1927

Clara Bow: The "It" Girl.

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“The days of the Anglo-Saxon as the ruling class of the Republic are numbered.”

 

Hendrik Van Loon

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Hendrik Van Loon, writing about America in colonial times compared the desire to come to Massachusetts Bay and make money, to the drive of Americans when he was writing in 1927:

 

To-day when one company makes money out of radio a dozen other companies are formed in just as many minutes. When one man is known to have made a fortune out of Florida real estate, six hundred thousand hopeful idiots pack their wives and children into the family Ford and hasten to Miami. (124-115)

 

In still another passage, he writes,

 

The “polyglot boarding-house” of which President Roosevelt was to speak with such intense bitterness has probably come to stay.

 

In due time it will be a little less polyglot but that will not change the fact that the days of the Anglo-Saxon as the ruling class of the Republic are numbered.

 

To some of us that may appear in the light of a terrible disaster.

 

To the Roman of the year 500 the advent of the Goth and the Burgundian seemed little short of a calamity.

 

He knew that their success was due to his own lack of interest – to the faltering courage of his own children – but that knowledge did not make it any easier for him to accept his defeat.

 

He predicted the decay of the empire, the fall of the human race, the end of the world.

 

And behold, a thousand years afterwards, the admixture of West and East had given birth to a new form of civilization, superior in every respect to the narrow culture of the old Imperial days.

 

The mills of the gods grind slowly.

 

Perhaps we had better let them grind on for a little longer.  

 

For as a rule they grind best. (124-428)

 

Later, he assessed the spirit of the times, the year he wrote – that Americans finally “created a new deity which should henceforth rule the Republic and which they called ‘Success.’” (124-439)

 

He adds:

 

“You have,” so this deity (who is not deprived of a sense of humor) remarked, “you have been accumulating more wealth than anyone has ever done before. You have built larger factories than anyone else and more of them and faster trains and more of them and higher houses and more of them and your bank deposits run into the billions and your per capita national wealth is greater than that of any other country since the days of Moloch. But now that you've got all that, ‘What,’ in the words of one of your wittiest compatriots, ‘are you going to do with it?’”

 

And when we came to think of it, for the life of us, we did not know! (124-443)

 

It is telling, of the spirit of the times, that Van Loon’s book ends there.

Drawing from Van Loon, 1927.

 

* 

Early in the year: Dorothy Hope Smith completes a black and white line drawing of her neighbor’s baby girl, Ann Leslie Taylor, then four or five months old. (Smith can’t remember exactly when it was.) 

The following year, Smith, a commercial illustrator, wins a contest sponsored by Gerber. The company announces that her work will appear on labels of a new line of baby foods. The name of the child, and even the child’s sex, are not revealed, and for years remain a mystery. 

In 1951, Ann did receive a $5,000 settlement, enough in those days for a great down payment on a house. 

For more than ninety years, Ann Talor Cook’s picture (she married and became a teacher) has graced Gerber bottles. Mrs. Cook was asked, after her secret leaked, did she feed her own children Gerber foods?

“Not exclusively,” she replied.

*

 

February 15: The movie, “It,” is released, starring Clara Bow. Based loosely on a story written by Elinor Glyn, an English aristocrat, it focuses on a young woman of “almost mysterious magnetism or charisma,” as a New York Times writer recently explained. (Glyn had advised not only Ms. Bow, but Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.)

 

Glyn herself defined “It,” this way: “That quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With ‘It’ you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man. ‘It’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.”

Bow became the first of a series of Hollywood stars who were said to have “it,” that force that gave them unusual appeal.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I would expect students to have all kinds of interesting comments if you asked what current celebrities they believed had “it,” that hard to define magic.

A young woman in 1927, was not supposed to reveal her undergarments.

Audiences would be surprised to see an actress display so much leg!

Scenes from the movie (above).

*

 

April 19: Mae West and the producer of a play called Sex are arrested by New York City police. Along with a lawyer, they are sentenced to ten days in jail for giving a performance that “tended to corrupt the morals of youth and others.”

 

West was also fined $500.

 

West had other legal run-ins, for a play, Drag, later renamed The Pleasure Man, which dealt with homosexuality, and The Constant Sinner. The latter play was shut down after only two performances, twice as long as the former play lasted before the morals police arrested West and most of the cast.

 

In Sex, West plays a prostitute trying to better her life and find a rich man to marry. (See by comparison: Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts, in 1990, which was labeled a “romantic comedy.”)

