| World Chronology: 1920 |
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U.S. government agents make raids in 33 cities beginning January 2, rounding up thousands of persons suspected of "subversive" activities (see 1919). They have acted on orders from Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who claims that there is a Bolshevik "conspiracy" to overthrow the government, and many are detained for long periods of time without being charged, provoking widespread criticism from civil libertarians who include New Jersey-born assistant secretary of labor Louis F. (Freeland) Post, now 69, who will face impeachment proceedings next year for stopping Palmer from deporting thousands of "radical" aliens and will shame his inquisitors. Palmer will succeed in deporting only about 550 people; opposition from labor union unions and liberals has probably cost him the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Russia's civil war continues as the Bolsheviks struggle to consolidate control of the country in the face of opposition from the Poles and Letts, who capture Dvinsk January 5. The White Russian admiral Aleksandr Kolchak is defeated at Krasnoyarsk, relinquishes his command to Gen. Anton I. Denikin, seeks Allied protection, but is is turned over by the Czechs to Bolshevik authorities at Irkutsk, subjected to intensive interrogation, and then executed by a Red Army firing squad February 2 at age 45. His body is thrown into the Angara River. the Bolsheviks take Odessa February 8, but the counter-revolutionary Whites carry on under the leadership of Lithuanian-born general Baron Petr Nikolaievich Wrangel, 41.
Hungarians reject the communist rule of Béla Kun (see 1919). Admiral Horthy (Miklós de Nagybánya Horthy), 52, forms a new royalist government March 1, Rosika Schwimmer finds her life endangered under Hungary's new dictatorship, and she has herself smuggled onto a boat that carries her down the Danube (see 1919). She emigrates to America, where she is regarded as a Bolshevik spy (see 1926).
Adolf Hitler persuades the German Workers' Party (GWP) to change its name in February to National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei) and it will become known as the Nazi Party (see 1919). Using money obtained by Ernst Roehm to promote itself, the party holds a rally February 24, attracts more than 2,000 people, and announces a 25-point program calling for the rejection of the Versailles Treaty, the reunification of all German people, and denial of rights to "aliens" and "foreigners"; the party is not socialist and does not represent the workers but it uses anti-Semitic appeals to capitalize on social unrest, promising full employment, an end to labor problems, and recovery of lost territory (see Hitler, 1923).
Berlin is seized March 13 in a right-wing Putsch aimed at restoring the monarchy. New York-born journalist Wolfgang Kapp, 51, receives support in his attempted coup d'état from irregular troops under Gen. von Luttwitz, 60 (see 1919). Back from fighting in the Baltic provinces to destroy "Bolshevik republicanism," the disbanded troops are led by the Erhardt Brigade wearing helmets painted with swastikas. The legitimate government escapes to the provinces, Kapp is made chancellor and orders a general strike. He receives support from Gen. Ludendorff (who encourages the myth that Germany was undefeated in the field [unbesiegt im Felde] and would have prevailed in 1918 had she not been "stabbed in the back" by civilian defeatists), but although politician Gustav Stresemann does not oppose Kapp's Putsch the new regime fails to gain foreign recognition, the army remains generally uncommitted, a general strike hampers Kapp, the security police of Defense Minister Gustav Noske employ brutal tactics to oppose him, he soon finds that he has no authority, and he flees the city March 17. Noske resigns his position and will serve as governor of Hanover until 1933. The Reichstag moves from Weimar back to Berlin but the government will continue to be called the "Weimar Republic" (see 1921; Hitler, 1923).
Novorossiisk on the Black Sea falls to the Red Army March 28 and the White Russian Army of Gen. Denikin collapses (Denikin escapes to Constantinople). Polish troops under Marshal Jozef Pilsudski overrun the Ukraine in late April, take Kiev May 7, but are driven out June 11 despite support from the Ukrainians.
Five men kill a factory guard and paymaster April 15 at South Braintree, Massachusetts, and escape in a stolen motorcar with a steel box containing a payroll of $15,776.51. Factory worker Nicola Sacco, 20, and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 32, are picked up May 5 in a car containing propaganda leaflets that attack the U.S. government and all other governments, both are arrested for the April 15 murder and robbery, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer prosecutes the Italian-born anarchists as "Reds" (see 1927).
President Wilson rules May 5 that the Communist Labor Party of America is outside the scope of U.S. deportation laws.
Romania's Queen Marie sees her diplomatic efforts of last year rewarded in the Treaty of Trianon signed June 4 and other peace treaties by whose terms Greater Romania (Romania Mare) becomes a vast country of 122,282 square miles (see 1919). Hungary loses nearly three-fourths of her territory and two-thirds of her population in the Treaty of Trianon, signed by Admiral Nikolaus Horthy, who will serve as regent until 1944. Western Hungary is ceded to Austria, Slovakia to Czechoslovakia, Croatia-Slavonia to Yugoslavia, the Bánat of Temesvár in part to Yugoslavia and in part to Romania, which also receives Transylvania and part of the Hungarian plain.
A new federal republic of Austria succeeds the Austro-Hungarian Empire (see 1919); the constitution adopted by the constituent assembly October 1 abolishes the State Council and establishes a bicameral assembly (Bundesversammlung) whose upper house (Bundesrat) is to be elected in at least rough proportion to the population of each state and is to exercise only a suspensive veto, not an absolute veto; the lower house (Nationalrat) is to be elected by universal suffrage on a basis of proportional representation; the Bundesrat is to elect the president for a 4-year term, the Nationalrat) to elect the chancellor who heads the government. A plebiscite held October 10 along the Yugoslavian border shows that 59 percent of the population prefers Austrian citizenship to Yugoslav. Liberal economist Michael (Arthur Josef Jakob) Hainisch, 62, is elected president in December and will serve until 1928.
Former British sea lord John A. "Jacky" Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, dies at London July 10 at age 79, having gained a popular reputation second only to that of Lord Nelson more than a century ago. Scorned by those who knew him as an abusive philanderer who appropriated other men's ideas as his own, he was more foresighted than his contemporaries in the Royal Navy, embracing new technology (oil-fueled engines, submarines, torpedoes, radio, naval aviation) at a time when the others yearned for the old days of sail; the former French empress Eugénie dies at Madrid's Palacio Liria July 11 at age 94.
The Red Army takes Pinsk July 27 and crosses into Poland, but Polish forces supported by Brussels-born French general Maxime Weygand, 53, defeat the Bolsheviks August 14 to 16 and force them to give up their Polish conquests.
Finnish diplomat Juho Kusti Paasikivi, 49, warns his countrymen against trying to take advantage of Russia's present weakness and heads a delegation that signs a peace treaty with Russia October 14 at Tartu, Estonia.
Russia's Polish War ends October 12 in a peace treaty signed at Tartu, freeing the Red Army to push back the White Russian forces of Baron Petr N. Wrangel, who has taken over much of southern Russia. Gen. Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze, 35, forces Wrangel back to the Crimea November 1; having taken command of the eastern front last year to oppose Admiral Kolchak, Frunze routs the army of Wrangel, who loses Sevastopol November 14 and has to evacuate his troops to Constantinople, ending the Russian counterrevolution.
The new Bolshevik government recognizes the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania created during the 1917 revolution as independent nations after unsuccessful efforts to make them part of the new union of socialist republics (see 1940; USSR, 1923).
France's president Paul Deschanel resigns for reasons of health September 15, and Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand assumes the presidency. Voters have chosen Deschanel in the January 17 presidential election, rejecting Georges Clemenceau because they felt the Treaty of Versailles to be too lenient, but Deschanel is a manic-depressive who has wandered about the countryside in his pajamas after falling out of a railroad sleeping car, left an outdoor political gathering to embrace a tree, and walked fully clothed into a lake; former prime minister Joseph Caillaux has drawn a 3-year prison sentence April 23 for dealing with the enemy (see 1924).
