1903

__________ 

“Kitty Hawk: Success. Four flights Thursday morning. All against 21-mile wind. Started from level with engine power alone. Average speed through air 31 miles. Longest 59 seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas.”

 

Telegram from the Wright Brothers to their parents, December 17, 1903

__________

In my class this was the watchword.

Terrance was an ancient Roman thinker.

MASSACHUSETTS is the first state to require license plates, as automobiles multiply. Across the United States, 32,900 cars and trucks are now on the roads. With an estimated U.S. population of 80,632,000, that meant there was 1 car or truck for every 2,451 people.

 

That would compare with the 283.8 million cars and trucks owned by Americans in 2021.

 

The U.S. population, according to the 2020 census stood at 331,449,281, meaning we have 1 car or truck for every 1.17 persons.

 

If we eliminate persons too young to drive, there are more vehicles than there are drivers in this country.  

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might be an interesting question to put to students: How have cars and trucks changed life, and made it better or worse for Americans? What future do they see for the automobile, c. 2050?

 

*

 

JULIA BREESE was attending normal school in Emporia, Kansas in 1903, but never finished the year. Her parents took her to San Antonio, hoping drier air would cure her tuberculosis – but it didn’t. She died. In March 1904, she succumbed. Her mother later wrote, “We can only fancy what a welcome we’d give her if she came back.” 100/311

 

*

 

July 26: Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker, team up to become the first to ever drive an automobile across the United States. They manage to make the trip in only 52 days! The trip began in San Francisco on May 23, and was the result of a $50 bet. An argument over drinks, four days earlier, whether or not the automobile was a novelty, too unreliable to ever replace the horse, led Jackson to accept a bet: that he could reach New York City within 90 days.

 

Crocker, a mechanic recommended a used 20-horsepower Winston, a cherry-red auto. As the History Channel notes, “American roads were extremely primitive – fewer than 150 miles nationwide were even paved. There were no road signs, road numbers or gas stations, and automobiles were extremely prone to breakdowns.” Only fifteen miles out of town, the travelers had their first flat tire, one of many which would follow.

 

When their car broke down in Oregon, and they were stranded for eight hours, they finally got a tow from a cowboy who lassoed the Winston and pulled it along. In Idaho they bought a dog, a bull Terrier they named “Bud,” and took him along. They even fitted Bud with a pair of goggles to keep dust out of his eyes. They got stuck in mud later and a team of horses had to pull them out. Bud got sick drinking bad water. The men went hungry for 36 hours at one stretch in Wyoming. Jackson later joked that he and Crocker started eying Bud as they “tightened their belts.”

 

All kinds of breakdowns slowed their progress and by the time they left Cheyenne, Wyoming, on July 7, 46 days had already passed.

 

Wherever they went, people crowded around, because many Americans had never seen an automobile.

 

They picked up speed from there, averaging 150 miles per day, reaching Chicago on July 17. There was a stop in Cleveland, where the Winston had been built, an accident near Buffalo, New York that tossed the two men out of the car, in an era when seat belts were unknown. On July 26, after 4,500 miles and 63 days, the men finally reached New York City. They were hailed as heroes in the newspapers and their feat was noted in Winston Automobile advertisement in years ahead.

The famous auto. Author's collection.

 

*

 

October 13: The Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the first World Series, a best-of-nine affair, five games to three. The longest game, the sixth, took only two hours and two minutes to complete. Game 7, in Boston, drew the largest crowd, 17,038.

 

Cy Young did good work for Boston. Honus Wagner, star shortstop for the Pirates, had a bad series, batting .222 and committing six errors. The fact that Deacon Phillippe started five of eight games for the Pirates, went for 44 innings, and wore out his arm, didn’t help their cause.

 

Baseball was a different game in that era, with only three homeruns hit in the series, two by Boston’s Patsy Dougherty.

 

The Pirates committed 19 errors, the Americans 14.

 

In 2018, one of only three programs known to exist from that World Series was put up for auction. Expected selling price: $150,000 to $250,000.

 

 

*

 

December 17: The Wright Brothers make four successful flights at Kitty Hawk. Most newspapers ignore the story or barely notice. (See: Year 1900, for first mention of the brothers.)

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: In a reading for my students, I described what happened this way. During the winter of 1902-03, after a summer of successful tests at Kitty Hawk in 1902, Orville and Wilbur worked harder than ever.

