Tuesday, August 22, 1923. Oaths of Office, Air Mail, No French Concessions, Japanese Navy Disaster, Societal Shifts.

Calvin Coolidge was administered the oath of office for the second time because of a question of whether the presidential oath had to be administered by a federal official. Judge Adolph A. Hoehling Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia administered did the honors this time, at the  Willard Hotel.

The Coolidge's then moved into the White House later that day.

I'm amazed that our disgraced former business magnate President didn't think of having a notary at the bank or something administer another oath to him.

Mail was getting speedier.

France informed Britain that it would not make concessions on the Ruhr.

Kalamazoo, Michigan banned dancers from staring into each other's eyes.

This sounds absurd, of course, but society was having a difficult time figuring out how to adjust to the arrival of dating.  It didn't come in all at once, of course, but the arrival of modern dating, principally in control of the dating couples or prospective couples, had increased enormously following World War One.

We've dealt with it extensively here before, but the 1920s really saw the onset of domestic machinery which would end up changing women's relationship with work.  And it also saw a dramatic rise in the number of young women who lived outside their parent's homes, or who were semi-independent of their parent's household.  FWIW, a really good portrayal of this can be found in A River Runs Through It, in a rural setting, which is of course a memoir of this period.  Much of this would be arrested with the arrival of the Great Depression, which retarded the advance of household appliances of all sorts, and sent many young people, male and female, back into their parent's households.

Among the difficulties being adjusted to were the morality problems the shift presented.  Now presented as quaint, they really were not and were not easily instantly adjusted to, and in some ways can be argued to have never been worked out.  We may in fact be in the final stages of working them out now.  An item from yesterday demonstrated an aspect of that, being the rise of pornography before there was any consensus on how to address that, which there still really is not.

The Imperial Japanese Navy's submarine 70 sank in a disaster, killing 88 of its men.  She was swamped by a passing ship with her hatch open.  Only six men survived, including her commanding officer.

Six men sawed their way out of the Natrona County jail.

Sawing your way out of a jail window is such a Western movie trope that it's odd to read of it actually being done.

Related Threads:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two