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“There Were Giants in Those Days”
In an August 1924 New York Times Magazine article, Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the type of European leaders who caused World War I were now all gone. She even specifically namechecked Mussolini as an example of this “new” type of leader.
Ebert the saddler fills what is left of the place occupied by the greatest of the Kaisers.
McCormick references the now-forgotten Friedrich Ebert, president of Germany at the time until his death in office the next year, 1925.
While Adolf Hitler had accumulated at least some modicum of power by 1924, having already become leader of the Nazi Party in 1921, he wouldn’t became the true leader of Germany as an entire nation until 1933.
An unknown Russian, a lesser than Lenin, asserts the power of the most imperial of the Czars.
Lenin had died that January. His successor Joseph Stalin clearly hadn’t made the full force of his power felt by a mere seven months into his 29-year reign.
A Socialist and conscientious objector is Prime Minister and an engine-wiper Colonial Secretary of Great Britain.
The U.K. prime minister referenced is Ramsay MacDonald, who would serve for less than a year, from January to November 1924, though he would return to the post from 1929-35.
Neville Chamberlain wouldn’t ascend to the post until 1937, while Winston Churchill wouldn’t gain the position until 1940.
The editor of Avanti triumphantly dictates the policies of Italy.
Mussolini was indeed previously editor of the official publication of the Italian Socialist Party. McCormick’s description of him seems to imply something akin to “He can’t be that bad, he’s only a journalist.” (In other words, the same profession she herself had.)
McCormick went on to describe how these new national leaders posed little to no risk of creating a World War II:
Where are the political gods of yesterday? Where, now, are the warmakers, those portentous figures that shadowed the horizon of the world ten years ago and were powerful enough to mobilize an entire generation of the human race?
Hiding in plain sight.
There Were Giants in Those Days: Ten Years Have Swept Away the Political Gods Who Wrought the War in Darkness, and Mere Men Now Rule the World
Published: Sunday, August 3, 1924
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Coolidge, Provoker of Legend
Today, President Calvin Coolidge’s “Silent Cal” reputation is the most famous thing about him. An August 1924 New York Times Magazine article by Horace Green collected notable examples of this personality on display, even if some anecdotes are of dubious veracity.
Like this one:
One afternoon toward sundown, the president asked his friend and adviser, Frank W. Stearns, to come into the Executive Office. Stearns found a dejected figure in the back of a chair, gazing out of the oval windows toward the Potomac. He waited for Mr. Coolidge to speak. He sat down. Ten minutes went by without a word. At length the president turned around and said:
“That will be all.”
Personally, I find the story a little hard to believe. Stearns really went ten whole minutes without saying anything? Not even “What’s on your mind, Mr. President?” After about 10 to 30 seconds, almost any other person would have broken the silence.
Another story that Green quotes was apparently debunked by Coolidge himself:
During Coolidge’s vice presidential days, one of the sisters was placed on his left at dinner, whereupon she opened the conversation with the sally:
“Oh, Mister Coolidge, I’ve just made a ten-dollar bet that I can make you talk.” With some dignity, the vice president of the United States answered: “I am sorry, Madam, that you have lost your wager,” and turned his strict attention to the lady on his right.
Coolidge’s apocryphal quote is usually quoted as simply: “You lose.” However, Coolidge debunked this anecdote at the Associated Press annual luncheon in April 1924, four months before this article.
However, Green relays at least one fact which is almost certainly true, because it could be fact-checked by anyone who visited the physical site where it takes place. Referring to the Coolidge family cemetery plot in Vermont, Green wrote:
Below each name is the date of birth and death. There is nothing more. No word of any sort, kind, or description. Not a single stone carries an epitaph. There is no “Where stranger pauses by these bones,” no poem, no cherub without wings. Not even a decorative “Hie Jacet.” [Latin for “He lies here.”] The name and the date. All else left to the imagination.
What an astounding revelation of the mental directness of the ancestors of our president. What a stone-cut denial of the allegation that his silences are a pose for political or other purpose!
Indeed, when Coolidge would later die nine years later in 1933, his gravestone looks the exact same:
Source: FindAGrave.com
https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2023/188/6551998_1b4c1c5a-3c1c-4f49-bf55-1bffe252db8c.jpeg
Coolidge, Provoker of Legend: Folklore of the Silent President’s Brief Lapses Into Language
Published: Sunday, August 10, 1924
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Byron Also Among the Abbey Poets?
On the 100th anniversary of British poet Lord Byron’s death in 1924, New York Times Magazine asked why Byron wasn’t commemorated in Poets’ Corner of London’s Westminster Abbey. A memorial would later be erected there in 1969.