 

    For they expected to fly – not glide – the next summer. Assisted by Charles Taylor, a Dayton mechanic, they calculated that they would need a gasoline engine with at least eight horsepower. Taylor, a wizard in a machine shop, set to work to make one. In six weeks he completed his task:  producing a twelve horsepower model, fueled by a one gallon tank. Meanwhile, Orville and Wilbur devoted three months to testing hundreds of propellers, looking for the best design. Notebook after notebook filled with careful measurements and formulas.

 

    By summer 1903, they were ready. By now they realized that other inventors were copying their ideas. Indeed, they were far from certain that they would be the first to fly. They did know they were close to manned, powered, and controlled flight. But they did not realize how far ahead of their competition they were. They were particularly worried by the efforts of Professor Samuel Langley, one of America’s most respected scientists.

 

    After more than ten years of study Langley appeared ready to launch his first plane. News reports indicated he might test his craft at any moment. Fearing defeat, the Wrights rushed ahead. Once more they returned to Kitty Hawk in the fall of 1903, and tested their newest model as a glider, planning to add the engine later. On October 3, Orville had another brush with death. During a test flight a gust of wind threw him from his pilot’s cradle and rolled him along the wing. He barely managed to regain his position in time to avoid a smashup. Another day a sudden down-draft brought the glider close to the sand. A wing tip struck Wilbur hard in the head, as he stood watching.

 

    Despite such troubles, Orville and Wilbur pushed ahead, always fearful that Langley might defeat them. A series of maddening delays blocked their path. Weather along the coast proved unusually bad. Plans for flying were put on hold. The brothers placed their engine in position on the lower wing and ran their first tests. The results were a disaster. The engine sputtered badly, the propellers broke loose, and the drive shafts were badly damaged.

 

    Langley had his chance: and he made his launch on October 7, 1903.  Something went wrong and his craft (called Aerodrome) snagged on its catapult launcher at the end of the rail. Since Langley worked from the roof of a barge on the Potomac River pilot Charles Manly ended up swimming rather than flying!

 

    Meantime, the Wrights had their damaged drive shafts repaired. Again they tested their engines. This time a shaft cracked. On November 30, Orville found himself returning to Dayton for another round of repairs. Winter was settling down on the North Carolina coast, and the surfaces of small ponds near camp froze each night. Biting winds blew off the ocean. Temperatures fell. There were times the brothers’ hands were too numb to work. By December it appeared as if Orville and Wilbur had missed their chance.

 

    Working overtime, Langley and his team were ready again on December 8. Once more Aerodrome headed down the runway. For a brief moment she rose into the sky. Then, with engines churning hopelessly, the tail broke off and the machine tumbled into the river. Once again Manly barely escaped drowning. Newspapers across the nation tore into the professor the next day. The New York Times labeled the whole affair a “ridiculous fiasco.”  Editors predicted that “the flying machine which will really fly” would not be ready for “one to 10 million years.”

 

* 

    After a near miss and minor damage to their plane on December 14, the Wrights were prepared to launch again, three days later. Rising early on December 17, 1903 they set to work preparing for the test. Several times the cold drove them back to their work shed to warm themselves by the stove. By 10:30 a. m. all was ready. The two brothers shook hands and Orville took the controls. The engine was started. A restraining wire was dropped and the plane began moving down a launch rail in the sand. Wilbur ran alongside steadying the right wing. Then, with five other men as witnesses, the machine gave a sudden jerk and rose into the air.

 

    On its own power. From a flat surface.

 

    All controlled by Orville Wright!

 

    The first man to fly.

 

    This “flight” lasted only twelve seconds, and covered a mere 120 feet. Then the plane (now renamed The Flyer) skidded back to the sand. Still, it was a giant’s step.  One excited witness took off to spread the news. At the Kitty Hawk post office he shouted,  “They have done it!  They have done it!  D---ed if they ain’t flew!”

 

    On that famous day at Kitty Hawk the brothers made three more flights, each longer than the last. On the fourth Wilbur traveled 852 feet and stayed in the air 59 seconds.

 

    Man had taken his place beside the birds, and pointed himself to the stars.

NOTE TO TEACHERS: In readings for my seventh and eighth grade students, I highlighted words in bold I thought many might not know.

