1921: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Russian revolutionist Pyotr A. Kropotkin dies at Dmitrov, near Moscow, February 8 at age 78. He returned to Russia from exile in Britain 4 years ago but has played no role in the Bolshevik revolution. Russian sailors mutiny at Kronstadt beginning February 23 as the nation's economy collapses. Bolshevik authorities tolerate no dissent and put down the mutiny by March 17, but at least 1,600 anarchists are killed or wounded, their machine guns have mowed down at least 10,000 Red Army troops, and the bloodshed shatters any hope that the destitute country will somehow emerge as a democracy.
Bolsheviks overthrow the Menshevik regime in the Republic of Georgia that was established 3 years ago; Nikolai S. Chkheidze emigrates to France.
Bolshevik-trained Mongols form the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, establish an Independent People's Government, and use Russian help to defeat a Japanese-backed puppet government (see 1911; 1924).
V. I. Lenin tells his fellow Bolsheviks in November, "We have entered a new period in which we have . . . won the right to our international existence in the network of capitalist states." Having prevailed in Russia's civil war and organized a Soviet government along traditional ministerial lines, the Bolsheviks seek to establish traditional relations with foreign powers (see USSR, 1923).
Persia has a bloodless coup d'état February 20 as former Cossack trooper Reza Khan Pahlevi, 44, ousts the incompetent and self-indulgent Ahmad Shah who has reigned since 1909 (and will remain titular shah until 1925), expels all Russian officers from the country, and starts a new regime. V. I. Lenin gives up special rights in Persia, frees her of obligations to Russia, and gives Persia joint command of the Caspian Sea (see 1924).
The Milner Report published in February recommends ending Britain's protectorate over Egypt and negotiating a treaty with the Egyptians (see 1920). Adli Yakan forms a new Egyptian government, but his rival Sa'd Zaghlul frustrates his efforts to negotiate a treaty with London, forcing Yakan to resign, whereupon Zaghlul brings out his supporters in street demonstrations designed to thwart the formation of an alternative government. Gen. Allenby has Zaghlul arrested and deported to the Seychelles; he persuades London to promulgate a declaration that incorporates the Milner Report and confers a limited degree of independence on the Egyptians (see 1922).
Former Ottoman grand vizier Mehmed Talat is killed by an Armenian at Berlin March 15 at age 46. The Treaty of Moscow signed March 16 recognizes the nationalist Turkish government of Mustafa Kemal and its possession of Kars and Ardaha in return for Turkey's retrocession of Batum. Moscow agrees to supply the nationalists with weapons and ammunition for their war with Greece in an accord that follows by 3 days an Italian agreement to evacuate Anatolia in return for economic concessions, but hostilities continue between Greece and Turkey. The Turks prevent the Greeks from reaching Angora (Ankara) only by desperate efforts. France recognizes Turkey's Grand National Assembly by signing the Treaty of Ankara (Franklin-Bouillon Agreement) October 20 while Britain continues to recognize the Ottoman sultan Mehmet VI's government at Constantinople. The nationalists have refused to ratify last year's Treaty of Sèvres, their troops have defeated the French in Cilicia (southwestern Anatolia), diplomat Henri Franklin-Bouillon agrees to evacuate Cilicia, and Turkish nationalist foreign minister Yusuf Kemal Bey agrees to a new Turkish-Syrian border with a "special administrative regime" at Alexandretta (Hatay). The agreement releases Turkish troops for combat against the Greeks (see Treaty of Lausanne, 1923). Former Ottoman grand vizier Said Halim is assassinated by an Armenian at Rome December 6 at age 58.
London issues a White Paper on the Middle East: Gertrude Lowthian Bell has written "Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia" (she serves as oriental secretary to the British high commissioner Sir Percy Cox, who has conducted a plebiscite showing 96 percent approval of installing Syria's emir Faisal I as king of Iraq) (see 1920). When told by her mother that her work was well received, Bell replies, "The general line taken by the Press seems to be that it's most remarkable that a dog should be able to stand on its hind legs at all—i.e., a female write a White Paper (see Doctor Johnson, 1763). I hope they'll drop that source of wonder and pay attention to the report itself." Faisal arrives at Basra June 23, and the RAF takes over the chief responsibility for suppressing resistance to British occupation. English-born RAF officer Arthur Travers Harris, 29, helps devise a delayed-action bomb as a terror weapon and uses it to deadly effect against civilian populations; raised in Rhodesia, he says, "The only thing the Arab understands is a heavy hand" (see Hamburg, 1943). Faisal is installed on the throne of Iraq August 23, and he will reign until his death in 1933, establishing the Hashemite dynasty that will continue until 1958 (see 1922; energy [petroleum], 1927).
British authorities in Ireland sentence Countess Markievicz to 2 years' hard labor for having founded the Fianna in 1909 (see 1920). Unionist Party leader James Craig, 50, takes office June 22 as prime minister of Northern Ireland (he will hold the position until his death in 1940); Sinn Fein leader Michael Collins and others engineer a truce between the British and Irish armies, it takes effect July 11, and the countess is released July 24 (see 1923; Collins, 1922). Southern Ireland gains Dominion status December 6 in a treaty signed with Britain (see 1920). The Catholic Irish Free State (Eire) gains independence December 6 under terms of a treaty negotiated in part by Britain's lord chancellor Frederick E. Smith, now 49, who has been created Viscount Birkenhead and next year will be made 1st earl of Birkenhead; the new Free State embraces 26 of Ireland's 32 counties, but the six counties in Protestant Northern Ireland remain part of the United Kingdom and conflict between the two will continue (see IRA, 1922).
Yugoslavia's Peter I dies at Topaderi, near Belgrade, August 16 at age 77 after less than 3 years as monarch of the new nation. He is succeeded by his 33-year-old son, who will reign until 1934 as Aleksandr I (see 1929).
Two former German officers shoot left-wing Catholic Center Party deputy Matthias Erzberger, 45, to death in the Black Forest at Baden August 26 as violence increases in the Weimar Republic (see Kapp, 1920). Erzberger negotiated the peace terms that were signed in November 1918 (see Rathenau, 1922). Former German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg has died at Hohenfinow January 1 at age 64, Austrian political extremist Georg, Ritter von Schönerer, at Rosenau bei Zweitl August 14 at age 79. The eccentric former Bavarian king Ludwig III dies at Sternberger See October 18 at age 76.
Former Luftwaffe pilot Friedrich Christiansen persuades aircraft designer Ernst Heinkel to move to Travenmude and resume his previous career (date approximate; see 1916). The Treaty of Versailles has forbidden Germany to maintain an air force, Heinkel has returned to his native Swabia and started an electrical components factory, but Christiansen has urged him to design a collapsible seaplane that could be carried on U-boats, Japanese and U.S. agents have connived in the plan, and Heinkel will build a plane (the U-1) that can be assembled in 33 seconds, climb to 3,300 feet in 6 minutes, and attain a top speed of 87 miles per hour (see 1922).
Portugal has a revolution following the assassination in October of a founder of the 11-year-old republic.
U.S. House minority leader and former speaker of the House Champ Clark (D. Ky.) dies at Washington, D.C., March 2 at age 70; Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward D. White at Washington, D.C., May 19 at age 75 (President Harding appoints former president William Howard Taft to replace him, and Taft will head the court until 1930); former civil service reformer and trust buster Charles J. Bonaparte dies at his native Baltimore June 28 at age 70.
North Dakota voters recall Gov. Lynn Frazier, 46, who has been charged with promoting radical socialism and using the state's public libraries to spread "the propaganda of free love" (he is actually a devout Methodist who does not smoke or drink). Bank failures and plunging prices of beef and wheat have fueled a grassroots movement to remove the Minnesota-born farmer, who is serving his third 2-year term, he signed the law himself that provided for recall (see California, 1911), and he is the nation's first governor to be recalled, but he will be elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican next year and serve until he loses a bid for reelection in 1940 (see California, 2003).
Billy Mitchell sinks a former German battleship in the Chesapeake Bay July 21 to prove his contention that a strategic air force makes large navies obsolete. Brig. Gen. William Mitchell, 41, led a mass bombing attack of nearly 1,500 planes in 1918, his Martin M-2 bombers are twin-engined biplanes whose 418-horsepower Liberty engines give them a top speed of 98 miles per hour, they drop 1,000 bombs in the morning and 2,000 bombs in the afternoon as Congressmen look on, and the 22,800-ton Ostfriesland becomes the first capital warship to be sunk by bombs from U.S. planes (see 1925).
