The Savoy opened in Harlem, and would remain open until 1958.
Japanese destroyers were fired upon by the Chinese from the Taku Forts.
Last edition:
Showing posts with label The Roaring Twenties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Roaring Twenties. Show all posts
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Thursday, December 31, 1925. Reining in New Years.
The first attempt at a worldwide New Year's celebration was made via international radio when the United States sent out musical entertainment and New Year's greetings from the consuls general of various foreign countries in New York.
There was an effort in many locations in the US to rein in New Years celebrations, which if they were in compliance with the law, should be dry:
European flooding which had broken out on the 29th hit Belgium.
Today In Wyoming's History: December 31: 1925 The legendary Swan Land & Cattle Company issued its corporate holdings report for the year.
Last Edition:
Wednesday, December 30, 1925. Ben-Hur.
Labels: 1920, 1920s, 1925, 1925 at the movies, 1970s, Biology, Clothing, Education, Education Societies, Female Biology, Menstruation, trends, Women
Friday, November 14, 2025
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Thursday, November 12, 1925. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five.
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five (Lous, his then wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, Edward "Kid" Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Johnny St. Cyr on guitar and banjo) recorded their first songs for Okeh Records.
The British submarine HMS M1 was hit by the SS Vidar and sank in the English Channel with the loss of all 69 hands.
Last edition:
Sunday, November 8, 1925. The Eagle.
Sunday, November 2, 2025
They were careless people.
Donald Trump at Mar A Logo's Halloween 1920s themed party. Seated to Trump's left was an unhappy looking Marco Rubio with Jeanine Pirro looking back. The event featured scantily clad dancing women, complete with the timeless barely clad woman in a giant champagne glass.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Donald Trump ought to read a little. History would be a good start, but also Fitzgerald's great novel.
Friday, June 13, 2025
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Monday, April 20, 1925. Route shields
The US adopted the shield symbol for highway routes.
New York police raided Minsky's Burlesque for featuring striptease acts. Not really newsworthy at the time, the event was later made famous due to a 1960 novel that was turned into a film.
Burlesque shows are mostly a thing of the past, although there are odd efforts to reenact them. Sort of remembered in a cutesy fashion, they were really much raunchier in some ways than recalled, and indeed many stage shows in general featuring women through the 1920s were fairly pornographic.
Last edition:
Saturday, April 18, 1925.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Thursday, January 29, 1925. 裁軍 and Flapper Fanny.
About 20 people were killed when representatives of the Fengtian Clique met resistance attempting to disarm about 1,000 defeated Jiangsu troops, who apparently weren't quite as defeated as thought.
Flapper Fanny Says was on day three of its new syndicated run. The cartoon would run until 1940, during which time Fanny ceased being a flapper. It had two different cartoonist illustrate it, both of them women.
Last edition:
Wednesday, January 28, 1925. Russian Mercenaries
Labels: 1920s, 1925, China, Chinese Warlord Era, It was because of the Russian Revolution, Mercenaries, Shanghais in Shanghai.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Monday, January 12, 1925. Ordering Thompsons.
The North Side Gang attempted a drive by assassination of Al Capone, with the would be killers armed with Thompson submachine guns.
Capone was inside a nearby restaurant at the time, conducting business, and only his bodyguard was wounded. The event did cause him to order Thompsons himself, which were not restricted from purchase in any fashion at the time.
These would have been the M1921 Thompson, not the M1928 Thompson that is more familiar to most people, although telling the difference between the two at a glance is difficult. They were extremely expensive.
Period Thompson advertisement. Thompson marketed them to police and for self defense, but of course at the price, they weren't economically attractive to regular people, and they were to criminal organizations, as well as to the police.
Last edition:
Sunday, January 11, 1925. Jargon of the Juveniles, Times Signal, Zanesville.
Saturday, January 11, 2025
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Friday, April 4, 1924. Wolves in Albany County.
Educational broadcasting began with the introduction of what is now BBC School Radio.
Frank Capone, the brother of Al, received an elaborate funeral in Chicago. Al closed speakeasies and gambling establishments that he owned in honor of his dishonorable brother. Some of the press in the crime-ridden town lauded the late mobster and criticized the police in his death.
Wolves raided cattle in Albany County.