 

In a footnote, regarding events of December 17, I added this: 

    Later that day, as the brothers discussed their success, the wind sprang to life. Their craft was caught and flipped with a sickening crash. An assistant named John Daniels tried to grab hold of the wings but became tangled in the wires. Soon Daniels and The Flyer were tumbling end-over-end across the sand. Before anyone could stop the craft it was a complete wreck.

 

    Daniels was badly shaken but unhurt. Later he laughingly called this his “first – and God help me – my last flight.”

 

 

 

* 

“Slime siphoned upon us from the Continental mud tanks.” 

    Stephen Miller’s great grandfather, a Jew fleeing pogroms and abuse in Russia, and speaking Yiddish, arrives in this country. Under rules implemented in 2018, at the urging of his great grandson, an advisor to President Trump, he would have been barred from entry. Sam Glosser was his name and he passed beneath Lady Liberty’s torch around 1903. Most East European Jews went straight to work in the sweatshops of the New York City garment industry, low-skilled workers, earning low pay. 

    Virulent anti-Semitism was common in America at the time. A New York newspaper referred to people like Glosser as “slime” being “siphoned upon us from the Continental mud tanks.”

 

* 

THE SONG “The Eyes of Texas” debuts at a student-organized minstrel show. The composer is John Lang Sinclair. More than a century later, controversy continues to roil the campus of the University of Texas. For many years the song has been the fight song of the university, and many students would like it banned, because of its roots. On the surface, it does not seem to be problematic: 

The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the livelong day.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them
At night or early in the morn – 
The Eyes of Texas are upon you
Til Gabriel blows his horn.

 

Wikipedia explains in part: 

    The lyrics are set to the tune of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” It is common practice that the last line, “Til Gabriel blows his horn,” is sung and played to a slightly slower tempo than the rest of the song. Students, faculty, staff, athletes, and alumni punctuate each beat of the last line with a small chopping motion of their right raised arm and “Hook ‘Em” hand sign.

 

    It doesn’t help to know that no African Americans were enrolled at the school until 1956, or that white students continued to play the song at minstrel shows until the mid-1960s, when such shows – if not the sentiment behind them – fell out of favor. In 1986, a graduate of the university and a donor, complained about attempts to ban the song. He or she wrote, “It is sad that it is offending blacks,” the donor wrote. “As I said before the blacks are free and it’s time for them to move on to another state where everything is in their favor.” 

    Ugh. 

    That’s a modern variant of the “Go back to Africa” brand of thought.

* 

A COMPARISON of sorts: In April 2021, a law student at Rutgers causes anger to erupt after quoting a legal opinion from 1993, which included the word “nigger.” This was during a Zoom call with her professor and other students. A group of black students has now called for the student and professor to apologize. Or another student uses the word in a discussion of racism, language, and freedom of expression. (A fifteen-second clip of his words goes viral.) 

    I have never been one to say it’s difficult to uncover racism; but you do have to wonder. An example: calling your football team the “Redskins?” Clearly racist. But which of these sports logos are racist?

 

 

    Of course, the racists (and other brands of haters) always walk among us. Attacks on Asian Americans increase dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part, many believe, after President Trump insistently calls the virus the “Kung Flu,” the “Wuhan flu,” and stresses it came from China. 

   Time magazine publishes this cover:

  

    Asian Americans feel a need in May 2021 to organize anti-hate groups of their own, and create this poster, which I love: 

December 30: An appalling disaster unfolds in Chicago, as related by Edward Ellis:

 

    On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, at a matinee performance of the Iroquois Theater, Chicago, a structure with all modern appliances and believed to be fire proof, a small blaze started in the stage draperies, supposed to have been caused by calcium or arc light, and spread with terrifying swiftness. The immense audience was thrown into a wild panic, and fought and trampled on one another in the frenzied struggle to reach the outer air. Nearly all the exits were found locked and the asbestos curtain would not work. Penned in, the miserable children, women and men succumbed by the score to the most horrible of deaths. More than six hundred persons were offered up as a sacrifice to the greed and criminal neglect of men. (33/2202)

 

1920

 

____________________

 

“The older generation pretty much ruined this world before passing it on to us.”

