Stuck in the Zeitgeist of our own time. Looking back, but not.

I published this just the other day:

Lex Anteinternet: February 12, 1921. Covers, Installations, Rebelli...: February 12, 1921, was a Saturday, and hence the day that a lot of print magazines hit the magazine stands, and mailboxes. Leslie's feat...

When I did, I also put up the posers and photos on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub reddit, the reddit that features things that occurred exactly 100 years ago on the mark.

At one time Saturdays were the days on which weekly magazines hit the stands.  It made sense as people worked every other day of the week, but Saturdays they normally had off.  It's been interesting in and of itself how that's worked, as labor strove for years for a two day weekend, Saturday and Sunday.  Traditionally laborers got one day off, the same day everyone else got off, Sunday.  Achieving the extra day off was a big deal. We've managed to actually retreat on that enormously as every retail everything on earth is open on Saturday. . . and on Sunday, any more.  The Internet, moreover, has intruded on the weekend off for everyone.

But I digress.

When I put up century old cover illustrations, sometimes I get comments here or there.  I knew that there would be this time.

I put up three, but two of them have items that could spark commentary, and one did.  Interestingly, the one that actually had a bit of a hidden meaning didn't spark any, and the one that didn't, did.

Here's the first one:

Leslie's was a magazine that dated back to 1855 and which started off as Frank Leslie's Illustrated News.  As the name would indicate, it featured illustrations.  Started by journalist Henry Carter, the magazine was carried on by his widow after his death.  She was a suffragist and the magazine reflected that.  Sold in 1902, it continued on as before, very updated, and given its history, it very frequently featured early feminist themes, such as the issue that ran this week, a century ago.

The term "lumberjack" is a Canadian one, and while I don't know its etymology, the "jack" part of that term isn't likely to refer the the name "Jack", which basically means a laborer.  Therefore its unlikely that there was ever a word "lumber jane", but Leslie's depicted a female lumber worker on the cover.

Where there female lumberjacks in 1921?  Probably not many, if any, but Leslie's thought there ought to be, and it was taking a stand of a sort eons ahead of its time.

Leslie's would cease publication in 1922.

Nobody commented on the illustration at all.  Probably didn't register with the modern eye, and if it did, it probably didn't seem to be sending any sort of message.

The illustration that did strike the modern eye as sending a message is one that wasn't intended to.

The Saturday Evening Post a century ago ran an illustration by Frederic Stanley.  When I posted it, I knew that there'd be comments about it, and there was.

Plenty of viewers of this illustration saw an outright homosexual depiction.  Others saw a veiled one, in which the artist must be meaning to send a gender bending message sub silentio.  What else could a depiction of a young man in a dress holding hands with another young man mean?

Well, not much really.

This takes us back to Valentine's Days past.

Even when I was very young there were still Valentine's Day masquerade parties.  I don't know why, but there were.  A person could speculate on the concept and what it tried to encourage, but masquerade parties in general were something that was more common at one time than now. Now, they seem limited to Halloween.  Not always so.

Indeed, the 1920s were oddly big in general on masquerade parties and naturally there'd be some associated with Valentine's Day.  Probably a lot of them actually.  Another example, in fact, from the same year, 1921, can be seen here:

A Wyoming Valentine in Pictures

A person can pretty safely assume that Frederic Stanley wasn't trying to send any secret homosexual messages in his February 12, 1921 Saturday Evening Post cover illustration. And it would be additionally safe to assume that the Saturday Evening Post wouldn't have been interested in sending any either.  No matter what a person's opinion may be now, such a thing would have been overwhelmingly condemned then.

Indeed, it's interesting to note that one commenter on the Reddit sub immediately wondered if the illustration was by J. C. Leyendecker.  It isn't, and it doesn't even look like one.  It looks in fact a lot more like an early Norman Rockwell, who is often very mistakenly assumed to have done every cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post.  Leyendecker in fact did a lot of them and has a very distinct style. Quite a few of his cover illustrations can be found on this site, as there are no many.  Leyendecker actually probably was homosexual, and actually lived for years with his primary male model. That was undoubtedly known to the art community but not to the general public, and it likely would have ruined his career if the implications of that had become too widely known.

There's also an element of assumption in that, as Leyendecker, while he never married, and he lived with his primary male model.  The assumption is probably correct, but it's just an assumption.  None the less, that hasn't stopped a lot of people from claiming to seem outright homosexual undercurrents in his work, which is also probably grossly exaggerated.

