On February 24, 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premieres at An Experiment In Modern Music concert at Aeolian Hall, New York.
The 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris featured track and field athletes from all over the world such as Harold Abrahams of the UK, Eric Liddell from Scotland, Jackson Scholz from the United States, and Paavo Nurmi of Finland. The 1924 Olympics is the setting for the 1981 Academy Award-winning film, Chariots of Fire.
January 21, 1924. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the Soviet Union, dies at the age of 54. His death leaves the Soviet government with a power struggle: possible leaders include Leon Trotsky, general of the Red Army and Josef Stalin, general secretary of the COmmunist Party. Stalin immediately begins to purge (kill) his rivals to clear the way for his leadership.
April 6, 1924. Fascists win the elections in Italy with a â…” majority.
April 6-September 28, 1924. The first aerial circumnavigation of the world is conducted by a team of aviators of the United States Army Air Service. The trip takes 175 days, covering 27,340 miles, without crossing the equator into the southern hemisphere. Four planes left Seattle in April, and two of the four returned to Seattle in September to complete the trip.
June, 1924. During the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition, George Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine both disappear somewhere high on the North-East ridge during their attempt to make the first ascent of the world’s highest mountain. Mallory is famously quoted as having replied to the question “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” with the retort “Because it’s there!”. Whether Mallory and Irvine reached Everest’s summit is unknown.
August, 1924. France and Belgium agree to withdraw their troops from the Ruhr within a year, and Germany promises to pay off the war debts it owes mostly to those two countries.
August 28, 1924. Georgia rises against the Soviet Union in a rebellion, in which several thousands die. The rebellion is unsuccessful.
September, 1924. Indian nationalist Mohandas Gandhi goes on a hunger strike to protest fighting between Hindus and Muslims in British India.
December, 1924. People in the United States can now use disposable paper tissues made by Kleenex to catch those winter sneezes.
December 30, 1924. Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that Andromeda, previously believed to be a nebula, is actually another galaxy, and that the Milky Way is only one of many such galaxies in the universe.
In 1924, E.M. Forster publishes A Passage to India, a book I’m supposed to be reading for the Faith ‘n Fiction Rounndtable. However, I haven’t yet obtained a copy. I remember trying to read the book once before, but I didn’t get very far. Maybe this time will be different. E.M Forster went to India twice before writing his novel, and he had become an opponent of British imperialism in India.
Herman Melville’s Billy Budd is published posthumously in 1924. Melville died in 1891. Billy Budd, a novella about a Christ-like sailor, was discovered in manuscript form among Melville’s papers by his biographer.
Robert Frost wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1924.
And in April 1924 crossword mania hits the U.S. after publisher Simon and Schuster publishes the first book of crossword puzzles, “”this odd-looking book with a pencil attached to it.” The New York Times complains of the “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport.” More history and information at Wikipedia.
Nonfiction set in 1924:
Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago. (Harper). Recommended by Albert Mohler. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two nineteen year old boys from millionaire families who confessed to murdering a fourteen year old neighbor boy for “thrills”. The case shocked the nation.
January 11, 1923. Despite strong British protests, troops from France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr area to force Germany to pay its reparation payments. Hyperinflation in Germany means that 17,000 marks are now needed to buy an American dollar. The Germans couldn’t pay the reparations if they wanted to.
June 18, 1923. Mount Etna erupts in Italy, making 60,000 homeless.
July, 1923. The USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, officially comes into being, consisting of Russia, Ukraine, White Russia, and Transcausia.
August 2, 1923. Warren G. Harding, 29th President of the United States, dies in office and is succeeded by his vice-president Calvin Coolidge.
September 1, 1923. The Great KantÅ earthquake devastates Tokyo and Yokohama, killing an estimated 140,000 people.
October 29, 1923. Turkey becomes a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Kemal Atatürk is elected as the president.
November 8, 1923. Beer Hall Putsch: In Munich, Adolf Hitler leads the Nazis in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government. Hitler and his supporters burst inot a beer hall, armed and declaring that “the national revolution has begun.!” Police and troops crush the “revolution” the next day. On November 12 the fugitive Hitler is arrested.
November 15, 1923. The hyperinflation in Germany reaches its height. One United States dollar is worth 4,200,000,000,000 Papiermark (4.2 trillion). Chancellor Gustav Stresemann abolishes the old currency, and begins again with a new currency, the Rentenmark. 1923 will be called “the year of crises” in Germany.
