History in the Margins

This was the year that inspired me to return to writing “A Year in Review” posts. Things related to 1924 caught my attention over the course of the year. Not just events related to Sigrid Schultz and Nazi Germany, though obviously that was part of it. The more notes I took about 1924, the more items I saw: Blue Ford Syndrome at work once more.

When I finally sat down to write this post earlier this week, it spun totally out of control. So many events, so many possible themes, so much STUFF. In fact, that out-of-control feeling could be a metaphor for 1924 as a whole. The Roaring Twenties were in mid-roar.* It was a period of creativity, heavy drinking,** and social disruption. As Sigrid Schultz described it, the mid-1920s were a time when “people were still living at top speed trying to catch up with the fun they had missed in wartime and fun they might miss in the upheaval that was bound to come.” Sometimes the speed was literal: more and more people owned automobiles and aviation advances made the front page on a regular basis.

It was also a period of political disruption as Europe, Russia, and the former Ottoman Empire attempted to settle into the changes wrought by revolutions and the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

But let’s look at 1924 specifically.

In the arts, just to name a few of the many possible choices:

George Gershwin premiered his Rhapsody in Blue, which combined jazz elements with classical composition in new ways and has been the subject of conversation and controversy ever since.***

Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain.

Walt Disney released the first cartoon from his own studio, a short titled Alice's Day at Sea that combined live action shots of a young actress and a big dog  with animated characters and background.

 

The comic strip Little Orphan Annie, created by Harold Gray and syndicated by the Chicago Tribune’s Tribune Media Services, debuted in the New York Daily News on August 5. It quickly became one of the most popular strips in syndication, running from 1924 to 2010. In 1930, its eponymous heroine also became the subject of a highly-rated radio program that ran for twelve years.

French poet André Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto, which is considered one of the most important texts of modern art, on October 15. (Personally, I think Little Orphan Annie left a bigger cultural footprint in the world’s imagination.)

In science and industry, loosely defined:

Astronomer Edwin Hubbble announced his discovery of the spiral nebula Andromeda (now called the Andromeda galaxy) in an article in the New York Times, proving the existence of other galaxies for the first time. He went on to create the most commonly used system for classifying galaxies. There's a reason they named the big space telescope after him.

Engineer Carl Taylor patented an machine that rolled freshly baked thin wafers into ice cream cones—a small step for man, a giant step for mankind. His machine built on the innovation of a Syrian-American chef named Ernest Hamwi, who rolled zalabia, a waffle like pastry, into cones at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, when ice cream vendors at a neighboring stand ran out of serving bowls. (Or so the story goes. There are lots of competing claims about who created the first waffle cones. Hamwi, however held the patent for a cone maker which Taylor’s machine was designed to work with.)

Depending on who you listen to and how you define terms, the first radio broadcasts aimed at a listening public happened in 1916, 1920, or 1921. No matter which version you accept, radio was still new in 1924 but it was making an impact. Here are a few radio firsts from 1924

• The Republican presidential convention was broadcast live to nine cities from the public auditorium in Cleveland, Ohio.  Calvin Coolidge was the nominee.
• After the election, Calvin Coolidge was the first president to deliver a radio broadcast from the White House. He had appeared on radio for the first time the year before. Four months after he became president following Warren G. Harding’s death, he chose to broadcast his Annual Message (what we now call the State of the Union address) from the House of Representatives. Coolidge was not a radio fan, but he understood the value of the medium, which allowed him to enter the homes of millions of Americans without leaving Washington.
• The Royal Greenwich Observatory began broadcasting hourly time signals.
• The first photo facsimile was transmitted across the Atlantic by radio from London to New York City, which meant that newspapers could now run photographs from overseas while they were still news.  (Do not ask me how this works.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ9hV7X87zA

Ford produced its 10-millionth Model T. (See, I told you there were more cars on the road!) The company sent it on a cross-country tour on the Lincoln Highway from New York to San Francisco. Excited crowds gathered along the way to cheer it on as if it were a visiting dignitary, which in some ways it was.  (Please remember, if you want to watch the video, you need to open the post in your browser.  You can do this by clicking the post title.)

In related news, Rand McNally published its first road atlas, called the Rand McNally Auto Chum.

In Europe, the political repercussions of the Great War were still shaking out. Here are a few examples, in roughly chronological order:

Vladimir Lenin died in January. A few day’s after Lenin’s death, the city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Millions of mourners from across Soviet Russia waited in line for hours to see his body, which was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Red Square. His death provoked a power struggle in the newly formed USSR that was not resolved until the late 1920s with Trotsky’s exile and the subsequent consolidation of power in Stalin’s hands. (And yes, the Soviet Union had its roots in Russia’s disastrous experiences in World War I. )

In related news, several newly formed states were absorbed into the Soviet Union, in theory as independent states. They were not necessarily happy about their new circumstances. In fact, nationalists in Stalin's home state of Georgia staged an unsuccessful uprising against Soviet rule, known as the August Uprising.

The Treaty of Versailles created new states, and new border disputes. One of the oddest of these was the short-lived Free State of Fiume,which was dismantled in January, 1924 in the Treaty of Rome. The Kingdom of Italy annexed the Free State of Fiume and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes absorbed Sušak. Similarly, Lithuania took the Klaipeda region from East Prussia, making it an autonomous region under Lithuanian sovereignty, though not for long.