British reinforcements arrive in Ireland May 15 to support His Majesty's forces against attacks by Sinn Fein political militants who continue resistance to British regulars and to the new "Black and Tans"—Royal Irish Constabulary recruits whose khaki tunics and trousers and dark green caps are almost black (see 1919). Nicknamed after a familiar breed of Irish hound, the Black and Tans have been helping the British suppress Irish nationalists since March and take reprisals for nationalist acts of terrorism (see 1919). They arrest Countess Markievicz September 26 and hold her in Mountjoy Jail. Two agitators for Irish independence die in an English prison after fasting for 75 days in a protest demonstration (see Gandhi, 1914): Cork Lord Mayor Terence James MacSwiney, 41, collapses on the 15th day, physicians are unable to save him, and his death in October produces widespread rioting. The rebels shoot 14 British spies November 21, the Black and Tans retaliate that afternoon by firing at random during a football match at Croke Park, killing 12 women and men (including one of the players) and wounding 60. The countess is court-martialed December 2 and 3 on charges that she organized the Fianna in 1909. The Government of Ireland Act passed by Parliament December 23 gives Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland the right to elect separate parliaments of their own with each to retain representatives in the British Parliament at London, and Countess Markievicz awaits her sentence at year's end (see 1921).
Constantinople-born field marshal Fevzi Cakmak, 44, wins appointment as minister of war in the sultan's government but resigns to join Mustafa Kamal and help him resist Allied occupation of Anatolia. Appointed chief of the Turkish general staff in 1918 after commanding Ottoman troops in the Dardanelles, the Caucasus, and Syria, Cakmak becomes prime minister of the Grand National Assembly at Ankara and will be promoted to full general in April of next year. Greek forces advance against Turkish nationalist forces June 22 with British encouragement, defeat the Turks June 24 at Alashehr, take Bursa July 9, and accept the surrender of Adrianople July 25. Greece's king Alexander dies of blood poisoning at the Tatoi Palace outside Athens October 25 at age 27 after a 3-year reign (he has been bitten by a pet monkey). His father, Constantine, resumes after a 3-year hiatus the reign that he began in 1913 and continues hostilities against Turkey (see 1922).
The Treaty of Sèvres signed August 10 by the feeble Ottoman sultan Mehmet VI obliges Constantinople to renounce all claims to non-Turkish territory. The sultan agreed last year to elections, nationalists won a majority in the voting held late in the year, but the sultan has dissolved the parliament again April 11, and the nationalists have set up a provisional government at Angora (Ankara). The treaty recognizes the independent kingdom of Hejaz, provides for a Kurdish homeland, makes Syria a French mandate and Mesopotamia and Palestine British mandates, gives Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands to Italy, eastern Thrace, Smyrna, the other Aegean islands, Imbros, and Tendedos to Greece, but Turkish nationalists find the terms unacceptable (see Treaty of Ankara, 1921; Treaty of Lausanne, 1923).
The Red Army attacks Azerbaijan the night of April 26. The 60,000-man Azerbaijani Army is preoccupied with fighting Armenian forces and cannot defend the country's northern border; the Bolsheviks march into Baku April 28 and order the government to give up power (see 1919). The Azerbaijani Parliament complies to avoid bloodshed, and the short-lived republic's leader Mammad Emin Rasulzade emigrates to Finland. A Dashnak terrorist assassinates the minister of internal affairs Beybut khan Javanszhirov July 19 at Istanbul, another Dashnak terrorist assaassinates the minister of foreign affairs Fatali-khan Khoyski at Tbilisi in September; other leaders will soon either emigrate or be killed (see 1922).
Armenia's government suppresses Bolshevik uprisings in May, but Turkish forces attack Armenia September 23 without a declaration of war (see 1918); a Bolshevik diplomat arrives at Erivan October 13 and proposes that the Armenians consider the Treaty of Sèvres non-binding, allow the Red Army free passage through their country, and permit Moscow to negotiate Armenia's borders. Erivan rejects all three proposals, Armenian troops destroy a Turkish army in late October, but Armenian communists take over the government in late November and Armenia is declared a Soviet republic December 2 (see 1921). A treaty signed at Alexandrapole December 2 ends hostilities between Erivan and Constantinople.
The League of Nations establishes a British mandate over Iraq April 24 and Britain accepts May 5, taking over a country with a population of about 3 million. British and French representatives have met at San Remo April 24, they have implemented the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 by letting Britain have Iraq and Palestine, with France taking Syria and Lebanon; news of the arrangement is made public April 24 and the Arabs view Britain's takeover as a duplicitous betrayal (see 1919; Arab annals will refer to 1920)as "Am al-Nakha," "Year of Catastrophe". Muslim clerics at Baghdad mosques begin denouncing British rule. Gertrude Lothian Bell writes to her father from Baghdad in early June about "violent agitation" against British rule, saying that the extremists "have adopted a line difficult in itself to combat, the union of the Shi'ah and Sunni, the unity of Islam. And they are running it for all it's worth . . . There's a lot of semi-religious semi-political preaching . . . and the underlying thought is out with the infidel. My belief is that the weightier people are against it—I know some of them are bitterly disgusted—but it's very difficult to stand out against the Islamic cry and the longer it goes on the more difficult it gets." Demonstrations spread to Karbala, where the Shiite ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi denounces the British, and a great insurrection begins in July as more than 100,000 armed tribesmen attack occupation forces. They besiege some garrisons for weeks, and the fledgling Royal Air Force (RAF) counters the uprising with ruthless bombing and strafing. Secretary for War and Air Winston Churchill has written February 19 to Sir Hugh Trenchard to ask if the pioneer of air warfare would take control of Iraq, suggesting that this would entail "the provision of some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death . . . for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes." As colonial secretary Churchill writes August 31, "It is an extraordinary thing that the British civil administration should have succeeded in such a short time in alienating the whole country to such an extent that the Arabs have laid aside the blood feuds they have nursed for centuries and that the Sunni and Shi tribes are working together." Sir Percy (Zachariah) Cox, 57, is named high commissioner October 1. He takes office at Baghdad, and British troops restore order later in October, having burned villages and killed about 4,000 Arabs (British casualties number 450 dead, more than 1,450 wounded). They leave Iraq's Sunni religious minority with power over the Shiite majority (see 1921).
Egyptian nationalist Sa'd Zaghlul holds meetings at London during the summer with the British diplomat Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner (see 1919). Milner agrees unofficially to the terms that Sir Reginald Wingate rejected in 1918, but Zaghlul fears that an agreement with the British will undermine his position at home so he returns to Egypt without having endorsed any agreement (see 1921).
Former British home secretary Herbert (Louis) Samuel, 49, is named first high commissioner for Palestine. One of the first Jews to serve in the cabinet, he will administer the mandated territory until 1925, working to improve its economy and maintain harmony between Jews and Arabs despite occasional turmoil.
Paris proclaims the creation of Lebanon September 1 with its capital at Beirut.
Mohandas K. Gandhi in India launches his first nationwide satyagraha ("devotion to truth") campaign August 1 as a revolutionary response to last year's Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar. Now 50, Gandhi announces a program of non-cooperation at a special session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta and attracts supporters who took offense at Annie Wood Besant's position and encourages their hopes for an end to rule by the British raj (see 1922).
A coalition of rival Chinese warlords defeats the army of warlord Duan Qirui (Tuan Ch'i-jui) in July and forces him to retire from politics (see 1919; but see also1924).
Mexican president Venustiano Carranza tries to engineer the election of Ignacio Bonillas as his successor, but insurgent general Alvaro Obregón, 39, leads an armed rebellion with support from Generals Adolfo de la Huerta and Plutarco Elías Calles. Carranza flees the capital and heads for Veracruz, carrying government records and treasure, his train comes under attack, and although he escapes capture and flees into the mountains with some followers he is betrayed and killed at Tlaxcalantongo May 21 at age 60 by an assassin in the employ of the insurgents. Obregón is elected president August 31 following the surrender of Pancho Villa, who receives a handsome estate where he will live until his assassination in 1923.
Canada's Prime Minister Borden resigns in July after 9 years in office and the Union Party elects former minister of the interior Arthur Meighen, 46, prime minister. The youngest man to have held that position, he will succeed in blocking a renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance and advocate a protective tariff system to resist U.S. economic power (see 1921).
The League of Women Voters is founded by suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt to give impartial, in-depth information on candidates, platforms, and ballot issues. An outgrowth of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) that Catt reorganized between 1905 and 1915 as she developed the state-by-state strategy to build momentum for suffrage, the non-partisan League aims to educate newly-enfranchised women, study issues at all levels of government, and take positions on social issues.
