1921

Racism was once common in school books.

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“Return to Normalcy.”

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The National Conference on State Parks is formed to provide camping in good scenic spots all over the U.S. for motorists.

Advertising in those days had much in common with the kinds of ads we see today. “It’s almost a miracle!” one cure for dandruff proclaimed. 

Another ad posed a compelling question, still compelling a century later: “How long can a woman keep the charm of ‘A skin you love to Touch?’” 

Still a third posed this dilemma for women: “Will Your Hair Stand Close Inspection?” If you applied Woodbury’s Facial Soap in the first case and used Mulsified Cocoanut Oil Shampoo on your hair, you could be sure your man would stick around another day. 

A similar pitch pictured a glum married couple sitting apart in their home. He is reading a newspaper. She is working on her knitting. Starting the second year of their marriage, “they are all talked out.” The text continues: “He sits in moody silence under the lamp. The click of her needles is the only sound that breaks the veil of depression in the room.” 

Well, nothing to worry about now! Buy Dr. Charles W. Eliot’s famous “five-foot shelf of great books!” Read one of these books – just fifteen minutes a day – and you’d have plenty of interesting conversations ahead. 

Last, but not least, one must use Listerine every day, to end the scourge of halitosis, the silent killer of many a fine relationship.

* 

The blogger’s parents enter kindergarten. Older students may be reading Modern Times and the Living Past, by Henry W. Elson. Elson describes the four main races so:

 

The Caucasian race comprises most of the peoples of Europe and their descendants in America and elsewhere, also the peoples of northern Africa and of western Asia. In ancient times the peoples of India, Babylonia, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, and of Greece, Italy, and the rest of Europe, belonged to this race. Their modern descendants comprise the great nations of Italy, France, Russia, Germany, and England, the white people of the United States, and many smaller nations. Not only are almost all the civilized nations of to-day of the white race, but throughout all the historic ages this race has taken the lead and has been foremost in the world’s progress.

 

The Ethiopian or Negro race inhabits central Africa and other warm lands, where many have adopted the civilization of white men.

 

The Mongolian or yellow race includes the Chinese, Japanese, and other peoples of northern and eastern Asia and adjacent islands. A small part of this race is sometimes called the Malay or brown race. We find also a few yellow peoples in Europe, as the Turks and Hungarians. The yellow race boasts of a very ancient civilization; but after it reached a stage that we should pronounce half-civilized, two thousand or more years ago, its growth was checked and thereafter it made little progress until very recent times.

 

The American race, or Indians, were unknown to the rest of the world until 1492. When discovered by the Europeans, the great majority of the Indian tribes lived in the polished Stone Age and in the hunting and fishing stage. (Elson, pp. 12-13.) 

 

*

March 4: Warren G. Harding is inaugurated. Mark Sullivan says the country was tired of “God in the White House,” and ready for what Harding called a “return to normalcy.” (1127/6)

Harding looked presidential; but he failed at the task.

 

As Arthur Walworth explains, Woodrow Wilson decides to attend the inaugural, despite his lingering illness.

 

He had rejected suggestions that he used his infirmity as an excuse to escape the inauguration ceremonies. As the day approached, his love of his country’s institutions had triumphed over his distrust of his successor. When he had been urged to act in a way that would put Harding and the Republican Party “in a hole” he had replied: “I do not wish to put Mr. Harding in a hole. The situation of the nation and the world is too serious…I should like to help Mr. Harding and I hope every good citizen will try to help him.” (10/408-409 II)

 

Later, he would come to see Harding as “a fool of a president.” Even as the end of his life neared, his belief in “the goodness of God and the essential nobility of man” still prevailed. (10/421 II)

  

* 

Ray Kelly was only three years old in 1921; one day, he said years later, “I was having a catch with my father in a park along Riverside Drive and the Babe lived around the corner and stopped to watch. “I was a pretty good player for age 3, and Babe told my dad: ‘I’m taking Little Ray with me to the Polo Grounds tomorrow. He’s going to be my mascot.’” 