 

The notoriety led West, then 38, into a movie career. Despite her age, when most actresses’ careers start to wind down, she landed star billing when Paramount Pictures offered her a contract at $5000 a week, or roughly $73,000 in 2019 dollars. As the website Feed Your Brain explains,

 

They also let her re-write her lines in the films, such as in her first film, Night After Night, that set the tone for her persona from her first line where a hat check girl says to her “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds.” To which West replied, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”  Within three years she was the second highest paid person in the United States behind only William Randolph Hearst.

 

In 1933, West had her first big movie hit in She Done Him Wrong. In one scene, co-star Cary Grant wonders, “Haven’t you ever met a man who could make you happy?”

 

“Sure,” she replies. “Lots of times.”

 

She later said, “I got fun out of being a legend and an institution.” During World War Two,  inflatable chest life preservers were known as Mae Wests. Some of her famous lines include: “She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.” “It is better to be looked over than overlooked.” “Any time you’ve got nothing to do – and lots of time to do it – come on up.” (Time, 12/1/1980, p. 80.)

 

 

*

The Pulitzer comes with prejudices.

 

Spring: Louis Bromfield wins a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Early Autumn, which Wikipedia describes as “a harsh portrait of his wife’s Puritan New England background.”  

 

“He is, of all the young American novelists, pre-eminently the best and most vital,” John Carter wrote in The New York Times at the time.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: A little background. In the 90s, I was tasked with teaching Ohio history, as part of an American history class. 

I set out to find interesting material, heard about Bromfield, and read his Pulitzer winner, Early Autumn, and came away impressed. As often happens, curriculum changes came quickly, and we were soon absolved of teaching Ohio history; so I never read any more of Bromfield’s novels, even though I owned a battered copy of what I thought were three separate works, The Green Bay Tree, Early Autumn and A Good Woman. 

The years, and many other curriculum changes followed. It was not until I was deep into retirement, and had read all of Shakespeare’s plays, and plenty of David Foster Wallace, and Rick Atkinson’s trilogy on the U.S. Army in World War II, that I got around to Bromfield again. 

This time, I was deeply disappointed, partly with the plots and characters of the first and third books. 

And in A Good Woman, it became increasingly clear that Bromfield was a racist, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on your reading. Philip Downes, the son of Emma Downes, the “good woman” of the title, uses the “n-word” constantly. At first, I hoped it was used, as in Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, because that was how people talked in an earlier era. But the more I read, the worse I felt. 

I should also note that in the volume I own, Cass Canfield provided a “Foreword,” in March 1957. 

He gives no warning of any racism in Bromfield’s work. 

Bromfield’s writing naturally reflected the attitudes of the 20s, however, and a teacher today might find some of his insights of value and use in a classroom. So, I’ll type up what I consider useful and then I may chuck his book in the trash. My reading of Twain, for example, leads me to believe he was deeply sympathetic to the downtrodden, including African Americans and Chinese. 

Bromfield is sympathetic in A Good Woman to immigrant workers, which I liked. So, in the order he wrote the three novels, a few of his best observations: 

 

 

The trilogy is set in the Town, located in the old Western Reserve (northeastern Ohio), and opens with a scene of “men and women in the costumes of the late nineties.” Julia Shane is the focus, the widow of John Shane, a darkly handsome man, but rumored to have thrown his wife down the steps of their mansion during one of his rages. John Shane was rumored to have lived in sin with his Irish housekeeper, “a pretty middle-aged Irish woman who never mingled with the townspeople,” but she was sent away when he married Julia, a girl of the Town, and they went to Europe for their honeymoon. We meet, in passing, Ellen Tolliver, a niece of Julia Shane. “She was an obnoxious child of sixteen, wilful [sic], spoiled, savage, but beyond the possibility of denial, she played the piano superbly in a truly extraordinary fashion.”

 

I found that description interesting, in that teenagers have always had, do have, and always will have the power to be obnoxious when they choose.

 

The Town is the site of a booming steel industry, located in the Flats. There immigrants labor long and hard. The native-born Ohio people refer to them as “Dagoes,” and “Hunkies,” and there’s one big Ukrainian, Stepan Krylenko, who looms large. Judge Weissman is a power in politics in the town, “a fat perspiring Oriental and the son of an immigrant Viennese Jew.”