The U.S.S. Jupiter is the first U.S. aircraft carrier (see Royal Navy, 1918). Converted from an 11,050-ton collier, she has a stem-to-stern flight deck 534 feet (163 meters) in length and will be commissioned for fleet service in September of next year as the U.S.S. Langley, but catapult launches will not be perfected until the 1930s.
Former British first sea lord Louis Alexander Mountbatten, 1st marquess of Milford Haven, dies at London September 11 at age 67.
Japan's prime minister Takashi Hara is assassinated by a young right-wing fanatic at Tokyo November 4 at age 65. Founder of the powerful Seiyukai Party, Hara compromised with the nation's oligarchs, sent a military expedition to Siberia in 1918, took office in late September 1918, formed the first cabinet in accordance with principles parliamentary organization, encouraged the extension of suffrage, suppressed labor organizations, suppressed the independence movement in Korea, and supported naval armament.
The Washington Conference on Limitation of Naval Armaments opens November 12 and hears U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes say, "Competition in armament must stop." Hughes announces that the United States is prepared to scrap immediately 15 old battleships and to cancel construction of nine new battleships and six new cruisers, some of them 85 to 90 percent complete. Naval power is generally believed to have given the Allies their margin of victory in the Great War; the announcement that Washington is prepared to scrap two-thirds of the U.S. battleship fleet stuns the conferees, many of whom believe that such a decision would be suicidal (see 1922).
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., November 11 (a sculpture by Thomas Hudson Jones, now 30, will be installed on the tomb). Similar memorials were created last year in Europe, inspired possibly by a chaplain who in 1918 saw a crude wooden sign at the front with the words "An Unknown British Soldier" scrawled on it.
The Battle of Annoual in Morocco July 21 ends in defeat for a Spanish army at the hands of Rif resistance forces under the command of Abd el-Krim, 36, who chases the Spaniards into the suburbs of Melilla and establishes a Republic of the Rif with himself as president. An anarchist has assassinated Spain's prime minister Eduardo Dato Iradier March 8; Gen. Fernandez Silvestre commits suicide when the Rifs kill 12,000 of his 20,000 men, and news of the disaster at Annoual produces a political crisis at Madrid (see 1923).
Former Egyptian grand vizier Halim Pasha Said is assassinated by an Armenian at Rome December 6 at age 58.
Australian voters elect their first female member of Parliament March 13.
President Harding sends a fact-finding mission to the Philippines (see Jones Act, 1916). Republicans have raised questions about retiring governor general Francis B. Harrison's policy of preparing the islands for independence by replacing Americans with Filipinos in civil-service jobs; this has resulted in a notable deterioration in services, the critics charge, and the president has asked Gen. Leonard Wood and W. Cameron Forbes to investigate; the Wood-Forbes Mission reports in October that the islands are ill prepared for independence, with many educated Filipinos preferring the status quo. News of the report creates a furor in the Philippines. Gen. Wood is named to succeed Harrison, he will serve as governor general until his death in 1927, but although efficient and honest, he will never gain any popularity among the people (see Tydings-McDuffie Act, 1934).
Former Colombian president and dictator Rafael Reyes (Prieto) dies at Bogotá February 19 at age 70.
A Mexican mob carrying red flags invades the lower chamber of the Congress in late May; fearing for their lives, the Majority Deputies arm themselves as anarchists and ultra-Radicals stage a series of disturbances at Mexico City.
Canada's Union Government loses in the national elections, Prime Minister Meighen is unseated, and Liberal Party leader W. L. (William Lyon) Mackenzie King, 47, becomes prime minister December 21 even though his party falls slightly short of having a majority in the federal Parliament at Ottawa.
Canada's Parliament gets its first female member following the election of Agnes Mcphail (née Campbell), 31, as representative of the United Farmers of Ontario; she will champion the cause of women in the workforce. Canadian feminist Nellie McClung is elected as a Liberal in Alberta; she will try without success to liberalize the province's divorce laws and fail to win reelection in 1925.
President Harding commutes the prison sentence of Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs December 25 to time served (see 1918), Debs is released, and a tumultuous crowd greets him on his return to his native Terre Haute 3 days later.
Bolshevik authorities open the Holmogor concentration camp at Archangel; it is the world's first such camp since the Boer War of 1899-1902, Moscow will establish many similar camps, and at least 10 million prisoners will die in them in the next 32 years.
A race riot at Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 31 begins with the arrest of a black shoeshine man accused of having made advances towards a white woman in an elevator. The man will later be cleared of all charges, but an armed lynch mob turns up at the Tulsa County Courthouse, armed blacks arrive to thwart the lynching, shots are fired, the Oklahoma National Guard moves in too late and rounds up 6,000 blacks, the mob firebombs churches, homes, and stores in the prosperous but predominantly black 35-square-block neighborhood known as Greenwood on the north side of town, and by the time the riot ends as many as 300 people lie dead and Greenwood is in ashes. Black survivors will file lawsuits, but all the cases will be dismissed.
A British divorce court swears in six women jurors January 25. They are the first women ever to serve in a case involving the breakdown of a marriage, but when lawyers produce letters described as "beastly" and "abominable" in evidence they are read only by the six male jurors, the women choosing simply not to look.
Swedish women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.
President Harding warns a Des Moines, Iowa, audience November 22 that it would be dangerous if women voters were to unite as a class.
A New York Times editorial explains that Robert H. Goddard's rockets cannot possibly work because there is nothing in outer space for the rockets' exhausts to push against (see 1919; Oberth, 1923; Goddard, 1926).
Russia's Communist Party announces a New Economic Policy (NEP) as industrial and agricultural production fall off and shortages in food, fuel, and transportation become acute. Sponsored by V. I. Lenin and approved by economists who include Nikolay Dmitriyevich Kondratev, 29, the NEP abolishes food levies to placate Russia's peasants and a limited grain tax is substituted. Some freedom of trade is restored to enable the peasants to dispose of their surpluses and some private commercial enterprises are permitted in the cities.
U.S. Secretary of State Hughes rejects a Russian plea for resumption of trade relations March 25. There will be no such trade so long as communism prevails, Hughes declares.
The Allied Reparations Committee announces in April that Germany owes 132 billion gold marks in war reparations, with the amount to be increased in the event that the defeated country is able to pay more; 1 billion gold marks is due by May 31, ultra-nationalists and some industrialists urge that the Weimar Republic refuse to pay; moderates persuade the government to adopt a "policy of fulfillment" in order to reestablish trust with a view to negotiating better terms. The Allies threaten to occupy the Ruhr if the money is not forthcoming, and the first tranche is finally paid in August, using money raised with a loan at London, where economist John Maynard Keynes ridicules reparations on economic, moral, and political grounds.
German industrialist Hugo Stinnes works to spur his country's economic recovery as he expands his holdings to Austria, the Balkans, Switzerland, Russia, and Argentina (see 1916), but he tries to abolish the 8-hour day in order to increase productivity, and he resists socialization.
British coal miners walk out of the pits March 31. British unemployment reaches 2.5 million in July but then begins a gradual drop to 1.2 million where it will remain until 1930. Seven million Britons take wage cuts; the unemployed receive allowances for dependent relatives (see 1920).
The British Medical Association estimates that a family of five needs 22s 6½d per week for food to maintain proper health, but as unemployment reaches its peak in July, the dole is 29s 3d per week, and rents in even the worst slum tenements average 6s per week.
Britain's national income falls to £1.804 billion, down from £2.021 billion in 1913; France's to 250 billion francs, down from 328 billion in 1913.
An Emergency Tariff Act signed into law May 27 raises duties on farm products such as meat, sugar, wheat, and wool, and embargoes German dyestuffs (see Fordney-McCumber Act, 1922).
