1919: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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The Versailles Peace Conference opens January 18 outside Paris with delegates from 27 victorious nations; 1 week later it adopts a unanimous resolution to create a League of Nations, whose members will protect each other against aggression and which will devote itself to such matters as disarmament, labor legislation, and world health (the League's covenant has been drafted in large part by London-born statesman Robert Cecil, 54, whose father was the three-time prime minister Robert Cecil, marquis of Salisbury, and who has been working on an international peacekeeping agreement since 1916; he will work for the League until it is superseded in 1945). Former German chancellor Georg, graf von Hertling, has died at Ruhpolding January 4 at age 75, and diplomat Sir Mark Sykes dies of influenza in February at age 39 while attending the peace conference. Romania's Queen Marie pleads her country's cause at the conference, where she is fêted by Clemenceaux, Poincaré, and British statesman Arthur Balfour. She was influential in bringing Romania into the war on the side of her British and Russian cousins, only to have her adopted country devastated by invading German and Hungarian armies (see Wilson's Fourteen Points, 1918).
Berlin authorities arrest socialist agitators Rosa Luxemburg, now 49, and Karl Liebknecht, 48, after an insurrection inspired by their Spartacus Party, whose members have been fomenting strikes (see 1914). The two are brutally murdered January 15 while being transferred from military headquarters to prison and Luxemburg's body is thrown into the Landwehr Canal, where it is not found until June 1. Former German officers join with others in forming the right-wing paramilitary organization Freikorps.
Germans establish a new republic with its constituent assembly at Weimar, a Thuringian city on the Ilm River far to the southwest of Berlin (the place has been selected mostly to avoid the violence at Berlin but also because its traditions are humanistic rather than militaristic). Elections held January 19 for a constitutional convention, or assembly, give 163 seats to the Social Democrats, 89 to the Catholic Center Party, 75 to the new, progressive Democratic Party, and the three parties represent a ruling coalition. Friedrich Ebert tells his countrymen, "No enemy has overcome you." He wins election as president and will head the Weimar Republic until his death in 1925. The national assembly meets February 6 to discuss the modern, democratic constitution drafted by Hugo Preuss, who serves as minister of the interior.
Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner loses his bid for election in February and is assassinated February 21 by a nobleman on his way to present his resignation to the Bavarian parliament. The assassination triggers a revolution, 30,000 German troops under the command of Munich-born Iron Cross recipient Franz Epp, 50, suppress the uprising with bloody violence. They kill an estimated 600 communists and socialists, and Bavaria joins the Weimar Republic.
Austria holds democratic elections in February and forms a People's Guard (Volkswehr) to resist communist efforts to take over the government (see 1918). Two such attempts are made (April 17 and again June 15) without success, some of the states (Länder) claim autonomy. Vorarlberg votes for union with Switzerland in May, Tyrol tries to secede, but political and social order is restored with parliamentary principles by the end of June (see 1920).
The Third International founded at Moscow March 2 is an organization dedicated to propagating communist doctrine with the avowed purpose of producing worldwide revolution. This Comintern will unite communist groups throughout the world.
Hanover-born newspaper publisher Alfred Hugenberg, 53, joins with industrialist Hugo Stinnes and others to found the right-wing German Nationalist Party (DNVP); formerly chairman of Krupp Armaments Co., Hugenberg owns Germany's largest film company (UFA). He soon becomes chairman of the party, and he will win election next year to the Reichstag.
Munich locksmith Anton Drexler, 35, joins with nationalist Dietrich Eckart, 51, and Wurzburg-born construction company owner Gottfried Feder, 36, to found the German Workers' Party (GWP). Austrian-born political agitator Adolf Hitler, 30, becomes the party's 54th member; a former lance corporal who distinguished himself under fire on the Western Front during the Great War, he soon brings in men who belonged to his army unit, notably his Munich-born commander Capt. Ernst Röhm, 31, who has joined the Freikorps under the leadership of Franz Epp, has access to the army's political fund, and transfers some money to the new GWP (see 1920).
German foreign minister Ulrich, graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, 50, resigns in June after failing to dissuade his government from ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, the new constitution is adopted July 31 and provides for universal suffrage, proportional representation, and referenda, but the country is embroiled in communist uprisings mixed with conspiracies to reestablish the monarchy. Reichstag Social Democrat Georg Ledebour, now 69, is among the leaders of a communist insurrection at Berlin, but Defense Minister Gustav Noske employs ruthless measures to suppress it and uses right-wing Freikorps groups to put down leftist revolts at Bremen, Halle, Hamburg, and Leipzig, as well as in Bavaria, Brunswick, the Ruhr, Silesia, and Thuringia (see 1920).
Leftist and libertarian Milan newspaper publisher (Amilcare Andrea) Mussolini, 35, launches his Fasci Italianii Combattimento (Italian Combat Fascists) movement at a March 23 meeting in the Piazza San Sepoloro and organizes paramilitary squads to oppose his political enemies (see 1922).
Italy's Popular Party (Partito Populaire Italiano) has its beginnings in the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana) founded in January by Sicilian-born priest Luigi Sturzo, 47; it captures 101 of the 508 seats in the Chamber of Deputies in November elections.
Romania annexes Transylvania January 11 as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia help themselves to other Hungarian territories. Hungarian statesman Count Mihály Károlyi, 43, takes office as president of a democratic republic January 11 but resigns March 20 when the Allied powers demand further territorial concessions; a Bolshevist coup d'état overthrows the government March 21, and revolutionary Béla Kun, 34, seizes power with a view to establishing a dictatorship of Hungary's proletariat (see 1918; 1920). Károlyi flees the country in July, monarchists regain control August 1, Romanian forces invade Hungary, capture Budapest August 4, force Béla Kun to take refuge at Vienna, plunder Hungary, are induced to withdraw November 14, but take with them everything they can carry (see 1920).
The Weizmann-Faisal Agreement signed at London January 3 calls for full cooperation between an independent Arabia and an independent Zionist state (see Balfour Declaration, 1917). Depressed at what he considers a betrayal of his promise to the Arabs, T. E. Lawrence has invited Faisal to London, but British and French leaders have no intention of honoring Lawrence's promise to Faisal of an independent Arabia, and Britain establishes the state of Iraq January 10 from the Mesopotamian villayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, the three easternmost provinces of the old Ottoman Empire, giving it a name used in ancient times and excluding the small Persian Gulf sheikdom of Kuwait controlled since 1756 by the al-Sabbah family (see 1920).
British authorities in Egypt arrest nationalist leader Sa'd Zaghlul and three of his associates in March and deport them to Malta (see 1918). Sir Reginald Wingate's arrest order exacerbates the unrest that has persisted since last year, the British dismiss Wingate and replace him with Gen. Edmund Allenby, but the Egyptian government resigns. The countryside rises in rebellion, and Allenby releases Zaghlul and his associates. Zaghlul proceeds to Paris, and although he has little success in his efforts to press Egypt's case before the peace conference at Versailles, he is a national hero; a mission headed by former high commissioner for South Africa Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, now 65, is appointed at Gen. Allenby's recommendation, but Zaghlul insists that he alone should negotiate with the British and arranges to have other Egyptians boycott the Milner mission (see 1920).
Montenegro deposes her king Nicholas I April 20 and votes for union with Yugoslavia (see 1918).
Greek troops land at Smyrna May 15 with Allied support, and Italian troops land in Anatolia (see 1915). Turkish war hero Mustafa Kemal organizes resistance to further dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire beginning May 19, but the new sultan Mehmet VI comes to power July 4 at age 57, dismisses Kemal July 8, and declares him an outlaw July 11. Kemal declares himself independent of the sultan August 5 at the Turkish Nationalist Congress. The Armistice of Mudros October 30 ends hostilities between Allied forces and the Ottoman Empire, British authorities banish former Egyptian grand vizier Halim Pasa Said to Malta, and an Allied military administration is set up at Constantinople December 8. The Committee of Union and Progress collapses, its members take refuge abroad, and the sultan dissolves parliament December 21, determined to crush the nationalists and perpetuate the Ottoman dynasty. British forces pull out of Azerbaijan at year's end (see 1920).
The Treaty of Noailles signed June 28 obliges Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing the Great War. Germany returns to France the Alsace-Lorraine conquests of 1871, cedes other territories to Belgium and Poland, cedes her colonies to the Allies to be administered as mandates under the League of Nations, and agrees to pay large reparations.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain signed September 10 obliges the new Austrian republic to recognize the independence of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Austria agrees to pay heavy reparations and cede the territories of Galicia, Istria, the Trentino, South Tyrol, and Trieste. The treaty stipulates that the new republic shall stop calling itself German-Austria (Deutscheösterreich) and become simply the Republik Osterreich; article 88 forbids any Austrian union (Anschluss) with Germany without approval from the new League of Nations (see 1920).
Liechtenstein entrusts her external relations to Switzerland (see 1868). Both countries remained neutral during the Great War, Liechtenstein will become a constitutional monarchy in 1921, and beginning in 1938 she will become increasingly important as a financial center and tax haven (see 1989).
The second Treaty of Neuilly signed November 27 obliges Bulgaria to recognize Yugoslavian independence, give up her Aegean seaboard, and pay $445 million in reparations (see 1919). Premier Stamboliski helped to negotiate the first such treaty and assumes dictatorial powers that he will retain until 1923.
Finland's legislature confirms a new constitution July 17 (see 1918). Gen. Mannerheim has failed to convince the Social Democrats that he is truly committed to republicanism, so they support the liberal National Progressive Party leader Kaarlo Juho Stahlberg, 54, who has drafted the constitution, becomes the new nation's first president, tries hard to narrow the differences between "Reds" and "Whites," and will eventually grant amnesty to those who have received long prison terms in connection with last year's civil war. The right-wing parties and the Agrarian Party will form coalitions to rule during Stahlberg's presidency, which will continue until 1925 (see peace treaty, 1920).
"I have been over into the future and it works," says author-journalist Lincoln Steffens to financier and presidential adviser Bernard M. Baruch after a visit to Russia, but Steffens has been deceived. The communist system does not work, and the world will spend the rest of this century learning that while capitalism requires some government regulation to avoid its pitfalls and reach optimum productivity there is no salvation in government-regulated economies that throttle innovation. Russia, meanwhile, is embroiled in civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and a White Russian Army led by Gen. Anton Ivanovich Denikin, 46, with Allied support. Gen. Denikin routs Red Army forces in the Caucasus February 3 to 9, but the Red Army captures Kiev February 3, invades Estonia, enters the Crimea April 8 (the day after the Allies have evacuated Odessa), and takes Ufa June 9.