 

John F. Carter

____________________

 

 

    In an August 1965 issue of American Heritage, Bruce Catton explains, “All the old rules seemed to be vanishing in the Twenties.” “…the characteristic figure of the era was the Flapper, the girl who bobbed her hair and wore short skirts with nothing in particular beneath them and put in her time piling in and out of open cars populated by collegians in coonskin coats.”

 

    Catton writes: “There was an immense, all-pervading disillusionment. The nation’s highest ideals had been appealed to during the war, so that to win the war seemed the holiest of causes; the war had been won, but it was hard to see that anything worth winning had been gained; the idealism had been used up, and people had an uneasy feeling that they had been had.” 

 

    Westbrook Pegler called it “the Era of Wonderful Nonsense.” Says Catton: “Publicity was the thing, and it had no standards of value except pure sensation.” Farmers and wage earners did not share in the growing prosperity. One “conservative senator announced that congressmen who protested about this situation were simply ‘sons of the wild jackass’ whose cries need not be noticed.”

 

    E. B. White summed up the impact of radio: that man’s “words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.”

 

    Jack Shuttleworth described the Jazz Age: “Fitzgerald wrote it, Held drew it…” John Held, Jr. was born in Salt Lake City in 1889. At age nine he sold his first woodcut for nine dollars. He was later trained by one of Brigham Young’s “160-odd grandsons,” Mahonri Young.

 

    Shuttleworth describes Held’s art:

 

    The scenes were football games, fraternity houses, speakeasies, cocktail parties, tea dances. The step was the Charleston or Black Bottom and the picturesque means of transportation the Stutz Bearcat, the Marmon roadster, and the Model T. And at all these places, in any car, stairway, and alcove, one main, almost relentless recreation was necking.

Held makes fun of college men and their affectations.

 

    Malcolm Crowley describes how the decade began:

 

    When we first heard of the Armistice we felt a sense of relief too deep to express, and we all got drunk. We had come through, we were still alive, and nobody at all would be killed tomorrow. The composite fatherland for which we had fought and in which some of us believed—France, Italy, the Allies, our English homeland, democracy, the self-determination of nations—had triumphed. We danced in the streets, embraced old women and pretty girls, swore blood brotherhood with soldiers in little bars, drank with our elbows locked in theirs, reeled through the streets with bottles of champagne, fell asleep somewhere. On the next day, after we got over our hangovers, we didn’t know what to do, so we got drunk.

 

…We returned to New York, appropriately—to the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you met came from another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have parents, or a past more distant than last night’s swell party, or a future beyond the swell party this evening, and the disillusioned book he would write tomorrow.

 

    Hemingway talks about the embarrassing use of words like “sacred, glorious, and sacrifice.” Having served in the ambulance corps, he admitted, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”

 

   John F. Carter Jr. wrote in a letter to a friend: “the older generation pretty much ruined this world before passing it on to us.” It was like a child had been handed this Thing back in the 90s in good shape. “But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages.”

 

*

 

THE 1920 CENSUS will show the State of New York standing first of 48 states in population, at 10,384,829. Pennsylvania will be second, Illinois third. Cleveland, Ohio will have 796,841 people – making it larger than Los Angeles, San Francisco or San Diego.

 

    Kansas will rank 24th in population, at 1,769,257. Hard to believe a century later, but Florida will trail, standing 32nd, with 968,470. Miami, Florida will count only 29,571 residents.

Abandoned high school near Ness City, Ness County, Kansas.
In 2020, the population of Ness County was 2,687,
or about 2.5 people per square mile.
In 1920, the county had 7,490 people.

The blogger bicycled across the country in 2007. 
In two small Kansas towns, the locals reported that even McDonalds had closed.

These two young riders were heading east, also riding across the country.
I was heading west.
(I lost their names, unfortunately.)
Kansas Highway 96 was flat for many miles.

 

    The ten least-populous states will be:

 

39. Montana

40. Utah

41. New Hampshire

42. Idaho

43. New Mexico

44. Vermont

45. Arizona

46. Delaware

47. Wyoming

48. Nevada

 

   Only three cities have topped a million people: New York leads (5.6 million, including 1,989,216 persons foreign born); Chicago is second (2.7 million); and Philadelphia is third (1.8 million).

 

   Detroit is close (993,678). (Source: The North American Almanac, 1924).

 

  A century later, with two states since added, New Hampshire is still #41. Montana is #43, Delaware is #45, Vermont is #49, and Wyoming finds itself at the bottom, #50.