Leyendecker was a master at painting male figures in a very rugged, manly and heroic style.  There's an art term for it, and I can't recall what it is, but it goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and it basically involves portraying male figures outside of their actual proportions to some degree. The eye won't catch it, unless way over done, but it registers mentally.  Leyendecker exhibited that in his art. 

And early on, he also often had real trouble depicting women correctly.  Leyendecker's female figures up into World War One were often incredibly tiny and didn't have much in the way of figures.

Be that as it may, by this point in time Leyendecker had gotten over that and was definitely portraying female figures correctly, even lushly, so you can't really read much into that. Indeed, one of his most often reprinted illustrations is his deeply weird Easter 1923 illustration for the Saturday Evening Post that probably really does have all sorts of underlying psychological messages, that illustration being a woman who is very sensually kissing a winged baby on the lips who is in a bird cage.  I don't know what the heck is going on in that illustration, and I'm really surprised that the Saturday Evening Post printed it, but something is up with it.  Leyendecker by that time was taking some liberties with portrays, and those liberties sometimes involved women.  It was the Roaring 20s and even the Saturday Evening Post was willing to run those at the time.

Emmett Watson, who painted the feminist message which was missed by almost everyone was a period illustrator who lived until 1955.  He never achieved the fame that Norman Rockwell did, though he did  have a long career as a commercial and "pulp" illustrator.  He wasn't, however, a James Montgomery Flagg, a Rockwell, or a Leyendecker.  

Frederic Stanley, whose illustration was close enough to Rockwell at this time that his cover could have been easily mistaken for one, went on to a long career as an illustrator as well.  His work, as noted, rivaled Rockwell's at the time.  He was self taught.  After a bought with meningitis in the 1940s he switched to being a portrait artist.  He died in 1967.

Rockwell and Leyendecker we've already discussed.  Leyendecker, we'll note, was somewhat of a tragic figure and Rockwell, who greatly admired his work, eclipsed him in fame and frankly, ultimately in talent.  He lived for some time with his brother, who died of a drug overdose, and who was also an artist with a very similar style, and his sister.  Something in the Leyendecker family had gone wrong somehow in that all three siblings had unusual and tragic lives in varying degrees.  Leyendecker remained a significant artist for decades, however, and produced one of the most famous illustrations of George Patton during World War Two.

What's it all mean?

Well, sometimes an illustration is just an illustration.  Sometimes it isn't.  But considered out of the context of its times, you can't assume too much.

February 12, 1921. Covers, Installations, Rebellions, and Cocker Spaniels.

February 12, 1921, was a Saturday, and hence the day that a lot of print magazines hit the magazine stands, and mailboxes.

Leslie's featured a "Lumber Jane", a woman working in the logging industry, with an illustration by Emmett Watson. We haven't featured Watson here before, but he was a period illustrator.  He died in 1955.

I don't know if the term "lumber jane' is a real one.  I suspect not, and the illustrator and the magazines was simply taking a highly progressive view of female emancipation, a topic of the era.

The Saturday Evening Post also came out, of course.

Frederic Stanley's illustration for the Post was supposed to be funny, and no doubt was for contemporary audiences.  It features two  young men at a masquerade party around Valentine's Day, and the one dressed as a clown has mistaken the one dress as a belle, as a belle.  Today the message would come across with all sorts of other meanings and, because of that, it wouldn't be published at all unless those meanings were intended.

Judge also hit the stands.

Judge, which often had amusing cover illustrations, managed to go full bore creepy with a home bootlegger looking over his shoulder at imagined law enforcement as he works on raisin wine, which sounds absolutely gross.

The monument to Women's Suffrage was hauled up to the capitol rotunda on this day 1921.

Various Washington dignitaries, including Justice White and Gen. Pershing showed up for something.  Perhaps the same event?

Winston Churchill, a member of the British government during the Great War, and a former cavalry officer in the British Army, was appointed Secretary of Colonies on this day in 1921.

In Georgia, a Soviet backed and inspired rebellion spread.

A cocker spaniel named Midkiff Seductive took Best In Show at Westminster.

"Where was that photo taken?"

There are a lot of photos on this blog.  Indeed, a blog without at least some photos, and there are some, is sort of like a ship on the ocean without sails.  It might float for its owner but most folks aren't going to want to get on board.  