The journalist P.W. Wilson wrote that Byron’s scandalous personal reputation had prevented such an honor:
When, therefore, they who mourned for Byron, dead at the age of 36 and like Lycidas, dead ere his prime, knocked at the portals of Westminster Abbey, where lay Chaucer and Spenser and where would be laid Browning and Tennyson, they found those doors closed against his frail and shuttered dust.
Many wanted a monument to Byron placed there after all, under the “better late than never” logic:
Not that it is proposed to disturb those dry bones of Byron which molder to decay, and, when clothed in flesh and blood, were the ministers of his indulgence. The idea is, rather, to surrender his body to corruption and record the splendor of his mind by that kind of sculpture which has filled Poets’ Corner with the memory of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Gray, of Wordsworth, of Ruskin and of Longfellow, all of them entombed elsewhere.
Sure enough, a monument to Byron was ultimately erected in 1969. His actual body remains buried in his family vault in Nottinghamshire, though.
Other prominent poets and authors memorialized since then, even long after their death, include:
- Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll: died 1898, memorialized 1982
- Playwright Oscar Wilde: died 1900, memorialized 1995
- The Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis: died 1963, memorialized 2013
Byron Also Among the Abbey Poets?: Lucifer, Outcast From Paradise, May After One Hundred Years Find a Place in England’s Pantheon
Published: Sunday, July 27, 1924
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Political Revolution by Radio
1924’s Republican and Democratic Conventions were the first broadcast by radio. That July, Helen Bullitt Lowry wrote in New York Times Magazine that FDR — eight years before winning the presidency — delivered one of only two addresses delivered well for this new medium.
First, Lowry wrote, this entirely new communication method would change everything:
These are epoch-making signs of the revolution which, within one short year, has made politics the possession, not of the few, but of the very general public.
…
Because of the far-reaching radio, these hundred percent American institutions — fixed political methods, bosses, and oratory — are going to have to be done over into a twentieth century mold.
But would these changes be for better or for worse?
Whether conditions will be improved or wrecked by the revolution is beside the point. The thing is going to happen. It is happening.
In a prescient prediction of things to come, Lowry cited Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of the best orators for radio. At the time, FDR was between stints as the unsuccessful 1920 Democratic vice presidential nominee and his later successful 1928 big for New York governor.
Lowry raved:
Thus far — and counting in both conventions at that — there have been just two nominating speeches that have stood up under this radio test, which requires that there be something short and pithy to say before the orator says it.
One speech was Franklin Roosevelt’s nominating Governor [Al] Smith. The other was Dr. Kate Barrett’s speech seconding Senator Glass’s nomination. The other speeches made the blunder of boring the five million voters who were listening in.
Sure enough, FDR would go on to become America’s “radio president,” delivering 31 Fireside Chats by radio during his administration.
Political Revolution by Radio: Old Tricks of the Trade Must Be Scrapped Now That the Millions Can Hear the Actual Wheels Go Round
Published: Sunday, July 20, 1924
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Great Men’s Pastimes
In 1924, 240 accomplished people were asked what they did for fun. The top three answers: fishing, golfing, and hunting / shooting.
Augusta Shuford wrote about the findings for New York Times Magazine:
The answers given are from twenty men in each of the following twelve groups:
- Statesmen and politicians
- Clergymen
- Bankers and heads of other big businesses
- Doctors
- Army and navy officers
- Lawyers
- Scientists, most of them engineers or technical chemists
- Publishers and editors
- Educators
- Authors of “literature”
- Painters, sculptors, and architects
- Actors and musicians
Then for the results:
Judged by the answers of the twelve groups, the favorite recreation of civilized man today is fishing. … Eighty-five of the entire 240 men questioned gave fishing as a recreation.
…
Next in popularity to fishing stands golf, 74 of the 240 registering their fondness for the game.
…
The Army man… will have to be shown with a gun, twelve of the twenty officers having given shooting as a favorite diversion. It also follows as third choice of the entire number, 40 out of the 240 naming it.
Also noteworthy was which hobbies weren’t mentioned:
The most striking fact in regard to these answers is that, while a taste for football and the theatre is acknowledged three or four times, not a man mentions baseball, moving pictures, musical comedy, or radio.
While I was able to find modern-day surveys asking about people’s hobbies, I wasn’t able to find any specifically asking accomplished people. If anybody is able to track such a survey down, please post a link in the comments section.
Still, it seems very likely that golf would still place in the top three hobbies of accomplished people today. Fishing and shooting, though, seem much less likely.
Great Men’s Pastimes
Published: Sunday, July 13, 1924
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New York Street Cries
The number of “street cries” and people peddling their wares on New York City sidewalks was notably decreasing, A.R. Ross wrote in a 1924 New York Times Magazine article.