"America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy," says presidential hopeful Warren Gamaliel Harding, 54, of Ohio in a speech at Boston May 10. Selected in a smoke-filled suite (Rooms 408-409-419) of Chicago's Blackstone Hotel, the handsome, genial, but colorless U.S. senator is nominated by the Republicans and opposed by Ohio's Democratic governor James M. Cox, 50, a newspaper publisher who purchased the Dayton Daily News in 1898 to begin a media empire. Running with former assistant secretary of the navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cox campaigns on a platform favoring U.S. membership in the League of Nations but wins only 34 percent of the popular vote and receives only 127 electoral votes to Harding's 404. Socialist Eugene V. Debs is in federal prison at Atlanta but runs for a fifth time and wins 1 million votes. President-elect Harding's harsh-voiced wife Florence (née Kling) (he calls her the Duchess) is 5 to 8 years his senior; she was deserted by her first husband.
The League of Nations meets for the first time November 15 in its new headquarters at Geneva, but its membership does not include Russia, the United States, or nations defeated in the Great War. The Senate has finally rejected U.S. membership March 19 in a victory for opponents led by Henry Cabot Lodge (R. Mass.) (see 1919).
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded by social reformers who include Methodist minister Harry F. Ward, 47; Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, now 40; Clarence Darrow; Upton Sinclair; Jane Addams; Helen Keller; Roger Williams, 36; former War Labor Policies Board chairman Felix Frankfurter, 37; and Ohio-born socialist Norman (Mattoon) Thomas, 35. Thomas is a former clergyman who will staunchly oppose both communism and fascism but advocate such "radical" ideas as low-cost public housing, a 5-day work week, minimum wage laws, and the abolition of child labor (Congress will ultimately legislate them all), and he will be a quadrennial Socialist Party presidential candidate from 1928 through 1948. FBI agents soon infiltrate the ACLU (see 1919).
Lynchings continue across much of the South, and there is even one at Duluth, Minnesota, where a mob breaks into the city jail June 15, drags out three black circus workers accused of having assaulted a white woman, and hang them from a light pole while a crowd of 10,000 looks on. Lige Daniels, 16, is hanged by a lynch mob at Center, Texas, August 3, and photographs of the black youth hanging from a tree limb are made into postcards.
The first Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) international convention opens at Liberty Hall in New York's Harlem under the leadership of Marcus Garvey, who has founded UNIA branches in nearly every U.S. city with a sizeable black population (see 1916). Some 25,000 delegates from 25 nations attend, and Garvey begins to exalt African beauty, promoting a "back to Africa" movement with a plan for resettlement in Liberia (see politics, 1847; 1924).
Former Royal Air Force officer Anthony J. (John) Arkell, 22, joins the Sudan Political Service with the intent of abolishing the slave trade between the Sudan and Ethiopia. He will establish villages for freed slaves (they will call themselves "the Sons of Arkell") before starting a new career as archaeologist and historian.
U.S. woman suffrage is proclaimed in effect August 26 following Tennessee's ratification of the Nineteenth amendment to the Constitution: "1. The Right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation." Wisconsin has been the first state to ratify, Illinois the second, but some supporters of woman suffrage—including Kentucky suffragist Laura Clay, 71, whose father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was an ally of Abraham Lincoln—have opposed a federal law because of their dedication to states' rights. Carrie Chapman Catt, now 61, who has come to Nashville to combat the Men's Anti-Suffrage Association and other opposition groups, will later write, "Never in the history of politics has there been such a nefarious lobby as labored to block the ratification . . . In the short time that I spent in the capital I was more maligned, more lied about, than in the 30 previous years I worked for suffrage," but Catt will be haunted in later life by her 1919 statement, made in Mississippi and South Carolina, that "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage." Suffragist (Anita) Lili Pollitzer, 25, has met with Tennessee State Legislator Harry T. Burn, 24, and persuaded him to cast the deciding vote. "I know that a mother's advice is always safest for a boy to follow," he says, "and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification." The amendment enfranchises 26 million women of voting age.
Czech women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.
Japanese feminists who include Raicho Hiratsuka and Fusae Ichikawa (see 1919) form a Coalition of New Women (Shinfujin Kyokai) that includes the Bluestockings, groups of teachers, newspaper reporters, and housewives. It begins to publish a newspaper under the name Josei Dōmei (Women's League) and in July sends a petition to the Diet requesting voting rights for women and an end to laws that forbid women from having political meetings and participating in politics (see 1945).
Polar explorer Robert E. Peary dies at Washington, D.C., February 20 at age 63.
The U.S. Supreme Court decides March 1 to reject a Department of Justice request to dissolve United States Steel Co. for alleged antitrust violations.
North Butte Mining Co. detectives open fire on striking Montana copper miners April 25, killing two men, wounding 16, and prompting an International Workers of the World (IWW) organizer to say, "Butte is a law unto itself" (see 1918; Frank Little, 1917).
The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor is created by an act of Congress signed into law by President Wilson June 5 "to formulate standards and policies to promote the welfare of wage earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for popular employment." Swedish-born labor organizer Mary Anderson, 47, the bureau's first director, receives a salary of $5,000 (she came to America in steerage at age 16, spoke no English when she arrived, and has risen through the ranks of the labor movement).
Japan has 4 million gainfully employed women, but they earn only about one-third as much as men; only 12.5 percent work in offices, where they are expected to perform "womanly" duties such as serving tea and otherwise making conditions more pleasant for men.
The All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) is founded to represent India at the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations. The AITUC will be the nation's second largest labor union of its kind.
The "Ponzi scheme" bilks thousands of Bostonians out of their savings. Italian-born "financial wizard" Charles Ponzi, 38, offers a 50-percent return on investment in 45 days, 100 percent in 90 days, and by late July his Securities and Exchange Co. at 27 School Street is taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. Ponzi says he has found that a 1¢ reply coupon issued in Spain as a convenience by international postal agreement is exchangeable at any U.S. post office for a 6¢ stamp and that he has agents buying up millions of coupons throughout Europe and is making a 5¢ profit on each. The idea is ridiculous, says Boston financier Clarence W. Barron, now 65, who publishes the Wall Street Journal and a financial daily that will become Barron's Weekly next year. Ponzi replies to critics that he has invented his postal coupon story to keep Wall Street speculators from divining his real secret, but by late afternoon of July 26 the Suffolk County district attorney announces that he has agreed to accept no more funds until his books can be audited. Ponzi continues to reimburse investors at 50 to 100 percent interest, his supporters claim that he is being attacked by "unscrupulous bankers," but it soon develops that he has been convicted of swindling at Montreal and that the "wizard" with the mansion in Belmont and the chauffeur-driven Locomobile has merely been paying out part of what he has been taking in. At least $8 million of the $15 million that he has accepted will never be accounted for, his noteholders will receive 12¢ on the dollar, six banks will fail as a result of the pyramid scheme, and Ponzi will serve 3½ years in Plymouth County jail, escaping a further 7- to 9-year term by jumping bail of $14,000 in 1925.
A bomb explosion September 16 scars the J. P. Morgan bank building, kills 35, injures 130, and causes between $2 million and $3 million in property damage. A brown wagon covered with canvas and pulled by an old bay horse stops at the corner of Wall and Nassau streets, the driver walks away, the clock on Trinity Church finishes striking the noon hour, and the horse and wagon disappear in a blast that sends iron fragments flying through the air and starts fires. Windowpanes are knocked out for 10 blocks around; clerks in offices as high as the sixth floor suffer severe burns; pedestrians hit by metal shards suffer crushed skulls, smashed legs, and gashed arms, and the dead include millionaire Edward Sweet, who once owned Sweet's restaurant at Fulton and South streets. The perpetrators will never be discovered.
Banker-philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff dies of heart disease at New York September 24 at age 73, leaving an estate of $50 million; former Bank of England governor Walter Cunliffe, 1st Baron Cunliffe, has died at Epsom Surrey, January 6 at age 64 as world economies struggle to revive in the wake of the Great War. Demobilized soldiers find few job openings. Parliament orders unemployment insurance for all workers except domestic servants and farm workers (see allowances for dependent relatives, 1921).
British miners strike in October, demanding a 2-shilling-per-hour raise. The lack of coal idles dockers and other workers.