The Budget and Accounting Act adopted by Congress June 10 creates the Bureau of the Budget, initially as part of the Treasury Department. Former president Woodrow Wilson vetoed a bill that would have required the president to prepare annual budgets for final disposition by the House and Senate, objecting that it barred the president from removing from office the chief government auditor (the comptroller), but President Harding has called a special session of Congress and urged passage of the budget bill. The General Accounting Office (GAO) created by the same measure is the first federally-funded arm of Congress since the Library of Congress was established in 1800. Headed by the comptroller general, the GAO will be a congressional watchdog on federal spending, conducting audits of federal government accounts.
U.S. workers strike as employers cut wages by 10 to 25 percent. United States Steel Corporation cuts wages three times during the year, and the Railroad Labor Board cuts wages 12 percent July 1.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) elects Samuel Gompers president for the 40th time.
The United States has nearly 20,000 business failures; by September, nearly 3.5 million Americans are out of work. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover serves as chairman of an Unemployment Conference convened by President Harding.
A Revenue Act approved by Congress November 23 repeals the corporate excess profits tax imposed during the Great War, reduces the minimum surtax rate from 65 to 50 percent (Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon had urged a much deeper cut), and actually increases corporate income taxes from 10 to 12.5 percent. The nation has assumed a huge debt to prosecute the war and Congress has wrestled with the dilemma of meeting the demand for lower taxes and meeting the need to pay down the debt.
Columbia University medical school graduate Armand Hammer, 22, goes to Russia to help the Lenin government cope with its postwar disease plagues and collect $150,000 owed to his father's company for drugs shipped during the Allied blockade of Russian ports. Hammer's Russian-born father is in Sing Sing prison on an abortion conviction; the young physician travels to the Urals, barters a million tons of U.S. wheat for a fortune in furs, caviar, and precious stones, and meets late in August with V. I. Lenin, who persuades him to take a concession to operate an asbestos mine in the Urals. The mine will not be successful, but Hammer and his brother Victor, now 21, will open an export-import business at Moscow that will serve as agents for Ford Motor, Parker Pen, U.S. Rubber, Underwood Typewriter, and nearly three dozen other foreign companies.
The U.S. Supreme Court calls an Arizona picketing law unconstitutional. The 5-to-4 decision comes December 19 in the case of Truax v. Corrigan, but Justice Brandeis dissents from Chief Justice Taft's majority opinion.
The New York Curb Exchange moves into a new building of its own in Trinity Place following decades in which members have transacted business in all kinds of weather by signaling from curbstone street positions to clerks located in windows of surrounding buildings (see American Stock Exchange, 1953).
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 81.10, up from 71.95 at the end of 1920.
Corning Glass Works improves light-bulb production efficiency with a new ribbon machine that turns out between 21,000 and 31,000 bulbs per hour (see 1903; Langmuir, 1912).
Incandescent bulb co-inventor Frances R. Upton dies at Orange, N.J., March 10 at age 68; mercury-vapor electric lamp inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt at Paris August 25 at age 60.
Congress grants a depletion allowance for petroleum producers to encourage exploration of potential new reserves as America increases her consumption of gasoline. The tax incentive will stand at 27.5 percent until it is cut to 22 percent in 1969.
Pennsylvania-born chemist Thomas Midgley Jr., 32, discovers the antiknock properties of tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive; a German chemist first identified the substance in 1854 but its high toxicity has kept it from being used. General Motors helps Midgley establish the Ethyl Corp. (see 1923).
The Port of New York Authority created April 30 will administer marine terminals, tunnels, bridges, and other facilities that will include airports, helicopter pads, rail and bus terminals, and office buildings. Eugenius H. Outerbridge, now 61, has campaigned for years to have the waterways of the metropolitan area treated as a single entity rather than in piecemeal fashion. New York State and New Jersey have set up the authority to prevent mutually ruinous competition between the two states and enable them to work on a cooperative basis (see bus terminal, 1950).
Berlin's Avus Autobahn opens to traffic September 10. Originally planned in 1909 and nearly complete when the Great War stopped construction, the Autobahn has been designed by Pforzheim-born engineer Fritz Todt, 30, built almost entirely with hand labor, and is the world's first highway designed exclusively for motor traffic and with controlled access (on ramps, off ramps, overpasses). It runs 6.25 miles from the Grunewald to the suburb of Wannsee, a 26-foot-wide grass mall separates its two 24.6-foot-wide carriageways, and it is spanned by 10 ferroconcrete bridges (see 1932).
A Federal Highway Act passed by Congress November 9 begins to coordinate state highways and to standardize U.S. road-building practice. The United States has 387,000 miles of surfaced road by year's end, up from 190,476 in 1909 (see 1930).
More than a million trucks travel on U.S. roads and highways, up from 100,000 in 1909.
Generators become standard equipment on Model T Fords, which account for 61.34 percent of all U.S. motorcars sold.
Durant Motors is founded by W. C. Durant, who has again been forced out of General Motors but has raised $7 million to start a new venture (see 1916). Durant acquires the Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant of the bankrupt Locomobile Co. to build a Durant luxury car that will supplement the $850 Durant Four and the medium-priced Durant Six made at Muncie, Indiana, and he pays $5.25 million to acquire the Willys plant at Elizabethport, New Jersey, which is the world's most modern auto factory (see Duesenberg, 1919). Willys-Overland has gone bankrupt and its receivers sell Durant the Willys design for a new medium-priced Flint motorcar that Durant intends to market (see Star, 1922; Willys-Overland, 1936).
GM's share of the U.S. motorcar market reaches 12 percent; the company begins a rapid expansion.
Pneumatic tire inventor John B. Dunlop dies at London October 23 at age 81.
The first transcontinental U.S. day-night flight encourages Congress to support airmail service (see communications, 1918). Mail pilot Jack Knight lands at Omaha February 22 after a 248-mile flight from North Platte, Neb., learns that no pilot is available for the next leg, flies on through heavy snow to Iowa City and refuels, and proceeds to Chicago, covering 672 miles in 10 hours; two other pilots take the plane through to New York, setting a transcontinental flight record of 33 hours, 20 minutes (see Doolittle, 1922).
English pilot Harry G. Hawker dies July 12 at age 29 in a crash of the Nieuport Goshawk he is testing for T. O. M. Sopwith's Hawker Engineering Co., Ltd., which Sopwith renamed in Hawker's honor last year (see 1912; 1919).
The U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) has its beginnings in an executive order by President Harding that establishes a Veterans Bureau. Veterans of the Great War have been receiving medical care and examinations for pensions or compensation from various hospitals, but an inspection by the Bureau's first director reveals "absolutely deplorable" conditions in "many cantonments." Charles R. Forbes has been director of the War Risk Insurance Bureau; the president's personal physician Charles E. Sawyer tells him that all patients must be housed together, including those with neuro-psychiatric problems and tuberculosis as well as general medical and surgical cases, but Forbes will opt for segregation in the facilities now being built under a massive hospital construction program (see 1923).
Heart disease becomes the leading cause of death in America after 10 years of jockeying for the lead with tuberculosis. Coronary disease accounts for 14 percent of U.S. deaths and the figure will increase to 39 percent in the next 50 years.
The Council of the American Medical Association refuses to endorse an American Medical Association (AMA) resolution proposed in 1917 that would oppose use of alcohol as a beverage and would discourage its use as a therapeutic agent. More than 15,000 physicians and 57,000 druggists and drug manufacturers applied for licenses to prescribe and sell liquor in the first 6 months after passage of the Volstead Act in 1919 and by 1928 physicians will be making an estimated $40 million per year by writing prescriptions for whiskey.
Psychodiagnostics by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, 36, introduces the Rorschach test. Based on subjects' reactions to inkblots, the test will be used to probe the unconscious.
Viennese child psychologist Melanie Klein (née Reizes), 39, presents her first paper, "The Development of a Child," before the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. She will work on techniques for analyzing children using a psychoanalytic setting similar to that employed by Freud for adults, providing a child with a box of toys on the assumption that the child will express herself or himself more fully in play than in words.
Poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis) strikes former assistant secretary of the navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, now 39, in August at his vacation home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick. His 36-year-old wife, Eleanor, loyally and compassionately nurses FDR in his illness, setting aside the hurt and resentment caused by his infidelity; since he will no longer be able to walk, she will hereafter serve many times as his emissary.
Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages are introduced by Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, N.J. The company will install machines in 1924 for mass-producing Band-Aids in precut three-inch by 3/4-inch sizes, and it will distribute them to Boy Scout troops nationwide. J&J will diversify its product line in this decade to offer items such as Johnson's Baby Cream.