I.e, want readers?  You need viewers.  And viewing means that if you are putting something up on the screen you need a few photographs.

Anyhow, we get questions and comments on photos from time to time, but the photograph below is unique as its been getting some unique attention recently, and it's not a recent arrival here on the site.

Indeed, this photo appears at the bottom of this website and has been incorporated into the site itself. When that was done, a quote from G. K. Chesteron was added to it. 

The photo also appears in several other locations on this blog in posts.  In its unaltered form, it looks like this:

It's one of my favorites, which is why I've used it more than once and in more than one place.

For those who might be wondering, the location is Camp Kearny, California.  It was taken in December, 1917. The written notation on the photo states:  "Captain Valentine in command of Remount Station, 100k head of stock."

Camp Kearny, which I've never seen or been to, is in San Diego County California.  I've never been to San Diego County either.  The Army started operating it in 1917, only shortly before this photograph was taken, and it served the country in the build up of the Army during World War One.

Camp Kearny, 1918.

The camp was closed following demobilization from the Great War in 1920, although the 15,000 acre facility was retained and the airfield was kept open for use by arrangement.  In 1932 the Navy took over the site as it was big enough for airships and it isn't really all that far inland, although it is inland.  In turn, they leased the facility to the Marine Corps, which is an odd thought as the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy and isn't crystal clear as to why the Marines would need to lease something from the Navy, or how one department of the Federal government leases anything from another department. During that time it was expanded to 26,000 acres.

Today its Naval Air Station Miramar, which is likely how most people who have heard of the location know of it.

So what's the deal with the photo here? Well, it fits the era the blog is focused on, and it fits a lot of the theme.  Were 100,000 horses really at Camp Kearny? That seems like an awful lot, but there were horses there and they were important. Even so, this is the modern era, a century removed.  There's just something about it.  A location and a scene in both worlds.

And then there's Chesteron's quote. . . which is quite true, no matter how much we moderns are afraid of it and what that means.  Radical free will includes the option of looking back.

St. Valentine's Day, 1919. The Polish Soviet War commenced, Quixotic Portuguese Monarchist fail, Blizzard shuts things down, League of Nations floated, Novel spellings.

Heroic late war Polish poster.

The Polish Soviet War commenced on this date in 1914 when Polish troops were allowed to occupy a town in current day Belarus by the Germans, as part of the German withdrawal from the region, and were soon thereafter attacked by the Red Army.

The war would go on until March, 1921.

The results of the war are surprisingly disputed.  By most measures it would have to be regarded as a Polish victory given that they held off the Red Army even to the point of defending Warsaw against a Soviet offensive.  Moreover, the first Red Army attack had been given a name that suggested Warsaw was its goal.

Soviet propaganda poster showing the Red Army as liberators.

On the other hand, the initial Polish counteroffensives had been enormously successful and the Polish Army had been able to maintain that stance for quite some time during the war, advancing into territory they disputed in Russia and Ukraine.  The reversals in fortune were enormous and the Poles nearly retreated to the German border in the late stages of the war.  Still, Red Army losses during the Battle of Warsaw late in the war were so severe that the Poles were given a border that closely approximated that of the 1772 partition and therefore granted them most of the territory they were seeking,including the debatable Lithuanian town of Vilnius.  By and large, the Poles gained the territory they were seeking, although less than that which Pilsudski would have wanted for a greater Poland.

Polish propaganda poster showing Polish cavalry, which in fact there was a lot of, fighting bestial troops of the Red Army.

The war at least arguably put an end to the Trotsky vision of marching through Poland and on into Germany and likely cemented a growing rift between Stalin who wished thereafter to build Communism in what remained of the Russian Empire as opposed to Trotsky who argued for an immediate global revolution.

Polish solders with captured Soviet battle flags.  The Red Army may have been a new people's army in theory, but in the field it kept the trappings of earlier armies in having battle flags.

Poland, it might be noted, founds itself in substantial wars from the very first moment of the "Peace" of November 1918.  It's amazing it survived as a state.  It fought all of its neighbors to some degree in one way or another.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, a quixotic effort to restore the Portuguese monarchy, which had never received the endorsement of the former Portuguese royal family, ended and with it the self declared Portuguese Monarchy Of The North.

Portuguese monarchist who fought for a monarchy whose former leaders didn't endorse it.