 

At one point, as Weissman leaves The Hill, where the “Shane Castle” stands, he passes a boy in his carriage who shouts in Russian, “‘Jew! Dirty Jew!’ Judge Weissman regarded the boy with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and muttered to his companion, Lawyer Briggs, ‘These foreigners are getting too free in their manners. … The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of these days. … There ought to be a law against letting them into the country.’”

 

The Shanes had two daughters, one the beautiful Lily, who is in her 20s when the novel opens, and may or may not be in love with The Governor, a power in the state, “a tall man of perhaps forty. … People said there was no reason why he should not one day be president. He was shrewd in the way of politicians, too shrewd perhaps ever to be anything but one who made other men presidents.”

 

In Chapter 3, we see Lily refuse to marry The Governor, for reasons unclear. Lily’s sister, Irene, is for some reason horrified and runs from the house across the lawn of the estate.

 

This scene follows. Her mother speaks first:

 

“There must be some reason, Lily…. It is a match not to be cast aside lightly…. it would make me very happy.”

 

The Governor, who had been standing by the window, turned sharply. “I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Shane…alone, if possible. There are some things which I must tell… things which are unpleasant but of tremendous importance, both to Lily and to me.” He coughed and the blood mounted to his coarse handsome face. “As an honorable man, I must confess them.”

 

At this last statement, a faint sound of mirth came from Lily. She bowed her head suddenly and looked away.

 

“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.

 

The subject the Governor must discuss is the revelation that he and Lily have had sex, despite not being married, a topic almost too shocking in polite circles of that era to discuss – and which Bromfield covers only by making clear that it has occurred. When Lily is finally allowed to return, she explains why she will not marry. She has money of her own, from her father’s estate. As for marrying the Governor, she explains, “It is no use….How can I explain to you? I would not be a good wife. I know… you see, I know because I know myself. I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. It is my affair.”

 

This, in 1924, when the first novel was written, would have been a line that shocked older generations.

 

By Chapter 9, Lily has also refused marriage with William Harrison, or “Willie,” son of the rich mill owners of the town. “You’re a strange, strange girl,” her mother tells her when Lily says she’s not concerned. She decides she will go to Paris to live (something Bromfield himself had done after World War I).

 

The Town booms, as the Mills boom.

 

Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Poles, Italians, Negroes took up their abodes in the unhealthy lowlands, in the shadows of the furnace towers and the resounding steel sheds, under the very hedges of Shane’s Castle. In Halsted street, next door to the corner saloon, a handful of worthy citizens, moved by the gravity of conditions in the district, opened an establishment which they gave the sentimental name of Welcome House, using it to aid the few aliens who were not hostile and suspicious of volunteer workers from the Town.

 

In Chapter 13, Irene, the younger daughter tells her mother, “I’ve decided to enter the Church.”

 

Bromfield writes, “The Church to both meant but one thing – the Roman Catholic Church – which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mock all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the Scarlet Woman of Rome.”

 

Julia replies to her daughter. “I won't hear of it. I’ve told you often enough, Irene…. I won’t have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can prevent it.” She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin to hatred. “You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am dead, if I can help it.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I don’t know if students today are as clear about the animosity displayed by members of different churches in the “good old days.” I know my father and mother, she a Catholic, had to get a letter of permission from the Pope in 1939, to marry, since my father, raised a Presbyterian, I think (he almost never attended church while I was growing up, and if he did only came to midnight mass on Christmas Eve with my mother and my brothers and myself; and then only so he could fall asleep). 

In 1967, I also recall how my younger brother, Ned, had to stop dating a girl named Mary MacDonald, because he was Catholic, and she was not.

 

In any case, in The Green Bay Tree, Lily goes to Paris for four years, and returns, cultured and beautiful, while Irene becomes involved in helping the foreign workers of the Mills. When Lily returns, we learn that she has had a child, “le petite Jean.”

 

The Governor has offered to help with his raising, and would like him to go to school in America. Lily explains to her mother, “But Jean is mine. I shall accept nothing from him. He is afraid to recognize Jean because it would ruin him. I shall send the boy where I like.” In Europe, Lily is in a relationship with the Baron, a dashing soldier, who will later command a cavalry regiment in World War I. “Cousin Charles,” Julia Shane explains to Lily on her return, has been county treasurer, and discovered that the Cyclops Mill owes the county $500,000 in back taxes.