The Oxford Group is founded at Oxford University by German-born U.S. evangelist Frank (Nathan Daniel) Buchman, 43, who claims to have had a vision of the Cross in the English lake district in 1908. Buchman has served as a missionary for the YMCA in Japan, Korea, and India, he works to "change" lives through his First Century Christian Fellowship, and he will organize groups in the Scandinavian countries, Canada, the United States, South America, and Latin America (see Moral Rearmament, 1939).
Iraq's new Hashemite kingdom establishes Sunni Muslim rule over the nation's Shiite majority, a relationship that will not change in this century.
The Maryknoll Seminary for Chinese Boys is founded at Yangchiang by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Catholic missionary Francis Ford Xavier, 29.
Siam's Buddhist prince-patriarch Vajirañanovarorasa dies at his native Bangkok August 2 at age 61.
The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce speaks out January 16 about the poor state of education, which he says has fallen below the standards of every other civilized country: of the 600,000 teachers in America, he tells the National Education Association, one-sixth are under 21; 30,000 have no education themselves beyond eighth grade; 150,000 have not gone beyond the third year in high school; and 450,000 U.S. children either have no classrooms or must learn in overcrowded classes.
Chicago's 28-year-old Field Museum of Natural History opens in a new building overlooking Grant Park.
Girton College, Cambridge, founder Emily Davies dies at Hampstead, London, July 17 at age 91.
Britain's University of Leicester opens with nine students in an 84-year-old building donated by textile manufacturer Thomas Fielding Johnson for use as a living memorial to those who died in the Great War. The University will receive a royal charter in 1957, gain full degree-granting powers, and grow to have about 10,000 full-time students.
Some 150,000 people hear President Harding's inaugural address March 4 as a Western Electric public address system amplifies his speech to the assembled crowd at Washington, D.C.
Engineer Edouard Belin makes the first transatlantic facsimile "fax" transmission, sending a picture by cable from Annapolis, Maryland, to Malmaison, France (see 1907; plain-paper fax, 1975).
Cincinnati's WLW radio station is started by local auto parts producer Powel Crosley, 35, who moves his ham station 8CR transmitter from his house to his factory and has it licensed under the call letters WLW. Crosley will organize Crosley Radio Corp. in 1923 (see sports [first night baseball game], 1935).
Two-way weekly airmail service between Cairo and Baghdad begins in June. The Royal Air Force reduces the time that it takes a letter from London to reach Baghdad to between 5 and 10 days, down from 28 days before the airplane.
The Parker Duofold fountain pen ("Big Red") is introduced by the Parker Pen Co. of Janesville, Wisconsin (see 1904), but many consider the $7 pen too large for comfortable writing.
The 81-year-old Melbourne Herald appoints war correspondent Keith Murdoch editor in chief (see 1915). Now 40, Murdoch will help make the Herald Australia's highest-circulation newspaper and go on to acquire other Australian papers as he builds a publishing empire (see 1952).
The 2-year-old New York Daily News launches a Sunday edition. By 1925 the Sunday News will be outselling all other Sunday papers with help from its comic strips.
"Tillie the Toiler" by cartoonist Russ Westover challenges the 2-year-old comic strip "Winnie Winkle." "Smitty" by cartoonist Walter Bendt appears for the first time November 29 in the Chicago Tribune.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. launches its first helium-filled blimp under the name Pilgrim to promote the 27-year-old firm. Goodyear blimps will become fixtures at U.S. sporting events.
Boston Globe editor Charles H. Taylor dies at Boston June 22 at age 74 and is hailed as the dean of American journalism. His descendants will continue as publishers for generations (seeNew York Times acquisition, 1993); Morning Telegraph sports editor (and former frontier peace officer) William B. "Bat" Masterson dies at New York October 25 at age 67, having spent his final years hobnobbing with cowboy film star William S. Hart, writer Gene Fowler, and the late president Theodore Roosevelt, whom he met when Roosevelt came out west in the 1880s; former Louisville Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson dies at Jacksonville, Florida, December 22 at age 81.
"One look is worth a thousand words," writes journalist Frederick R. Barber in Printers' Ink December 8. He will revise the aphorism in 1927 to make it, "One picture is worth a thousand words," calling it a Chinese proverb; others will waste no time in ascribing it to Confucius.
Nonfiction: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Vienna-born philosopher Ludwig (Josef Johann) Wittgenstein, 31, of Cambridge University. A brother of the pianist, Wittgenstein wrote the work while on active service with the Austrian Army in 1918; The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung) by German Existentialist Franz Rosenzweig, 34, who began the work while on active service with the German Army in 1918; Socialism and Co-operation by Leonard S. Woolf; The Founding of New England by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born historian James Truslow Adams, 42; London River by H. M. Tomlinson.
Naturalist-author John Burroughs dies March 25 at age 83 while en route from California to his native New York State; economist-author Henry Carter Adams dies at Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 11 at age 69; philosopher Eugen Dühring at Nowawes, Germany, September 21 at age 88; Marxist author Henry M. Hyndman at his native London November 22 at age 79.
Fiction: Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes) by Marcel Proust; The Knife Between the Teeth (Le Couteau Entre les Dents) by Henri Barbusse; Anicet; or The Panorama by French poet-novelist Louis Aragon (originally Andrieux), 23; Chrome Yellow by Aldous Huxley; Héloïse and Abelard by George Moore; Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare; To Let by John Galsworthy; Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution by Rafael Sabatini; Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington; Three Soldiers by Chicago-born novelist John (Roderigo) Dos Passos, 25, who served as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Great War; The Mistress of Husaby (Husfrue) by Sigrid Undset; Tales and Legends by German poet-playwright Nelly Leonie Sachs, 30; Husband and Wife (Mann und Frau) by Helene Voigt-Diederichs; The Triumph of the Egg (stories) by Sherwood Anderson; Balisand by Joseph Hergesheimer; A Parody Outline of History by Ohio-born humorist Donald Ogden Stewart, 26, wins its author instant success and entrée to New York's Algonquin Round Table; Mavis of Green Hill by New Rochelle, N.Y.-born novelist Faith Baldwin, 28, whose books will be serialized in magazines for women and be second in popularity only to those of Kathleen Norris (see 1911); Her Father's Daughter by Gene Stratton Porter; The Young Enchanted by Hugh Walpole; Rich Relatives by Compton Mackenzie; The Mysterious Affair at Styles by English mystery writer Agatha (Mary Clarissa Miller) Christie, 30, introduces the London detective Hercule Poirot, late of the Belgian Sûreté.
Poetry: "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned,/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity"; Devoirs de vacances by Raymond Radiguet; Second April by Edna St. Vincent Millay; Hymen by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); At the Very Edge of the Sea (U Samogo Morya) and Anno Domini MCMXXI by Anna Akhmatova, who has defied her father's objections to her career; Mile II (Versty II) by Marina Tsvetaeva; Nets to Catch the Wind by New Jersey-born poet-novelist Elinor Wylie (née Hoyt), 36; Poems by Marianne Moore; The Farmer's Bride (The Saturday Market) by English poet Charlotte Mary Mew, 51.
Poet Austin Dobson dies at London September 2 at age 81.
Juvenile: The Story of Mankind by Dutch-born U.S. historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 39; Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery, who married a clergyman 10 years ago, moved to his manse in Ontario, and deals in her latest book with the impact of the Great War on a little island community.
The P.E.N. Club is founded at London by John Galsworthy, who has assembled some leading colleagues. The Pen American Center will be established next year in the United States, and PEN will become a worldwide writers' lobby lending support for freedom of expression and the spread of literacy but whose internal dissensions will sometimes make headlines.
The Phillips Collection that opens at Washington, D.C., is the first U.S. modern art museum. Yale-educated Pittsburgh steel heir and collector Duncan Phillips, 35, has been buying art since the end of the Great War; his intent is to show the essential continuities of art, including modernism's roots in the Old Masters, and he will be the collection's director until his death in 1966, emphasizing works by the impressionists, post-impressionists, School of Paris, and American color field painters, and Old Masters, avoiding sculpture, eschewing cubism and surrealism (see Nonfiction [Breton Manifesto], 1924), and most expressionism (see Museum of Modern Art, 1929).