The time is coming when all street cries will be stilled. The radio gives out with no uncertainty the boisterous tones of robust tenors and bellowing baritones and far-reaching basso profundos, to say nothing of hilarious jazzes of strident brass bands. Overhead whir the airplanes and finally come the remorseless and everlasting toots of automobiles, pleasure and business craft, the trumpetings, screechings, and agonized howls as of lions, tigers, hyenas in the last throes of torturing death to drown all our cherished street cries into silence and to consign them to an oblivion from which they shall never emerge.
Among the most prominent “street criers” of the early 20th century were newsboys. The occupation is perhaps most prominent to modern audiences from 1992’s Disney movie Newsies starring a young Christian Bale, plus the 2012-14 Broadway musical adaptation. These kids would stand at streetcorners to hawk the latest print editions by calling out headlines. In particular, they became known for the phrase: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”
Sure enough, they began to disappear around 1924. “The age of the newsboy lasted only until the 1920s, when a growing preference for home delivery and tougher child labor laws ended the papers’ reliance on street sales,” Marquette University’s Children in Urban America Project explained.
New York Street Cries: They Are Not So Many Nor So Noisy as Once They Were
Published: Sunday, July 6, 1924
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That Dark Secret — The Constitution
In a June 1924 New York Times Magazine article, Charles Willis Thompson feared that most Americans’ knowledge of the Constitution was extremely low.
“I think full half of the population, Protestant and Catholic alike, imagine that there is [a clause preventing a Catholic from becoming president] in the Constitution.”
Clearly there isn’t, considering the country has had two Catholic presidents: John F. Kennedy and incumbent Joe Biden. Indeed, there isn’t any religious test or qualification at all.
“Conservatively I should estimate that 75 per cent [sic] of the American people do not know what treason is.”
The Constitution’s official definition of ‘treason’ is found in Article 3, Section 3: essentially, the United States needs to officially be at war and the person must have aided the declared enemy.
Congress hasn’t officially declared war since 1942; subsequent “wars” in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq weren’t technically official. That’s why the last person convicted of treason was Tomoya Kawakita in 1952, when the Japanese-American dual citizen was found guilty of aiding Japan during World War II.
Thompson suggested that the key to increasing the American public’s understanding of the Constitution lay with the then-young generation:
“A group of newspapers in different parts of the country recently combined under the lead of the Los Angeles Times to popularize the Constitution by getting schoolchildren all over the Union to compete in prize essays or orations… Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren learned more about the Constitution than their principals with the faculty thrown in.”
Speaking of the nation’s founding document, I’d recommend the new A.J. Jacobs book The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning about his attempt to live like a colonialist in modern-day New York City. At the Gaithersburg Book Festival, he even signed my hardcover copy!
That Dark Secret — The Constitution
Published: Sunday, June 29, 1924
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Colonel Coolidge of Plymouth Notch
In a June 1924 New York Times Magazine article, Rose Feld spoke with President Calvin Coolidge’s father for a rare interview.
John Calvin Coolidge Sr. named his son John Calvin Coolidge as well, though his son went by his middle name (and without the “junior”). The father had previously served in both the Vermont state House and state Senate, as a Republican like his son.
The father’s biggest claim to fame in American history: swearing his son in as president.
While the Chief Justice of the United States usually does the honors, that’s not actually a requirement; it just has to be some judicial officer. The younger Coolidge was visiting his family home when President Warren Harding died of a heart attack. Since the elder Coolidge was a justice of the peace, he swore his vice president son into the presidency.
In 1925, during the younger Coolidge’s second inauguration after winning election in his own right, tradition returned and Chief Justice William Howard Taft administered the oath of office.
The journalist Rose Feld — whose name kind of sounds like “Roosevelt” — trekked up to the Green Mountain State to interview the elder Coolidge. The “Plymouth” of her article’s title refers to the town in Vermont, not the same-named town in Massachusetts where the Pilgrims landed in 1620.
Notable interview quotes from the elder Coolidge…
On not owning a car:
“Well, I reckon I can have a car if I want one. I reckon I can get one when I want one. I haven’t yet decided that I do. I find it satisfactory coming down to town behind a horse. A horse is a good way of traveling, a sure way. Traveling on foot is even better when the distance isn’t too great.”
On owning a radio:
“They also made me get a radio. I didn’t want it, but everybody thought I ought to have it, so I let them put it in. But I don’t care much for it. I haven’t time for it.”
On his son’s status:
“I wouldn’t say Cal was a statesman or a politician.”
“Would would you call him, then?”
