Month: October 2021
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A New Literary Broom
This 1921 article predicted potentially great things for the new literary magazine Broom. Its final issue was published less than two and a half years later, in January 1924. There can be no doubt of the potentialities of Broom, the international magazine of the arts whose first issue, dated November, has just reached this side of the…
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From Flapper to Girl Scout
After its 1912 founding, the Girl Scouts of the United States (as it was then known) had amassed almost 70,000 members by 1920. This 1921 New York Times Magazine article profiled the surging organization, which would more than triple its membership that decade to 200,000+ members by 1930. “Camping” to the girls has meant a canoe…
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One Soldier on “Three Soldiers”
Even the most popular cultural phenomena can fade away. A 1921 New York Times Magazine article begins: “Every one now seems to have taken part in the discussion of John Dos Passos’s brilliantly written novel” Three Soldiers. Today, the novel’s Wikipedia article barely contains any information, while its Goodreads page has 1,131 user ratings. For comparison, the most famous…
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Renaissance of the Masher and Swashbuckler
As life tamped down in 1921 under Prohibition, people sought to live vicariously through the uninhibited characters of stage and screen, characters this New York Times Magazine article called “the masher and swashbuckler.” “The leaden lid of ‘Thou Shalt Not’ has been hammered down on us so tightly that the explosion of our suppressed healthy animality…
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‘Heroes by Any Other Name’
This 1921 article was already calling Babe Ruth a “legend,” even though he hadn’t even won his first MVP award yet. I think most people are hero worshippers, don’t you? Only nowadays they do not pick their heroes from the ranks of soldiers and senators. Five years of war gave us no outstanding figure, but…
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