British spy Sidney Reilly goes into hiding in July following a failed effort to assassinate V. I. Lenin (see 1917). British, French, and U.S. troops invade Russia in August, Anglo-White Russian forces defeat the Red Army August 10 in North Dvina, and British troops occupy Archangel September 27, but they withdraw from Murmansk October 12.
Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has its beginnings in the Government Code and Cipher School established at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, with 25 cryptologists and a support staff of 30 to monitor foreign communications. The school will come under Foreign Office control in 1922 (see 1938).
A Far Eastern Republic established April 6 tries to act as a buffer between Russia and China. Bolshevik forces expel the French from Odessa April 8 (see 1918), British troops withdraw from Baku August 19, the Allies evacuate Archangel September 30 and evacuate Murmansk October 12, and the Red Army takes Omsk November 15 and Kharkov December 13 as forces under the command of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak fail to stem the Bolshevik advance (see 1920).
Former president Theodore Roosevelt dies suddenly at his Oyster Bay, N.Y., home Sagamore Hill January 6 at age 60; former Canadian prime minister Sir Wilfred Laurier at Ottawa February 17 at age 77.
The American Communist Party has its beginnings in a local of the Communist Labor Party founded at Kansas City by socialists who include Staten Island, N.Y.-born feminist and labor agitator Ella Bloor (née Reeve), 57, who adopted the name Bloor when she wrote pieces of investigative reporting for Upton Sinclair at the turn of the century. A fiery speaker for the party, she is known as "Mother Bloor." She opposed the war, hailed the Bolshevik revolution, and will be arrested more than 30 times. But there are only about 70,000 professed communists in America.
Bombings by suspected anarchists disrupt eight U.S. cities June 2 and continue through the summer. One of the June 2 bombs severely damages the Washington, D.C., home of Moosehead, Pa.-born Attorney General A. (Alexander) Mitchell Palmer, who was appointed to his position in March, having served as alien property custodian and run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. Now 47, Palmer has supported woman suffrage, opposed child labor, championed tariff reform, and written an essay ("The Case Against the Reds") declaring that communism is "eating its way into the homes of the American workman." With encouragement from Congress, Palmer begins a series of well-publicized raids on labor union offices and the headquarters of communist and socialist organizations, especially those of resident aliens who have fewer rights than citizens (see 1920).
Federal authorities release anarchist Emma Goldman from prison September 27, release Alexander Berkman a few days later, but soon take them to Ellis Island (see 1917). The Supreme Court upholds conviction of Russian propagandists opposing U.S. intervention in Russia. Justices Holmes and Brandeis dissent from the ruling handed down November 10 in Abrams v. United States. Holmes says, "Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, 'Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,'" but Washington, D.C.-born Justice Department lawyer J. (John) Edgar Hoover, 24, handles deportation cases involving alleged communist revolutionaries and calls Goldman "the most dangerous woman in America" (Hoover will become assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] in 1921; [see crime, 1908]). Federal authorities deport Berkman, Goldman, and 247 other Russians December 21 aboard the transport ship S.S. Buford (see Goldman, 1921).
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is founded with help from former Wellesley College economics and sociology professor Emily Greene Balch, 52, who serves as international secretary. Wellesley did not renew her appointment because of questions about her "patriotism."
Britain's House of Commons seats its first woman member after Virginia-born Viscountess Nancy Witcher Astor (née Langhorne), 40, is elected as a Conservative to succeed her husband as member from Plymouth. A close friend of Romania's Queen Marie, she met and married émigré New York-born real estate heir Waldorf Astor, now also 40, in 1906, becoming one of the richest women in England. An agricultural expert, Waldorf has succeeded to his late father's title October 18, inherited ownership of the London Observer, and moved to the House of Lords. "Obviously I can't say that the best man won," Lady Astor jokes, "but the best policy did."
Sinn Fein Party members of Parliament proclaim an independent Irish Republic January 21 and organize a Parliament of their own (see 1916). Countess Markievicz gains release from Holloway Gaol March 6 following the death of another prisoner from influenza in Gloucester Gaol and returns to Dublin March 15. The Dail Eireann includes Sinn Fein president Eamon de Valera, now 37, who gains release from prison in the spring through the efforts of Michael Collins, who was himself released with many others before Christmas in 1916. Countess Markievicz is appointed secretary for labour in the new government with support from the Irish Women Workers Union, headed by Helena Molony (see 1918). But the countess makes a speech in May at Newmarket urging a boycott of English manufacturers, authorities deem her remarks seditious, she is arrested June 13, the British suppress the Dail Eireann September 12, they hold the countess in Cork Jail until October 16, firebombing and murders of constables and police officers become so common that scores of officers leave their jobs each month, and war begins November 26 between the 14-year-old Sinn Fein and British regulars (see 1920).
Former Brazilian president Francisco de Paula Rodrigues Alves dies at Rio de Janeiro January 16 at age 70; he was reelected last year but had not yet taken office.
Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata is lured into attending a meeting at the hacienda of Chinameca in his native Morelos state and is shot to death April 10 at age 49 by Carrancista soldiers.
Former Nicaraguan dictator José Santos Zelaya dies at New York May 17 at age 65.
Former Peruvian president Augusto Leguía y Salcedo is recalled to the presidency. Some elements of the nation revolt, but Leguía's followers seize power July 4 in a coup d'état and install him in the office that he vacated at the end of his first time in 1912. Now 56, Leguía will break with the old oligarchy, force many prominent political figures to go into exile, preside over the creation of a new constitution, but rule as a dictator until 1930.
President Wilson suffers a stroke at Wichita, Kansas, in late September while on a tour to rally support for ratification of the Versailles peace treaty. Rushed back to Washington, D.C., he suffers a massive stroke October 2 as isolationist Republican senators mount opposition to joining the League of Nations that Wilson has championed; they gain support from Americans disillusioned since 1918 with participation in foreign wars and fearful of losing the nation's traditional independence in international affairs. The president's second wife, Edith, now 47, has decoded secret messages and even attended peace talks in her husband's stead as smaller strokes have left him increasingly disabled, and she decides whom he will and will not see during the longest period of a presidential disability since the shooting of President Garfield in the summer of 1881. She prevents his physician from announcing news of the president's condition (his left side is completely paralyzed, but the public hears at first that Wilson has suffered indigestion, then that he has nervous exhaustion) and carries on in his place without public knowledge (some will call her the "First Woman President").
The U.S. House of Representatives unseats Wisconsin socialist congressman Victor Berger November 10; Berger's district reelects him in December, but the House will declare his seat vacant next January.
The U.S. Senate rejects the Versailles Treaty and rejects U.S. membership in the League of Nations. President Wilson is powerless to fight isolationists, led by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R. Mass), who have particularly attacked Article X of the treaty, the one that insures the permanence of the territorial boundaries agreed upon at Versailles and requires any member of the League to help any other member who comes under attack. The president has called this "the heart of the covenant," but critics assail it as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and constitutional authority to declare war; the November 19 Senate vote fails to come up with the two-thirds majority needed for ratification, and isolationist sentiment will prevail in America for more than 20 years.
France acquires mandate control of Syria from Turkey and of Togo and Cameroon in Africa from Germany. Belgium acquires Burundi and Rwanda and will administer them as "protectorates" along with the Congo until 1962.
Afghanistan's Amir Habibollah returns to Jalalabad after a hunting trip at Kalagosh and is assassinated February 20 at age 46 after an 18-year reign in which he has kept his country aloof from the European war despite widespread popular support for the Ottoman Turks against Britain, thereby incurring the anger of young anti-British militants. He has opened Afghanistan to Western technology, introduced electricity, automobiles, and Western medical practices, founded schools and a military academy, started a weekly newspaper, and agreed to accept British counsel in foreign affairs in return for an annual subsidy of £160,000. His 26-year-old son Amanullah is governor of Kabul, controls the country's arsenal and treasury, and is crowned despite the prior claim of his uncle Nasrullah (Amanullah will not assume the title king until 1926). Britain has controlled Afghanistan's foreign policy since 1880, when Amir Abdur Rahman concluded Anglo-Afghan agreements that provided protection from Russian aggression and a financial subsidy plus war matériel; Amanullah demands a revision of those agreements, London balks, and a third Anglo-Afghan war begins May 3. Exhausted by losses sustained in the Great War, Britain negotiates at Rawalpindi, Mussoorie, and Kabul, concluding a peace that leaves Afghanistan free of British control. Amanullah becomes a national hero and will reign until 1929.
The Rowlatt Acts passed by Parliament in February extend the wartime powers of the 1915 Defence of India Act, and the Government of India Act (Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) incorporates most of the principles agreed upon at the end of 1916 in the Lucknow Pact: it provides for elections to be held next year, introducing some degree of democracy for the first time into the executive branch of Britain's colonial administration on the subcontinent. The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms increase the number of native members of the viceroy's executive council from at least two to at least three, turns the legislative assembly into a bicameral body with lower house (the Legislative Assembly) and upper house (Council of State). The lower house is to have 140 members, of whom 100 are to be elected, and 40 of the 60 members of the upper house are to be elected. Liberal Party leader Edwin Samuel Montagu, 40, has helped introduce the measure, having worked as parliamentary undersecretary to the India Office from 1910 to 1914 and become secretary of state for India in 1917. The new law introduces a system of double government (diarchy), dividing the executive branch of each provincial government into an authoritarian part (which controls justice, police, land revenue, and irrigation) and a part responsible to the electorate (which controls agriculture, forests, fisheries, education, public health, and public works) (see 1935).
The new Government of India Act limits the franchise to men of property and education, but the number of Indians eligible to vote for representatives to provincial councils is expanded to 5 million (only 1 million are eligible to vote for Legislative Assembly candidates, and only 17,000 to vote for Council of State members).
