Boxing was illegalized in New York state in 1896, then legalized in 1911, then re-illegalized in 1917, then re-legalized for the final time in 1920. And this time, something was new: women were attending the matches.

Spurred on partly by the previous year’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women voting rights previously reserved for men, women also sought admission to a group previously nearly all-male: boxing spectators. As this 1921 article described:

Scattered through the audience are all grades of femininity — from the stout blond sportswoman who sits on the bleachers at the races and gets her “tips” from a friend that’s married to a jockey, to a box full of the best New York society… Boxing bouts have been taken up by all sorts of women — from Anne Morgan, who would turn their proceeds into the useful channels of war relief, to the two little shopgirls, powdering their noses at the Garden, who have been brought by their men friends to see the show.

Why were women taking to this sport above many other sports? The article suggests, with a more-than-patronizing subtext, that it was essentially because women would have a harder time understanding any of the other sports.

Women are at the fights to stay… because at a boxing bout no special education is required to understand what is going on, because what the contestants are trying to do to each other is so direct and simple. The uninitiatied lady asks no questions of her escort. That alone should be enough to give permanency to the new custom of taking her. The contestants so conveniently carry their goals with them that she can’t get mixed up about which side is winning. And, even if she does lose count, there are the simple remarks of her neighbors to save the day.

Imagine telling somebody in 1921 to forget about women merely watching boxing, but that women’s boxing itself would one day become an Olympic sport. While men’s boxing had been an event in the Games since 1904, women’s boxing was added in 2012.

Woman at the Ring Side (PDF)

Published: Sunday, January 30, 2021

Ah, the days before microphones. This 1921 article described how “not a dozen men have ever heard a Presidential inaugural address.” That same year, Warren Harding became the first president with loudspeakers at his inauguration.

The people around him do not hear him. The newspaper men have seats nearer than the other invited guests on the platform, but they catch only a detatched word or sentence here or there. Down at their feet, below the platform, they see men with their hands at their ears, straining to catch a word and then giving it up. Perhaps the Vice President and some of the foreign Ambassadors hear the speech, but nobody else does. Having attended every inauguration since and including that of McKinley, I feel sure of my ground in saying that not a dozen men have ever heard a Presidential inaugural address.

As opposed to today, when we can hear presidential inaugurations but often wish we hadn’t.

The 1921 article also noted that the vice president was inaugurated in the Senate chamber, not on the Capitol steps as occurs today. That changed in 1937, during the second inaugural of Franklin D. Roosevelt with Vice President John Nance Garner.

False Splendor of Past Inaugurals (PDF)

Published: Sunday, January 23, 1921

In 1921, a Harvard government professor warned that “There has never been a time of such uneasy and hostile feeling between the two nations” of the U.S. and Japan. 20 years later came Pearl Harbor.

Albert Bushnell Hart noted that the animosity was a relatively recent development:

Can two countries be found with a longer record of international friendship? For half a century Japan has welcomed Americans, while the United States has been a land of pilgrimage for Japanese. The two countries have also been bound together by eight successive commercial treaties, and the United States in 1804 was the first nation to accept Japan as a full member of the family of nations.

The tension in 1921 primarily related to certain U.S. states’ restrictions on Japanese immigrants’ rights:

California by statute, and also by a recent referendum, has prohibited aliens who are not capable of becoming citizens (that is, in effect, Chinese and Japanese) from holding land directly or through forms of trust. Whether a State may legally thus discriminate between aliens is not yet settled by the courts, though there are precedents.

Here then is the case in a nutshell. The National Government prohibits Chinese immigration but not Japanese. It restricts Japanese immigration by a roundabout and makeshift method which allows thousands to sift through. The Pacific States are powerless to shut these people out, but are alarmed at their acquirement of lands, as an evidence of intention to form a permanent settlement. The Japanese Government dislikes any restriction, and formally protests against treatment of Japanese which is not precisely the same as that of other immigrants.

The issue wouldn’t be resolved legally for 27 years, until 1948’s case Oyama v. California — and even then, it would only be partially resolved.