Painting: Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso; Odalisque in Red Trousers by Henri Matisse; Still Life with Guitar by Georges Braque; Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner) and Woman with a Cat by Fernand Léger; The Open Window and Woman with Dog by Pierre Bonnard; Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue by Piet Mondrian; The Fish and Hoffmanesque Scene by Paul Klee; Gray Day by German painter George Grosz, 28, is a savage portrayal of German society. Grosz volunteered for the infantry in 1914, was invalided to Berlin 2 years later, took a garret studio and sketched disfigured veterans, prostitutes, and other casualties of the war; he depicts the decadence of his time in his drawing collection, The Face of the Ruling Class; Parents of the Artist by German expressionist painter-engraver Otto Dix, 29, who will soon begin teaching at Düsseldorf and producing Two Sacrifices of Capitalism, Pimp and Girls, and other antiwar and anti-capitalist drawings and paintings; The Elephant of the Célèbes by Max Ernst; The Kiss by Edvard Munch; Bull Durham by Stuart Davis, now 26, who has turned to Cubism.
Etching: Killed in Action by Käthe Kollwitz.
Photograph: Village Schoolmaster by August Sander.
Theater: Diff'rent by Eugene O'Neill 1/4 at New York's Provincetown Playhouse, 100 perfs.; The Green Goddess by Scottish playwright William Archer, 65, 1/18 at New York's Booth Theater with George Arliss, Cyril Keightley, 440 perfs.; R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek 1/25 at Prague's National Theater; Nice People by Rachel Crothers 3/2 at New York's Klaw Theater, with Katharine Cornell, Francine Larrimore, Huntsville, Ala.-born actress Tallulah Bankhead, 18, 120 perfs.; The True Sedemunds (Die echten Sedemunds) by Ernst Barlach 3/23 at Hamburg's Kammerspiele; Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'autore) by Luigi Pirandello 5/10 at Rome's Teatro Valle; If by Lord Dunsany 5/30 at London's Ambassadors Theatre, with Leslie Banks, Gladys Cooper (originally Merivale), 32, who began her career at age 16 and has risen from chorus girl and understudy to become an accomplished actress; Dulcy by Pittsburgh-born playwright George S. (Simon) Kaufman, 31, and his McKeesport, Pa.-born colleague Marc (Marcus Cook) Connelly, 30, 8/13 at New York's Frayzee Theater, with Lynn Fontanne, Elliott Nugent, Howard Lindsay, 246 perfs.; Getting Gertie's Garter by Wilson Collison and Avery Hopwood 8/21 at New York's Republic Theater, with Hazel Dawn, 120 perfs.; A Bill of Divorcement by Clemence Dane 3/14 at St. Martin's Theatre, London, with Lilian Braithwaite, 48, as Margaret Fairfield, Malcolm Keen as her husband, Meggie Albanesi as her daughter Sidney (10/10 at New York's George M. Cohan Theater, with German-born actress Katharine Cornell, 27, as Sidney, Charles Waldron, 173 perfs.); Anna Christie by Eugene O'Neill 11/2 at New York's Vanderbilt Theater, with Pauline Lord as Anna Christopherson in the story of a prostitute's fight for redemption, 177 perfs.; The Difficult Man (Der Schwierige) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal 11/8 at Munich's Residenztheater.
Playwright Georges Feydeau dies at Rueil-Malmaison June 5 at age 58.
Britain's George V makes May Witty a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her success at raising money for the war effort in America and her native Australia. Now 56, she is the first actress to be so honored.
"Weary Willy" makes his bow at Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey's circus. Kansas-born clown Emmet Kelly, 22, will play the role of sad-faced character for 50 years.
Films: Fritz Lang's Destiny and Spies; D. W. Griffith's Dream Street with Carol Dempster, Ralph Graves; Griffith's Way Down East with Lillian Gish, Lowell Sherman, Richard Barthelmess, photography by Billy Bitzer; Fred Niblo's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, both with Italian-born vaudeville dancer Rudolph Valentino (originally Rodolpho d'Antonguolla), 26; Charles Chaplin's The Kid with Chaplin, Los Angeles-born actor John Leslie "Jackie" Coogan, 6 (who will soon be making $22,000 per week and earning 60 percent of the profits from his films), Edna Purviance, 26; Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford's Little Lord Fauntleroy with Mary Pickford; Frances Marion's Lovelight with Mary Pickford and Marion's Presbyterian minister husband, Fred Thomson; Lois Weber's The Blot (about the economic challenges facing a young couple in a society that gives little reward for intellectual and moral efforts while heaping riches on those with capitalistic skills); Sam Wood's Peck's Bad Boy with Jackie Coogan; James Cruze's Leap Year with Fatty Arbuckle; Landon Hillyer's The Whistle with William S. Hart, Frank Brownlee. Also: Martin and Osa Johnson's Jungle Adventures. Kansas-born explorer-film maker Osa Johnson (née Osa Helen Leighty), 27, married adventurer-photographer Martin E. Johnson at age 16 and will continue to make films of African and South Sea Island wildlife and tribal groups after her husband's death early in 1937, with backing from New York's American Museum of Natural History.
Opera: Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, and Das Nusch-Nuschi 6/4 at Stuttgart, with music by German composer Paul Hindemith, 25; Kát'a Kabanová 10/23 at Brno, with music by Leos Janacek, libretto from an 1859 Ostrovsky play; Amalita Galli-Curci makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 11/14 in the 1853 Verdi opera La Traviata (she will be a regular member of the Met company until January 1930); The Love for Three Oranges 12/30 at Chicago, with music by Sergei Prokofiev.
Tenor Enrico Caruso dies of pleurisy at his native Naples August 2 at age 48; composer Engelbert Humperdinck at Neustrewitz September 27 at age 67.
Ballet: The Buffoon (Le chout) 5/17 at the Théâtre Gaité-Lyrique, Paris, with music by Sergei Prokofiev; The Sleeping Princess 11/2 at London's Alhambra Theatre, with Bronislava Nijinska, music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Marius Petipa.
Isadora Duncan opens a Moscow school for the dance at the invitation of the Bolshevik government (see 1905). Now 43, Duncan meets and marries Russian poet Sergei A. Esenin, now 26, who 2 years ago founded the imagist group and is known as the "poet laureate of the Revolution." He and Duncan will tour the United States, neither speaking the other's language; many will call them Bolshevist spies (see 1927).
First performances: Pastorale d'Eté by Arthur Honegger 2/17 at Paris; Le Roi David Symphonic Psalm for Chorus and Orchestra by Arthur Honegger 6/11 at the Jorot Theater in Mezieres outside Lausanne; The Lark Ascending Romance for Violin and Orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams 6/14 at London; Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra by Sergei Rachmaninoff 12/16 at Chicago.
The Eastman School of Music is founded at the 71-year-old University of Rochester with a gift from photography pioneer George Eastman.
Composer Camille Saint-Saëns dies at Algiers December 16 at age 86.
New York musicians organize Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The powerful local will negotiate contracts with the Metropolitan Opera, the League of New York Theaters, and recording companies.
The Selmer "C Melody" alto saxophone introduced by the 36-year-old H. and A. Selmer Co. gives the Paris-based firm an addition to its line of clarinets. By next year it will have 50 employees turning out 30 saxophones per month and will launch a tenor "C Melody" sax; the company will acquire the late Adolph Sax's company in 1928, have 110 employees by 1935, and be a thriving concern by the time founder Henri Selmer dies in 1941 at age 83.
