1924

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“America is a nation of idealists.”

 

President Calvin Coolidge

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January: Arthur Pound, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, offers his observations on Henry Ford in “The Ford Myth.” For starters, he cites a news item, regarding a speech by Rep. William A. Green, an Iowa Republican. Green was addressing the National Tax Association, and

 

declared that the present system of corporate taxation presents an easy way of evading taxation, adding that he did not believe the American people would permit this state of affairs to continue indefinitely. Mr. Green said Henry Ford was popularly supposed to have the largest income of any citizen in the country, and that while no one knows what income tax Ford pays, it is certain that it cannot be at all in proportion to his income.

Henry Ford.

 

Members of Congress, Pound writes, seldom arrive at such ideas by “sheer ratiocination. Instead, they pluck them out of street-corner conversations and general-store debates. Iowans must have been discussing the Ford fortune before Mr. Green mentioned it at white Sulphur Springs.” 

By this time, Ford’s wealth is estimated to be $750,000,000, including $200,000,000 in cash. As for the company:

 

 Its domestic production of cars and trucks reached one new “high” in the week ending August 7, and another in the week ending September 25, when production amounted to 41,769 cars and trucks and 1857 tractors. From January 1 to October 18, it produced 1,500,696 cars and trucks – almost as many as all other American manufacturers combined.     

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Philanthropy does not retard materially the bulbous growth of the Ford fortune. The Fords may indulge in many quiet benefactions; and no doubt they meet the levies laid upon them in various drives, like other well-to-do citizens whose names and ratings are down in the books of their local charity organizations. But the public gifts of Henry Ford are small and few in proportion to his huge earnings. He built a hospital in Detroit – to date that is his chief contribution to the public-service plant of the city where he made his money. Derided as a “pay-as-you-enter” hospital because it is self-sustaining, it nevertheless provides excellent hospital service at rates the average man can afford to pay. His purchases for public use of two literary shrines – John Burroughs’s birthplace and Longfellow’s “Wayside Inn” – are graceful and pleasant acts; but not expensive when measured by the forward ability to pay. He helps to support the Wildlife-Protection Fund of the New York Zoological Society. Multiply the cost of these benefactions by ten and you would still be short of the Rockefeller or Carnegie gifts to public causes.

 

Unless Mr. Ford changes a deep-seated conviction, this situation is not likely to change. In My Life and Work he goes on record against charity and philanthropy. Also, he doubts the value of professional social service. Come what may, Henry Ford is unlikely to deluge the land with libraries, save heathen from hookworm, or provide palatial quarters for college undergraduates. Prominent solicitors often returned from Dearborn with the message: “We must wait till Edsel gets it.” There is no hint as yet that the Ford wealth is troubling the Ford conscience or burdening the Ford spirit.

 

Thus far Mr. Ford’s rise to riches distresses few of us. No one abuses Henry Ford simply because he is rich; “soap-boxers” do not rail against him and the radical press does not gird at him, as they rail and gird at many men of lesser wealth. His critics are mostly of two sorts: financiers and Jews – to Ford they seem to be one and the same. Neither group objects to his wealth and power, but merely to his talk. The common people extend a blanket blessing on all his works, in marked contrast to the hostility with which they have viewed other of the unco rich since the muckraking days of twenty years ago.

 

There are solid grounds for this approval, as well as mythical ones. Ford rose from commonplaceness “on his own.” He stuck by the shop when lesser industrialists fled from close touch with production and its human problems. He has raised wages, avoided strikes, and earned a reputation as a good boss – and good bosses are pearls of great price in industrial society. … But above all else Ford provided folks with cheap motor-cars.

 

By 1924, there had formed, Pound wrote, “a mass opinion that Henry Ford is a miracle man, a wonder-worker.”   

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“He scoffs at learning that has no earning power, and influence that is based only on affluence, and history, art, and many of those finer graces of life which, even in a democracy, as yet mean little to the masses.” 

“Better than any man of his generation Henry Ford came to personify the dynamic democracy of naive America.” 

“When Mr. Ford gets to hammering Wall Street, and then goes on to hammering international bankers and Jews indiscriminately, he reminds one of AE’s Irish orator who was forever trying to bring up a large family of words on a small income of ideas.”