It's flat out bizarre to contemplate a rebel movement to restore a monarchy occurring in 1919 when in many other nations rebels had successfully operated to depose their nation's monarchies.  Yet, in Portugal, such an attempt was oddly made.  It's hard to figure really, but it is perhaps best understood in the context of it being an ultra conservative revolution with no place to go.

Well, closer to home, sort of . . . .

The Tribune had a headline that today would cause people to recall its occasional nickname, the "Casper Red Star", what with its reference to a "World Constitution".  This referred, of course, to a stout League of Nations.

Rumors were afloat about bribery being a factor on a bill for a new county and a "dry" rally was being planned.

And news of a big blizzard was being reported everywhere in the state.

Hopefully that blizzard wouldn't delay the return of the returning Guardsmen of the 116th Ammunition Train which were anticipated to be home within a week.

The Cheyenne paper remembered it was Valentine's Day.

The second Cheyenne paper noted that communications with the East hung on by a thread, due to the blizzard.

Interestingly, but also without details, that paper also reported that "Dean Huston", a Cheyenne clergyman, would be choosing between two parishes for his new assignment back east.  No other substantial details were provided, but it's likely that he was an Episcopal churchman as the Episcopal Church used that title and that would make sense in context.

And finally the pressed for space Laramie Boomerang resorted to Rooseveltian phonetic spelling, as Wyoming papers in this era occasionally did, for their headline, changing Cheyenne to Chian.  

Theodore Roosevelt, who in spite of his genius was somewhat spealling challenged, had advocated for this movement which would have altered the somewhat bizarre spellings common in English to phonetic ones at large and tried writing that way himself for awhile, but like everyone else, he gave it up. For a brief time, however, Wyoming newspapers would resort to it if headlines seemingly required it, as here.

February 13, 1919. No love for alcohol

The big Wyoming news on this Valentine's Day Eve was the passage of a "Dry Bill" that limited the production of alcohol to beverages with no more than 1% of the stuff in them.

This has been noted before here, but the curious thing about this bill is that it was wholly redundant.  It was known at the time that the Federal government was going to pass its own bill to bring the provisions of the 18th Amendment into force. So why was a state bill necessary? Well, it really wasn't.

Or maybe it wasn't.  A modern analogy might be the bills regarding marijuana, which remains illegal under Federal law.  Many states prohibited it, and still do, under state law.  The Federal law remains in full force and effect for marijuana which technically, in legal terms, makes all state efforts to repeal its illegality, which date back to the early 1970s, moot.  However, in recent years the Federal Government has chosen not to enforce the law, and states have legalized it under state law.  There's nothing to preclude the Federal government from enforcing its own laws again other than that it would be unpopular.

Something similar, but not identical, occurred with alcohol.  The Prohibition movement was successful in making it illegal under the laws of numerous states before the 18th Amendment became law.  Even running right up to that states were passing anti alcohol laws right and left, and as can be seen, some passed them even after Prohibition came to the U.S. Constitution.  But that meant than when the 18th Amendment was repealed those same states, i.e., most of them, had to figure out how to deal with the ban under their own laws.  Wyoming chose to step out of Prohibition slowly over a term of years.

To bring this current, in recent years there's been efforts in Wyoming to have Wyoming follow the smoky trail laid down by weedy Colorado, and to allow marijuana for some purposes.  If it did, that would certainly be the first step to being a general legalization under state law.  As people have become unaware that it remains illegal under the Federal law, that would be regarded as a general legalization, and indeed my prediction is that at some point in the future when the Democrats control both houses of Congress, the Federal law will be repealed.

All of that is, in my view, a tragedy as Americans clearly don't need anything more to dull their whits chemically than they already have.  While I'm not a teetotaler, and I think passing the 18th Amendment in general was a foolish thing to do, it's a shame that once it came it was reversed as society would have been better off without alcohol quite clearly.  In terms of public health, Prohibition was a success and likewise, the legalization of marijuana will be a disaster.  About the only consolation that can be made of it is that, in my view, within a decade it'll prove to be such a public health threat that lawyers will be advertising class action law suits against weed companies for whatever long lasting health effects, and it will have some, that its proven to have.  It'll vest into American society like tobacco, something that we know is really bad for us, but people use anyway, and then they file suit against companies that produce it based on the fact that they turn out to be surprised that its really bad for you.

In other 1919 news, a big blizzard was in the region.