Stage musicals: Shuffle Along 5/23 at the 63rd Street Music Hall, with Florence Mills, 25, and teenager Josephine Baker in an all-black revue, songs that include "Love Will Find a Way" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry" by Eubie (James Hubert) Blake, 38, and Noble Sissle, 32, 504 perfs.; Two Little Girls in Blue 5/31 at George M. Cohan's Theater, with music by Vincent Youmans, 23, and P. Lannin, lyrics by Arthur Francis (Ira Gershwin), songs that include "Oh Me! Oh My!" 134 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies (revue) 6/21 at New York's Globe Theater, with Mary Eaton, Fanny Brice, book by Channing Pollock. Brice sings the torch song "My Man," published at Paris last year under the title "Mon Homme" and made poignant by the fact that Brice is married to gambler Nick Arnstein. English lyrics by Alfred Willametz. "Second Hand Rose (From Second Avenue)" by James F. Hanley, lyrics by Grant Clarke, is another Follies hit, 119 perfs.; The Co-Optimists 6/27 at London's Royalty Theatre, with music and lyrics by Melville Gideon, songs that include "When the Sun Goes Down," "Tampa Bay," 500 perfs.; (George White's) Scandals 7/11 at New York's Liberty Theater, with White, Ann Pennington, Lou Holtz, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Arthur Jackson, 97 perfs.; Tangerine 8/9 at New York's Casino Theater, with book by Philip Bartholomae and Guy Bolton, music by Carlo Sanders, lyrics by Howard Johnson, 337 perfs.; The Greenwich Village Follies (revue) 8/31 at New York's Shubert Theater, with Ted Lewis, songs that include "Three O'Clock in the Morning" by Spanish composer Julian Robledo, 34, lyrics by New York lyricist Dolly Morse (Dorothy Terrio), 31, 167 perfs.; Get Together 9/3 at New York's Hippodrome, with dancer-choreographer Michel Fokine, comedian Jack Hanley, book by R. H. Burnside, 397 perfs.; Blossom Time 9/21 at New York's Ambassador Theater, with book and lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly, who has adapted the German operetta Das Dreimädelhaus based on the life of composer Franz Schubert, music by Sigmund Romberg, 592 perfs.; The Music Box Revue 9/22 at the new Music Box Theater at 239-247 West 45th Street (designed by C. Howard Crane and E. George Kiehler), with Irving Berlin songs that include "Say It with Music," 440 perfs.; The O'Brien Girl 10/3 at the Liberty Theater, with Georgia Caine, Edwin Forsberg, music by Lou Hirsch, book and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel, 164 perfs.; Bombo 10/6 at the new Jolson Theater (later to be called the Century) at 932 Seventh Avenue, between 58th and 59th streets, with Al Jolson singing numbers by Sigmund Romberg, book and lyrics by B. G. DeSylva. Jolson soon interpolates "My Mammy," "Toot, Toot, Tootsie" by Dan Russo, lyrics by Gus Kahn and Ernie Erdman, "April Showers" by Louis Silvers, 32, lyrics by Jack Yellen, "California, Here I Come" by Joseph Meyer, lyrics by Jolson and B. G. DeSylva, 219 perfs.; Good Morning Dearie 11/1 at New York's Globe Theater, with music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Anne Caldwell, 347 perfs.; The Perfect Fool 11/7 at George M. Cohan's Theater, with Ed Wynn, Guy Robertson, book, music, and lyrics by Wynn, 275 perfs.; Kiki 11/29 at the Belasco Theater, with Lenore Ulric, songs that include "Some Day I'll Find You" by Zoel Parenteau, lyrics by Schuyler Green, 600 perfs.
Composer Ivan Caryll dies at New York November 29 at age 60; composer Victor Jacobi at New York December 11 at age 37.
Popular songs: "Ain't We Got Fun" by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Gus Kahn and Raymond Egan; "There'll Be Some Changes Made" by U.S. composer Benton Overstreet, lyrics by Billy Higgins; "I'm Nobody's Baby" by Milton Ager and Lester Santly, lyrics by Benny Davis; "All by Myself" by Irving Berlin; "Ma! (He's Making Eyes at Me)" by Con Conrad, lyrics by Sidney Clare (for The Midnight Rounders with Eddie Cantor); "Careless Love" by W. C. Handy, Spencer Williams, Martha Koenig; "The Sheik of Araby" by Ted Snyder, now 40, lyrics by Harry B. Smith, Francis Wheeler; "Wang Wang Blues" by Paul Whiteman orchestra trumpet player Harry Busse, clarinetist Gus Mueller, and trombonist Buster Johnson; "Fire Dance" ("Danse Rituelle du Feu") by Manuel de Falla, lyrics by Martinez Serra, 41.
Spanish bullfighter Juan Belmonte retires at age 29 after matador Manuel Granero is killed in the ring at Madrid in May, but the millionaire founder of modern bullfighting will return several times before finally devoting himself exclusively to breeding bulls for the corrida.
Boxing has its first $1 million gate July 2 in a hastily erected stadium at Boyle's Thirty Acres in Jersey City, where heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey defeats French challenger Georges Carpentier by a fourth-round knockout. Now 27, the handsome Carpentier won the world light-heavyweight title from Battling Levinsky in a Jersey City bout held October 20 of last year and Tex Rickard of Madison Square Garden has promoted the bout with Dempsey. It begins at just after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, draws more than 90,000 spectators, who pay $1.7 million for tickets, and earns $300,000 for Dempsey, $215,000 for Carpentier.
Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen win the singles titles at Wimbledon, Tilden and Mrs. Mallory the U.S. titles at the West Side Tennis Club courts in Forest Hills, N.Y.
Eight members of the 1919 White Sox team go to trial in June on charges of accepting bribes from gamblers to throw the Series (see 1920), all eight are acquitted, but Chicago judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, now 53, presided over the grand jury that indicted them, he has been named first commissioner of professional baseball in January, and he bans them all from organized baseball for life. Included is Joseph Jefferson "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, 33, who played flawless ball in the 1919 Series and hit the only home run.
The New York Giants win the World Series, defeating the New York Yankees 5 games to 3 in the last eight-game Series.
Cuban chess master José Raul Capablanca y Granperra, 33, wins the world title at his native Havana March 15 that he will hold until 1927. He learned the game at age 4 by watching his father play, beat Cuba's best player in 1901, has not lost a game since 1916, and defeats Emanuel Lasker, who has been world champion since 1894.
Chanel No. 5 is introduced May 5 by Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (see 1913); created for Chanel by Ernest Beaux, it has a woody base of sandalwood and vetiver blended with jasmine and rose, a floral top note of ylang-ylang and neroli but contains none of the "feminine" floral scent found in other fragrances, and it will become the world's leading perfume despite vigorous competition (see My Sin, Shalimar, 1925).
The "New Improved Gillette Safety Razor" is introduced in May by the Gillette Co., whose 1904 patent will expire in November (see 1904). While charging $5 for its new product, the company offers its old-style razors, with three blades in the package, for just $1; by 1925 unit sales will have increased by a factor of 10 over 1917 sales.
The Van Heusen collar is introduced by the New York firm Phillips Jones Corp., which has acquired rights to a starchless but stiff collar patented last year by John M. (Manning) van Heusen, 52. The collar is made from multiple ply, interwoven fabrics, and van Heusen has patented collars, cuffs, neckbands, and other articles made in whole or in part from such fabrics. Men have worn shirts with detachable collars since 1820, and many will continue to wear such shirts for more than 30 years.
The Arrow shirt is introduced by Cluett, Peabody Co. of Troy, N.Y., as demand begins to increase for collar-attached shirts (see strike, 1905). Veteran Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator J. C. Leyendecker, now 47, creates the idealized Arrow Shirt man. Arrow shirts will come to outsell all other makes, and Leyendecker illustrations will create a manly image also for the Chicago suit and coat manufacturer Hart, Shaffner & Marx (see Sanforizing, 1928).
The Seducta shoe introduced at Romans sur Isére by French shoe designer Charles Jourdan, 38, is a luxury item that launches its creator on a major fashion career. Jourdan set up in business for himself 2 years ago after working for 2 years as foreman of a leather-cutting establishment (see stiletto heel, 1951).
The Gucci fashion empire has its beginnings in a shop opened by Florentine leather craftsman Guccio Gucci, 40, who began making saddles in 1906 and has returned home to Italy after sojourns at Paris and London. He will found a company 2 years hence that will grow under the management of Gucci's sons Aldo and Rodolfo to have a worldwide presence.
The first Miss America is named in September: wearing dark, knee-high stockings and a chiffon bathing costume with a tiered skirt, five-foot one-inch Margaret Gorman, 16, 108 pounds, beats out seven other contenders, including a New York showgirl, to win the Atlantic City Bathing Beauty Contest (also billed as the Inter-City Beauty Contest) and begin a tradition that lasts into the 21st century.