In mid-1922 the magazine Vanity Fair coined the word “flapper” to describe the new “free’ young women who were beginning to embrace a more relaxed and libertine lifestyle, at least in the big cities and East Coast enclaves of sophisticated culture. These women “wore shorter skirts, cropped their hair and danced brazenly in public.” The music they danced to was new, too. Jazz music with its syncopated sounds was the successor to ragtime, and the Twenties became the Jazz Age as the fashionable set tried out dances such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.
In 1922, Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At the same time, Al Jolson, a white singer and entertainer who often performed in blackface, was making hit song recordings such as April Showers and Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!). According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, “Jolson was to jazz, blues, and ragtime what Elvis Presley was to rock ‘n’ roll.”
Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Eugene O’Neill, Anna Christie.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson: Collected Poems. The poem that everyone knows by Robinson, because Simon and Garfunkel rewrote it and set it to music, is Richard Cory. But here’s another rather enigmatic poem from his Pulitzer Prize winning collection:
Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine
With him one day; and after soup and meat,
And all the other things there were to eat,
Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine
And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign
For me to choose at all, he took the draught
Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed
It off, and said the other one was mine.
And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And smiled, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be
As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams
Newbery Award for Children’s Literature in the U.S.: First awarded in 1922 to The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon.
Also published in 1922:
T.S. Eliot’s master poem, The Wasteland.
The Modernist classic Ulysses by James Joyce.
Sigrid Undset completes her Kristin trilogy with The Cross.
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. I just saw the movie based on this book for the first time, and I thought it was delightful. It’s sort of a modern fairy tale that takes place in a land of enchantment, a castle in Italy. (No fascists to be seen.)
And in February 1922, a new magazine, The Reader’s Digest, is launched. Sadly enough, the Reader’s Digest now is only a pale imitation of its former self. It used to be a fine place to get an introduction to the news topics of the day, plus feature articles, adventure and self-help, plus a condensed version of a best-selling novel or nonfiction story, plus some good jokes, anecdotes, and inspirational quotes. I’ve read it in the past several years a few times, and it just seems more commercial and less significant in the choice of topics and the depth of coverage. Nevertheless, here’s to Reader’s Digest, the magazine where lots of Americans, at any rate, learned to enjoy reading.
February 28, 1922. The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt, giving Egypt the gift of limited self-rule and independence, but there are significant limitations. Britain still reserves the rights to supervise the Egyptian military, communications, and foreign relations.
March 11, 1922. Mohandas Gandhi is arrested in Bombay for sedition. He is sentenced to six years imprisonment. Gandhi’s program of “non-cooperation” with the British government and the boycott of British goods is having some limited success in at least getting British attention for the nationalist movement.
June, 1922. U.S. scientists claim that the sun produces Vitamin D in the body, a vitamin that prevents the disease rickets.
June 28, 1922. The Irish Civil War begins. The two sides in the conflict are the forces of the Provisional Government that established the Irish Free State in December 1922, who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the Republican opposition (the IRA, Irish Republican Army), for whom the Treaty represented a betrayal of the Irish Republic. The war was won by the Free State forces.
August 23, 1922. Turkey attacks Greece in an attempt to recover land lost during World War I.
August, 1922. Hyperinflation in Germany means that 7000 German marks are now needed to buy a single American dollar.
September, 1922. U.S. pilot James Doolittle makes the first coast-to-coast flight across the United States from Florida to California, taking less than 24 hours to complete the journey.
October 28-30, 1922. 30,000 Fascist black-shirted followers of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, march on Rome in a demonstration of Fascist strength. King Victor Emmanuel, fearing a civil war, sends for Mussolini and asks him to take up the office of prime minister. Mussolini is now in a position to take over the Italian government as dictator and supreme leader of Italy. In November, Mussolini will be granted absolute power for the period of one year by the Italian government.
November 1, 1922. The Ottoman Empire is abolished and its last sultan Mehmed VI Vahdettin abdicates. Later in the month, the former sultan leaves for exile in Italy.
November 26, 1922. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in over 3,000 years.
December 30, 1922. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasia come together to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Five year old Jackie Coogan stars with British comedian Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin’s first full length film, The Kid. In September, fans mob Chaplin when he arrives in London on his first visit to his native country in nine years.