The Turkish Caliphate, which was the final remnant of the Ottoman Empire, which had been abolished after the Great War, was abolished on March 3, bringing the Caliphate to an end. All members of the Ottoman dynasty were exiled. The constitution of the new Republic of Turkey was adopted on April 20. The new state had a secular government. On the downside, Kurdish schools, publications, and associations were banned.

German reparations were a constant issue from the moment the Versailles Treaty was signed to the Adolph Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933. Germans believed that the reparations were unfair and a major cause for the country’s economic problems. The allied states disagreed. When Germany defaulted on a payment in January, 1923, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr district of Germany in an effort to force Germany to pay up. (It didn’t work, but that’s a story for another day.) In April 1924, the German Reichstag approved the Dawes Plan, created by an international committee headed by American banker Charles G. Dawes. The plan was intended to resolve disputes over German reparations.It provided for the end of the French and Belgian occupation of the Germany’s Ruhr region.. It put the German economy under international supervision and created a payment plan for Germany, which lowered Germany’s annual reparations payment but left the full amount to be paid uncertain. In the short run, the plan stabilized the German economy, which was suffering from hyperinflation, but it did nothing to resolve the fundamental conflicts related to reparations. Many French citizens believed their government was being too lenient to Germany. Many Germany citizens believed the entire world was dog-piling on Germany. Dawes, who was vice-president under Calvin Coolidge, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 for his work on the plan.

And speaking of fundamental conflicts between Germany and the allied powers, at the same time that Europe was trying to put World War I to bed, it was also taking steps toward World War II:

The French government signed a treaty of mutual aid with Czechoslovakia in light of the possibility of an unprovoked attack by a third country. It turned out not to be worth the paper it was written on. At the Munich Conference in 1938, instead of defending Czechoslovakia, France and England compelled Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland region to Germany without putting up a fight.

Adolph Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for his participation in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. The coup failed, but from Hitler’s perspective it could be considered a success. The trial gave him more public attention than he had enjoyed before, and he made the most of it. At every chance during the trial, he gave speeches declaiming what would become major Nazi positions. He served less than nine months of his sentence, and used the time to write Mein Kampf.

The Fascists won the general elections in Italy with a two-thirds majority. Several months later, the fascists’ leader, Benito Mussolini, ordered the suppression of opposition newspapers. (A few months later, he expelled Chicago Tribune reporter George Seldes for what Seldes described as “honest reporting.”)

In Japan, things were literally shaking:

A major earthquake caused the Great Fire of Tokyo, killing 143,000. To put this in context: The Great Chicago Fire LINK of 1871, which was NOT caused by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, killed 300 and left 100,000 homeless. Accounts of the casualties in the San Francisco fire of 1906, also caused by an earthquake, range from 700 to 3000.

In the United States,****

Congress passed a new immigration law. In addition to limiting the total number of immigrants allowed into the country each year, the new law established immigration quotas for each country based on the proportion of each nationality in the United States in the 1890 census, effectively reducing immigration from central and southern Europe. Asian immigrants were excluded altogether, with these exception of those from Japan and the Philippines. (These exceptions were the result of political pragmatism. Japan kept tight control over the number of immigrants allowed to leave. The Philippines was a U.S. Possession.) The quotas remained in place, largely unchanged, until 1965.

A month later, Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared all Native Americans to be American citizens.

Edwin Denby, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Albert B Fall, Secretary of the Interior, were forced to resign as a result of the Teapot Dome Scandal over government corruption regarding oil leases.

J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, a position he would hold for 48 years.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb abducted 14-year-old Bobby Franks and murdered him. Both Leopold and Loeb were wealthy and intelligent. Their sole motive was to commit a perfect murder. They did not succeed. Their trial became a national sensation.

Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming (1876-1977) was elected as the first woman governor in the Unites States, filling her husband’s unexpired term after his death. (Another example of what political scientists often term the “widow’s walk to power.”) After being defeated for reelection in 1926, she went on to become the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. President Roosevelt appointed her to two five-year terms as Director of the U.S. Mint. (Why don’t we ever hear about these women??!! )

A couple of nice things to cleanse our historical palates:

The first Winter Olympics was held at Chamonix in the French Alps: eight sports, 16 events, 293 participants, 16 nations

The first Negro League World Series took place, attracting interest from baseball fans who had not shown interest in the Negro Leagues before.

 

*If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, the term was in use as early as 1923—apparently people realized even then that the times were roaring. (Interestingly, the term was applied to the 1820s as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Who knew?) Germans call the same period the “Golden Twenties,” which has an entirely different feel.

**Not just thanks to Prohibition, though it certainly played its part.

***I first heard it when I was twelve and it remains one of my favorite pieces of music. Its opening bars are engraved in my brain and make my heart swell every time I hear them.

****I am aware that things happened in the Americas in 1924 outside the United States, but I must admit I don’t know enough to prioritize what is important and what isn’t. Embarrassing, but true. I’m also leaving out China, where the Nationalist and Communist parties were active, and India, where the nationalist movement was gaining ground. And in the case of India, I don’t have the excuse of not knowing enough.