Kajiro Oyama, a Japanese citizen living in the U.S., became de facto owner of California land which had technically been purchased in the name of his six-year-old son Fred, a U.S. citizen through birthright citizenship. The California Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s law, declaring Oyama’s purchase an illegal evasive maneuver intended to circumvent the state’s ban on Japanese immigrants owning land. The Harry Truman administration disagreed and appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 in Oyama’s favor, finding that California’s law indeed violated the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause rights of six-year-old Fred, an American citizen.

However, there was a catch. The Court’s stances on issues related to the Japanese back then was firmly rooted in an antagonist World War II-era sentiment. Four years earlier, in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Japanese internment in Korematsu v. U.S., which the Court didn’t formally overrule until 2018. So in a sly bit of legal maneuvering, while the Court ruled in Oyama’s favor for this specific case, they declined to actually invalidate or overturn California’s law outright. That wouldn’t occur until the California Supreme Court — which, keep in mind, had found against Oyama back in 1946 — reversed itself and declared the state law unconstitutional in a subsequent unrelated 1952 case. The California government itself formally repealed the law in 1956.

On a federal level, it wasn’t until Congress enacted 1952’s McCarran-Walter Act that Japanese immigrants were allowed to become U.S. citizens. The law also simultaneously upheld America’s quotas for immigration based on nation of origin, which weren’t discontinued until the Immigration Act of 1965.

To be fair, while all this did contribute to escalating tensions between the U.S. and Japan, none of this directly caused the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Instead, the preemptive assault on a major U.S. naval base intended to hobble America’s potential deterrance capabilities in the Pacific, paving the way for Japan to carry out its planned aggressions against Pacific territories of the United Kingdom and Netherlands.

Still, these other tensions probably didn’t help matters. You don’t go to war against your friends.

Our Japanese Question (PDF)

Published: Sunday, January 16, 1921

A 1920 book by humor columnist C.L. Edson provided advice for the aspiring humor columnist. His biggest advice dealt with when — and when not — to make puns.

Mr. Edson has here laid down a code for the columnist, the first law in which reads: “Do not write Paragraphs with Puns on Names.” He gives as Horrible Examples: “The Russians are rushin’ the Finnish, who can see their finish” and “Austria is Hungary for a piece of Turkey.” Then he tells us that “this is the lowest depth to which humor could descend.” And certainly these Examples are truly Horrible.

Yet there are always exceptions to the rule.

A little later, Mr. Edson admits an exception to his rule — punning is permissible when it is not on a proper name and when at the same time it has what Mr. Edson terms a “news-slant,” that is when it possesses what Augustine Daly used to call “contemporaneous human interest,” when it is absolutely timely, not only up to date, but up to the very last minute. He cites as an instance of this legitimate use of what has been contemptuously called the “lowest form of wit,” this paragraph by Mr. Franklin P. Adams: “Homer Aids Boston to Conquer Giants. – TIMES headline. Yet the universities are abolishing Greek.”

Hopefully Edson would have approved of my timely pun routine in early 2019, punning on the then-current flood of Democratic presidential candidates entering the race.

The Gentle Art of Newspaper Humor (PDF)

Published: Sunday, January 9, 1921

In 1921, the U.S. Forest Service director said he wanted to protect America’s forests. He succeeded.

The 1920s were the first decade in American history where total forest acres increased (slightly). The number has remained roughly steady ever since.

This graph from ThoughtCo., using data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program, tells the tale.

In this 1921 interview, William B. Greeley warned that forests shouldn’t be depleted, because demand for wood and lumber would still remain. If anything, given population growth, it would likely increase.

“This use cannot be appreciably reduced without serious injury to our agriculture, home building and manufacturing. We cannot cut per capita consumption — amounting to about 300 board feet yearly — to the level of European countries, where lumber is a luxury, if our resources are to be developed and our industrial supremacy maintained.”

The current chief of the U.S. Forest Service is Vicki Christiansen. Today the service is best known for their mascot Smokey Bear and the iconic slogan “Only you can prevent wildfires!” (Before 2001, “Only you can prevent forest fires.”)

New Forest Chief on Saving Our Forests (PDF)

Published: Sunday, January 2, 1921