Rudolph Valentino becomes the heartthrob of early twenties after his performance in The Sheik, a movie in which Valentino plays the starring role of Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, the romantic interest of English Lady Diana Mayo, played by actress Agnes Ayres. Women who see his silent movies swoon over Valentino, aka “The Latin Lover.”
A popular song of 1921 was My Little Margie, recorded by Eddie Cantor:
Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, is first performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, to a very mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of “Manicomio!” (“Madhouse!”). It’s a play about six characters from a play who appear at a rehearsal after having been abandoned by their author. The Director thinks they are crazy, but he begins to listen to them and even have his actors act out their story because they have such a compelling drama to tell. I read the play many years ago in a modern theater class I took in college, but I have never seen it on stage. Pirandello himself wrote about this play within a play within his mind and yet on stage:
“Why not,†thought I, “represent this unique situation —an author refusing to accept certain characters born of his imagination, while the characters themselves obstinately refuse to be shut out from the world of art, once they have received this gift of life? These characters are already completely detached from me, and living their own lives; they speak and move; and so, in the struggle to live that they have persistently maintained against me they have become dramatic characters, characters who can move and speak of their own initiative. They already see themselves in that light; they have learnt to defend themselves against me; they will learn how to defend themselves against others. So why not let them go where the characters of a play usually go to attain full and complete life—on a stage? Let’s see what will happen then!â€
French writer Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921 “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament.”
Booth Tarkington’s novel Alice Adams was published in 1921 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1922.
The Boston Post won the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for “its exposure of the operations of Charles Ponzi by a series of articles which finally led to his arrest.” And newspapers have been exposing Ponzi schemes ever since–usually after most of the financial damage is done. What Ponzi proved is that you can fool a lot of people for long enough to take in a lot of money, but you had better have an escape plan. Eventually, any scheme in which there is no actual valued product or labor involved will fall apart. Or as Dave Ramsey says, “Something that sounds too good to be true IS too good to be true! It’s very difficult to be conned if you’re not greedy.”
Playing mind games in a play on stage (Pirandello) can be fun, especially since you know it’s fiction. Letting somebody play games with your money isn’t fun, no matter what he promises you.
January, 1921. The Allies from World War I fix German war debts at 132 million gold marks, to be paid out over 42 years. Germany is practically broke and unable to pay, so the German government asks for a postponement of the debt.
February, 1921. Greece defies the League of Nations and declares war on Turkey, invading Anatolia (western Turkey).
February 12, 1921. The Democratic Republic of Georgia is invaded by Bolshevist Russia.
On February 25, the Red Army enters Georgian capital Tbilisi and installs a Moscow-directed communist government. The Russian Communists are expanding their influence and power throughout the region of Eastern Europe.
April 11, 1921. Out of territory taken from the Ottoman Empire, the British create The Emirate of Transjordan, with Abdullah I as emir. The British continue to exercise some control over the region, and a smaller part of the British mandate in Palestine is reserved to fulfill the British promise of a Jewish homeland. More and more Jews are coming to Palestine, especially since the U.S. has tightened its immigration laws to allow very few immigrants from Eastern Europe.
July 11, 1921. The Red Army captures Mongolia from the White Army and establishes the Mongolian People’s Republic. Mongolia will be a close ally of the Soviet Union for the remainder of the twentieth century.
July, 1921. Canadians Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best demonstrate that they can control diabetes in dogs by giving them an extract of insulin from the pancreas of healthy dogs. For this work, Banting and laboratory director MacLeod receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923. Banting and Best make the patent for insulin available without charge and do not attempt to control commercial production.
August, 1921. As a result of drought, disease, and civil war, famine is devastating Russia. Lenin appeals to the international community for aid.
September, 1921. The world’s first racing track/highway, the Avus Autobahn in Berlin, Germany opens exclusively to motor traffic. The racing track, also a public highway, is 19.5 kilometers (12 miles) long.
November, 1921. Benito Mussolini declares himself to be “Il Duce” (the leader) of the National Fascist Party of Italy.
December, 1921. The predominantly Catholic counties of southern Ireland become the independent country, the Irish Free State. Northern Ireland, mostly Protestant but with a significant Catholic minority, remains a part of the United Kingdom (Britain). Neither North nor South is entirely satisfied with the compromise.