Wolves were recently reintroduced in Northern Colorado and there is some angst in some quarters that the reintroduced predators, unable to appreciate the giant dotted lines that make up state borders, will come into Wyoming, which they will, and be shot here, which is a real risk. Perhaps somewhat mitigating against that, there's been rumors as far back as the 1980s, when I lived in Laramie, that there were already wolves in Albany County.
One of the reintroduce Colorado wolves has killed a calf in Grand County, Colorado, so the first instance of livestock depredation has now occured. Initially, Colorado's fish and game declined to opinion on whether the wolf involved was one of the new residents, or one of the ones that was part of a pack of ten that established itself by crossing down from Wyoming in 2020. The fact that they 'ad reestablished themselves on their own, as they will do, does give rise to the question of why an artificial reintroduction in Colorado was necessary.
It probably wasn't.
Gil Hodges, baseball great, was born in Princeton, Indiana. Hodges died at age 47 after suffering a heart attack.
Last prior edition:
Wednesday, April 2, 1924. Selecting Harlan Stone.
Saturday, March 30, 2024
Sunday, March 30, 1924. Camp Carey
Wow, what headlines.
I linked this in because of the reference to "Camp Carey", a Boy Scout Camp somewhere on Boxelder Creek, the land for which was donated by former Governor Robert D. Carey.
The Casper Herald also mentioned it on the front page.
It's not there today, and I don't know where it is, or what happened to it. A search for its fate was in vain, although through that method, I learned that it had been in existence as late as the 1950s and a local figure's obituary proudly noted his role in establishing it. A Camp Carey Road exists in Wyoming, but it seems to be in the Pole Mountain area of Albany County, which this is not. Indeed, there's a reference to a military "Camp Carey" that predates this 1924 Boy Scout establishment.
By 1925, Girl Scouts were also using the "woodland paradise".
In 1926, a terrible weather related tragedy occured there, apparently.
Twelve people died from drinking denatured alcohol at a party in Toledo, Ohio. That is, alcohol with poisons added to it by regulation.
This is very common and is designed to keep industrial and commercial alcohol from being used as a drink.
The German People's Party announced its election platform of a "new democratic monarchy".
Last prior edition:
Monday, November 27, 2023
Monday, August 21, 2023
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
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Monday, August 20, 1923. Shenandoah launched.
The Kimes-Terrill Gang and the Al Spencer Gang robbed a train on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railorad near Okemah, Oklahoma.
It was one of the last train robberies in the U.S.
The USS Shenandoah was launched for the first time, but was tethered and not under power. It was the first US rigid airship to use helium.
Strikes broke out in the Ruhr and Rhineland. German inflation, it might be noted, was now massively out of control.
Stretching a decline in public morals, Broadway began a 312 performance run of Artists and Models which featured nude and seminude female subjects. Rather obviously, going to peep at the nude subjects was the only purpose to go to the "review".
It's sometimes noted that The Roaring Twenties was as prelude to the 1960s in lots of ways. More accurately, the 1930s and the Great Depression interrupted trends started in the 20s which revived in the 60s, including this one.
Friday, June 16, 2023
Pride and Unintended Consequences.
Yesterday, I ran this item, which noted the following:
It wasn't the first time I noted this.
It's sometimes claimed, although I haven't researched it, that the moral descent of Berlin in the 1920s lead in part to people voting for the Nazis in the early 30s. I.e., their revulsion over what they were seeing lead them to an extreme reaction, it's claimed. At least one writer has noted:
It seems grotesque in retrospect, but Hitler posed as a moral crusader gallantly battling the forces of iniquity, corruption, and even deceit. Many Germans, horrified by the loosening of moral standards in Germany after World War I, were duped by his promises of moral rejuvenation. Hitler’s project resonated with many who were disgusted by the rampant hedonism and carnality of Weimar high culture and popular culture. Whether one views Hitler and Nazism as a Utopian and technocratic expression of the modernist project, or as an atavistic reaction against modernity, or as some blend of the two (“reactionary modernism” or “conservative revolution”), or as something completely unique, it is clear that Nazism promised a resurrection or awakening of the German people that involved a revival of morality that was in the process of decay and degeneration.
Hitler as Moral Crusader and Liar, Richard Weikart, abstract.
Extreme wealth in upper Russian society certainly contributed to the rise of the Communists in late imperial Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution.