The Amritsar Riots for Indian self-government produce a massacre April 10. Some 10,000 unarmed Sikh men, women, and children gather in the city's Jallianwa Bagh that Sunday in violation of a ban on public assemblies (see Gandhi, 1914): Sikh separatists have fortified the 314-year-old Golden Temple (Harimandir) and take up positions in it. The local British commander, Gen. Reginald (Edward Harry) Dwyer, 54, uses the occasion to retaliate for the killing of four Europeans and the beating of a woman missionary; he calls out 50 troops and without giving the demonstrators adequate warning has his men fire into the screaming crowd. They fire continuously until all 1,650 rounds in their guns have been discharged: 379 people lie dead in the enclosed area, having had no way to flee, and the 1,200 wounded receive no medical attention. The governor of the Punjab Province places the entire province under martial law April 15, Nobel poet-novelist Rabindranath Tagore repudiates the knighthood he was given in 1915, Annie Wood Besant alienates her followers by supporting the imperial policy of repression, but Calcutta-born lawyer Chittaranjan Das, 48, goes to the Punjab as a member of the unofficial Jallianwala Bagh Inquiry Committee. An official commission of inquiry censures Gen. Dwyer for his action, he is relieved of his command and forced to resign, but when he returns to Britain he is lionized by imperialists and given a jeweled sword inscribed, "Savior of the Punjab." More than 250,000 Ghurkas have fought for the crown in Asia and Europe at the height of the Great War, and Ghurkas will continue to play a major role in Britain's armed forces despite the ill treatment accorded them, but the Jallianwala Bagh massacre turns millions of Indians into fervent opponents of the raj, which heretofore has enjoyed the trust of most people. Chittaranjan Das attends the Amritsar Congress and antagonizes Annie Wood Besant by advocating a policy hostile to implementation of the new British laws (see Gandhi, 1920).
Korean nationalists begin a series of demonstrations March 1 at Seoul demanding independence from Japan, whose government agrees to withdraw from the issue of Vietnamese independence in return for French help in controlling the rebellious Koreans (see 1909; Cuong De, 1915). The Samil Independence Movement spreads to other parts of the country, and before it is suppressed in March of next year about 2 million Koreans will have participated, 7,000 will have been killed by Japanese police and soldiers, 16,000 will have been wounded, 46,000 arrested, 10,000 tried and convicted, and 715 private houses destroyed by fire, along with 47 churches and two school buildings, but the Japanese will continue to rule Korea until 1945.
China has a wave of demonstrations and protests beginning May 4 amidst anxieties that the government has been complicit in transferring German rights to Japan (see 1917). More than 3,000 students from 13 colleges and universities converge on Beijing's Tiananmen Square to demonstrate their anger. Students, merchants, and workers in other cities organize strikes and boycotts of Japanese goods as patriots of all classes united in denouncing Japanese aggression. Public pressure forces the government to release all arrested students, the unpopular foreign minister is removed, and Chinese delegates to the Versailles Conference refuse June 28 to sign the peace treaty because it does not grant China's requests. The May Fourth Movement marks the beginning of Chinese nationalism; warlord Duan Qirui (Tuan Ch'i-jui) comes under attack, and rival warlords form a coalition against him (see 1920).
South Africa's prime minister Louis Botha dies at Pretoria August 27 at age 56 after 9 years in office and is succeeded by his colleague Jan Christiaan Smuts, now 49, who helped him found the Boer Party Het Volk (The People) in 1905.
Race riots erupt in 26 U.S. cities throughout the year, and there are 83 mob lynchings in the South, up from 64 last year, as boll-weevil damage to the cotton crop motivates thousands of unemployed blacks to head North and the revived Ku Klux Klan intensifies its activities. Washington, D.C., has riots July 19 as white soldiers and sailors attack black ghetto sections and a 19-year-old white marine private is shot dead by Theodore Micajah Walker, 25. Walker has gone out looking for the children of friends who have worried about them being away from home in the riot-torn city. A mob has chased him, someone has yelled, "Kill the nigger," someone has hit him with an iron pipe, and Walker has pulled out a revolver that he has carried after being attcked earlier in the summer (an all-white jury convicts Walker of murder). But while Knoxville, Longview (Texas), and Philips County in Arkansas have riots the worst ones in the north are at Omaha and Chicago. Chicago's race riot begins July 27 with the death of a black youth who has been swimming at a Lake Michigan beach strayed into an area tacitly reserved for whites, and is stoned by white beachgoers to the point where he drowns. Police refuse to make any arrests, rumors of various kinds sweep the city, violence breaks out between gangs and mobs of both races in the city's Black Belt, the state militia is called out July 30, but the riot continues for 13 days until law and order can be restored; 15 whites and 23 blacks are left dead, 537 injured, many of them seriously, and 1,000 blacks are left homeless. President Wilson blames the "white race" as the "aggressor" in both the Chicago and Washington riots.
A race riot at Elaine, Arkansas, September 30 leaves as many as 200 dead. How the trouble began will remain in dispute, but whites will claim that a black sharecropper organized a union and incited its members to seize land and kill whites, whereas blacks will claim that they were trying to get their fair share of proceeds from cotton sales and formed a union to obtain an accurate account of how much they were owed by landowners; a white sheriff's deputy is shot dead at a church near the Mississippi Delta town, white mobs from Arkansas and Mississippi take revenge on blacks, four black men are killed while in custody, and Gov. Charles Brough arrives with federal troops to restore order.
The first Feminist Congress opens at New York March 1 with a statement by Crystal Eastman, who reminds her audience that four-fifths of the women in America are "still denied the elementary political right of voting."
A new Belgian electoral law adopted May 9 gives the franchise to certain classes of women.
France's Chamber of Deputies adopts a bill May 9 granting women the right to vote in elections for members of communal and departmental assemblies. Former prime minister Aristide Briand tells reporters, "It is inadmissible that after this war the privileges of women shall be inferior to those of men." French women vote for the first time in legislative elections held November 30, but they will not vote on the same basis as men until 1944.
Sweden's parliament grants suffrage to women May 28, but they will not vote on the same basis as men until 1921.
Dutch women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.
The Canadian province of New Brunswick grants woman suffrage (see Quebec, 1940; Prince Edward Island, 1942).
The U.S. Senate votes 56 to 25 June 4 to submit a woman suffrage amendment to the states for ratification (see 1918); a "lame duck" House of Representatives has failed by one vote February 16 to pass a woman suffrage bill (see 1920).
Italy's lower house of Parliament votes 174 to 55 September 9 to grant women the right to vote on a limited basis (see 1912; 1928).
Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg grants woman suffrage October 25.
Britain's Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act gives women access to the professions.
Japanese feminist Raicho Hiratsuka of 1911 Bluestocking fame joins with Fusae Ichikawa, 26, to start the organization New Women (Atarashi Onna) with the aim of amending a law that forbids women from listening or responding to political speeches. Daughter of a poor farmer, Ichikawa has managed to get through high school and attend teachers college at a time when only 40 percent of girls went even to elementary school. She taught elementary school and then became a reporter for a newspaper in Aichi Prefecture before coming to Tokyo. Atarashi Onna becomes an obscene term among Japanese men, who throw stones at Raichi Hiratsuka's house (see 1920).
A Chinese crusade against foot binding begins in December (see Xiang Jianyu, 1916).
"A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" by Massachusetts physicist Robert H. (Hutchings) Goddard, 36, predicts the development of rockets that will break free of Earth's gravitational pull and reach the moon, a dream that he has harbored since his teens (see Tsiolkovsky, 1911). Goddard has devised the first two-stage rocket; he received a grant from the Smithsonian Institution 2 years ago (see 1926; New York Times, 1921).
The Treaty of Versailles obliges Germany to pay large reparations that include not only billions of dollars, francs, pounds, lire, etc., but also merchant ships and fishing ships plus large quantities of coal to be delivered in the next 10 years to France, Belgium, and Italy. Germany loses 72 percent of her iron ore reserves as Lorraine is given back to France under terms of the Versailles Treaty. The second largest iron producer in 1913, Germany will be seventh largest as the Germans concentrate mining and steelmaking in the Ruhr Basin.
English economist John Maynard Keynes, 36, foresees that high reparations imposed on Germany will upset the world economy. Leader of the British Treasury team at Versailles, Keynes resigns to write in opposition to the reparations plan.
Inflation begins in France, which has suffered enormous property damage as well as human destruction in the Great War. The buying power of the franc in terms of gold will decline by 78 percent in the next 8 years (see 1926; 1928).
The Great War has cost the United States nearly $22 billion from April 1, 1917, through April of this year, and Washington has loaned nearly $9 billion to the Allied powers. Americans have paid high taxes to fund the war effort and contributed $400 million in cash and materials to the Red Cross War Council.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) created under the League of Nations is based on Article 23a of the League's Convenant, providing that it "maintain fair and humane conditions of labor for men, women, and children." The ILO will move its headquarters from London to Geneva in July of next year, and the United States will accept membership in 1934.
Australia has a maritime strike from April to May; a dock worker is killed in a fracas with police, and Western Australia's state premier narrowly escapes serious injury.
Winnipeg has a general strike as workers protest low pay and shabby working conditions. Police call the work stoppage a "communist revolution" and come down hard on the strikers.
Argentina has a major strike. President Irigoyen uses violent measures to break it up.
Labor unrest rocks the United States. Four million workers walk off the job or are locked out.
Boston police strike September 9 in protest against pay scales that range from 25¢ per hour for 83-hour weeks down to 21¢ per hour for 98-hour weeks despite wartime inflation. Only 427 of the city's 1,544-man force remain on duty to protest the orgy of lawlessness that ensues. Gangs of men, often drunk, roam the streets robbing, looting, raping, and beating up other citizens, Gov. Calvin Coolidge goes to bed at 10 o'clock and does not learn about the rioting until next morning. He sends state militia into Boston September 12, the 1,117 strikers are dismissed, and AFL leader Samuel Gompers asks that they be reinstated. Coolidge wires Gompers September 14, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time."
Steelworkers at Gary, Indiana, strike September 22 to force United States Steel to recognize their union. Chairman Elbert H. Gary, now 72, has refused to negotiate with the union and vigorously favors an open shop. The walkout ends in 110 days without success, and one-third of the workers continue to labor 7 days per week, but the walkout forces Gary to support abolishment of the 7-day week and 12-hour day. Taunton, Mass.-born William Z. (Zebulon) Foster, 38, is the AFL leader in the steel strike; a former IWW organizer, he will soon emerge as the leading figure in the American Communist movement.
Iowa-born United Mine Workers Union leader John L. (Llewellyn) Lewis, 39, begins a strike of bituminous coal miners November 1, but Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer perceives that public opinion has turned against organized labor and obtains an injunction under the 1917 Lever Act, whose wartime powers remain in effect. The strike ends November 9.
Legionnaires attack a Centralia, Washington, IWW hall November 11 and lynch organizer Wesley Everest.