 

The public may never outgrow the Ford myth entirely but Mr. Ford himself outgrows it little by little, a piece here and a piece there. He seems to have outlived the Messianic mood, in which he felt called to evangelize a sinful world even though at great expense.

 

This phase ended with the Peace-Ship fiasco. He admits now that the Peace Ship taught him a good deal about war. Except for tilting against international bankers (always unidentified), Mr. Ford no longer concerns himself greatly over international affairs

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Therefore the Ford fortune and the Ford policies have important social bearings. Are the Fords to become merely another rich American family, following the usual course of our plutocracy from shirt sleeves to polo, and from cook stoves to coronets, in three generations? Is the Ford business destined to be merely another big business which, founded by an original individual with spirited if somewhat narrow ideas of public service, is destined to degenerate into an impersonal, profit-taking machine, amid the growing indifference of its employees and the waning regard of a disillusioned public?

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The professed aims of Henry Ford’s existence are to pay high wages and sell goods cheap. You might think an employer could easily avoid profits by so doing; but Mr. Ford does not agree. Every time he has lowered prices, he has tapped another layer of buyers and increased his sales. Whenever he has raised wages, he has increased efficiency of production. His volume is now so enormous that he could sell cars at close to cost and still reap large profits from the sale of parts only. So the manufacturing and merchandising policies which Henry Ford approves are no more likely to keep his fortune from growing than his philanthropy, which he disapproves.

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The business, by reason of its size and social importance, will become in time one more battle-ground for unionism, one more target for state control, one more argument for Socialism. Ford is a Superman who has plowed a straight, deep furrow through the crust of custom; but another generation may reap stranger crops there then Ford ever dreamed he was planting

 

Mr. Green of Iowa, for the moment personifying the Sovereign state in its unending struggle with too masterful individuals, pointed an accusing finger at Mr. Ford one mild September day. The incident passed without much comment. Few noted the challenging gesture, as few mark the turn o’ the tide. Yet the turn is as inevitable as the tide itself. This challenge, too, was inevitable, and registers, unless all signs fail, the high-water mark of popular favor for Ford. Now, unless the man be great beyond his words and works, the ebb is on. (155/46-58)                                                                                                   

 

*

 

John Meacham, in a Time article (1/30/17) notes that Calvin Coolidge is best remembered for saying, “the business of the American people is business.” 

He adds context. Coolidge also said,

 

…make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.

 

* 

William Allen White, in A Puritan in Babylon, described a reporter asking Coolidge why he never invited artists, musicians, actors or poets to the White House, only businessmen. 

“Coolidge replied, ‘I knew a poet once, when I was in Amherst; class poet, name of Smith.’ A cud-chewing pause, then, ‘Never have heard of him since!’” 

President Coolidge.

 

 * 

The president also makes clear his support for the new quota laws, which will limit immigration from many countries. Coolidge explains:

 

There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. ….Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.

*

Crossword puzzles were a huge fad in 1924; the Baltimore and Ohio RR put dictionaries on its mainline trains.

 

* 

Civilization advances by small steps. In 1924, one small step for humankind is taken when the first recipe for s’mores is published. The New York Times explains:

 

The s’more’s origins are as hard to pin down as its oozing center. The first published recipe is often attributed to the 1927 guidebook “Tramping and Trailing With the Girl Scouts,” where it appears under the name “Some More.” But a similar recipe for “Campfire Marshmallow Graham Cracker Sandwich” from the marshmallow brand Campfire can be found in a recipe leaflet that Michigan State University dates to 1924. And a year later, The Norwalk Hour newspaper wrote of the introduction of “some-mores” to Girl Scouts at Camp Andree, about 30 miles north of New York City.

 

In any case, the first creator of the famous campfire treat, sadly anonymous, deserves posterity’s praise.

 

* 

June 2: You might say this was “somewhat overdue.” Congress passes the Indian Citizenship Act. The right to vote, however, was limited in some states, with the last state not allowing Native Americans to vote until 1957. 

A second source indicates that Utah did not clear the path to voting for Native Americans until 1962.