 

  Rounding out the bottom ten are states new to the list of least populated: Maine #42; Rhode Island #44; South Dakota #46; North Dakota #47; and Alaska #48. 

Parts of Wyoming remain barren a century later.
Author's photo from a cross-country bicycle ride - 2007.

Much of Montana is sparsely populated, as well.
Picture heading north toward Browning, 
from blogger's bicycle ride 2024.
Even finding shade was a challenge in places.

*

MARION DAVIES stars in the movie, “The Restless Sex,” as an adventurous young woman, torn between her love for two different men.

* 

THAT SPRING, Arthur Walworth writes, Wilson faced a number of post-war problems:

 

long-simmering problems of labor and industry were brought before the recuperating President for settlement. During his illness the men of his Cabinet had been debating delicate, incendiary issues of law. Now, when Palmer suggested the use of an injunction to suppress a strike in New York Harbor, the President turned to him quietly and said: “Every lawyer knows that is an abuse of the writ.” Labor could never be forced back into the conditions under which had worked before the war, Wilson thought.

 

Wilson refused, however, to consider a pardon for Eugene Debs, the Socialist, whom he considered a “traitor.” (10/397 II)

 

* 

February 25: Congress passes the Mineral Lands Leasing Act. Royalties to be paid to the federal government, by companies extracting oil and gas are set – but are not changed for at least a hundred years. Most lands can still be rented for an annual fee of $2 per acre for petroleum, and $3 per acre for coal.

 

*

 

March 26: This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, is published. At a time when polite society believed a woman who allowed a man to kiss her must then be engaged, this line shocked readers.

 

Amory Blaine’s girlfriend Rosalind Connage tells him, “I’ve kissed dozens of men, I suppose I’ll kiss dozens more.”

 

In the wake of World War I, young people challenged the old rules.

The pre-war style of 1914 is going out.

* 

REACTION against immigration continues to fester. H.L. Mencken offers his acerbic take on the Anglo-Saxon type:

 

As I say, the American of the old stock is not unaware of his steady, and, of late, somewhat rapid deterioration – this gradual loss of his old mastery in the land his ancestors helped to wring from the Indian and the wildcat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and, as if in despair of arresting it in fact, makes desperate efforts to dispose of it by denial and concealment. These efforts often take grotesque and extravagant forms. Laws are passed to hobble and cage the citizen of newer stocks in a hundred fantastic ways. It is made difficult and socially dangerous for him to teach his children the speech of his fathers, or to maintain the cultural attitudes that he has inherited from them. Every divergence from the norm of the low-caste Anglo-Saxon is treated as an attentat against the Commonwealth, and punished with eager ferocity.

 

It so happens that I am myself an Anglo-Saxon – one of far purer blood, indeed, than most of the half-bleached Celts who pass under the name in the United States and England. I’m in part Angle and in part Saxon, and what else I am is safely white, Nordic, Protestant and blonde. Thus I feel free, without risk of venturing into bad taste, to regard frankly the soi disant Anglo-Saxon of this incomparable Republic and his rather less dubious cousin of the Motherland. How do the two appear to me, after years spent largely in accumulating their disfavor? What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stick out above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence – his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms – in short, his hereditary cowardice.

 

He adds that the two great empires, English and American, “were built up primarily by swindling and butchering unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations.”

 

In fact, Mencken quotes a report focusing on the condition of the people of southeast Ohio, at the time, described as “more purely American than in any of the rest of the State.”

 

Here gross superstition exercises strong control over the thought and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feeble minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics is corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes abound, the schools have been badly managed and poorly attended. Cases of rape, assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence within five minutes’ walk of the corporation limits of the one of the county seats, while in another county political control is held by a self-professed criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and its evils results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but are extreme also in the towns. (49-131-132)

* 

May: In a book review, The New York Times takes note of the anti-Semitism of the era. 

    The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that was owned by Ford and circulated via Ford dealers around the country, launched a series titled “The International Jew.” It cited “The Protocols,” and advanced the plot: Schiff and the Warburgs, in this telling, had not just brought down the Russian Empire; they had also conspired to bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. (Unsurprisingly, these rich bankers did not in fact support the Bolsheviks.) International Jews, Ford’s paper said, were the “conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.” 