A U.S. labor conference committee urges November 22 that the country adopt an 8-hour workday and a 48-hour week.
E. I. du Pont de Nemours has $49 million in wartime profits even after paying out dividends of $141 million to stockholders (see 1915). The company's explosives have fired 40 percent of all Allied shells in the war, it has met at least half the domestic U.S. requirements for dynamite and black blasting powder, it has been plowing profits into research and acquisitions of other chemical companies, and it enlarges its holdings in General Motors, whose stock it began acquiring in 1916 and which it will soon control (see transportation, 1908). Pierre S. du Pont retires as president of the DuPont Co. to become head of GM, and Irénée du Pont becomes head of the chemical company (see transportation [Sloan], 1929).
Great Lakes Carbon Corp. has its beginnings in the Chicago brokerage firm Great Lakes Coal & Coke Co. founded by Chicago-born entrepreneur George Skakel, 27, in partnership with Rushton Fordyce and Walter Gramm. Skakel began his career as a railroad clerk at $8 per week and went on to work for Standard Oil. His firm will expand into oil and heating fuel, incorporate as a privately-owned company in 1939 under the name Great Lakes Carbon, and evolve into a major processor of metals and the world's largest producer of carbon black, making Skakel one of the country's richest men.
Many U.S. life insurance companies file for bankruptcy to avoid paying claims on policies issued last year to people who subsequently died of influenza. The companies took advantage of the widespread flu panic to sell policies, not anticipating the extent of the epidemic, and claims have exceeded their resources.
The cost of living in New York City is 79 percent higher than it was in 1914, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics (see Consumer Price Index, 1913).
Junior Achievement is founded at Springfield, Massachusetts, where some small after-school business clubs join under the direction of local paper manufacturer Horace A. Moses, 57, paper manufacturer (and former Massachusetts governor) Murray Crane, 66, and AT&T chairman Theodore N. Vail, now 74, who says, "The future of our country depends on making every individual, young and old, fully realize the obligations and responsibilities belonging to citizenship . . . providing each is given a fair and proper education and training in the useful things in life." A cofounder of the Eastern States Exposition (New England's largest regional fair), Moses is a farmer's son who believes in a strict work ethic and has become concerned that no organization exists to prepare rural children for careers in industry and trade. Junior Achievement will grow with help from the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys & Girls Clubs, YMCA, New England Rotarians, settlement houses, companies, and individuals into a worldwide group providing business education, practical experience, and marketable skills as more and more youths move to cities and need to know how to create products and services, set up in business, advertise, and sell.
The first fixing of the world gold price is held September 12 at the N. M. Rothschild & Sons London banking house (see Royal Mint Refinery, 1853). Fixings will continue twice each day into the 21st century.
Andrew Carnegie dies in his Berkshire Hills mansion at Lenox, Massachusetts, August 11 at age 83, having given away all but $11.8 million of his $475 million fortune in philanthropic contributions that inspired other U.S. millionaires to be philanthropic (see 1889); expatriate landowner William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor, dies of heart disease at his Brighton home October 18 at age 71, having established residence abroad in 1892 (the United States, he said, was no place for a gentleman to live) and become a British subject in 1899. His 40-year-old son Waldorf inherits his title, becoming 2nd Viscount Astor (of Hever Castle); former Carnegie Steel boss Henry Clay Frick dies at New York December 2 at age 69, leaving $20 million to public, educational, and charitable institutions at Pittsburgh (see art, 1935). His erstwhile business partner Andrew Carnegie had invited him to come a mile up Fifth Avenue for a visit in which they might make their peace, but Frick allegedly replied, "We'll meet in hell, which is where we're both going to go."
A Wall Street boom in "war baby" stocks sends prices to new highs. Baldwin Locomotive is up 360 percent over 1917 levels, General Motors up 940 percent, Bethlehem Steel up 1,400 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 107.25, up from 82.20 at the end of 1918.
Merchant F. W. Woolworth dies at his Glen Cove, L.I., estate April 8 at age 67, leaving a fortune of $67 million (none of it to charity). There are 1,000 Woolworth stores in the United States plus many in Britain, and the chain has annual sales of $107 million.
Oregon imposes the first state gasoline tax February 25. The idea of taxing gasoline to support highways has come from Oregon Voter editor-publisher C. C. Chapman, 43.
Amerada Petroleum Co. is founded by Dallas petroleum geologist Everett Lee De Golyer, 32.
Skelly Oil Co. is founded by Pennsylvania-born Oklahoma wildcatter William G. (Grove) Skelly, 41 (see Phillips, 1917). Skelly hopped a freight train to Oil City, Pennsylvania, at age 16, moved west, and settled in 1912 at Tulsa, where he will soon build a 24-room mansion (see Oklahoma City Field, 1928).
Halliburton Corp. has its beginnings in the Better Method Oil Well Cementing Co. founded by Tennessee-born engineer Erle P. (Palmer) Halliburton, 29, who has devised a way to line oil wells with steel pipes held in place by cement as a means of strengthening the well walls, reducing the risk of explosions, and preventing contamination of water tables. Halliburton has left his job at Perkins Cementing Co. in California because that company did not want to move its cementing services to Oklahoma. He has moved to Burkburnette, Texas, but he finds no buyers and next year will start a one-man firm with a borrowed wagon and mule team, steam pump, and mixing boxes; he will obtain his first patent in 1921, earn his first profit (50¢) that year after moving to the Hewitt Field at Wilson, Oklahoma, patent a jet mixer in 1924, and go on to build a company that by the time Halliburton dies in 1957 will have 201 offices in 22 states and 20 foreign countries (see Schlumberger, 1927).
Brown and Root Inc. is founded by Texas-born engineer Herman Brown, 26, with working capital advanced by his brother-in-law Dan Root, a prosperous cotton farmer; the contractor who has employed Brown at his native Belton has gone bankrupt, and Brown has accepted 18 mules in lieu of back wages. His brother George R. (Rufus), now 20, will join the engineering and construction company in 1922, Root will die in 1929, and after paving dirt roads and building steel bridges the company will grow to specialize in offshore drilling platforms. Halliburton will absorb Brown and Root in 1962.
The German airline Deutsche Luftreederie begins service February 5, flying between Berlin, Leipzig, and Weimar. It is the world's first airline (see Lufthansa, 1926).
The Farman Co. begins service February 8, flying across the English Channel between Paris and London in a converted Goliath bomber.
Imperial Airways has its beginnings in Handley Page Transport, Ltd., organized by aircraft builder Frederick Handley Page to conduct flights from Britain to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland (see 1924; politics [Page], 1918; BOAC, 1939).
Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij voor Nederland an Kolonien, or Dutch Royal Air Transportation Co. (KLM) is founded October 7 by Dutch banking and business interests under the leadership of former pilot Albert Plesman, 30, who will head the company until his death in 1953 (see 1920).
New York restaurateur-hotel proprietor Raymond Orteig, now 49, speaks at the Aero Club of America March 22 and offers a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop solo flight, in either direction, between New York and Paris; his prize will go unclaimed for 8 years (see Lindbergh, 1927).
The NC4 flying boat designed by Iowa-born U.S. Navy aeronautical engineer Jerome C. (Clarke) Hunsaker, 33, for Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor makes the first transatlantic crossing by a heavier-than-air machine, leaving Newfoundland May 16 and arriving at Lisbon via the Azores May 27 with a five-man crew under U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander Albert C. Read (Curtiss has produced more than 4,000 JN4 "Jenny" biplanes for training U.S. Army and Navy pilots in the war) (see 1911).
The Sopwith biplane Atlantic takes off from Newfoundland May 18 powered by a 350-horsepower Rolls-Royce engine and carrying 400 gallons of fuel. Pilot Harry G. Hawker, 27, and navigator K. Mackenzie Grieve fly 1,000 miles towards Ireland in quest of the £10,000 prize offered by Lord Northcliffe in 1913 for the first nonstop transatlantic flight, but engine trouble forces them to ditch, a Danish tramp steamer picks them up, London gives them a hero's welcome, and the Daily Mail awards a £5,000 consolation prize (see 1921).
A Vickers Vimy bomber powered by two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines achieves the first nonstop transatlantic flight June 14. Former Royal Flying Corps pilot John W. (William) Alcock, 27, was captured by the Turks after bombing Constantinople during the war and has left military service in March. He makes the 1,960-mile flight from Newfoundland to Ireland in 16 hours and 12 minutes, accompanied by navigator Arthur Whitten-Brown, but the two land ingloriously in an Irish bog outside Clifden, County Galway, and although they receive the Daily Mail's £10,000 prize and are made knight commanders of the Order of the British Empire, Alcock is fatally injured December 18 while trying to deliver an amphibious aircraft to Paris in foul weather (see Lindbergh, 1927).
A daredevil pilot flies a biplane through the Arc de Triomphe at Paris August 8.
Australian aviators Keith Macpherson Smith, 28, and his brother Ross, 26, take off from England in a twin-engine Vickers Vimy biplane November 12 with two sergeants as mechanics and land at Darwin, Northern Territory, December 10, having made the first flight from Britain to Australia. Keith has flown with the Royal Air Force since 1917, Ross with the Australian Flying Corps in Palestine (he made the first flight from Cairo to Calcutta last year). Both will be knighted and receive a £10,000 prize for their exploit.
Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Co. is founded at Detroit by California aviation engineer Malcolm Loughhead, now 32 (see 1916). He and his brother Alan spent $30,000 to develop a single-seat civilian biplane whose $2,500 price was too steep for most buyers at a time when so many war-surplus planes were available. Alan Loughead has become a real-estate salesman, the brothers' Santa Barbara aircraft shop will close in 1921, and Malcolm's new company will have little success until 1923, when Walter Chrysler buys Lockheed brakes for the first Chrysler motorcars (see Lockheed Aircraft, 1926).
German aircraft designer Hugo Junkers opens an aircraft factory at Dessau. Now 60, Junkers will design the first all-metal airplane to fly successfully and will establish one of the first regular mail and passenger airlines in Europe.
Europe's Orient Express becomes the Simplon-Orient Express. Suspended in 1914, the fabled 36-year-old luxury train avoids passing over any German or Austrian soil by using the 12-mile Simplon Tunnel that opened through the Alps in 1906 between Brig, Switzerland, and Domodossola, Italy (see 1929).
Canada's Grand Trunk Railway goes bankrupt, having lost large sums of money on the Grand Trunk Pacific that it started in 1903 (see Canadian National Railway, 1923).