The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America begins a 6-month strike in December against sweat shops and nonunion shops (see 1918). Now 100,000 strong, the union workers find themselves locked out by New York, Boston, and Baltimore clothing manufacturers who charge the union leadership with "Sovietism" and demand a return to piecework pay. The manufacturers will lose an estimated $10 million before the strike ends in June of next year, the workers will accept a 15 percent wage cut while promising to increase productivity by 15 percent, but the clothing companies will agree to a union shop and a continuation of the 44-hour week (see 1937).
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets to 43.12 November 19, rebounds to 74.63 the next day, and closes December 31 at 71.95, down from 107.23 at the end of 1919.
U.S. wells supply nearly two-thirds of the world's petroleum (see Venezuela, 1922). U.S. Geological Service chief David White says that if production continues at present levels the nation will "exhaust the estimated 7 billion barrels of natural petroleum remaining in the ground in 18 years."
Hunt Oil Co. has its beginnings as the collapse of farm prices impels Arkansas-Louisiana planter H. L. Hunt to start dealing in oil leases in the new Arkansas oil fields. Now 31, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt invested a small inheritance in Arkansas Delta cotton land in 1911, having worked his way through the West and Southwest since leaving home at age 16; he has increased his holdings in Arkansas and Louisiana to some 15,000 acres, will build up capital, begin drilling his own wells, and within 4 years will have made his first million dollars (see 1930).
The Cunard liner S.S. Imperator leaves Liverpool February 21 on her first voyage to New York (see 1919). She will soon be renamed S.S. Berengaria and sent to Armstrong Whitworth & Co. on the Tyne for a complete overhaul and conversion from coal-burning engines to oil (see 1922).
The Esch-Cummins Act approved by Congress February 28 returns railroads to private ownership (see 1917), establishes the Railroad Labor Board, and authorizes the Interstate Commerce Commission to promote railroad consolidation.
Former New York Central chairman and yachtsman William Kissam Vanderbilt dies at Paris July 22 at age 70.
London designates Croydon Airport in March as the city's terminal for air traffic to and from the Continent. Regular KLM Royal Dutch Airline flights between Rotterdam and London begin May 17 (see 1919). KLM opens a route to Copenhagen via Hamburg later in the year, and next year will open the world's first airline reservations and ticket office at Amsterdam (see Brussels, 1923).
De Havilland Aircraft Co. is incorporated in September by designer Geoffrey de Havilland, now 38, who worked as chief designer and test pilot for the Aircraft Manufacturing Co. (Airco) during the Great War and produced some successful fighters and light bombers (see politics, 1916). De Havilland has bought out Airco (see Moth, 1925).
Douglas Aircraft Co. is founded by former Glenn L. Martin designer Donald W. (Wills) Douglas, 28. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Douglas has quit to start his own firm to produce the large, safe, relatively slow commercial plane that he has designed but that Martin has refused to produce (see 1924).
Stinson Aircraft Co. is founded at Dayton, Ohio, by Alabama-born aviator Edward "Eddie" Stinson, 26, who went to St. Louis at age 17, persuaded a pair of airplane designers to hire him as a test pilot, crashed the kite-like contraption but survived, gave the Wright brothers his life savings of $500 for flight instruction at their Dayton school, quit school the following year, and became a barnstormer and stunt pilot. His older sister Katherine and younger sister Marjorie are also trained aviators, have worked as airmail pilots, and helped Stinson train pilots for the U.S. and Canadian armies at San Antonio's Kelly Field during the Great War while he earned a lieutenant's commission. He bought the Dixie Flying Field at Birmingham, Alabama, earlier this year but has relocated to Dayton and will move in 1925 to Detroit (see 1925).
The U.S. Post Office implements transcontinental mail service September 8 with a flight across the Rocky Mountains (see 1919). Planes cannot fly at night, but airmail shaves 22 hours off the time usually required to send letters and packages between the east and west coasts.
Regular air service begins between Cuba and Key West, Florida (see Trippe, 1923).
QANTAS Airlines has its beginnings in the Queensland and Northern Territories Aerial Services Ltd. that begins service in November. Tasmanian-born Australian Flying Corps DFC winner (Wilmot) Hudson Fysh, 25, and another former war pilot last year surveyed a route between Darwin and Lonreach, Queensland, for the Britain-Australia air race and have gained backing from local pastoralists to establish the new carrier.
U.S. motorcar production increases, with Ford Model T cars accounting for 54.57 percent of all cars sold.
Toyo Kogyo Co. is founded at Akigun in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan; it will produce Mazda trucks and motorcars (see energy [Wankel rotary engine], 1957).
E. I. du Pont de Nemours acquires U.S. rights to the Chardonnet viscose rayon process of 1883 from the French company Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels and sets up the DuPont Fibersilk Co. at Buffalo, N.Y. (see 1919; cellophane, 1924).
Celluloid and roller bearing inventor John Wesley Hyatt dies at Short Hills, N.J., May 10 at age 82.
The mass spectograph developed by English chemist-physicist Francis William Aston, 43, accurately distinguishes atoms of the same element with different masses (isotopes). Oxygen, for example, has six known isotopes, weighing 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 atomic weight units, respectively (although 99.76 percent of natural oxygen is oxygen-16).
Archaeologist Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy dies at Paris February 25 at age 75 (his wife, Jeanne, died in 1916, having discovered a 12th-century mosque at Hasan, Morocco, 4 years earlier); historian of mathematics Moritz B. Cantor dies at Heidelberg April 10 at age 90; mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan of tuberculosis at Rumbakonam April 26 at age 32. Little known outside his native India, he is recognized by fellow mathematicians as the equal of the 18th century genius Leonhard Euler and the 19th-century genius Karl Jacobi; astronomer and Nature magazine editor Sir Joseph Lockyer dies at Salcombe Regis, Devon, August 16 at age 84.
The Rockefeller Institute assigns Winchester, Mass.-born medical researcher Louise Pearce, 35, to a team that goes to Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo to conduct scientific tests of a compound (it will become known as tryparsmiva) isolated last year by Pearce and her colleague Wade Hampton Brown. Endemic in the Congo, sleeping sickness inflames the brain and keeps the victim in a state of constant drowsiness, and researchers have isolated the cause of the disease in a microscopic parasite transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly. Pearce and Brown's compound effectively destroys the parasite in test animals; they conduct a scientifically planned program to determine the efficacy of tryparsmiva, and within weeks even victims of the most severe cases are cured and the effects of sleeping sickness reversed. Pearce's work will save tens of thousands of lives (and make Congo workers far more productive) by eradicating the disease; she is awarded the Order of the Crown of Belgium and will receive the $10,000 King Leopold II prize in 1953.
Microbiologist Dmitri Ivanovski dies at Rostov June 20 at age 55, having pioneered the study of viruses; former U.S. Army surgeon general William C. Gorgas dies at London July 3 at age 65. He played a major role in eliminating yellow fever and retired 2 years ago with the rank of major general.
The Vatican canonizes Joan of Arc, who becomes St. Joan. She was designated "venerable" in 1904 and declared "blessed" in 1909.
Britain's Imperial War Museum opens at London with exhibits relating to the Great War. It will move in 1936 to Lambeth Road in the borough of Southwark, where it will occupy a late Georgian-style building that formerly housed the Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the mentally ill (Bedlam) and will later broaden its focus.
A training manual issued by Massachusetts Supervisor of Americanization John J. Mahoney advises teachers on how to instruct immigrant children in American ways.
Women account for 47 percent of all U.S. college undergraduates, up from less than 40 percent in 1910, and for the first time have as much access to a college education as men.
Oxford moves May 18 to give women professors equal status with their male colleagues and on October 7 admits the university's first 100 women to study for full degrees (see Holloway College, 1889).
AT&T chairman Theodore N. Vail dies at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital April 16 at age 74, having spread telephone communication throughout much of Argentina and Europe as well as the United States.
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) is founded by Puerto Rican sugar broker Sosthenes Behn, 38, and his brother Hernand, 40, to run telephone and telegraph operations in Cuba and Puerto Rico (see Tropical Radio Telegraph, 1910). Born in the Virgin Islands of Danish-French parents, the Behn brothers have acquired a small San Juan telephone business in settlement of a bad debt (see 1928).