    The newspaper series was a crisis for American Jews. But Schiff, uncharacteristically, advised restraint. “If we get into a controversy we shall light a fire, which no one can foretell how it will become extinguished,” he wrote to a group of Jewish leaders in June. “I would strongly advise therefore that no notice be taken of these articles and the attack will soon be forgotten.”

 

Schiff died later that same year, and did not live to see how terribly wrong he had been.

Ford turned the series, “The International Jew,” into a book (subtitle: “The World’s Foremost Problem”) and millions of copies were printed. 

Two years later, The Times reported that Adolf Hitler, had a portrait of Ford on his office wall in Munich. On a table in his anteroom you could pick from a stack of copies of The International Jew, translated into German.

* 

August 10: Mamie Smith and Perry Bradford record a song, written by Bradford, “Crazy Blues.” Smith is from Cincinnati, a singer with only one other recorded title to her credit. In the first month, “Crazy Blues” sells 75,000 copies, two million over time. As The New York Times noted on the hundredth anniversary of its release, “It established the blues as a popular art and prepared the way for a century of Black expression in the fiery core of American music.”

 

“Crazy Blues”

By Mamie Smith

 

I can’t sleep at night

I can’t eat a bite

‘Cause the man I love

He don’t treat me right

 

He makes me feel so blue

I don’t know what to do

Sometime I sit and sigh

And then begin to cry

‘Cause my best friend

Said his last goodbye

 

There’s a change in the ocean

Change in the deep blue sea, my baby

I’ll tell you folks, there ain’t no change in me

My love for that man will always be

 

Now I can read his letters

I sure can’t read his mind

I thought he’s lovin’ me

He’s leavin’ all the time

Now I see my poor love was blind

 

I went to the railroad

Hang my head on the track

Thought about my daddy

I gladly snatched it back

Now my baby’s gone

And gave me the sack

 

Now I got the crazy blues

Since my baby went away

I ain’t got no time to lose

I must find him today

 

Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can

But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man

I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news

Now I got the crazy blues

 

I’m gonna do like a Chinaman

Go and get some hop

Get myself a gu, and shoot myself a cop

 I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news

Now I’ve got the crazy blues.

 

The Times explains the power of the song: 

A boisterous cry of outrage by a woman driven mad by mistreatment, the song spoke with urgency and fire to Black listeners across the country who had been ravaged by the abuses of race-hate groups, the police and military forces in the preceding year — the notorious “Red Summer” of 1919.

 

The blues worked on multiple levels simultaneously and partly in code, with “my man” or “the man” translatable as “the white man” or “white people.”

 

Out of her mind with despair, the singer turns to violence against her oppressor for relief in the chorus that gives the song its title: “Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can/ But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man/ I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news/ Now I’ve got the crazy blues.”

 

Indeed, the blues became a full-blown craze, with listeners of every color able to buy and listen at home to music marketed as “race records.” The form was initially associated almost exclusively with women such as Ms. Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. They and many more women made hundreds of records that sold millions of copies over more than a decade — well before the great bluesman Robert Johnson stepped into a recording studio for the first time, in November 1936.

 

But so was the song’s disturbing but powerful ending, in which Ms. Smith sings allegorically of the darkening circumstances: “There’s a change in the ocean/ change in the deep blue sea.” In the concluding verse, she speaks of changing the way she responds. She has decided to “go and get some hop,” she announces, and “get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop.”

 

Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was also a dance tune: People were not only moved by it; they moved to it. 

A young woman of the era: showing too much ankle!

No good girl would ever smoke or show so much skin!!!

1920 Model T Coupe by Ford.

* 

September: In the Atlantic Monthly, “These Wild Young People” appears, written by One of Them.

 

The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They gave us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof. “So simple that a child can run it!” But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages. Now, with loving pride, they turn over their wreck to us. (155/frontispiece)

 

* 

November 2: President Wilson is convinced Democrats will prevail in the voting. “You need not worry,” he tells his cabinet on Election Day. “The American people will not turn Cox down and elect Harding.” (10/403 II) 

It’s not even close. 

Warren G. Harding polls 16,151,916 votes, a winning margin of 60.3 percent. James M. Cox earns 9,134,074. Democrats manage to win the votes of every former Confederate state, save Tennessee. 

They also pick up Kentucky. The rest of America votes – as we might say a century later – red.