The 11-year-old Jantzen Knitting Mills obtains a patent for a swimsuit that it advertises in Life and Vogue magazines with the slogan "the Suit that Changed Bathing to Swimming." An Oregon rowing-club member approached Carl Jantzen and his partner more than 5 years ago and asked if they could make him a pair of rowing trunks with an elastic rib stitch. Jantzen has adapted a hosiery knitting machine to make an automated circular machine with a fine needle-bed that produces a stretchable lightweight material at substantially lower cost than other machines.
Drano is introduced by P. W. Drackett & Sons, whose drain cleaner consists of crystals containing sodium hydroxide (caustic lye). Cincinnati chemist Philip Wilbur Drackett and his wife, Sallie, began distributing chlorinated lime, soda ash, and other bulk chemicals in 1910 and 5 years later started the company to sell Epsom salts (see Windex, 1933).
Clorox reaches East Coast stores (see 1913).
Electrolux vacuum cleaners are introduced by Swedish electric lamp salesman Axel Wenner-Gren, 40, who has founded the Electrolux Co. to produce the machines that will be the world's top-performing vacuum cleaners. Wenner-Gren's company will also be a major factor in refrigerators.
U.S. cigarette consumption reaches 43 billion, up from 10 billion in 1910 despite the fact that cigarettes are illegal in 14 states. Anticigarette bills are pending in 28 other states, college girls are expelled for smoking, but tobacco companies encourage the growing addiction to nicotine.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director William J. Flynn resigns August 21 after 2 years in office, saying that he has a "private business matter to accept"; President Harding's attorney general Harry M. Daugherty immediately appoints detective William J. Burns to the position; J. Edgar Hoover is assistant director.
A French court sentences Henri Desiré Landru, 52, to death December 1. Nicknamed "Bluebeard," he has allegedly promised marriage to 10 women and then murdered them, although no bodies have been produced (he has also killed a boy). Landru will be executed in February of next year.
Gangster Carlo Gambino, 19, comes to New York in December, having arrived by freighter at Norfolk, Virginia, from his native Palermo. The family of the Mafioso's mother has smuggled him out of Italy and he is welcomed by her relatives, the Castellanos, in Brooklyn, where he will begin a career of shrewd and ruthless criminality (see 1931).
Amsterdam's triangular Het Schip (The Ship) is completed on the Oostzaanstraat, where the public housing project designed by architect Michel de Klerk breaks ground with oddly placed little windows, a spiky steeple at the "stern," and a post office at the "bow."
Watts Tower goes up at Los Angeles, where Italian-born tile-setter Simon Rodia, 41, uses only hand tools, shells, glass, and other found objects to build a structure that will awe visitors for decades.
Hollyhock House is completed on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles to designs by Frank Lloyd Wright with assistance from Viennese-born architect R. M. (Rudolph Michael) Schindler, 33, who 5 years ago wrote, "The architect has finally discovered the medium of his art: SPACE." Oil heiress Aline Barnsdall has commissioned Wright's first project in L.A., some of her friends commission similar houses in the Hollywood Hills, Schindler starts his own practice, and Barnsdall will donate her house to the city in 1927.
Kate Gleason sells six-room concrete block houses at East Rochester, N.Y., for $4,000 (see 1920). Included are built-in mirrors, bookcases, ironing boards, and gas ranges (see 1927).
Housing reformer Alfred Tredway White dies at New York's Harriman State Park June 29 at age 75.
Hot Springs National Park is created by act of Congress. Set aside as a government reservation in 1832, the 3,535-acre park in Arkansas contains 47 mineral hot springs.
Stamford, Conn.-born forester Benton MacKaye, 42, proposes an Appalachian Trail for hikers. Extending nearly 2,000 miles from Georgia's Springer Mountain to Maine's Mt. Katahdin, the footpath will in large part follow the Great Indian Warpath that existed in the 18th century from Creek Territory in Alabama into Pennsylvania. A son of the late actor and playwright Steele Mackaye and a Harvard graduate, MacKaye is first president of the Wilderness Society and will unify the Trail's diverse parts.
Landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand (née Jones), 49, begins work on the gardens of Dumbarton Oaks—the Georgetown, Washington, estate purchased last year by diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife, Mildred. A niece of novelist Edith Wharton, Farrand traveled in 1895 to England, where she visited the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West. She has designed gardens for Wharton's estate at Lenox, Massachusetts, the White House, Princeton University, and her own Reef Point family estate at Seal Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Farrand will continue work on Dumbarton Oaks until 1947 as she accepts other commissions.
Half-hourly radio broadcasts begin March 6 to give quotations from the Chicago Board of Trade, but relatively few people have crystal-sets to hear the prices, which are falling at a rate depressing to farmers. They overproduce on acreage planted during the war, and farm prices in July fall to levels 85 percent below 1919 highs. Cotton is 11¢/lb., down from 42¢; corn 42¢ per bushel, down from $2; wheat $1, down from $3.50. Farmers average only 12.7 bushels of wheat per acre; the soybean crop is little more than 1 million bushels.
The Harding administration tries to relieve the agricultural depression with an emergency tariff act imposing high duties on imports of wheat, corn, meat, sugar, wool, and other farm products. Harding appoints Henry C. Wallace secretary of agriculture (seeWallace's Farmer, 1895); Wallace has made enough money from the family farm journal to acquire five of the best stock and dairy farms in Iowa and adjoining states; he will campaign for farm relief (see Agricultural Credits Act, 1923; Pioneer Hi-Bred, 1926).
U.S. farmers average only 28.4 bushels of corn per acre, but Harvard biologist Edward Murray East, 42, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and Princeton botanist George Harrison Shull, now 47, perfect a hybrid corn variety that will yield far more per acre than conventional corn (see 1905; Jones, 1917). Produced by removing the tassels of inbred corn, so that it cannot seed itself, and then pollinated from another inbred parent planted in the same field, it is based chiefly on germ-plasm from Reid's Yellow Dent (see 1893). Hybrid seed permits growing plants of predictable size and quality that can be harvested mechanically, and by next year such seed will be available on a commercial basis to farmers who have never known anything but the flint corn (notably Tropical Flint) which has dominated world markets (see 1930; Pioneer Hi-Bred, 1926).
Boll weevils halve cotton production in Georgia and South Carolina (see 1916; 1924).
Botanist George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee on the value of peanuts, which Georgia and South Carolina farmers are planting in increasingly numbers in place of cotton (see Carver, 1914).
U.S. communist Harold M. Ware, 31, persuades journalist Lincoln Steffens to donate more than $70,000 in lecture fees to buy tractors and other farm equipment for Russia. Elder son of Ella "Mother" Bloor, Ware has made a study of U.S. farming methods in response to last year's request by V. I. Lenin and notes that Russia has fewer than 1,500 tractors, many of them unrepairable wrecks (see 1922).
Famine kills 3 million Russians and threatens the existence of more than 20 million more as grain reserves run out (see 1920). The country has few if any agricultural stockpiles; the NEP abolishes food levies to placate Russia's peasants, and a limited grain tax is substituted. Some freedom of trade is restored to enable the peasants to dispose of what few surpluses they have, but frozen corpses are piled 20 feet high in the streets waiting for the ground to thaw so that burial pits can be dug. Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration responds to an appeal from writer Maksim Gorky, now 53, and raises more than $60 million in July; U.S. relief workers enter Russia in August; the first meal of American relief food is served September 21, and many are spared starvation (Gorky will credit American aid with having saved the lives of 3.5 million children, 5.5 million adults, 15,000 students, and at least 200 Russians of the learned professions).
A Russian Famine Relief Act signed into law by President Harding December 22 authorizes the expenditure of $20 million for the purchase of U.S. corn, seed grain, and preserved milk to be sent to Russia. Supplemental government and private donations will eventually raise the total expenditure to $60 million, $12 million of it—at Hoover's urging—from the Russian government's gold reserve (see 1922).
Vitamin pioneer E. V. McCollum finds that cod-liver oil is a preventive against rickets (see 1918); he observes that rats fed large amounts of calcium develop bone deformities much like those seen in rickets but that the deformities are prevented if a little cod-liver oil is added to the rats' rations (see 1922).
Modesto, Calif.-born embryologist Herbert McLean Evans, 39, at the University of California, Berkeley, shows with rat studies that mammals other than humans require an "anti-sterility" factor in their diets if they are to reproduce (see vitamin E, 1935).