Marconi Radio transmits a concert by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba from New York City May 19. The Radio Argentina Society broadcasts a performance of the 1882 Wagner opera Parsifal from Buenos Aires August 27 and follows it over the next 19 days with broadcasts of other operas. The navy ministry sent Enrique Susini to France during the Great War to investigate the effects of poison gas in the trenches; he smuggled in some vacuum tubes when he returned last year, began experimenting with radio technology, and has turned a former circus site into a theater. By 1924 there will be five radio stations in Buenos Aires plus some in other parts of the country.
David Sarnoff proposes a plan for making $75 radio music boxes (see RCA, 1919); at least a million could be sold in 3 years, he predicts (see NBC, 1926). Pittsburgh's Joseph Horne Co. department store advertises radios for $10 and up September 29; a buyer can purchase a ready-made receiver in a box with headphones and tuning knobs.
The world's first radio broadcasting station goes on the air November 2 to give results of the Harding-Cox election. Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad, 46, has set up KDKA at East Pittsburgh, announcer Leo Rosenberg climbs into a wooden shack on the roof of the local Westinghouse plant, picks up a converted telephone mouthpiece, and says, "We shall now broadcast the election returns," but only about 5,000 Americans have radio receivers, mostly "cats-whisker" crystal sets (see radio advertising, 1922).
Chicago Tribune editor Col. Robert R. McCormick quits his law firm and takes over as publisher of the paper he has edited since 1910. Now 40, the barrel-chested six-foot-four publisher will build circulation from 200,000 to 892,000 (1.4 million on Sundays), make the Tribune number one in America (in terms of advertising revenue), boost what he calls "Chicagoland," and establish a radio station with the call letters WGN (for "world's greatest newspaper"). McCormick's political views will reflect those of his mother, Kate, who called Woodrow Wilson a "villain" and will tell an interviewer, "I hate the Jews, I hate the British, I hate the French. God damn them all." "Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner" by cartoonist Martin M. (Michael) Branner, 31, begins in September in the 15-month-old New York Daily News, becoming the first career-girl comic strip. Wage earners are still called "breadwinners" despite diminishing U.S. consumption of bread and other baked goods.
Congress enacts legislation enabling the Post Office to accept first class mail not stamped with adhesive stamps (see 1847).
Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter Co. is founded to produce a meter acceptable to the U.S. Post Office. Arthur H. Pitney, 49, is a former Chicago wallpaper company employee who saw the firm's postage stamps being stolen by office workers and developed an early postage meter in 1901 (he received a patent in 1902); English-born Walter H. Bowes, 38, is a former Addressograph salesman who has been selling a high-speed postmarking and stamp-canceling machine to the Post Office (whose officials have rejected a postage meter Bowes proposed because it did not completely protect government stamp revenues). Bowes teams up with Pitney, whose self-locking meter does protect stamp revenues, and the new American Postage Meter Co. takes over the Universal Stamping Machine plant at Stamford, Conn.. It produces meters that rent for $10 per month, and the first metered letter is posted December 10.
Nonfiction: Outline of History by H. G. Wells, who intends it to replace "narrow nationalist history by a general review of the human record." "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe," he says; Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Belloc, who attacks the ideas set forth by Wells; Instinct and the Unconscious by W. H. R. Rivers, whose work helps to gain English acceptance of psychoanalytic theory; The Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittem) by German author Ernst Jünger, 25, who served at the front in the Great War and yet describes a battle with an almost clinical detachment; Three Masters (Drei Meister) by Austrian essayist Stefan Zweig, 38, is about Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoievsky; The Americanization of Edward Bok (autobiography) by the Dutch-born Ladies' Home Journal editor; The Color of Life by Philadelphia-born Kansas author-publisher E. (Emanuel) Haldeman-Julius (originally Julius), 31, who adopted the maiden name of his wife, Marcet, after their marriage in 1916 and last year began publishing 10¢ Little Blue Books (pamphlets), starting with Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Pioneer sociologist-historian Max Weber dies at Munich June 14 at age 56; journalist-author John Reed of typhus at Moscow October 20 at age 32. He is buried beside Bolshevik heroes within the Kremlin walls.
Fiction: This Side of Paradise by Minnesota-born New York advertising copywriter-turned-novelist F. (Francis) Scott (Key) Fitzgerald, 23; The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; Main Street by Minnesota-born novelist Sinclair Lewis, 35, who satirizes small-town America; Women in Love and The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence; In Chancery by John Galsworthy; "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" (story) by Galsworthy; The Captives by Hugh Walpole; La Relève du matin by French novelist Henri Millon de Montherlant, 24, who was severely wounded in the Great War and has traveled to Spain; Bridal Wreath (Kransen; in England, The Garland) by Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, 38, is the first novel in her Kristin Lavranstatter trilogy; Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield includes "Je Ne Parle Français" and "Prelude"; The Lee Shore and Potterism by English novelist (Emilie) Rose Macaulay, 39; Chéri by Colette; This Marrying by Buffalo, Minn.-born novelist Margaret Banning (née Culkin), 29; Poor White (stories) by Sherwood Anderson; Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale; Winsome Winnie, and Other New Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock; The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim, whose bestseller will be adapted for the screen three times; Bull-Dog Drummond: The Adventures of a Demilitarized Officer Who Found Peace Dull by British novelist H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile, 31, who won the Military Cross while serving with the royal engineers and has been writing under the pseudonym "Sapper."
Novelist-editor William Dean Howells dies at New York May 11 at age 83.
Poetry: Les Joues en feu by French poet Raymond Radiguet, 17; The Christ of Velázquez (El Cristo de Velázquez) by Miguel de Unamuno; October and Other Poems by Robert Seymour Bridges, now 75, who was appointed British poet laureate in 1913; City in Tears (Mesto v slzách) by proletarian Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, 19; The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken; Alchemy: A Symphonic Poem by East Orange, N.J.-born poet Robert (Silliman) Hillyer, 25; A Few Figs from Thistles by Edna St. Vincent Millay: "My candle burns at both ends;/ It will not last the night;/ But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—/ It gives a lovely light."
Juvenile: The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts by English-born New York civil engineer Hugh Lofting, 34, who was wounded in 1917 and has turned to writing and illustrating. His book about a physician who can talk to the animals begins a series.
Painting: Guitar, Book, and Newspaper by cubist Juan Gris; The Mechanic (Le Mécanicien) and The Tug Boat (Le Remorqueur) by Fernand Léger; L'Odalisque by Henri Matisse; Temple Gardens by Paul Klee, whose colorful work is based on memories of a visit to Tunis in April 1914; Here Everything Is Still Floating by German Dadaist Max Ernst, 29; Merzbild 25.A. Des Sternenbild (collage) by Kurt Schwitters, who has conceived the notion of building a cathedral of everyday objects; Portrait of Josie West by Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton, 31; Church by Paris-born U.S. cubist (Andreas Bernhard) Lyonel Feininger, 49; Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella; Asbury Park South by Florine Stettheimer; Elsie de Wolfe and Miss Natalie Barney, "L'Amazone" by Romaine Brooks, whose latter work depicts Ohio-born expatriate writer Natalie Clifford Barney, 42, whose Paris salon at 30 Jacob in the sixth arondissement attracts a galaxy of literary and intellectual lights each Friday evening; Reclining Nude by Amédéo Modigliani, who dies at Paris January 25 at age 35 (his widow, Jeanne [née Hébuterne], commits suicide the next day, jumping from a window).
Art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler returns to Paris in February, having been out of the city when war broke out in August 1914 and been unable to return because of his German citizenship. His gallery was closed, the works in it were confiscated, they will be auctioned off in the next 2 years, but Kahnweiler, now 35, opens the Galerie Simon in September and will become a French citizen in 1937.
New York's Société Anonyme is founded by Marcel Duchamp, Katherine S. Dreier, and Philadelphia-born Dadaist photographer-painter-sculptor Man Ray (originally Emmanuel Radinski), 30, who will open the city's first modern art museum (see Phillips Collection, 1921; MoMA, 1929).
Goldsmith-jeweler-designer Peter Carl Fabergé dies in exile at Lausanne September 24 at age 74.
Photography pioneer Louis Ducos du Hauron dies at Agen in October at age 83, having lived on a French government pension.