“I don’t know. A good, plain, hardworking country boy. That’s all.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
What about Coolidge’s mother? Victoria Josephine Moor died several decades prior, in 1885 at only age 39, when her son was 12. The cause of death is unknown, though it may have been tuberculosis.
The elder Coolidge died in March 1926, less than two years after his New York Times Magazine interview.
As of 2024, none of the three most recent presidents had either parent alive by the start of their presidency: neither Obama, Trump, nor Biden. The last president with either parent alive was George W. Bush, who actually had both.
But at least one presidential grandparent has outlived their grandchild, though it comes with a giant asterisk because of assassination. Kennedy’s grandmother lived to 98 and actually outlived her presidential grandson by 10 months.
Colonel Coolidge of Plymouth Notch
Published: Sunday, June 22, 1924
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Reign of Beauty in Business
In a June 1924 New York Times Magazine article, M.B. Levick analyzed the rise of women’s looks as a preeminent qualification in hiring.
The era of “first wave feminism” is considered to have lasted from 1848, with the first Women’s Rights Convention, to around 1920, when women were granted the constitutional right to vote. Well, it had clearly ended by 1924.
Once upon a time… the stenographer was hired, and the bookkeeper and the clerk and the attendant, and all the others feminine, on a haphazard idea of capability. Under the new dispensation it is capability plus: the house commits itself to a policy of pulchritude [beauty].
It sets up a standard of appearance. Instead of “neatness, 20 points; dispatch, 30,” and so on till the 100 percent is filled, it derives a new scale — which, if reduced to paper would stand some such ratio as this: “color of eyes, 10; height, 20; hair, 15; magnetism, 20” — with the old-time neatness and dispatch still there, but in a proportion reduced to allow for the new elements.
Levick even ended with a paragraph warning feminists not to worry about it:
It may be that feminist noses will tilt up at all this and feminist voices assail the fact as a reversion to earlier periods, when the world’s attitude toward women was more emphatically decorative than under the present order. But let the feminist nose tilt down again.
After all, Levick reasoned, men often must meet a certain standard for hiring too — though acknowledging that “the standard is more a mental matter than physical.” (So in other words, the comparison was completely inapt.)
Listen: there is a corporation in New York which insists also on a type standard for its men employes [sic] — for the outside men who travel in the city and beyond. The standard is more a mental matter than physical, it is true, yet the successful applicants are, in the main, fellows of a definite style and any one of them might walk into a clothing advertisement and feel himself among his fellows.
Which begs the question: was the writer M.B. Levick male or female? Surprisingly, I’m finding that question shockingly difficult to ascertain online.
There was no short “about the author” bio, the way New York Times Magazine (and almost every journalism publication) includes nowadays. And while googling Levick’s name produces some results, such as their archive of New Yorker articles, nothing about their sex.
That final paragraph of theirs does seem extremely “male,” though.
Reign of Beauty in Business
Published: Sunday, June 15, 1924
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Coolidge, The Man Who Says “No”
P.W. Wilson previewed the upcoming presidential election for a June 1924 New York Times Magazine article, with some strong similarities to 2024’s election… but also some huge differences.
First, the similarities:
[The] President of the Republic will play a leading part in the drama that is Europe still groping toward the ways of peace. The next five years will be years of rapid decision in international affairs, with chances of war always in the balance and Western civilization, including the United States, face to face with an awakened Asia.
At the time, the European war issue was post-World War I uncertainty. Today, it’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And at the time, the rising Asian nation was presumably Japan, which the Encyclopedia Britannica says “had become the strongest imperialist power in East Asia” by 1912. Today, it’s China.
But there were also some massive differences. Namely, the 1924 article argued that which man won the presidency would be less important than Congress — a statement it’s impossible to imagine anybody making in 2024.
To foreign countries, therefore, in their necessary dealings with the United States, the question of interest today is not so much whether next November there is to be elected a Republican or a Democratic president, but whether the president so elected will be allowed by Congress a reasonable initiative in foreign affairs.
The article also claimed the real issue regarding Congress was its level of leniency towards the executive branch, more so than the body’s partisan control:
One of the difficulties of the situation is that the two parties in Congress do not vote as parties. A Democrat may vote with a Republican group, and vice versa. The fate of any particular proposal is thus uncertain up to the last moment.
Those were the days.
“The imperial presidency” era arguably started not too long after this 1924 article, with FDR in the 1930s-40s, expanding even further under LBJ in the 1960s, and truly escalating with the post-9/11 presidencies of George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
By the 2020s, Washington Post opinion columnist George Will could write of the imperial presidency: “On Jan. 3, the 117th Congress will convene. It is not clear why.”
Coolidge, The Man Who Says “No”
Published: Sunday, June 8, 1924
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