Germany hands over the 5-year-old Hamburg-Amerika Line passenger ships S.S. Vaterland and S.S. Bismarck to the British as war reparations; they will be renamed the S.S. Leviathan (see 1922) and S.S. Majestic, respectively. The S.S. Imperator makes her first voyage as a Cunard liner December 11, sailing from New York to Liverpool (seeBerengaria, 1920)
Electric starters become optional on the Model T Ford (see Kettering, 1911); most Model Ts are still started by handcranking the engine.
Henry Ford builds a motorcar factory at his family's ancestral home town of Cork in Ireland.
Bentley Car Co. is founded by British engineer and former London taxi-fleet manager W. O. Bentley, now 31, who created the B.R. 2 "Merlin" rotary engine that powered the Sopwith Camel during the war. He opens a factory at Cricklewood in northwest London, will sell his first car in 1921, and design a three-litre racing car that will win at Le Mans in 1924 and lead to luxury sedans (see Rolls-Royce, 1931).
The Citroën motorcar is introduced by Paris-born munitions-maker André-Gustave Citroën, 41, who purchases the Mors company that he headed before the war and turns his factory over to mass production of motorcars that can be sold at low prices. By 1933 Citroën will have built 90 percent of the taxicabs in Paris (see 1934; CV2, 1948).
The Duesenberg brothers set up shop at Indianapolis to make motorcars after selling John North Willys the war plant that they set up at Elizabeth, N.J., to build aviation engines and a 160-horsepower tractor engine (see 1913; 1922; Willys, 1915; Durant, 1921).
General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC) is founded by GM, now 28.7 percent owned by du Pont interests. Established by GM's finance committee chairman John Jakob Raskob, the subsidiary enables dealers to finance their inventories of cars and offer long-term financing to their customers; it will become the world's largest automobile financing company (see 1939).
Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of relativity receives confirmation May 29 from two British scientific expeditions organized at the initiative of English astronomer Arthur S. (Stanley) Eddington, 37. Einstein has insisted that his equations be verified by empirical observation and has devised specific tests; e.g., a ray of light just grazing the surface of the sun must be bent by 1.745 seconds of arc, twice the gravitational deflection estimated by Newtonian theory. The Royal Society has sponsored the expeditions, whose members include Astronomer Royal of England Sir Frank Dyson, now 51; an observation post on the island of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa provides a location for the experiment, plates of photographs taken of stars near the sun during a total solar eclipse are measured, the results published November 6 show that the rays of light grazing the sun do, indeed, bend by 1.745 seconds of arc, and Einstein is hailed as a genius for the accuracy of his predictions (see 1929).
German mathematician (Amalie) Emmy Noether, 37, gains an official appointment at Göttingen University, where she will develop theories of ideals and of noncommutative algebras. Anti-Semitism and male dominance have hindered her academic career despite the major contributions that she has made to the development of abstract algebra.
Vienna-born zoologist Karl von Frisch, 32, demonstrates that honeybees have a sense of smell not unlike that of humans, and although it is less highly developed they can be trained to distinguish between various tastes and odors. He will discover that bees use two types of rhythmic dances to communicate to other members of their colonies the distance and direction of food supply, a circling dance indicating that the food is within 250 feet of the hive, a wagging dance that it is farther away (see 1949).
Physicist Sir William Crookes dies at his native London April 4 at age 86; botanist Mikhail S. Tsvett at Voronezh, Russia, June 26 at age 48; Nobel physicist John W. Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, at Terling Place, Witham, Essex June 30 at age 76; Nobel chemist Emil Fischer at Berlin July 15 at age 66; zoologist and evolutionist Ernst Haeckel at Jena August 9 at age 85.
The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 March 3, ruling 5 to 4 in the case of United States v. Doremus against physician Charles T. Doremus, who prescribed 500 tablets of morphine to a known addict in violation of Section 2 of the law that forbids anyone from dispensing of narcotic drugs except by a written order on a form issued by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. A lower court had held this section to be unconstitutional as an invasion of state power, Chief Justice White dissents from the majority opinion, as do Justices McKenna, Van Devanter, and McReynolds; courts in the next few years will send thousands of physicians to prison for violating the 1914 law, but underworld sources will continue to supply addicts with opium, heroin, and morphine.
The Eastman School of Medicine and Dentistry is founded at the 70-year-old University of Rochester with a gift from photography pioneer George Eastman, whose company supplies the fledgling motion picture industry with its raw film stock.
Pediatrics pioneer Abraham Jacobi dies at Bolton Landing, N.Y., July 10 at age 89; Sir William Osler at Oxford, England, December 19 at age 70.
Henry Ford acquires the Dearborn Independent, whose editorials soon reveal a tone of anti-Semitism. The paper will serialize the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" over the course of more than 90 weeks (see 1903), and many U.S. Jews will refuse to buy Ford cars, as will some non-Jews who find the paper's views objectionable.
Boston-born Jesuit priest Edmund (Aloysius) Walsh, 33, establishes a School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The War Department appointed him last year to a board of five educators charged with coordinating studies for the Students' Army Training Corps. He served as educational director for the New England area, and he came to the conclusion that U.S. education did not pay enough attention to the study of diplomacy, foreign languages, and international relations.
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) opens.
Chicago-born educator Carleton W. (Wolsey) Washburne, 29, returns to Illinois after 5 years as head of San Francisco State Teachers College's science department, becomes superintendent of schools at Winnetka, and devises the Winnetka Plan for individualized, ungraded learning in the town's elementary schools. Most school systems use a uniform grading system that holds all children to the same rate of progress, but Washburne's plan lets a pupil move on as soon as he or she has mastered the material in his grade work, which includes not only the common essentials but also art, crafts, drama, literature, music appreciation, and physical activities. A pupil may do as much or as little of these "electives" as she desires, and with regard to the essentials may work in several grades at once.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes formulates a "clear and present danger" test for defining conditions under which the constitutional right of freedom of the speech may be abridged. "When a nation is at war," says Holmes March 3 in an opinion handed down in the espionage case Schenck v. United States, "many things that might be said in times of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight."
U.S. Navy officials advise Herkimer County, N.Y.-born General Electric president Owen D. Young, 45, that GE's high-frequency Alexanderson alternator is vital to long-distance wireless communications and must remain in U.S. hands. U.S. authorities seized the assets of Italian-owned American Marconi Co. 2 years ago and merged the patents of major companies to facilitate the war effort. British Marconi has offered $5 million for rights to the alternator, but the assistant secretary of the navy Franklin D. Roosevelt wants radio patents kept under U.S. control and urges GE to start its own radio company. Owen Young convinces Congress to give G.E. and American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T) a monopoly in international radio, founds Radio Corp. of America (RCA) October 17, and puts David Sarnoff in charge as general manager (see Sarnoff, 1917); the navy loans Ernst Alexanderson to RCA, which will employ him as chief engineer for 5 years (see 1906). RCA acquires Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. (see 1907), it will have $4 million in revenues from "wireless" by 1925, and it will go on to acquire the Victor Co. (see Victrola, 1906), becoming a radio-phonograph colossus; Young will be chairman of RCA until 1933, but antitrust court actions will separate RCA from GE (see NBC, 1926).
The U.S. telecommunications industry returns to private ownership August 1 after a year of nationalization in which American Telephone & Telegraph Co. and Western Union have been allowed to raise rates, AT&T has earned an extra $42 million in that year, and the Treasury Department pays AT&T another $13 million to cover any "losses" it may have incurred.
Dial telephones are introduced November 8 at Norfolk, Virginia, by AT&T, which has earlier rejected dial phones but accepts them now under threat of a telephone operators' strike. So many switchboard operators are needed to run the nation's telephone system that the growth of phone ownership will soon outstrip the supply of available labor.
Ha'aretz (The Land) begins publication at Tel Aviv under the direction of Russian-born Zionists who include Gershon Agronsky. Tel Aviv's population is scarcely 50,000, but it will grow, as will the newspaper's circulation.
The King Features comic strip "Barney Google" makes its debut in U.S. newspapers June 17 under the name "Take Barney Google, F'rinstance." Chicago artist Billy DeBeck, 29, has started the strip about a half-pint sports fan and will continue it until his death in 1952, but it has little initial appeal (see Spark Plug, 1922).
The New York Daily News (initially the New York Illustrated Daily News) begins publication June 26 under the direction of Chicago Tribune veteran Joseph Medill Patterson, 40, a socialist who tells his editors, "Tell it to Sweeney—the Stuyvesants will take care of themselves." A war correspondent before 1917, when he won a captaincy and commanded a field artillery unit in the Rainbow Division, Capt. Patterson got the idea for his paper from British publisher A. C. W. Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, 54, a family friend whose London Mirror is selling 800,000 copies per day. Patterson remains in Chicago but has rented offices in the Evening Mail Building and uses the slogan, "See New York's Most Beautiful Girls Every Morning"; he begins with a print-run of only 57,000 copies, fills his paper with suggestive pictures, comic strips, sports coverage, beauty and limerick contests with cash prizes, and stories of sex and crime that attract readers who never before read any newspaper on a regular basis. The News will not show a profit until 1920, but Patterson will make it the first successful U.S. tabloid and the most widely read U.S. newspaper of any kind (see 1910; 1921).
Collier's Weekly is acquired by J. F. Knapp's Crowell Publishing Co., which pays $1.75 million for a majority stock interest (see 1911; Robert Collier's death, 1918). Competing with the Saturday Evening Post, Crowell will pour $15 million into the 5¢ magazine over the next 15 years before Collier's becomes profitable (see Chenery, 1925).
True Story magazine is started by New York physical culture enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden, now 51, who has been publishing Physical Culture magazine since 1898. True Story will reach a peak circulation of more than a million as it titillates readers with suggestive morality stories while Macfadden goes on to publish a host of movie, romance, and detective story magazines plus 10 daily newspapers, including the New York Evening Graphic (see Fawcett, 1922).
Fawcett Publishing Co. has its beginnings in Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, a 25¢ pocket-size monthly that started as a mimeographed off-color joke sheet for hospitalized veterans put out by Minneapolis Tribune reporter Wilford H. Fawcett, 33, who served as a captain in the war; his sons Roger, Buzz, Gordon, and 6-year-old Roscoe haul the magazine to local cigar stores and newsstands on Roscoe's red coaster wagon; within 6 years it will have a circulation of about 500,000 (seeTrue Confessions, 1922).