Theater: The Acquittal by Rita Weiman 1/5 at New York's Cohan and Harris Theater, with Chrystal Herne, New York-born actor William Harrigan, 26, 138 perfs.; A Lady (Una señora) by Jacinto Benavente 1/20 at Madrid's Teatro del Centro; Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O'Neill 2/2 at New York's Morosco Theater, with Richard Bennett, Louise Closser Hale in O'Neill's first full-length play, 111 perfs.; The Outlaw (Loupeznik) by Czech journalist-playwright Karel Capek, 29, 3/2 at Prague's National Theater; The White Savior (Der Weisse Heiland) by Gerhart Hauptmann 3/28 at Berlin's Grosses Schauspielhaus; The Skin Game by John Galsworthy 4/21 at the St. Martin's Theatre, London, with Edmund Gwenn, Frederick Cooper, 349 perfs.; Mary Rose by James M. Barrie 4/22 at London's Haymarket Theatre, with Fay Compton, Norman Forbes, Jean Cadell, 399 perfs.; I'll Leave It to You by English actor-playwright Noël (Pierce) Coward, 20, 7/21 at London's New Theatre, with Coward, Moya Nugent, 37 perfs. (born of middle-class parents, Coward's formal schooling ended at age 9 but he has affected the manners of sophisticated London society); Opportunity by Owen Davis 7/30 at New York's 48th Street Theater, with Lily Cahill, New York-born actress Nita Naldi, 23, New Hampshire-born actor Kenneth MacKenna, 20, 138 perfs.; The Unknown by W. Somerset Maugham 8/9 at London's Aldwych Theatre (moved to the Lyric 9/20), with Basil Rathbone, Lady Tree, 78 perfs.; Ladies' Night by Avery Hopwood and Charlton Andrews 8/9 at New York's Eltinge Theater, with Charles Ruggles, 360 perfs.; Spanish Love by Avery Hopwood and Mary Roberts Rinehart (who have adapted a Spanish play) 8/17 at Maxine Elliott's Theater, New York, 308 perfs.; The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood 8/23 at New York's Morosco Theater, with Effie Ellsler in a dramatization of Rinehart's 1908 novel The Circular Staircase, 867 perfs.; The Bad Man by Beverly, Mass.-born playwright Porter Emerson Browne, 41, 8/30 at New York's Comedy Theater, with Frank Conroy, San Francisco-born actor Holbrook Blinn, 48, 342 perfs.; Little Old New York by Rida Johnson Young 9/8 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with Ernest Glendenning, Genevieve Tobin, Donald Meek, 308 perfs.; The Mirage by Edgar Selwyn 9/30 at New York's Times Square Theater, with Alan Dinehart, Philadelphia-born actress Florence Reed, 37, 193 perfs.; The First Year by Frank Craven 10/20 at New York's Little Theater, with Craven, 760 perfs.; Gas (II) by Georg Kaiser 10/29 at Brno's Vereinigte Deutsche Theater in Czechoslakia; The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill 11/1 at New York's Provincetown Playhouse, with Charles S. Gilpin as the Pullman porter who becomes dictator of a tropical island and disintegrates morally (the play moves uptown 12/27), 204 perfs.; Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw 11/10 at New York's Garrick Theater, with Helen Westley, Dudley Digges, 125 perfs.; Masses and Men (Massen Menschen) by Ernst Toller 11/15 at Nuremberg's Stadtheater; The Makropolous Secret (Vec Makropulos) by Karel Capek 11/21 at Prague's National Theater; Cornered by Memphis, Tenn.-born actor-turned-playwright Dodson Mitchell, 52, 12/8 at New York's Astor Theater, with Madge Kennedy, 143 perfs.; The Magnificent Cuckold (Le Cocu magnifique) by Brussels-born playwright Fernand Crommelynck, 35, 12/18 at the Théâtre de la Maison de l'Oeuvre, Paris; Hands Around (La Ronde, or Rigen) (complete version) by Arthur Schnitzler 12/23 at Berlin's Kleines Schauspielhaus (he wrote the play in 1897); Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale 12/27 at New York's Biltmore Theater, with Richmond, Va.-born actress Catherine Calhoun Doucet, 45, Louise Closser Hale, Carroll McComas as the abused spinster who rebels against her dense brother-in-law in an adaptation of Gale's novel. Gale will rewrite the last act after a week to give the play a happy ending, wits will say that it should now be called Miss Lulu Better, and it will win its author the first Pulitzer Prize to be conferred on a woman, 198 perfs.
Films: D. W. Griffith's The Idol Dancer with Richard Barthelmess, Clarine Seymour; Griffith's The Love Flower with Barthelmess, Carol Dempster; Mebraska-born director Fred Niblo's The Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks; George Melford's The Round Up with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle; Buster Keaton's The Saphead with Keaton.
Ballet: Le Boeuf sur le toit (The Nothing-Doing Bar) 2/21 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, with famous circus clowns and acrobats, music by French composer Darius Milhaud, 27, scenario by Jean Cocteau; Pulcinella 5/15 at the Théâtre National de I'Opéra, Paris, with Leonide Massine, Tamara Karsavina, music by Igor Stravinsky based on scores by Giambattista Pergolesi, choreography by Massine, scenery and costumes by Pablo Picasso.
German dancer-choreographer Mary Wigman (Marie Wiegmann), 34, opens a school at Dresden that will grow to have branches throughout Germany and have an influence that will spread through Wigman's star pupil Hanya Holm to New York (see 1931).
First performances: Chant de Nigamon (Symphonic Poem) by Arthur Honegger 1/3 at Paris; Le Tombeau de Couperin Suite for Orchestra by Maurice Ravel 2/28 at Paris; La Valse, a choreographic poem by Ravel 12/12 at Paris.
New York's Juilliard Foundation is established with a legacy left by the late French-born textile merchant Augustus D. Juilliard who in 1874 started a New York firm that earned him a fortune. Juilliard died last year at age 83 and stipulated in his will that income from the legacy be used to further music in America. The Juilliard Graduate School will be founded in 1924, the foundation trustees 2 years later will take over the Institute of Musical Art founded in 1905, and in 1946 the two schools will be combined under the name Juilliard School of Music.
University of Petrograd physicist Leon Theremin (Lev Sergeyevich Termen), 24, pioneers electronic music with a new instrument that produces eerie sounds without being touched. A box containing radio tubes that produce oscillations at two sound-wave frequencies above the range of the human ear, its inventor calls it an etherphone (it will later be called a theremin), he controls its pitch by moving his hand or a baton toward or away from an antenna located at the right rear of the box, and he produces tone colors over a range of six octaves (see Moog synthesizer, 1964).
Composer-conductor-music critic Reginald De Koven dies at Chicago January 16 at age 61; composer Max Bruch at Berlin October 2 at age 82.
Broadway musicals: (George White's) Scandals 6/7 at the Globe Theater with Ann Pennington, comic Lou Holtz, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Arthur Jackson, 134 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies 6/22 at the New Amsterdam Theater with Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Moran and Mack, Van and Schenck, music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert, Joseph McCarthy, Harry Tierney, Gene Buck, and others, 123 perfs. (Brice has made headlines in February by refusing to turn over her husband, gambler Nicky Arnstein, to authorities on charges of having stolen $5 million in securities and passing bad checks unless the New York district attorney give Arnstein immunity from questioning and release him on $50,000 bail); Good Times 8/9 at the Hippodrome, with music by Raymond Hubbell, book and lyrics by R. H. Burnside, 456 perfs.; Tickle Me 8/18 at the Selwyn Theater, with music by Herbert P. Stothart, book and lyrics by Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Frank Mandel, 207 perfs.; Tip Top 10/5 at the Globe Theatre, with Fred Stone, the Los Angeles-born Duncan sisters Rosetta, 19, and Vivian, 18, music by Ivan Caryll, book and lyrics by Anne Caldwell and R. H. Burnside, 246 perfs.; Mary 10/18 at the Knickerbocker Theater, with San Francisco-born actress Georgia Caine, 43, Jack McGowan, music by Lou Hirsch, book and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel, 220 perfs.; Sally 12/21 at the New Amsterdam Theater with Marilyn Miller, Leon Errol, Frank Kingdon, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by New York-born writer B. G. (George Gard) DeSylva, 25, songs that include "Look for the Silver Lining," 570 perfs.; The Passing Show of 1921 12/29 at the Winter Garden Theater, with Eugene and Willie Howard, Marie Dressler, Michigan-born actor Harry Bannister, 31, Janet Adair, music by Jean Schwartz, lyrics by Harold Atteridge, songs that include "In Little Old New York," 200 perfs.