Kelly would sit beside Ruth and other Yankee stars for the next decade. As The New York Times describes it:

 

He was a good-luck charm at many home games in the Polo Grounds and at Yankee Stadium and was also Ruth’s guest on some road trips, sharing a hotel room with Eddie Bennett, the Yankees’ adult bat boy. “I was just there to sit on the bench and look cute,”' Mr. Kelly once said.

 

He was on the bench the day Yankee Stadium opened (April 18, 1923) and watched Ruth blast a three-run homer in a 4-1 victory over the Boston Red Sox. But Kelly never saw Ruth hit his sixtieth homerun in 1927. “Nope, I was in school that day,” he always said. By the time he turned 13, school obligations were interfering with his time to sit on the bench. He and his dad did, however, attend the 1932 World Series as guests of the Babe. They had box seats next to the Yankees’ dugout when Ruth hit his famous “called shot” in Game 3 at Wrigley Field. 

The Times article continued:

 

Mr. Kelly maintained long afterward that Ruth did indeed point to the center-field bleachers before hitting the ball there. “He absolutely did it,” he said. “I was right there. Never in doubt.”

 

…Asked once if the Yankees had watched their language on the bench with a child sitting among them, Mr. Kelly replied: “Are you kidding? Where do you think I learned to swear?”

 

Whatever the Yankees’ manners, Mr. Kelly always revered Ruth. As he put it: “He was like a second father to me. He treated me like the son he never had. Babe was idolized by everyone, particularly kids. He treated children with a great deal of respect, and adults appreciated that.”

 

Kelly went on to serve as a sergeant in the Army Air Corps during World War II. In 1998, he was asked how he thought Ruth would do if he was playing today. “If he was alive today he’d hit 100 home runs.”

 

*

 

“I had not thought death had undone so many.” 

Edward Sorel provided this insight into the life of T.S. Eliot in a quick column in The New York Times Book Review:

 

In 1921 T. S. Eliot teetered on the brink of a mental collapse. For two years he had been struggling at night to finish a long poem, while working by day in the foreign transactions department of Lloyds Bank. His neurologist — as they were then called in Britain — told Tom to get three months’ sick leave and then travel to Lausanne to see a leading psychiatrist. He did. His escape from London freed him from negotiating exchange rates and his unhappy marriage. While in Switzerland, he was able to complete his poem “The Waste Land.”

 

Eliot handed the text to Ezra Pound, whom he had met in 1914 when the two lived in London. Both were Americans — Tom from St. Louis, Ezra from Idaho — and both were modernists who sought to shatter all existing forms of poetry. It was Pound who had edited Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and arranged for its 1915 publication in Poetry magazine. When the poem appeared in chapbook form two years later, it placed Eliot at the forefront of poetry’s avant-garde.

 

Now, in 1921, Pound edited “The Waste Land,” cutting down lines devoted to parody and eliminating witticisms, but leaving untouched its mood of despair and desolation, and its message of neo-Christian hope. Boni & Liveright published it in the United States, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press printed it in Britain. Some critics greeted the poem with outrage, some with puzzlement at its sudden changes in location, time and narrator. It was not written to be easily understood, but the youth loved it for reflecting their disillusionment after the Great War. Before long it was decided — by the people who decide such things — that T. S. Eliot was the greatest poet of the 20th century.

 

Sorel goes on to note Eliot’s later successes – a Nobel Prize in 1948, among others. “He should have been happy. But he had, as he himself said, ‘a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage and a Puritanical temperament,’ so how could he be?” 

I have gathered together some of my favorite lines from a reading. From the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” we have the opening lines and then a section that may reflect his gloom (in part at the carnage of the Great War?): 

April is the cruelest land, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land…

 

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

 

(That last line: You, hypocrite reader – my likeness – my brother.)

 

 

 

“Rat’s alley.” 

In another chapter he speaks of “other withered stumps of time.” The second section, “A Game of Chess,” includes this grim inner dialogue, it seems from a soldier, perhaps even dreaming.

 

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

 

  “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

  “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

 

  I think we are in rats’ alley                                             (rats’ alley: the trenches)

Where the dead men lost their bones.