Nonfiction: Ten Days That Shook the World by Portland, Ore.-born war correspondent John Reed, 32, who witnessed the 1917 October revolution in Russia. Reed will organize and lead a U.S. Communist Labor Party, edit its journal Voice of Labor, be indicted for sedition, and escape to Russia; Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, who says the Germans will be unable to pay the reparations demanded at Versailles; Democratic Ideals and Reality by political geographer Halford J. Mackinder, now 58, who says that Britain and the United States must preserve a balance between the powers contending for domination of the Eurasian heartland (see politics, 1904). Mackinder will be knighted next year; Authority in the Modern State by English political scientist Harold J. (Joseph) Laski, 26, who has been lecturing at Harvard since 1916 and next year will join the faculty of the London School of Economics; The Principles of Natural Knowledge by Alfred North Whitehead; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell; Epistle to the Romans (Der Römerbrief) by Swiss Protestant Reformed theologian Karl Barth, 33, who champions dialectic theology; The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIV and XV Centuries (Herfstij der Middeleeuwen . . .) by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, 47, whose work will appear in English translation in 1924; The American Language by Baltimore Evening Sun staff writer and Smart Set magazine co-editor H. L. Mencken, whose scholarly analysis of the differences between English spoken in England and American English will be supplemented in 1945 and 1948; Prejudices (essays) by H. L. Mencken, who will publish five additional books under the same title in the next 8 years; The Seattle General Strike by local journalist Anna Louise Strong, 31, who covered the strike that began February 6.
Fiction: "The Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolinie") (story) by Franz Kafka; La Symphonie pastorale by André Gide; Within a Budding Grove (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) by Marcel Proust; Light (Clarté) by Henri Barbusse; The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham; A New Life (Shinsei) by Shimazaki Toson; Jurgen by Virginia author James Branch Cabell, 40, whose medieval romance is suppressed on charges of obscenity but will win wide acclaim through the 1920s; Winesburg, Ohio by Chicago writer Sherwood Anderson, 43, whose vignettes refute sentimental notions of untroubled small town life; Java Head by Joseph Hergesheimer, who makes vivid the glory days of Salem, Massachusetts, in the flush of its China trade prosperity; The Pot Boils by English novelist (Margaret) Storm Jameson, 28; My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.
Poetry: Poems by T. S. Eliot; War Poems by Siegfried Sassoon, who won the Military Cross in 1917, threw it into the sea, made a public announcement of his refusal to serve further, but returned to France last year and was wounded a second time; Naked Warriors by English poet-art critic Herbert Read, 26, is based on his war experiences; Last Poems by the late Edward Thomas; Marlborough by the late Charles Sorley; Transfiguration (Preobrazhenie) by Sergei A. Esenin; "Levy marsh" by Vladimir Mayakovski, who goes to work for the Russian Telegraph Agency creating posters and cartoons with appropriate rhymes and slogans; Boy (Ragazzo) by Piero Jahier; Altazor by Chilean poet (Fernández) Vicente (Garcia) Huidobro, 26; "If We Must Die" by Claude McKay, who has been inspired by race riots; Poems about God by Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom, 31.
Nobel poet-novelist Karl A. Gjellerup dies at Klotzsche, near Dresden, October 11 at age 62; Ella Wheeler Wilcox near Branford, Conn., October 31 at age 68.
Juvenile: The Magic Pudding by Australian artist and author Norman (Alfred William) Lindsay, 39; The Young Visiters by English writer Daisy Ashford (Mrs. Margaret Devlin), 38, who wrote it when she was 9. James M. Barrie has written a preface; Lad, a Dog by New Jersey author Albert Payson Terhune, 47.
Author L. Frank Baum dies at Hollywood, California, May 6 at age 62.
Painting: a one-man show of works by Russian painter Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko, 26, opens at Moscow with pictures in a completely abstract, highly geometric style produced with a ruler and compass. Rodchenko paints a series of black-and-white geometric paintings intended as a response to his rival Kasimir Malevich, who has produced white-on-white paintings.
Other paintings: The Murder by Edvard Munch; Picture with Light Center (collage) by German Dadaist painter-poet Kurt Schwitters, 32; Portrait du Jeanne Hébuterne en pullover jaune, La Marchesa Casata, and Gypsy Woman with Baby by Amédéo Modigliani, who is dying of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and drug abuse; Pierrot by Pablo Picasso; Follow the Arrow (Suivez la flèche) and The City (La Ville) by Fernand Léger; Dream Birds by Paul Klee; The Return of the Prodigal Son by Giorgio de Chirico; Dreamy Improvisation and Arabian Cemetery by Wassily Kandinsky; Nympheas and Water Lilis, Reflections of Weeping Willows by Claude Monet; Anywhere Out of the World by Marc Chagall; Victory Day, May 1919 by Childe Hassam; Lake Placid and Heat by New York painter Florine Stettheimer, 48; Music—Pink and Blue II by Georgia O'Keeffe. Sir Edward Poynter dies at London July 26 at age 83; Ralph Albert Blakelock at a camp in the Adirondacks August 9 at age 71; Pierre-Auguste Renoir at Caques-sur-Mer December 17 at age 78.
Sculpture: Bird in Space (bronze) by Constantin Brancusi (see 1926). Wilhelm Lehmbruck commits suicide at Berlin March 25 at age 38.
Theater: The Woman in Room 13 by Samuel Shipman and Max Marcin 1/14 at New York's Booth Theater, with Janet Beecher, Lowell Sherman, Charles Waldron, 175 perfs.; Up in Mabel's Room by Ohio-born playwright Wilson Collison, 26, and Otto Harbach 1/15 at New York's Eltinge Theater, with Hazel Dawn, Colorado-born ingénue Enid Markey, 22, 229 perfs.; King Nicholas, or Such Is Life (König Nicolo, oder so ist das Leben) by the late Frank Wedekind 1/15 at Leipzig's Schauspielhaus; The Poor Cousin (Der arme Vetter) by German playwright Ernst Barlach, 49, 3/3 at Hamburg's Kammerspiele; Augustus Does His Bit by George Bernard Shaw 3/12 at New York's Guild Theater, with Norma Trevor, 111 perfs.; Elius Erweckung by Wedekind 3/16 at Hamburg's Kammerspiele; Tête d'Or by Paul Claudel 3/30 at the Théâtre du Gymnase, Paris; 39 East by Rachel Crothers 3/31 at New York's Broadhurst Theater (to Maxine Elliott's Theater 7/14), with Barcelona-born actor Luis Alberni, 32, Henry Hull, Constance Binney, Alison Skipworth, 160 perfs.; The Fall and Rise of Susan Lenox by George V. Hobart (who has adapted a posthumously-published novel by the late David Graham Phillips) 6/9 at New York's 44th Street Theater, with New York-born actress Alma Tell, 22, Illinois-born actor Philip Lord, 40; Transfiguration (Die Wandlung) by German playwright Ernst Toller, 26, 8/30 at Berlin's Tribune Theater. Toller is sentenced to 5 years in prison for his political activities; Hercules (Herakles) by Wedekind 9/1 at Munich's Prinzregenztheater; Scandal by Cosmo Hamilton 9/12 at New York's 39th Street Theater, with London-born actor Charles Cherry, 46, Francine Larrimore, 316 perfs.; Adam and Eva by Guy Bolton and George Middleton 9/13 at New York's Longacre Theater, with Toledo, Ohio-born actor Otto Kruger, 34, Ruth Shepley, Berton Churchill, 312 perfs.; The Gold Diggers by Avery Hopwood 9/30 at New York's Lyceum Theater, with Ina Claire, Ruth Terry, 282 perfs.; Clarence by Booth Tarkington 9/20 at New York's Hudson Theater, with Alfred Lunt, Mary Boland, Helen Hayes, New York-born actor Glenn Hunter, 24, 300 perfs.; The Storm by Langdon McCormick 10/2 at New York's 48th Street Theater, with New York-born actor Edward Arnold, 29, Helen MacKellar, 282 perfs.; Declassée by Missouri-born playwright Zoë Akins, 33, 10/6 at New York's Empire Theater, with Ethel Barrymore, Hartford, Conn.-born actress Clare Eames, 23, 257 perfs.; Wedding Bells by Salisbury Field 11/10 at New York's Harris Theater, with Wallace Eddinger, 168 perfs.; The Son-Daughter by George Scarborough and David Belasco 11/19 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Lenore Ulric, John Willard, Marion Abbott, San Jose, Calif.-born actor Edmund Lowe, 29, 223 perfs.; The Dead Day (Der tote Tag) by Ernst Barlach 11/22 at Hamburg's Kammerspiele; Mr. Pim Passes By by English playwright A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne, 37, 12/1 at Manchester's Gaiety Theatre. Punch contributor Milne wrote two comedies while fighting in France; One Night in Rome by J. Hartley Manners 12/2 at New York's Criterion Theater, with Philip Merivale, Laurette Taylor, H. Cooper Cliffe, 214 perfs.; My Lady Friends by Emil Nytray and Frank Mandel 12/3 at New York's Comedy Theater, with Chicago-born actress June Walker, 19, New York-born actor Frank Morgan (originally Francis Phillip Wupperman), 28, 214 perfs.; Aria Da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay 12/15 at New York's Provincetown Playhouse.
Actor-theater manager Sir Charles Wyndham dies at London January 12 at age 81, having remarried at age 79; actor Shelly Hull dies of influenza at New York January 14 at age 34.
Films: Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt. Also: Lambert Hillyer's Branding Broadway with William S. Hart; D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms with Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, photography by Billy Bitzer; Griffith's Fall of Babylon with Constance Talmadge, Elmer Layton; Griffith's Scarlet Days with Richard Barthelmess, Carol Dempster; Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female with Gloria Swanson and Dallas-born actress Bebe (originally Phyllis) Daniels, 18, Thomas Meighan (film editor Anne Bauchens, 38, works 16 to 18 hours a day in the cutting room and will continue editing DeMille's work until his death in 1959); Paul Powell's Pollyanna with Mary Pickford, screenplay by Frances Marion based on the 1913 Eleanor Porter novel; Charles Chaplin's Sunnyside; Victor Fleming's Till the Clouds Roll By with Douglas Fairbanks, Kathleen Clifford.
Loews Corp. is founded by vaudeville theater owner Marcus Loew, now 44, and his Russian-born partners Joseph Schenck and Nicholas Schenck, 39, who will soon turn many of its theaters into movie houses (see Loew, 1904). Loew has purchased a film production company called Metro Pictures Corp. (see M-G-M, 1924).