English music-hall male impersonator Vesta Tilley (originally Matida Alice Powles, now Lady de Frece) retires at age 56 after a career of more than 40 years in which she has gained particular popularity with the songs "Following in Father's Footsteps" and "The Piccadilly Johnny with the Little Glass Eye."
Popular songs: "Avalon" by Al Jolson and Vincent Rose (who have lifted the melody from the aria "E Lucevan Le Stelle" in Giacomo Puccini's 1900 opera Tosca); "I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time" by Albert von Tilzer, lyrics by Neville Fleeson; "The Japanese Sandman" by Richard Nutting, lyrics by Raymond B. Egan; "So Long, Ooo-long, How Long You Gonna be Gone" by New York-born songwriters Harry Ruby, 25, and Bert Kalmar, 36; "Margie" by New York-born songwriter Con Conrad (Conrad K. Dober), 28, lyrics by J. Russel Robinson, 28, and Benny Davis; "Whispering" by New York composer John Schonberger, 28, lyrics by Richard Coburn (Frank D. de Long), 34; "When My Baby Smiles at Me" by New York composers Bill Munro and Harry Von Tilzer, lyrics by Andrew B. Sterling and Ohio-born comedian Ted Lewis (Theodore Leopold Friedman), 30, who introduced the song 2 years ago at Rector's Café in New York; "Mon Homme" by French composer Maurice Yvain, 29, lyrics by Jacques-Charles. Mamie Smith (née Robertson), 37, records "That Thing Called Love" in place of Sophie Tucker, becoming the first black jazz-blues singer to cut a record, and she follows it with "Crazy Blues," a number so successful it makes a fortune for Smith and her promoter.
Babe Ruth signs with the New York Yankees January 3 to begin a 14-year career as "Sultan of Swat" for New York. Yankee co-owner Col. Jacob Ruppert, now 52, has acquired Baltimore-born Boston Red Sox pitcher George Herman Ruth, 24, for $100,000 plus a personal loan of $300,000 to Red Sox owner (and Broadway producer) H. H. "Harry" Frazee; his new left-hander sets a slugging average record of .847 in his first season with New York, hitting 54 home runs (which will become more common in the next decade as baseball owners introduce a harder, livelier ball), batting .376, scoring 158 runs, and making the Yankees the first team in any sport to draw more than a million spectators, nearly double the team's 1919 gate. The Giants tell the Yankees at the end of the season that they will have to move out of the Polo Grounds, and Col. Ruppert closes a deal with the Astor estate to acquire some property in the Bronx, across the river, for construction of a new ball park (he will buy out Tillinghast l'Hommedieu Houston for $1.2 million in 1922 and become sole owner; see Yankee Stadium, 1923).
The Rawlings Bill Doak baseball glove introduced by the St. Louis sporting-goods firm will serve as the basis for future gloves (see 1912). Pittsburgh-born Cardinals pitcher Doak, 28, has approached the company with an idea for a glove with a multi-thong web laced between the forefinger and thumb; his design revolutionizes the sport, Rawlings will replace the thong with a two-piece web in 1935, cowhide will overtake horsehide in the 1930s, the improved glove with its patented "Deep Well" pocket will remain in the Rawlings catalogue until 1953, and by the end of the century more than half of all major-league players will be using Rawlings gloves, each made from 16 to 20 pieces of cowhide with six to nine feet of rawhide lacing.
The "Black Sox" scandal threatens to undermine the prestige and popularity of America's national pastime. Eight members of last year's Chicago White Sox baseball team are indicted in September for fraud in connection with the 5-to-3 World Series loss to Cincinnati (see 1921).
The Cleveland Indians win the World Series, defeating the Brooklyn Dodgers 5 games to 2 in the last Series that will require 5 victories.
The Walker Law enacted by the New York State legislature at Albany is the first significant U.S. legislation related to boxing. Sponsored by Senate speaker James J. Walker, it legalizes professional boxing in the state and establishes the New York State Athletic Commission, which will remain independent of other boxing commissions. Its code of rules has been written for the most part by English-born promoter William Gavin, and the new law will serve as the basis for similar laws that will be adopted by other states.
Spanish bullfighter José Gómez Ortega dies in the ring at Talavera de la Reinais May 16 at age 25. The youngest man ever to receive the title matador (in October 1912), "Joselito" (or "Gallito") has helped (with Juan Belmonte) to revolutionize the art, has killed more than 1,565 bulls in the arena, and is fatally gored in a competitive bullfight (mano-a-mano) against his brother-in-law Ignacio Sánchez Mejias.
Man o' War does not run in the Kentucky Derby but wins both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes to close out a racing career in which he has been the odds-on favorite in every race he entered. The big chestnut colt is retired to stud at year's end, having won 20 of his 21 races.
The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe race has its first running at Longchamps, Paris, where the 2,400-meter contest for horses 3 years old and older will usually be run in October, attracting entrants from all over the world.
William Tatem "Bill" Tilden Jr., 27, (U.S.) wins in men's singles at Wimbledon (the first American to do so), Suzanne Lenglen in women's singles; Tilden wins in U.S. men's singles, Molla Bjurstedt Mallory in women's singles.
British golf champion Joyce Wethered, 19, wins the English Ladies championship to begin a decade of triumph in which she will be virtually unbeatable.
The Olympic Games at Antwerp attract 2,741 athletes from 26 nations; U.S. athletes excel. Suspended 4 years ago because of the Great War, the contests for the first time are held in a stadium that displays the Olympic flag designed in 1913 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin—five rings (blue, yellow, black, green, and red) intertwined on a white ground to represent the five continents. A Dominican monk befriended by the baron has provided a new Olympic motto: "Citius, Altius, Fortius" ("Faster, Higher, Stronger").
Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock IV is defeated 3 to 2 by the U.S. defender Resolute in its challenge for the America's Cup.
The National Football League (NFL) has its beginnings in the American Professional Football Association organized by men who include Joe Carr, who founded the Columbus Panhandles in 1904, and 1918 University of Illinois star end George (Stanley) Halas, 25 (see Green Bay Packers, 1919). Halas will buy the Decatur (Ill.) Staleys, move the team to Chicago in 1921, rename it the Bears, make it commercially viable in 1925 by hiring "Red" Grange, and revolutionize football in the 1930s by perfecting the T formation that will make the game a contest of speed and deception with increased use of the forward pass. He wlll coach the Bears until 1968, compiling a record of 325 wins, 131 losses, and 31 ties, with six league championships.
Maybelline Co. introduces its first eyeshadow line to supplement its 3-year-old compact mascara, advertising it with the line, "Eyes that glow with enchantment." The company will introduce eyeliner in 1930, cake mascara in 1932, Ultra Lash in the 1960s.
Antoine de Paris creates the mannish shingle bob haircut that will replace the conventional bob introduced by dancer Irene Castle in 1914. Polish-born hairdresser Antek Cierplikowski, 35, calls himself Monsieur Antoine.
Hemlines rise on U.S. dresses; sleeves are shortened or eliminated as designers introduce long-waisted styles to give women a slender look.
The 19-year-old Hanes Hosiery Mill of Winston-Salem, N.C., quits making men's hosiery to concentrate on its fast-growing women's business; P. H. Hanes Knitting Co. expands its line to include undershirts, briefs, sleepwear, and knitted shorts.
The ratio of domestic servants to the general U.S. population is half what it was in 1890, partly because immigration has ebbed, partly because of new and better-paying employment alternatives. Middle-class women employ mostly day workers, who tend to be blacks rather than immigrants or native-born whites. Only relatively affluent households can afford live-in help.
The New York State Legislature enacts a real estate tax abatement law that will stimulate construction of more than $1 billion worth of housing in New York City alone. Gov. Alfred E. Smith has warned that the state has a serious housing shortage (as does Britain, most of Europe, and much of America).
Dutch architect J. J. P. (Jacobus Johannes Pieter) Oud, 30, designs a block of houses for Rotterdam's Spangen district with a communal garden. Eight similar blocks designed by Oud will go up next year in the Tusschendijken district.