 

* 

“I am the law in Indiana.” 

American Heritage (8-1965): William E. Wilson recalls returning home to Indiana after his freshman year at Harvard. His father picked him up in Washington, D.C. and the family drove home, “my father’s touring speed of thirty-eight miles per hour.” At nights they stopped in tourist homes and “kept the electric fans going all night.” 

Like any 18-year-old, he felt disoriented returning home:

 

…there was the old house on Chandler Avenue to explore and readjust to, and there were all my stored possessions to sort over and reappraise: adolescent love letters hidden in the secret compartment of my roll-top desk, minutes of the club I had belonged to in high school, yearbooks, dance programs, my rock collection, and even a bag of marbles from grade-school days, with an agate mooned by many battles. I thought I had outgrown them all but discovered I could not throw anything away. Eighteen is an age that looks both ways.

 

One day his father, running for a second term in Congress, pulled him aside and said, “Son, I’m not going to be re-elected in the fall.” 

The younger man thought his father was joking. 

His dad continued: “A lot of people have turned against me, a lot of good, honest, but misguided people like your friends the Pattersons. I decided I’d better tell you tonight, before you begin to hear it from others.” His problem: he had refused to join the Klan. 

“Too many of them have been bamboozled into a sense of self-righteousness by a bunch of demagogues,” his father said of the voters. “We’ve gone a long way in this country, but apparently we still haven’t freed men and women of their suspicion of each other, their prejudices, their intolerance. I think that is going to be the big battle of this century.” With that his father clenched his fist and “drove it into the windshield before him, breaking a V in the glass and cutting his hand.” 

That summer D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan, could rightly say, “I am the law in Indiana.” Wilson notes: “Rumor had it that Stephenson had made over two million dollars in eighteen months from the sale of Klan memberships and Klan regalia. A congressman’s salary in those years was only $7,500.” Only Klan officials were admitting their membership that summer; but Stephenson told reporters, “God help the man who issues a declaration of war against the Klan in Indiana now.” 

Wilson describes the mood that summer:

 

If you were rich you could attribute your riches to your God-given right as a one-hundred-per-cent American to be rich and to be suspicious of anyone not of your kind who wanted to share the wealth with you; if you were not rich, you could at least be proud that you were not a Catholic who worshipped in Latin, a Jew who had a foreign-sounding name, or a Negro whose skin was black.

 

Eventually, he got a job for the summer at a filling station in Evansville, where he lived. The man in charge, Schelhaus, he says his name was, as best he remembers forty years later, was an unpleasant bigot. Dave, another young worker, was a little better. Was Wilson a “crossback,” he asked the first day, “We don’t want no crossbacks or kikes around here,” he explained. That is: a Catholic. 

Wilson describes one telling incident:

 

The first Negro came into the station about an hour after I started working. He was driving a Ford truck, with “Hauling” painted crudely on the panels. I wiped the windshield and filled the radiator while Dave stood at the back cranking out the gasoline. It was not until the truck drove off that I saw the dark, rainbow-streaked puddle of gasoline on the concrete. Dave must have spilled at least a gallon. I was sure that before long Schelhaus would lash out at him for carelessness, and there was an awkward silence among us when I sat down between him and Dave and tilted my chair against the wall.

 

“What the hell did you mean, doing that?” Schelhaus said, finally.

 

I glanced covertly at Dave, who remained silent, his gaze fixed on the cars passing in the street.

 

“You a Bolshevik or something” Schelhaus said.

 

Still Dave did not speak, and then I saw that Schelhaus was addressing me.

 

“You mean me?”

 

“Who the hell else would I mean? What did you think you were doing back there?”

 

I turned in appeal to Dave. But Dave continued to stare straight ahead.

 

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

 

“Oh, yes, you do!” Schelhaus said. “You know damn well what I mean. Giving that nigger radiator service and wiping off his windshield.”

 

“But you said—

 

“I never said you was to give free service to a god-dam black nigger!” Schelhaus shouted, sweat popping out on his oily forehead. “There ain’t no job in this country can make a white man wait on a nigger! This is still a free country, and you’d better learn that pretty quick—you and your old man both.”