United Artists is founded at Hollywood by director D. W. Griffith, comedian-director Charles Chaplin, romantic star Mary Pickford, and matinee idol Douglas Fairbanks, who have set up the production firm in competition with Biograph Studios, Carl Laemmle's Universal Pictures, and other studios in order to control distribution of their films and increase their share of the profits from those films. Now 36, Fairbanks will marry Pickford next year and both will continue making films selected, financed, and distributed (but not produced) by United Artists.
Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky Corp. opens the first studio of a six-acre Astoria, N.Y., complex on 35th Avenue between 34th and 37th streets. About 110 of its 440 films will be produced in the Astoria studios between now and 1927 (the rest will be made in Hollywood), using a stage 225 feet by 126 by 60 (see 1942).
Felix the Cat makes his debut in a cartoon short subject created by Union City, N.J.-born animator Otto Messmer, 27, who will continue turning out the cartoons until 1936 (see communications [comic strip], 1931).
Ballet: The Three-Cornered Hat 7/22 at London's Alhambra Theatre, with Leonide Massine of the Ballets Russes as the Miller, Tamara Karsavina as the Miller's wife, music by Manuel de Falla, choreography by Massine.
Opera: Die Frau ohne Schatten 10/10 at Vienna's Opernhaus, with Maria Jeritza singing the role of the empress, German soprano Lotte Lehmann, 31, the role of the Dyer's Wife, music by Richard Strauss, libretto by Hugo von Hoffmansthal.
The St. Louis Municipal Opera opens its first season with a performance of the light opera Robin Hood.
Impresario Oscar Hammerstein dies at New York August 1 at age 73; composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo at Montecatini August 9 at age 61, having written 20 operas; coloratura soprano Adelina Patti at Brecknock, Wales, September 27 at age 76.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic gives its first performance October 24 under the direction of conductor Walter Henry Rothwell, whom founder Andrews Clark Jr. has recruited from the St. Paul, Minnesota, Symphony Orchestra. A crowd of 2,400 attends the concert at Trinity Auditorium downtown (see Hollywood Bowl, 1922).
George V knights Scottish music hall favorite Harry Lauder for his recruitment efforts in the Great War. Now 48, Sir Harry lost his only son in the war.
Theatrical designer Erté goes to work for the Folies Bergère at Paris (see everyday life [Poiret], 1913). Now 36, he will continue until 1930 to structure lavish opening tableaux, finale scenes, and costumes for the French theater.
Stage musicals: The Velvet Lady 2/3 at the New Amsterdam Theater, with Jed Prouty, Eddie Dowling, music by Victor Herbert, lyrics by Henry Blossom, 136 perfs.; Monte Cristo, Jr. 2/12 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with South Dakota-born comedian Charles "Chic" Sale, 33, music by Sigmund Romberg and Jean Schwarz, book and lyrics by Harold Atteridge, 254 perfs.; The Royal Vagagond 2/17 at New York's Cohan and Harris Theatre, with Dorothy Dickson, music by Anselm Goetzl, additional numbers by George M. Cohan, 208 perfs.; The Whirl of Society 3/5 at the Winter Garden Theater, with Al Jolson, George White, Blossom Seeley (who runs up and down the aisles via a runway across the pit that also gives audiences a closer look at the chorus girls), music by Louis A. Hirsch, lyrics by Harold Atteridge, 136 perfs.; (George White's) Scandals 6/2 at the Liberty Theater, with White, "dimple-kneed" Ann Pennington, Portland, Ore.-born ingénue Ona Munson (originally Owena Wolcott), 12, music by Richard Whiting, book and lyrics by White, Arthur Jackson, 128 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies 6/16 at the New Amsterdam Theater, with Marilyn Miller, Eddie Cantor, Eddie Dowling, Van and Schenck, music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, Dave Stamper, Gene Buck, songs that include "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" by Berlin whose song will be the Follies theme, 171 perfs.; Happy Days (extravaganza) 8/23 at New York's Hippodrome, with book by R. H. Burnside, 452 perfs.; Who's Hooper? 9/13 at London's Adelphi Theatre, with Ivor Novello, music by Clifford Grey, lyrics by Fred Thompson; The Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic 10/2 at the New Amsterdam Roof, with Fanny Brice, Ohio-born comedian Ted Lewis, 28, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Chic Sale, music and lyrics chiefly by Dave Stamper and Gene Buck, songs that include "Rose of Washington Square" by James F. Hanley, lyrics by Ballard MacDonald; Apple Blossoms 10/7 at New York's Globe Theater, with Fred and Adele Astaire, music by Austrian-born violinist Fritz Kreisler, 44, and Hungarian-born composer Victor Jacobi, 35, book and lyrics by William Le Baron, songs that include "I'm in Love," "Who Can Tell," 256 perfs.; The Passing Show (revue) 10/23 at the Winter Garden Theater, with Charles Winninger, James Barton, Reginald Denny, music chiefly by Sigmund Romberg, lyrics chiefly by Harold Atteridge, 280 perfs.; Buddies 10/26 at the Selwyn Theater, with Peggy Wood, Roland Young, music and lyrics by B. C. Hilliam, 259 perfs.; Irene 11/18 at the Vanderbilt Theater, with Edith Day, Virginia City, Nev.-born actor Hobart Cavanaugh, 33, book by James Montgomery, music by Harry Tierney, lyrics by Joseph McCarthy, songs that include "In My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown," 670 perfs.
Composer-lyricist Manuel Klein of Hippodrome extravaganza fame dies at Yonkers, N.Y., June 1 at age 42; Effie Ellsler at Nutley, N.J., December 12 at age 97.
Popular songs: "Swanee" by composer George Gershwin, lyrics by Irving Caesar (Al Jolson will record the number early next year); "Dardanella" by Felix Bernard, 22, and Johnny Black, lyrics by Fred Fisher; "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They've Seen Pa-ree)" by Walter Donaldson, lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young; "Oh, What a Pal Was Mary" by Pete Wendling, lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Bert Kalmar; "Cielito Lindo" ("Beautiful Heaven") by Mexican composer Quirino Mendoza y Cortez; "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" by English composer Ernest Seitz, lyrics by Eugene Lockhart; "Let the Rest of the World Go By" by Ernest R. Ball, lyrics by J. Keirn Brennan.
The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Co. at Kalamazoo, Mich., hires mandolinist Lloyd Loar, who will change the appearance of the instruments made by the late Orville Gibson (see 1903). In place of the standard round or oval sound holes, Loar will develop the first U.S.-made f-shaped sound holes. The Gibson company will become Original Acoustic Instruments, Inc., and it will diversify into banjos, ukeleles, and electric guitars.
Georgia-born Chicago pianist Thomas A. (Andrew) Dorsey, 20, writes what he calls the first "gospel" songs, merging blues with religious music. Dorsey is a preacher's son, and although churches reject his creations as being too lively and irreverent he will persevere.
New York's Roseland Ballroom opens December 31 at 1658 Broadway (51st Street), where it will remain (one flight up) until 1956, when it will move to 239 West 52nd Street. Proprietor Louis J. Brecker, 21, opened a Philadelphia Roseland 3 years ago while attending the Wharton School; he has moved to New York to escape Philadelphia's blue laws.
Scotland's 165-year-old Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews takes over management of the British Open and amateur championship tournaments.
Gerald Leighton Patterson, 23, (Australia) wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Suzanne Lenglen, 20, (Fr) in women's singles (she defeats Mrs. Dorothea Lambert Chambers, now 46, after 44 games in three grueling sets); William M. Johnston, 24, wins in U.S. men's singles, Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman in women's singles.
Jack Dempsey wins the world heavyweight boxing championship July 4 by a third round knockout over champion Jess Willard at Toledo, Ohio. William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey, 24, of Mannassa, Colorado (the "Manassa Mauler"), has learned his effective left hook from his Michigan-born manager Jack Kearns (originally John Leo McKernan), 36, who met fight promoter Tex Rickard at Nome, Alaska, during the 1897 gold rush and met Dempsey 2 years ago at Oakland, California. Dempsey will hold the crown until 1926 (see 1921).
U.S. thoroughbred racing has its first Triple Crown winner as the chestnut colt Sir Barton wins the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes in a feat that will not be repeated until 1930.
The Green Bay Packers professional football team is founded August 11 by Indian Packing Co. shipping clerk Earl Louis "Curly" Lambeau, 21, who has been a halfback at Notre Dame and will coach the Wisconsin team from 1921 until 1949 (see NFL, 1920).
The Cincinnati Reds win the World Series, defeating the Chicago White Sox 5 games to 3, but heavy wagering on the underdog Reds raises suspicions that Sox players have been bribed to throw some games (see 1920).
The American Legion is founded at Paris in mid-March by delegates from combat and service units of the American Expeditionary Force and granted a national charter by Congress September 16 (see VFW, 1913). Avowedly nonpolitical and nonsectarian, the Legion is open to anyone who has served honorably in the U.S. military and received an honorable discharge, it will push for the establishment of hospitals and other services, champion the cause of compensation and pensions for the disabled and for widows and orphans, and grow to have some 3 million members enrolled in 16,000 posts nationwide (see Veterans Administration, 1930).
The pogo stick patented by Ellenville, N.Y., inventor George B. Hansburg, 32, is a bouncing metal stick that thousands will ride in the 1920s and will be the basis of a dance number in The Ziegfeld Follies. Chorus girls at New York's Hippodrome will perform on them, contests will be held to see who can make the most consecutive jumps, and Hansburg will continue to make the sticks until he sells his SBI Enterprises in the early 1970s to another Ellenville company that will continue making pogo sticks into the 21st century.
Cooper Underwear Co. of Kenosha, Wis., introduces knitted undershirts and boxer shorts to make up for falling sales of its patented Kenosha Klosed Krotch union suit introduced 9 years ago (see 1911). The U.S. military issued woven shorts to recruits beginning in 1917, the men found them far more comfortable than "long-handled" underwear (especially in warm weather), and increased use of central heating is contributing to the demand for lighter, less bulky underwear. Cooper also produces pajamas and nightshirts, company sales soar, and Cooper will continue to make innovations (see 1935).
Suzanne Lenglen appears at Wimbledon wearing a one-piece pleated dress without a petticoat, a shocking departure from the traditional tennis dress.