U.S. architects design middle-class houses with "servant-less" kitchens in response to decreased employment of domestic help.
Kate Gleason of 1893 Gear Planer fame pioneers low-cost concrete development housing with a project at East Rochester, N.Y. Houses up to now have all been custom-built and relatively expensive, but young families can buy Gleason's mass-produced units for a small down payment plus $40 per month (see 1921).
Barely 20 percent of America's virgin forest lands remain uncut.
An earthquake in China's Gansu province December 16 causes major fractures and landslides that kill an estimated 200,000 people.
Overfishing of the Sacramento River forces the closing of San Francisco's last salmon cannery (see 1866).
The U.S. soybean harvest reaches 1 million bushels, a figure that will increase more than 600 times in the next half-century (see 1924; wartime circular, 1918).
California legislators enact a new Alien Land Law to prevent Asians from renewing their leases on farmland (see 1913; Oregon, 1923).
The Federal Trade Commission orders the separation of the Deering and McCormick harvesting machines manufactured by International Harvester Co. The FTC acts under terms of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914 (see 1902).
The American Farm Bureau Federation founded at Chicago in November is an outgrowth of the country farm bureau movement that has helped farmers by using county demonstration agents, extension workers, and agricultural experts. It will soon begin sponsoring a variety of political measures and grow to become the driving force behind mobilizing right-wing political efforts, aligning itself with agribusiness while representing itself as the champion of family farmers, opposing environmentalists, gun-control laws, minimum wage laws, and civil rights legislation as it invests its farmers' dues in an insurance company and other non-farm activities and its membership becomes less and less farm-oriented.
California vineyard owners begin to diversify their production as a result of Prohibition. They will market as table grapes much of the fruit that has gone into wines and brandies, and improve their methods of producing raisins, which will soon be marketed under the Sun-Maid label.
Russia suffers a disastrous drought in the wake of 7 years of civil war plus more than 2 years of Bolshevik grain requisitioning. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover organizes the American Relief Administration (ARA) and tries to negotiate Russian acceptance of Western food aid. V. I. Lenin appeals to the U.S. Communist Party for a report on American agricultural methods (see famine, 1921).
"Vitamines" become vitamins through efforts by British nutritional biochemist J. C. (Jack Cecil) Drummond, 29, who observes that not all coenzymes are amines (see Funk, 1911). Drummond labels the fat-soluble vitamin "A," the water-soluble vitamin "B," and the antiscorbutic vitamin "C," and with help from O. Rosenheim finds that the human liver can produce vitamin A from the provitamin carotene widely available in fruits and vegetables.
E. V. McCollum discovers a substance in cod-liver oil that can cure rickets and xerophthalmia. He has been at Johns Hopkins since 1917 (see 1921; Mellanby, 1918; vitamin D, 1922).
Botulism from commercially canned food strikes 36 Americans, 23 die, and falling sales motivate the U.S. canning industry to impose new production safety standards (see 1895; 1925).
Average per capita U.S. flour consumption drops to 179 pounds, down from 224 pounds in 1900, as Americans eat more meat, poultry, fish, and vegetables while reducing consumption of baked goods and pasta.
U.S. food prices will fall 72 percent in the next 2 years as farm prices plummet.
The world sugar price drops from 30¢ per pound in August to 8¢ in December.
M. S. Hershey loses $2.5 million in the collapse of world sugar prices and other large sugar consumers also take heavy losses.
A new Life Savers plant opens at Port Chester, N.Y., and Mint Products, Inc., is renamed Life Savers, Inc. (see 1913). Edward J. Noble and Roy Allen have patented the Life Savers design ("Nothing enclosed by a circle"), Allen has traveled the country seeking new salespeople, and Noble brings his mechanical-engineer brother Bob into the firm as head of production. He has increased sales by placing his nickel Life Savers next to the cash register at cigar stores and restaurants, instructing cashiers to include nickels in every customer's change. Americans buy 68 million rolls of Life Savers, up from 914,000 in 1914, 6.7 million in 1915, nearly 22.5 million in 1916, and 39 million in 1918 as Prohibition proves a boon to the candy industry.
National Prohibition of sales of alcoholic beverages in the United States goes into effect January 16 (see 1919). A mock funeral for "John Barleycorn" is held January 15 at Norfolk, Va., by Iowa-born evangelist William Ashley "Billy" Sunday, 57, who has agitated for Prohibition but whose popularity now begins to fade.
Consumption of alcoholic beverages will continue in the United States despite Prohibition through illegal sales of bootleg beer and distilled spirits, legally permissible home-brewed wine, and homemade "bathtub gin." Fewer people will imbibe such beverages, but drinking has been socially acceptable for so long and is so widespread that the ban on selling alcoholic beverages will prove unenforceable.
Australians defeat several attempts to pass Prohibition laws.
Defeat of a proposed Scottish Prohibition law December 5 cheers many Scotsmen. The distillery lobby has dropped "No Change" leaflets from airplanes to back "Wee Dram" supporters, who have used economic arguments to win out over churchmen, especially strict sabbatarians, who deplore the high rate of drunkenness in Scotland, most notably in city slums.
Prohibition in the United States booms sales of coffee, soft drinks, and ice cream sodas.
The Good Humor is created by Youngstown, Ohio, confectioner Harry B. Burt, 44, who has read about the "I-Scream-Bar" patented last year by Christian Nelson and will obtain his own patent for a chocolate-covered ice cream bar on a stick (see 1924).
Pepsi-Cola's Caleb Bradham loses $150,000 (he has bought sugar at 22¢ per pound), and Pepsi-Cola heads toward bankruptcy (see 1907; Guth, 1933).
U.S. hotels begin in many instances to convert their bars into soda fountains and lunch counters in order to comply with Prohibition rules; soda jerks replace bar tenders.
The advent of Prohibition brings an end to the "free lunch" that has been a fixture at virtually every U.S. city bar and saloon (most did not give it away free but generally offered it at a nominal price of a nickel or so while charging 30¢ for a five-course businessman's lunch). The free luncheon buffet at Delmonico's in New York has included hard boiled eggs with caviar, half a lobster, cold cuts, lobster aspic, pickled walnuts, hot roast beef, and Kentucky hams. Other fashionable restaurants have offered similar spreads.
The U.S. population reaches 105.7 million. Urban residents total 54 million, up from 1.4 million in 1840, and for the first time exceed rural residents (51.5 million), but one in every three Americans still lives on a farm, a proportion that will drop in the next 50 years to one in 22.
The world population reaches 1.86 billion.
A new French legal ruling classes contraception with abortion and makes anything having to do with birth control illegal. The action is designed to compensate for the population loss experienced in the Great War. Severe fines and prison sentences are ordered for anyone who administers or receives an abortion, but the law will be widely flouted. The number of illegal abortions will climb to an estimated 500,000 per year within 50 years, with bungled abortions causing an estimated 500 deaths per year.
"Any Protestant woman in her senses would object to marrying a Roman Catholic," writes Marie Stopes October 18 in a letter to an Irish Catholic. "They prohibit the use of proper hygienic Birth Control methods preferring that a woman's health should be entirely ruined and that she should bring forth feeble, dying, or imbecile infants rather than that proper hygienic methods should be used."
Youngs Rubber Co. is founded by U.S. entrepreneur Merle Leland Youngs, 33, to make Trojan brand condoms that will compete with Julius Schmid's Sheik and Ramses brands (see 1883). Once obliged to sleep on park benches, Schmid has become a millionaire through sales of his condoms. Trojans are made of latex rubber, they will prove far more effective than lamb cecums in preventing transmission of viruses, and they will become the largest-selling condoms sold through U.S. drugstores, but while condoms became familiar to U.S. doughboys during the war in France, they were used mostly to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases, and that association continues to hamper their acceptance for purposes of avoiding pregnancy in marriage (see 1923).
Russia legalizes abortion by a November decree of the Lenin government at Moscow, but while Russian physicians are not permitted to refuse an abortion where a woman is no more than 2½ months pregnant, they have orders to discourage patients from having abortions, especially in first pregnancies. The decree's stated purpose is to combat illegal abortions by providing safe and legal ones, which will be free until 1936. Russian physicians employ a method of vacuum extraction called "dry cupping" (see 1936).
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