 

When Charles Tolliver pursues the matter, Judge Weissman and other powers in the Town ruin him for his honesty. “He has killed himself politically. The Jew is too powerful for him. It’ll be hard on Hattie and the children, just when Ellen was planning to go away to study,” Julia Shane explains to her older daughter. “Judge Weissman will fight him from now on. You have no idea how angry he was. He tried to bellow at me, but I soon stopped him.

 

During her return visit, Lily takes a tour of the Mills with Willie Harrison, and her sister Irene. “Once a cinder penetrated Lily’s frail shoe and she was forced to lean against Willie while she took it off and removed the offending particle. He supported her politely and turned away his face so that he should not offend her by seeing her shapely stockinged foot.”

 

The “delicacy” of that Victorian Era might surprise students today.

 

At one point, this conversation occurs

 

“Those are the tempering vats,” said Willie. “Only negros work here.”

 

“But why?” asked Irene.

 

“Because the other workers won't,” he said. “The acid eats into their lungs. The negros come from South Carolina and Georgia to do it. They are willing!”

 

Reading the novel, I thought Bromfield might have sympathy for the men watching the acid vats, and for the workers, generally, he does. His racism only becomes clear in the third volume of his trilogy.

 

The dangerous conditions, and the lack of rights for workers, he makes clear in scenes like this:

 

“Yesterday,” shouted William Harrison in his thin voice, “there was a terrible accident yonder in the other yard. A workman fell into a vat of molten iron.”

 

Irene turned to her companion with horror stricken eyes. “I know,” she said. “It was an Italian named Rizzo. I heard of it this morning. I’ve been to see his wife and family. There are nine of them.”

 

William shouted again. “They found nothing of him. He became a part of the iron. He is part of a steel girder by now.”

 

Out of the evil, dancing shadows a man blackened by smoke leapt suddenly at them. “Look out!” He cried, and thrust them against the wall of a neighboring shed so roughly that Irene fell forward upon her knees. A great bundle of steel plates – tons of them – swung viciously out of the darkness, so close to the little party that the warmth of the metal touched their faces. It vanished instantly, drawn high into the air by some invisible hand. It was as if the monster had rebelled suddenly against its master, as if it sought to destroy Willie Harrison as it had destroyed the Italian named Rizzo.

 

Bromfield writes: “On the floor of the cavern, dwarfed by its very immensity, Men stripped to the waist, smooth, hard, glistening and streaked with sweat and smoke, toiled in the red glow from the ovens.”

 

A workman passes the party by as they tour the Mills, “carrying his iron bar as if it were a straw.”

 

Willie learns that Irene has been working with Krylenko, who he warns has been trying to start a union, and cause trouble. “Your Welcome House is making trouble I’m afraid, Irene. There is no good comes of educating these men. They don’t want it.”

 

Bromfield offers glimpses of the workers lives. Willie and the two sisters watch:

 

The workmen vanished suddenly into a little shed. Their shift was finished. They were free now to return to their squalid homes, to visit the corner saloon or the dismal, shuttered brothels of Franklin street, free to go where they would in the desolate area of the Flats for twelve brief hours of life.

 

Now, headed home,

 

They drove along between the two streams of millworkers, one entering, one leaving the Mill yards with the change of shifts. The laborers moved in two columns, automatons without identity save that one column was clean and the men held their heads high and the other was black with oil and soot and the heads were bent with a terrible exhaustion. It was a dark narrow street bordered on one side by the tall blank walls of warehouses and on the other by the Mill yard. The smells of the Black Fork, coated with oil and refuse, corrupted the damp air. On the Mill side a high fence made of barbed wire strung from steel posts was in the process of construction. To this Willie called their attention with pride. “You see,” he said, “we are making the mills impregnable. If the unions come in there will be trouble. It was my idea... the fence. A stitch in time saves nine.” And he chuckled softly in the darkness.

 

While she is home, Lily encourages Ellen Tolliver in her music, and gives her gorgeous new clothes, claiming she has already worn them herself. Then a cable arrives, “Jean has measles.” With that, “Trunks were packed with great haste.” When Lily returns to Paris, she sits in her home one night, hearing “the faint clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequently along the boulevards.”

 

Irene, her mother writes Lily one day, is now “a little touched perhaps by a religious mania.”

 

Krylenko is now a leader among the workers, and men of property, who have heard of him, Bromfield explains, describe him as “a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a criminal.”

