their fair pages. Strother’s thoughts on the failure of the immigration system were shared by many of his countrymen and in this column he lists many examples illustrating the collapse of America’s ability to assimilate the new-comers:

In fairness to the aliens, be it said that some of them have brought rich gifts to our civilization. But what shall profit a nation if it gain the whole world, and lose it’s own soul?

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