 

At mention of his father, Wilson exploded, and said it was a free country and a Negro should get the same service as a white man. “The Neegro,” Schelhaus mocked him, got up from his seat, went to the toilet and slammed the door.

 

Dave tried to “reason” with Wilson and calm him down.

 

O.K., O.K. Schelhaus is an s.o.b., and I don’t blame you. But you got to think of the principle of the thing too, kid. If you give a nigger an inch, he’ll walk all over you. Schelhaus is right about that. It’s a matter of self-respect, kid. A guy has to keep his self-respect or he ain’t worth a damn. It’s just a matter of self-respect, see?

 

Wilson had a new girlfriend that summer but never found out where she or her family stood in regard to the Klan.

 

She would not talk about it. Almost every time I took her out, my car was trailed by the Horse Thief Detective Association, which was the police force of the Klan. It was always the same car that did the trailing, and I finally got used to it. It would pick me up about a block from our house, follow me to my girl’s house, and wait while I went in to get her, and then follow us to the movies or wherever we were going. When we came out, it was there waiting and would follow us home. One night, when I eluded its shadow and parked on a country road with her, a farmer pulled up beside us and said, “If you kids know what is good for you, you’ll move along, The Kluxers are patrolling this road tonight, and God knows what they’ll do to you if they catch you here.”

 

I knew. At least I had read and heard stories of what the Horse Thief Detective Association was doing to others. They entered homes without search warrants and flogged errant husbands and wives. They tarred and feathered drunks. They raided stills and burned barns. They caught couples in parked cars and tried to blackmail the girls, or worse. On occasion, they branded the three K’s on the bodies of people who were particularly offensive to them. And over in Illinois there had even been a couple of murders. I took my girl home.

 

That summer he remembers various kinds of harassment. “By chance I answered a number of anonymous telephone calls we got at our house. ‘Hi, nigger-lover,’ the calls often began, and thereafter were so obscene they were unprintable.” Year later, in a safe-deposit box of his father’s, he found “anonymous letters” full of “threats, innuendoes, scurrilous abuse, obscenities.” Someone soaped K.K.K. on their window screens. He went to hear a Klan leader speak, the title of his presentation, “Here Yesterday, Here Today, Here Forever.” “The original Klan of 1861 was organized to deal with a bad system of local government,” the speaker explained (getting the date wrong). “The present Klan was formed to preserve the best system of government in the world.” 

Wilson recalls 300 new members being sworn in at the fairgrounds in New Harmony one summer night. At Boonville “three thousand of them gathered in the anonymity of their robes for an all-day outing and a big parade and speeches about the need for One-Hundred-Per-Cent Americans to take the law into their hands…They even turned up at the fair in Dubois County, where the population was predominantly Catholic.” Klantauguas, or informational meetings were held. “Processions of robed Klansmen marched into churches on Sunday morings in the middle of services and laid sums of money on offertory rails, and some preachers were suborned and spoke in support of “the Klan ideal” thereafter. One who did not, in the northern part of the state, was taken across the Michigan line and branded.” Kiddy Klaverns were organized. Konsort wives met. There was an abortive effort to turn Valparaiso University into a Klan Kollege. 

Standing on the corner of Seventh and Main one summer evening in Evansville, the young college student watched 5,000 marchers pass, “men on horseback, men in cars, men on foot, women, children, all in robes, all hooded, some carrying flaming crosses on long poles, silent except for the hum of motors and the clop of hooves and the soft shuffle of shoes on the half-molten asphalt.” 

He remembers his father shaking his head in dismay. “I would never have believed that a thing like this could happen to Indiana. Hoosiers have always been generous, friendly, and kind. A poison has got into their blood.” 

On the night before he headed back to college he visited his old high school friend and the “Patterson” family, as he calls them in his story. Mr. Patterson followed him down the porch steps, brushed his son aside, and said to William, “Tell your dad it’s not too late.” Then he held up three fingers—for the three K’s.