 

In Chapter 36, Irene explains to her mother that Krylenko is “fine and noble and pure.” She has taught him English and given him books to read, helped make him what he is.

 

“He’s been driven from the Mills for what he’s done for the people in the Flats. He’s been put on a blacklist so he can never get work in any other Mill. He told me so to-night. That’s what he was telling me when you stood watching us.” A look of supreme triumph came into her face once more. “But it’s too late!” she cried. “It’s too late….They’ve voted to strike. It begins tomorrow. Stepan is the one behind it.”

 

Later, people in the Town will remember “the year of the Great Strike.” It proves a boon in some ways. With the furnaces shut down, “For the first time in a score of years the sun became clearly visible. Instead of rising and setting as a ball of hot copper immersed in smoke, it appeared and disappeared quite clear and white, a sun such as God intended it to be.”

 

Again, having grown up in northern Ohio, and having often driven through “the Flats” of that city on the way to Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Browns games in the 60s. I remember well how all the houses and cars and tiny front lawns of the workers homes were powdered with an orange dust, the product of the steel mills nearby.

 

Bromfield writes about the strike next. Even Hattie Toliver, a kindly woman, Ellen’s mother, shows no sympathy for the workers. “They didn’t have to come to this country. I’m sure nobody wants ‘em,” she tells Julia one day.

 

“The Mills want them,” Aunt Julia replies. “The Mills want them and the Mills want more and more all the time.”

 

“But I don't see why we have to suffer because the Mills want foreigners. There ought to be some law against it,” Hattie replies.

 

Lily soon sends a letter, telling her mother that Ellen, who has gone to Europe at Lily’s urging, is making a success of her career as a pianist. Her mother Hattie grumbles, calling Paris “the wickedest city in the world.” Nor can Hattie understand why Lily is so happy, so “buoyant” in her own life. “Sinners can only suffer and be miserable,” she thinks to herself.

 

One evening, as Hattie is walking home from Shane’s Castle, she stumbles into the middle of a clash between striking workers and police. Hattie

 

carried her head high, despising the Irish constabulary as profoundly as she despised the noisy alien rabble. Clearly it was none of her affair. This embroiled rabble had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her family, nothing to do with her world….

 

And then, suddenly and without warning, the crack of a pistol tore the air; then another and another, and there fell at the feet of Hattie Tolliver…the body of a swarthy man with heavy black mustaches. Before she was able to move, one of the constabulary, rushing up, kicked the prostate body of the groaning man.

 

Hattie seems to change as the violence of the strike becomes clearer. At one point she speaks to Lily, who has again returned to the town, where her mother is slowly dying. “Only last night the police clubbed an old woman to death at the foot of the drive. She was a Polish woman… hadn’t been harming anyone. I wonder you didn’t see the blood. It’s smeared on the gates,” she explains. Of the police, she now says, “It’s a crime the way they behave…. It’s murder. No decent community would allow it.”

 

One day, Lily finally admits to Hattie what happened between her and the Governor, a scene that could only be written in the 1920s, and not earlier. Nor would it be written the same way today.

 

“When there is danger, I can’t run away. If I could run away I’d be saved, but I can’t. Something makes me see it through. It’s something that betrays me… something that is stronger than myself. That’s what happened with the Governor. It was I who was more guilty than he. It is I who played with fire. If I was not unwilling, what could you expect of him… a man. Men love the strength of women as a refuge from their own weakness.” She paused and her face grew serious. “When it was done, I was afraid… not afraid, you understand of bearing a child or even afraid of what people would say of me. I was afraid of losing myself, because I knew I couldn’t always love him…. I knew it. I knew it. I knew that something had betrayed me. I couldn’t give up all my life to a man because I’d given an hour of it to him. I was afraid of what he would become. Can you understand that? That was the only thing I was afraid of… nothing else but that. It was I who was wrong in the very beginning.”

 

But Mrs. Tolliver’s expression of bewilderment failed to dissolve before this disjointed explanation. “No,” she said, “I don’t understand…. I should think you would have wanted a home and children and a successful husband. He’s been elected senator, you know, and they talk of making him president.”

 

Lily’s red lip curved in a furtive, secret, smile. “And what’s that to me?” she asked. “They can make him what they like. A successful husband isn’t always the best. I could see what they would make him. That’s why I couldn’t face being his wife. I wasn’t a girl when it happened. I was twenty-four and I knew a great many things. I wasn’t a poor innocent seduced creature. But it wasn’t so much that I thought it out. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t marry him. Something inside me wouldn’t let me. A part of me was wise. You see, only half of me loved him... my body, shall we say, desired him. That is not enough for a lifetime. The body changes.”