 

    Later, we have a discussion in a bar, just before closing time:

 

  When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—                    (demobbed: demobilized)

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME                                         (the bar is soon closing)

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

 

The section called, “The Fire Sermon,” includes these lines, which capture Eliot’s own mental anguish.

 

“On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

 

Section IV, “Death by Water,” reads in its entirety:

 

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                   A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                   Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

 

* 

How was life different a hundred years ago? 

This story comes from Story Hour Readings, published in 1921, intended for fourth year students. It’s in the form of a letter from Cousin Dick, who lives on a farm, to Cousin Joe, a city boy.

 

                                                                             The Orchard, R. F. D. #3.

 

  Dear Cousin Joe: –

 

Your card reminds me of my promise to write you a letter about the farm – one you can read to your city school if I write one good enough.

 

I wish your school could visit ours this next week. The Corn Club, the Pumpkin Club, the Canning Club, and the Pig Club are to give an exhibition every afternoon and evening in our new school annex. The members of the club will exhibit their summer’s work. I am president of the Corn Club, and have hopes that my new kind of dent corn will win a blue ribbon. Sister Dorothy has twelve cans of fruit and vegetables on display. One of brother’s thoroughbred pigs is sure of a first prize.

 

Besides the prizes, we have classes in grading corn, hogs, etc.; that is, telling how many good points they have. Most of us also are doing some woodwork and carpentry in school, and one section of the exhibit will be the things we have made. At the close of the exhibit we offer our things for sale.

 

Isn’t that all different from your school shows in the city? It is new to us in the country too, but we like it.

 

You ride to school on the elevated railroad, you say. I have seen moving pictures of the elevated trains and the subways. We ride to school in a motor hack, which we call “the jitney.” About fifteen of us are hauled by our bus. There are six buses that bring the pupils to our school, and some of the pupils live five miles away. Our roads are good but they are not like your paved streets. We are all going to turn out Saturday and fill up some little holes on the main highways.

 

Some of our country houses are fine and big like many of your city houses. They are heated by furnaces and lighted by electricity or gas. Other houses have stoves in them. Almost every family in the country has a telephone and an automobile. Many farmers have tractors, too. Tractors are gas engines to pull the plows and haul big loads of grain to town. We have good times on the farm in the winter in spite of cold or mud. We get our mail everyday brought to the door. We read a great many magazines and farm papers besides doing our school work. We have coasting parties and skating picnics. We also have a neighborhood entertainment at the school or church once a week. Once a month we have moving pictures. On Saturdays sometimes my brother and I go hunting for rabbits.

 

But summer is the best time of all. Then every man turns out to help do the work. In the spring there are fences to repair and acres and acres of ground to be broken up (plowed). Then comes the planting, and the cultivating follows. It is wonderful how so much corn and oats can grow from such tiny seeds.

 

By the middle of summer, harvest time begins. The clover is cut down by mowing machines one day, and hauled into the barn in the next. One day it is clover grass, the next day it is clover hay, ready to feed cows and horses. A little later we cut the wheat and oats. This is done with the machine that cuts the grain and binds it in sheaves or bundles. These we set up in shocks and then it stands until the sap is dried out of the straw.

 

Then comes the threshing. This is the very top of the season. Our neighbors exchange work with us and our barnyard is full of horses, wagons, and men. The big thresher is run by a steam or gas engine. It hums day after day, beating the grain from the straw.

 

All summer long each of us children has his part of the regular chores to do. I shell the corn for the chickens, drive the cows in from the pasture, put hay in the mangers for the horses, and see that the tanks are kept full of water for the cattle and hogs. This gives me plenty of time to tend my own patch of corn and vegetables. Of course in the fruit seasons, all of us help pick strawberries, currants, cherries, or peaches.

 

We get tired sometimes of work, but I should be more tired with nothing to do. When I grow up I expect to own a big farm of my own. I hope this long letter will make your friends in the city want to come out into the country and help us young farmers grow more food for everybody.

 

                                                                                         Your cousin,

                                                                                         Dick