The point of this is this. While the Southern Populist ethics that have spread into the American middle class country wide (more on this soon) are full of hypocrisies, people do have a limit. Most people don't think night and day about politics, which opens the void to people like Rep. Ward of Casper, whose reaction to a Pride event in Casper lead to this headline:
Ward's rise as a legislator in a state that she has almost no connections with stunned me. She's of the extreme right and has a Weltanschauung that she's imported from the Rust Belt, where she previously lived and politiced. She's associated herself in politics with Christianity, but in a way that suggest she doesn't understand her claimed faith very well. In Illinois, she showed up associated with some outrage over a school teacher who claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, which in fact they do. In Wyoming's last legislative session, she made the claim that Christians are not their brother's keeper, and that the story of Cain and Able in the Old Testament really only meant that you just weren't supposed to kill your brother, but otherwise could let him suffer.
Middle Class Germans of the 1920s were heir to a long Christian tradition. Upper class Germans were as well, and frankly lower class Germans were too, that latter class being the one most vulnerable to Nazi and Communist agitation. Russia had a long history of Christianity, leading into 1917.
Wealthy societies produce largess. Largess produces self-indulgence, and a lot of the self-indulgence will, seemingly almost inevitably, turn into sexual narcissism and individual domination. Disgust inevitably results by those who don't chose that path, which is, at the end of the day, most people. But when a society becomes focused on it, those willing to stand most in the opposing spotlight, no matter how extreme they are, will take up most of the opposing light.
Immoderation leads, inevitably, to immodesty, which leads, almost inevitably, to opposing immoderation. When toleration becomes a demand for absolutely acceptance, in categories of extremes, those masses simply trying to get through their days will listen to the loudest voices.
Southern Populism gave us what the Southern Strategy took into the GOP. Losing the moorings on genuine civil rights, amongst other things, gave us a warped left wing view that individualistic self definition is a right, no matter how destructive or delusional. That latter left wing view is pushing the other, far right populist view, to success, at least temporarily.
Monday, May 22, 2023
Tuesday May 22, 1923. Baldwin rises, Cavalry Bandits caputured, Bryan Anti Evolution Measure voted down, Mark falls, D.C. Golf.
The Distillery Bandits, who were apprehended after a gun battle, were all veterans of the U.S. Army's cavalry branch.
William Jennings's Bryan's motion that the Presbyterian General Assembly cut off financial support for any Presbyterian body teaching evolution was voted down.
The Mark dropped enormously.
The President played in a newspaper golf tournament.
Sunday, April 2, 2023
Tuesday, April 3, 1923. Murderous Communists, lost rail, the Roaring Twenties
Anyway you look at it, Communists are a bunch of murderous criminals.
This rule is darned near universal.
The Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc., was asking about "spooning". That didn't mean what it would at some later date, but it wasn't all that far off. In this case, it applied to what we might call consensual groping, which oddly enough was undergoing a certain fad popularity in certain sets.
It didn't mean chase conduct. The Bureau of Social Hygiene resulted from the appointment of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to a Special Grand Jury to investigate white slavery in New York City as far back as 1910. The organization, centered under Rockefeller, came into existence in 1913. Funded by grants, it went out of existence in 1940 when other pressing concerns existed.
It's tempting to look at it as superficial, or "Victorian", but in reality many of the developments of the late 1960s were strongly foreshadowed by the 1920s, including nearly every aspect of what would later be called the Sexual Revolution, if, in fact, not every single aspect, including widespread drug use in some sectors. The rebellion against convention, as with the later one, was centered in youth, the difference being that the transformative era of the 1920s was in fact much greater than the one of the 1960s. "Dating", and women living outside their parents households, really only began to become widespread in the 20s.
As with a marked increase in women working outside their households, due to the onset of domestic machinery, this development would be arrested by the Great Depression, and then somewhat by World War Two. The Great Depression caused a lot of younger women, and men, to go back into their family homes, or remain there, throughout the 30s, something that World War Two likewise caused, although not in the same way given the widespread mobilization of society for the war effort.
This era of the Roaring Twenties is pretty well depicted in the book The Great Gatsby, and very well predicted by the second film variant of that novel. People like to talk about the loss of an "age of innocence", which in many ways never existed, but the 20s, in some ways, would be a good candidate for that.
A movement was building in Casper to get a new proposed rail spur.
FWIW, remnants of this spur exist far north of Casper for quite some time today. The groundwork was done. . . but the rail never laid down.
Turkey lowered its voting age to 18 and removed its poll tax.
Yankee Stadium, April 3, 1923.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)