 

The scene spans Chapters 43 and 44. At one point, Hattie, who likes Lily, finally responds, “Just the same, I don’t approve, Lily. I don’t want you to think for a minute that I approve. If my daughter had done it, it would have killed me. It’s not right. One day you will pay for it, in this world or the next.”

 

Lily replies boldly, saying that she had not needed the Governor to make life complete. She had Jean all to herself. She raised him as she wished. “As it is, his father is only a memory...pleasant enough, a handsome man who loved me, but never owned me...even for an instant...not even the instant of my child’s conception!”

 

Hattie is stunned, and has difficulty recovering her composure. “I don’t see, Lily, how you can say such things. I really don’t. The words would burn my throat!”

 

In another chapter, Bromfield writes of “the vulgar, noisy aristocracy of progress and prosperity” that has overcome the Town.

 

This argument over the desirability of foreign workers continues to this day, of course, and might interest students.

           

*

 

May 21: Bruce Catton (August 1965 American Heritage), in a story about Lindbergh, writes: “After he vanished into the over-ocean midnight, and before any word of him had come back, people waited in an agony of suspense, and when it was announced that he had indeed landed in Paris, unharmed and on schedule, there was literal rejoicing in the streets.”

 

Lindbergh describes the end of his trip:

 

I circle. Yes, it’s definitely an airport. I see part of a concrete apron in front of a large, half-open door. But is it Le Bourget? Well, at least it’s a Paris airport. That’s the important thing. It’s Paris I set out for. If I land on the wrong field, it won’t be too serious an error—as long as I land safely…I circle several times while I lose altitude, trying to penetrate the shadows from different vantage points…At one thousand feet I discover the wind sock, dimly lighted, on top of some building…I’ve never landed the Spirit of St. Louis at night before.

 

He lands in the dark, overshoots the spot he hopes to stop: “Ahead, there’s nothing but night—Give her the gun and climb for another try?” No, he decides, bounces a time or two and “I’m beyond the light—can’t see anything ahead…Uncomfortable…jolting into the darkness—Wish I had a wing light…the Spirit of St. Louis swings around and stops rolling, resting on the solidness of earth, in the center of Le Bourget.”

 

*

June 13: American Heritage (8-1965) says four million people cheered him in NYC on his return and dumped 1,800 tons of confetti.

 

Will Rogers joked, “The great thing Lindbergh demonstrates is that a person can still get the entire front page without murdering anybody.”

 

*

 

July: a talent scout heads for Bristol, Virginia. There he meets A. P. Carter, a carpenter, who can sing. The scout advertised he was paying for songs. A. P. tried to convince his wife to go to town. “Ain’t nobody gonna pay that much money to hear us sing,” she grumbled. The Carter Family soon became famous, recording “Little Darling Pal of Mine,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Worried Man Blues.”

 

The same scout uncovered Jimmy Rodgers, who sang “The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” “Sleep, Baby, Sleep,” “Blue Yodel” and “Ain’t nobody ever whipped the TB Blues.” Rodgers would die of the disease.

 

*

 

August 23: Sacco and  Vanzetti are executed.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: The following poem by Martin Espada, from 2017, I think, would make students think:

 

I Now Pronounce You Dead

By Martín Espada

 

On the night of his execution, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant
from Italia, fishmonger, anarchist, shook the hand of Warden

Hendry
and thanked him for everything. I wish to forgive some people for

what
they are now doing to me, said Vanzetti, blindfolded, strapped down
to the chair that would shoot two thousand volts through his body.

The warden’s eyes were wet. The warden’s mouth was dry. The

warden
heard his own voice croak: Under the law I now pronounce you

dead.
No one could hear him. With the same hand that shook the hand
of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Warden Hendry of Charlestown Prison
waved at the executioner, who gripped the switch to yank it down.

 

The walls of Charlestown Prison are gone, to ruin, to dust, to mist.
Where the prison stood there is a school; in the hallways, tongues
speak the Spanish of the Dominican, the Portuguese of Cabo Verde,
the Creole of Haiti. No one can hear the last words of Vanzetti,
or the howl of thousands on Boston Common when they knew.

