1923
Articles from 1923
‘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.
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.
The Earliest Mid-Flight Refueling
(Time Magazine, 1923)
A quartet of Army officers succeeded in passing a fresh supply of gasoline from one plane to another flying forty feet below at the same speed of 90 miles per hour.
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.
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…