 

His mother and sister wept when his father lost the election in November; but the Klan had peaked. In 1928, Boyd Gurley, editor of the Indianapolis Times, won a Pulitzer prize in 1928 for campaigning against the K.K.K. D.C. Stephenson, the leader of the Klan, ran into trouble in 1925, “when he was arrested for sadistic sexual assault” on a young woman named Madge Oberholzer. Twelve days later she died. Wilson writes: 

According to the young woman’s dying statement, Stephenson and two henchmen kidnapped her and took her to a town in northern Indiana. Stephenson, she said, had viciously assaulted her on the train enroute, then held her prisoner in a hotel. Finally, to console her, he sent her out with money to buy a new hat. She bought poison instead, and when Stephenson discovered she had taken it, he refused to call a doctor and drove her home to Indianapolis and dumped her on her doorstep. Stephenson always protested that he was “framed” by his enemies, but he was sentenced to life imprisonment for second-degree murder.

 

The governor elected with Klan support was indicted on bribery charges after he left office but saved by the statute of limitations. Harry Rowbottom, who defeated his father for a seat in Congress, was also arrested for accepting $750 to see that a government job went to the “right” man. Rowbottom spent the following year in a cell in Leavenworth penitentiary. American Heritage (8-1965) 

The Klan in Indiana.

 

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October 19: The Four Horseman of Notre Dame defeat Army 13-7. Grantland Rice writes: “In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Leyden. American Heritage (8-1965)

*

 

November: Robert DeC. Ward, writing in Scientific Monthly, describes the danger posed by undesirable immigrants.

 

Close students of the eugenical aspects of immigration have for many years felt that too large a proportion of incoming aliens have been of low vitality and poor physique – distinctly undesirable members of our population yet not specifically excludable under existing statutes. The matter has more than once been brought to the attention of Congress, but without result.

 

He adds:

 

There have been admitted not hundreds but thousands of aliens who were diseased; who were mentally and physically far below par; who had criminal records and tendencies; who could not earn their own living; who were in every way hopelessly undesirable and impossible material for American citizenship.

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The committee in Congress, focused on eugenics, noted:

 

Experts have estimated that had mental tests been in operation and had the “inferior” and “very inferior” immigrants been refused admission to the United States, over 6,000,000 aliens now living in this country, most of them potential fathers and mothers of future Americans, would never have been admitted. It surely is high time for the American people to put a stop to such a degradation of American citizenship and such a wrecking of the future American race.

 

Dr. William J. Mayo also spoke in favor of limits on immigration:

 

Eugenics as applied to man is still in its infancy. During the World War, tests showed that 18 per cent. of the young men drafted were not developed beyond the mental age of eleven years. Since our form of government must always be controlled by men of average intelligence, the general average of intelligence must be raised if the standards of government are to be raised.

 

He says also:

 

The alien is a public health problem, just as he is a social problem, and the public hospital sees the dark side of this picture. In the American of several generations, the doctrine of moral obligation has become thoroughly ingrained. In southern Europe the Oriental point of view more or less prevails that no obligation which is not enforceable exists. The laxity of the conduct of the law in the United States, the slowness of justice, and the extraordinary latitude allowed the offender against the community, give the criminal more than a sporting chance to escape punishment and have exposed the administrators of law to the contempt of the class of offenders brought to us in recent years by immigration. And these are the people with whom our public hospitals are overcrowded. Our courts have been filled with alien lawbreakers until the people have arisen in righteous indignation and reduced the number of immigrants to 3 per cent. of the number already here from each country. If the percentage system of immigration in effect in 1890 could be reverted to, as has been advised, a much more desirable class of citizens would be brought from the countries that gave birth to the United States and its concept of government. (155/95-97; also found online) 

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December: H.L. Mencken applies his pen to lambast “Chiropractic,” in an essay in the Baltimore Evening Post. A few quotes: 

“This preposterous quackery flourishes lushly in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities.” 

“In Los Angeles of the Damned there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians…” 

“The mormons who pore in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” conspicuously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of sorcerers.” 

“The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover.” 

What makes a good practitioner of this new art of medicine?

 

Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits – retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents.

 

As for schools of chiropractic, Mencken writes: “they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men, and decayed welter-weights, and the land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.” 

“I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal.” 

“And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on.” (49/148-152)