U.S. table-salt makers introduce salt iodized with potassium iodide to prevent goiter but iodization is not mandatory (see Morton, 1924; Akron study, 1916).
The Fundaments of Our Nutrition by Swiss physician M. O. Bircher-Bremer, 54, recommends ingestion of more uncooked foods.
Several states legislate sanitary dairy practices to improve the safety of U.S. milk, which often reaches consumers with a bacteria count of 500,000 or more per cubic centimeter (see 1900). Contaminated milk transmits undulant fever, brucellosis, bacillary dysentery, infectious hepatitis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and other diseases.
Wholesale butter prices in the New York market fall to 29¢/lb., down from 76¢ during the war. Imports of Danish butter have increased and Americans are using more margarine. U.S. butter is "scored" on a point system that gives 45 points for top flavor, 25 points on the basis of composition, 15 on color, 10 on salt content, 5 on the wooden butter tub used for packaging. Butter that scores 92 out of a possible 100 is called extra grade or "New York extras," but out of 622 Minnesota creameries only 200 make butter good enough to command the premium price paid for 92-score "New York extras."
Land O' Lakes Butter Inc., has its beginnings in the Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association formed by Meeker County, Minnesota, creameries. The federation will burgeon into a Minneapolis-based empire of midwestern dairy farmers.
Bel Paese semisoft cheese is introduced by Italian cheese maker Egidio Galbani.
Kraft processed cheese is introduced in foil-wrapped five-pound loaves enclosed in rectangular wooden boxes instead of in tins (see 1917). Demand is so high that Kraft is soon making 15,000 boxes per day, and homemakers are using the boxes as storage containers (see Kraft-Phenix, Velveeta, 1928).
SMA, the first commercial infant formula, is introduced by Wyeth, a U.S. company that will become part of American Home Products. Competing brands (Similac, Enfamil, Isomil, etc.) will come onto the market, mothers will be encouraged to bottle-feed their babies, and breast-feeding will decline sharply (see La Leche League, 1956).
World cocoa prices collapse in the absence of any futures market mechanism. Speculative "hoarders" have used bank credits to buy up cocoa beans produced from October through January in anticipation of the usual price advances but when the banks suddenly begin calling the loans the cocoa is thrown on the market, prices break nearly 20¢ per pound, and cocoa merchants sustain losses as do importers and outside speculators, many of whom are ruined.
Inventor Charles Strite obtains a patent October 18 on the world's first automatic pop-up toaster, a product intended for the restaurant trade (see 1919). Strite finds financial support to found the Waters Genter Co. and goes into production on large four-slice toasters with cast aluminum casings, but they weigh upwards of 20 pounds each and are so hard to manufacture that the company can make only one per day. Designers in this decade will invent bread-holding doors that pull down, out, or sideways so that slices of bread can be flipped over to toast the other side (see Toastmaster, 1926).
Cambridge, Massachusetts, chemist Bradley Dewey, 34, discovers the first water-based latex sealing compound. The sealant will be used inside the crimped rims by which tops and bottoms are attached to cans and Dewey's firm Dewey & Almy will be a major producer of the sealant and of the machines used to apply it.
The first stainless steel flatware is introduced by the Silver Co. of Meriden, Connecticut, which initially markets only knives (no forks or spoons), mostly to hotels and restaurants that want to save on replating and on the labor costs of constant polishing. Most household flatware continues to be made from carbon steel that is shiny but quickly discolors. British scientists 8 years ago alloyed pure chromium with 35-point carbon steel, basing their work on the observation by a French metallurgist in 1820 that an alloy such as chrome, when added to carbon steel, made the steel resistant to rust. Stainless steel flatware will come into wide use in U.S. and European homes beginning in the 1930s.
The name "Betty Crocker" is developed by Washburn, Crosby Co. of Minneapolis. The firm runs a picture-puzzle contest in a national magazine, offering as a prize a pincushion in the shape of a Gold Medal Flour bag; more than 30,000 entries pour in, many with questions about baking; men and women employees join forces to handle all the mail, company advertising man Samuel C. Gale suggests that the replies will carry more authority if they are signed by a woman, he makes up the name Betty Crocker (a company director named Crocker has recently retired) and runs an in-house handwriting contest, secretary Florence Lindebergan wins, and the signature "Betty Crocker" in Lindebergan's hand is added to the notes that go out in reply to contestants' questions (see 1905; 1924).
Wise Potato Chips are introduced by Berwick, Pennsylvania, grocer Earl V. Wise, who finds himself overstocked with old potatoes (see George Crum, 1853). He peels them, slices them with an old-fashioned cabbage cutter, follows his mother's recipe for making potato chips, packages the chips in brown paper bags, and sells them in his delicatessen. Wise will later use automatic peeling machines and beginning in the early 1930s will package his chips in cellophane.
The Eskimo Pie replaces the "I-Scream-Bar" of 1919 as Omaha, Nebraska, candymaker Russell William Stover, 32, teams up with Christian Nelson to sell franchises for the manufacture and sale of the chocolate-covered ice cream bars (see Good Humor, 1920).
The first White Castle hamburger stand opens in March with five counter stools in a plain 10-by-15-foot cement-block building at Wichita, Kansas. Local insurance and real estate agent Edgar Waldo "Billy" Ingram, 40, last year met professional cook Walter Anderson, who in 1916 rented a remodeled street car, procured a griddle plate and icebox, and went into business. Ingram has sold Anderson a house, helped him obtain financing for a third hamburger stand, and solved a problem that arose over leasing a fourth location by putting his own name on the lease agreement and going into business with Anderson. The partners have borrowed $700 to start the enterprise, repay the loan in 90 days, and will never borrow again, financing their growth from profits. Instead of round beef patties, they make square ones, and when they find that pancake turners do not stand up under the pressure of flattening hamburger patties, they have two-inch-square wedges cut out of handsaw blades and create spatulas by having handles brazed to each wedge (a manufacturer will later produce proper spatulas for them). Ingram and Anderson will incorporate in 1924 as the White Castle System of Eating Houses, and Ingram will buy out Anderson's interest in 1933 (see 1925).
Lindy's Restaurant opens at 1626 Broadway in New York under the management of German-born restaurateur Leo "Lindy" Lindeman, 33, whose crullers, cheesecake, and coffee will be favored by newspapermen, politicians, and theater people for half a century.
Sardi's Restaurant opens in West 44th Street, New York, under the direction of Italian-born restaurateur Vincent Sardi, 35, and his wife, Eugenia, whose canneloni and other dishes will attract the Broadway theater world for more than 70 years. Sardi's will move to 234 West 44th Street in 1927 when the first building is razed to make way for construction of the St. James Theater.
The Mothers' Clinic for Constructive Birth Control opens March 17 off the Holloway Road in North London. Founder of the first British birth-control clinic is Marie Stopes (see 1918); her 1918 book Wise Motherhood called family planning the basis of a truly fulfilled marriage, her new Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress puts pressure on government officials to provide working-class women with effective means of family planning, and her clinic gives out free advice and contraceptive aids (sponges, cervical caps, and suppositories). Stopes says coitus interruptus is extremely unreliable, physically and psychologically dangerous, and has deleterious side effects; she opposes the douche as possibly harmful, calls the condom unromantic and unaesthetic, and makes her staff take an oath promising not to provide any information on how to induce miscarriage (see 1923).
The Dillingham Bill (Emergency Quota Act) enacted by Congress May 19 establishes a quota system to restrict immigration. Entry is permitted only to 3 percent of the people of any nationality who lived in the United States in 1910 (see 1917; 1924).
Some 900,000 immigrants enter the United States in the fiscal year ending June 30.
British census results reported August 23 show a population increase of nearly 2 million since 1911; women outnumber men by 2 million, but the ratio remains virtually the same as before the Great War. Britain's population has reached 42.7 million, Germany's 30 million, France's 39.2, Italy's 38.7, Brazil's 30, Japan's 78, Russia's 136, India's more than 300 million, up from 200 million in 1872 (although India's population actually declined slightly between 1895 and 1905 as a result of famine and bubonic plague).
Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett found the American Birth Control League November 2 (see 1916; 1923).
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