After midnight, at the hour of the execution, Warden Hendry
sits in the cafeteria, his hand shaking as if shocked, rice flying off
his fork, so he cannot eat no matter how the hunger feeds on him,
muttering the words that only he can hear: I now pronounce you dead.

 

*

 

October 4: Work begins on Mount Rushmore. Originally, the idea is to carve figures down to the waist. Funding is a problem. Jefferson is started and well underway when a crack is discovered that might mean his nose would fall off; his visage is dynamited and the work is begun again.

 

Newspapers are not impressed. One reporter says of the planned sculpture, it “would be as incongruous and ridiculous as keeping a cow in the rotunda of the Capitol building.” Another remarks, “Why not just paint a mustache on everything?”

 

A NYT story on 3/26/17 notes that Black Hills granite is some of the oldest and hardest stone in the world. The sculpture will erode at a rate of 1" every 10,000 years.

 

Nearby, Crazy Horse will stand 563 feet tall when complete.

 

The work on Mt. Rushmore was completed five weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mt. Rushmore. Author's collection.

 

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November 21: The courts break new legal Jim Crow ground, as explained by Louis Menard in a 2019 article for The New Yorker:

 

Gong Lum came to the United States from China in 1904. After being smuggled across the Canadian border by human traffickers, he made his way to the Mississippi Delta, where a relative ran a grocery store. In 1913 he married another Chinese immigrant, and they opened their own store. 

They had three children and gave them American names. 

In 1923, the family moved to Rosedale, Mississippi, and Martha, then eight years old, entered the local public school. According to Adrienne Berard, who tells the Lums’ story in Water Tossing Boulders, nothing seemed amiss for the first year, but when Martha returned to school after the summer the principal relayed the news that the school board had ordered her to be expelled. Public schools in Mississippi had been racially segregated by law since 1890, and her school educated only whites. The board had decided that Martha was not white and, consequently, she could not study there.

 

The Lums engaged a lawyer, who managed to get a writ of mandamus—an order that a legal duty be carried out—served on the school board. The board, which must have been very surprised, contested the writ, and the case went to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which ruled that the board had the right to expel Martha Lum on racial grounds. That part was not so surprising.

 

The court acknowledged that there was no statutory definition of the “colored race” in Mississippi. But it argued that the term should be construed in the broadest sense [emphasis added], and cited a case it had decided eight years earlier, upholding the right of a school board to expel from an all-white school two children whose great-aunts were rumored to have married nonwhites.

 

That decision, the court said, showed that the term “colored” was not restricted to “persons having negro blood in their veins”—apparently since the children involved were in fact white. Martha Lum did not have “negro blood,” either, but she was not white. She could attend a “colored” school. Mississippi’s separate-schools law, the court explained, was enacted “to prevent race amalgamation.” Then why place an Asian-American child in a school with African-American children? Because, according to the court, the law was intended to serve “the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race.”

 

The Lums appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1868. The first clause of that amendment is the most radically democratic clause in the entire Constitution, much of which was designed to limit what the Founders considered the dangers of too much democracy….

 

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case, Lum v. Rice, was handed down in 1927, three years after Congress passed the Johnson-Reed immigration act, which barred all Asians from entering the United States. Was Martha Lum a citizen? The Supreme Court said she was. Was she being denied the equal protection of the laws? The Court said that she was not, and cited a series of precedents in which courts had upheld the constitutionality of school segregation.

 

It was true, the Court conceded, that most of those cases had involved African-American children. But it couldn’t see that “pupils of the yellow races” were any different, and the decision to expel such pupils was, it held, “within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.” Even though the Mississippi court had stated that the purpose of the school-segregation law was to preserve “the purity and integrity of the white race,” it was not a denial of equal protection to nonwhites. The Lums, of course, knew from firsthand observation what it meant to be classified as “colored” in Mississippi, and they did what a lot of African-American Mississippians were also doing—they left the state.

 

The decision was unanimous. The opinion of the Court was delivered by the Chief Justice, William Howard Taft; among the Justices who heard the case were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Brandeis. 

One of the precedents the Court quoted prominently in support of its decision was a case it had decided thirty-one years earlier—Plessy v. Ferguson.

 

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December 2: Ford Motors unveils its Model A at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. Race car driver George Robertson assures The New York Times, “As good looking as that car is, its performance is better than its appearance.” 

It comes in a variety of body styles, has a shatterproof windshield, and can reach a speed, Robertson notes, of 71 m.p.h.

A Model A Ford.