London-born couturier Edward Molyneux, 27, opens a Paris fashion house that he will head until 1950, gaining an international reputation.
Paris-born couturier Lucien Lelong, 29, opens a Paris fashion house. Awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery during his service from 1914 to 1917, he joined his father's dressmaking firm in 1918 after recuperating from severe wounds and will show designs under his own name beginning in 1923.
Paris couturière Evelyn Vionnet reopens the salon she ran briefly just before the Great War and will soon dominate the fashion scene with her bias-cut dresses and skirts of pointy handkerchief draperies. Paris holds its first fashion shows since the war, displaying feminine styles that in many cases show the influence of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, doing without corsets, using soft materials and panniers to emphasize hips, and introducing skirts that hang seven to eight inches from the ground. American visitors call the skirts too short and fill in backless evening gowns with lace.
The song "Alice Blue Gown" takes its title from a color named for the outspoken Washington hostess Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now 35, whose late father, the former president, has died in January.
Hattie Carnegie, Inc. is incorporated by New York designer Carnegie, who has dissolved her partnership with Ruth Rose Roth and made her first trip to Paris (see 1909). She brings back sample fashions, redesigns them to satisfy American tastes, will open a shop in East 49th Street in 1925, add a ready-to-wear line in 1928, and in 10 years will have annual sales of $3.5 million (see 1942).
Hair-straightener millionaire Madam C. J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove Walker) dies at her Irvington, N.Y., villa May 3 at age 51, leaving two-thirds of her fortune to charitable and educational institutions (including a girls' academy that she has founded in West Africa) (see Johnson Products, 1954).
Advertisements for the deodorant cream Odo-Ro-No introduce the term "B.O.," meaning body odor, to lure women concerned about armpit perspiration odor.
Mitsouko is introduced by the Paris perfumer Guerlain, whose managing director Raymond Guerlain has given it the Japanese word for mystery (see l'Heure Bleue, 1912; Shalimar, 1925).
The Hoover vacuum cleaner invented in 1907 arrives in British stores; Hoover will become a generic vacuum cleaner in Britain and hoover will become a verb. The Electric Suction Sweeper Co. in America will become the Hoover Co. in 1922, and by 1926 more than half the households in Zanesville, Ohio, will have vacuum cleaners.
Johnson's Wax founder S. C. Johnson dies at Racine, Wis. His son Herbert F. takes over the company that Johnson founded in 1886.
Italian-born Chicago crime czar James (originally Giacomo) Colosimo is murdered at Chicago May 11 at age 42 (approximate); since arriving in 1895, Colosimo has built what is now an empire of brothels, nightclubs, and speakeasies, his Italian-born enforcer Johnny Torrio, 39, has coveted those properties, and Torrio has allegedly brought in Italian-born New York gangster Alponse "Al" Capone, 21, to kill Big Jim (see 1924).
Hilton Hotel Corp. has its beginnings at Crisco, Texas, where entrepreneur Conrad (Nicholson) Hilton, 31, uses his life savings of $5,000 to finance the purchase of the small Mobley Hotel. A partner in his father's mercantile interests at San Antonio, New Mexico, before the war, Hilton will soon acquire several other small Texas hotels and build a new hotel at Dallas in 1925 (see 1945).
Grand Canyon National Park is established by a February 26 act of Congress (see architecture [hotels], 1903; National Monument, 1908). The 673,575-acre park in Arizona includes the most spectacular part of the Colorado River's great 217-mile canyon seen by John Wesley Powell in 1869 and visited by the late Theodore Roosevelt in 1903.
Zion National Park is established by act of Congress. The 147,035-acre park in Utah is rich in colorful canyon and mesa scenery.
Lafayette National Park is established by act of Congress on Maine's 41,634-acre Mount Desert Island (see Rockefeller, 1916). First national park east of the Mississippi, it will be renamed Acadia National Park in 1929.
Griffith Park donator Griffith J. Griffith dies at Los Angeles July 6 at age 67, having contributed money to build an astronomical observatory and Greek theater in the nation's largest city park.
On September 14 the Texas coast has its worst hurricane since 1900; Corpus Christi's high bluff and protective barrier island have given it a sense of security, but the big blow kills about 300 people and causes more than $20 million in damage.
Famine in eastern Europe boosts demand for U.S. wheat. Prices soar to $3.50 per bushel, and farmers on the southern plains are encouraged to plant wheat on land never before tilled (see 1915; 1921). A farmer with a horse or team can plow only three acres per day, but farmers with tractors will soon be plowing 50 acres per day (see duststorms, 1932; "dust bowl," 1934).
"Sunkist" is the first trademark to identify a fresh fruit commodity. California Fruit Growers Exchange executive Don Francisco, 27, burns the word into the skin of a California orange with a heated fly swatter and urges that all citrus fruit marketed by the Exchange be stamped with the name (see 1895; Chiquita Banana, 1944).
U.S. food prices remain far above 1914 levels. Milk is 15¢/qt., up from 9¢; sirloin steak 61¢/lb., up from 32¢, fresh eggs 62¢/doz., up from 34¢.
Belgian food prices drop by 50 percent, British by 25 percent, but prices remain high elsewhere in Europe. German ports are blockaded until July 12.
French beef, mutton, pork, and veal prices have increased nearly sixfold since 1914, reports Le Petit Journal, and egg, cheese, and butter prices have increased fourfold. France removes restrictions on the sale of beans, peas, rice, eggs, and condensed milk, and then on bread, but while the wartime ban on sugar imports is lifted, the import duty on sugar is raised to almost prohibitive levels.
Eastern Europe has famine as a result of poor crops and the shortage of manpower. Vienna cuts bread rations to four ounces per week in late December.
Diet evangelist Horace Fletcher dies of bronchitis at Copenhagen January 13 at age 68 (see 1903). Interest in "Fletcherism" (commonly called "Fletcherizing") has waned and will now disappear almost completely.
A team of scientists from Britain's year-old Accessory Food Factors Committee studies malnutrition in famine-stricken Vienna. Harriette Chick and her colleagues find scurvy common among infants, note a serious increase in rickets, and prove the success of good nutrition in curing rickets.
Edward Mellanby finds that rickets is not an infection as has been widely believed but rather the result of a dietary vitamin deficiency (see 1918; Drummond, McCollum, 1920; McCollum, 1922).
Congress amends the Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906 once again to eliminate loopholes (see 1912; 1913; Kallet, Schlink, 1932).
An Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating beverages is proclaimed January 16 to go into effect January 16, 1920 (see 1913). Per-capita consumption of beverage alcohol has been averaging 1.96 gallons per year, but a War Prohibition Act passed last year goes into effect at the end of June to continue until demobilization. Drafted by Rep. Andrew J. Volstead, 38 (R. Minn.), and passed over President Wilson's veto October 28, a Prohibition Enforcement Act (Volstead Act) defines as "intoxicating" any beverage containing 0.5 percent alcohol or more but makes a few exceptions, such as wine for sacramental purposes (see 1920).
Henry J. Heinz dies of pneumonia at his Pittsburgh home May 14 at age 74 (see 1905). His company has grown to include seed farms, container factories, and more than a score of food-processing plants.
The Fleischmann Co. launches a national advertising campaign to urge housewives to buy bakery bread instead of baking at home. The company now sells most of its yeast to commercial bakers (see 1876; Standard Brands, 1929).
Minneapolis-born Stillwater, Minn., inventor Charles Strite files for a patent May 29 on an automatic pop-up electric toaster (see 1908). Working as a mechanic at Stillwater during the Great War, Strite found that the toast served in the plant's cafeteria was often burned, so he devised a toaster with a heating element, a dual-lever design, a variable timing mechanism, and powerful springs that eject a piece of toast when it is done (see 1921; Toastmaster, 1926).
U.S. margarine production reaches a level of one pound to every 2.4 pounds of butter, up from one to every five pounds in 1914 (see 1881; 1921).
General Motors (GM) selects the name Frigidaire for a new refrigerator produced by GM, which has paid $56,000 to acquire Guardian Refrigerator Co., a one-man firm that was close to bankruptcy. GM has sponsored a naming contest and will make Frigidaire almost a generic for refrigerator.
Kellogg's All-Bran is introduced by the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Co. (see 1915; 1922).
U.S. ice cream sales reach 150 million gallons, up from 30 million in 1909.
The Eskimo Pie has its beginnings in the "I-Scream-Bar," a chocolate-covered ice cream stick patented by Danish-born Latin teacher-candy store proprietor Christian Nelson of Onawa, Iowa, who solves the dilemma of schoolchildren who come into his shop and cannot decide whether to spend their nickels on candy or ice cream (see 1921; Good Humor, 1920).
Homogenized milk gains success for the first time in the United States, at Torrington, Connecticut (see 1904). Arthur G. Weigold of the Torrington Creamery has tried to sell the milk on his home-delivery routes, consumers accustomed to seeing a cream line at the top of their milk bottles have resisted the new product, but Weigold sells the milk to restaurateurs, many of whose patrons find it better tasting, more uniform in appearance, and more digestible than ordinary milk, although some object that it tastes sterilized (see 1932).
Coca-Cola's Asa G. Candler turns 68 December 30 and sells out for $25 million to a group headed by Ernest Woodruff (see 1916; 1923).
A&W Root Beer has its beginnings in a roadside drink stand set up June 20 at Lodi, California, by local entrepreneur Roy Allen, who charges a nickel for a glass mug of his creamy concoction. He soon takes Frank Wright into partnership, opens a permanent stand at Lodi, and opens a second stand at Sacramento with tray boys for curbside service that make it the first U.S. drive-in. Allen and Wright will buy their concentrate from J. Hungerford Smith Co. beginning in 1921 and call their root beer A&W beginning in 1922, Allen will buy out Wright's interest 2 years later and begin offering franchises, and by 1933 there will be more than 170 A&W stands—America's first franchised restaurant chain—with franchisees using concentrated supplied exclusively by Allen.
New York's Algonquin Round Table gets under way in June with luncheons at the 17-year-old Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street). Manager Frank Case, now 49, will for years play host to journalists, literati, publishers, and actors (Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Frank Crowninshield, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Alfred Lunt, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and others) whose witty remarks ("I've got to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini") and malicious ripostes will be widely quoted, whether or not they originated over the luncheon table.
Massive relocations of ethnic minorities begin in Europe. The Treaty of Neuilly sanctions the exchange of 46,000 Bulgarian Greeks for 120,000 Greek Bulgarians (see Lausanne, 1923).
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