Recent Articles – Page 87 – Old Magazine Articles

Two Parachute Pioneers (Popular Mechanics, 1912)

Attached is a well illustrated article concerning two of the earliest parachute drops: one was quite fatal while the other had a jollier ending. The first leap documented in this column was made by a fellow known only as F. Rodman Law (dates?); he jumped 345 feet from the torch of the Statue of Liberty and landed 30 feet from the water’s edge. The next day, parachute enthuiast Franz Reichelt (1879 – 1912) jumped from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower with a parachute of his own design. The Popular Mechanics correspondent reported that:

His body was a shapeless mass when the police picked it up.

Harry Hawker (The Literary Digest, 1919)

An article on the pioneer aviator Harry Hawker (1889 – 1921), written on the heels of his his failed attempt to beat the Yankees in crossing the Atlantic. Australian by birth, Hawker came to Britain specifically to seek a career in the infant aviation industry. His wish was answered in 1912 when he was hired by Tommy Sopwith. Hawker saved his wages to afford flying lessons and acquired his flying permit in the September of that same year. The following month he won the British Michelin Cup with a grueling endurance flight of 8 hr, 23 min. Sopwith was impressed and Hawker was promoted to chief test pilot. The rest is told herein…

from Amazon: Hawker: Aviator, Designer, Test Pilot

REVIEWED: Broken Blossoms (Current Opinion, 1919)

A 1919 film review of Broken Blossoms, directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess:

Broken Blossoms came to the screen a masterpiece in moving pictures. Bare narration of the story cannot hope even to suggest the power and truth of the tragedy that Mr. Griffith has pictured.

You can read more about Lilian Gish here

Converted Film Haters (Photoplay Magazine, 1920)

Tin Pan Alley songster (and later Hollywood musical composer) Howard Dietz (1896-1983) penned this verse for Vanity Fair in celebration of the persuasive charm of film:

We used to sneer at movies; they were vulgar

To our aesthetic, cultured sort of mind;

Amusement for the lowbrows or people who had no brows…

Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.

As Europe Saw America in the War’s Aftermath (The Smart Set, 1921)

H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, editors of The Smart Set, surmised that as the Europeans bury their many dead among the damp, depressing ruins of 1920s Europe, America is neither admired or liked very much:

…the English owe us money, the Germans smart under their defeat, the French lament that they are no longer able to rob and debauch our infantry.

Carl Sandburg on Charlie Chaplin (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

This poem was submitted to the Vanity Fair editors by an obscure film critic named Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967):

The room is dark. The door opens. It is Charlie
playing for his friends after dinner, ‘the marvel-
ous urchin, the little genius of the screen…’

Between the years 1920 – 1928, Sandburg served as the film critic for the Chicago Daily News.

The Passing of an Era (The Nation, 1922)

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (1862-1922) was quicker than most of his contemporaries when he recognized what was unfolding in Europe during the August of 1914, and uttered these prophetic words:

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

The anonymous old wag who penned this opinion column came to understand Gray’s words; four years after the war he looked around and found that the world speeding by his window seemed untouched by the heavy handed Victorians. For this writer, the Victorian poet and writer Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) represented the spirit of that age and it all seemed to come crashing down in 1922:

Granting that the son of Arnold of Rugby was more troubled over the decay of Christian dogma than we are, it should be remembered that the decay symbolized for him a fact of equal gravity to ourselves — the loss of a rational universe in which to be at home. But he never doubted how a new world was to be built — by justice and by reason, not by claptrap and myth.

Fifth Avenue Observations (Vanity Fair, 1922)

This cartoon was drawn by the New York artist Reginald Marsh (1898 – 1954), who had a swell time comparing and contrasting the bio-diversity along 1922 Fifth Avenue; from the free-verse poets on Eighth Avenue up to the narrow-nosed society swanks on Sixty-Eighth Street -and everyone else in between.

Click here to read a 1921 article about the growth of the Jewish population in New York.

Click here to read a magazine article about 1921 Harlem.

P.G. Wodehouse: Master of American Slang (American Legion Weekly, 1919)

At the time this profile first appeared in 1919, P.G Wodehouse (1904 – 1975) had recently resigned his post as the drama critic for Vanity Fair in order to realize his ambitions as a novelist and playwright. This article revealed to all Wodehouse’s keen interest in American slang and American comic strips.

The Fight Against Lynching (Current Opinion, 1919)

Figures were presented at the National Lynching Conference showing that in the last thirty years 3,224 persons have been killed by lynching, 2,834 of them in Southern states which once were slave-holding.