Monthly Archives: November 2019

Ten 1919 Illustrators I’m Thankful For

Happy Thanksgiving! Or, as we say in South Africa, “Happy Normal Day When Spouses’ Employers Schedule Evening Work Events!”

So I won’t be celebrating with turkey this year, but I do want to pause to think about some people of 1919 I’m particularly thankful for. Last year, I thanked some of my most admired people from 1918. This year, as the end of the decade rolls around, I’m celebrating the illustrators of the 1910s who made the decade such a visual delight to go back to. You can learn about their lives, or, if you’re too zonked out from overeating, skip the words and feast your eyes on their beautiful art.

Gordon Conway

Gordon Conway, who despite her name was a woman, was born in Texas in 1894, the daughter of wealthy parents. Encouraged in her artistic aspirations by her globetrotting mother, she began her career with Condé Nast at the age of 20. She also designed costumes for film and the stage in New York and in Europe, where she moved in 1920 with her husband. The marriage didn’t last long, but she stayed in London, living with her mother. Conway’s work ethic was legendary, but ill health forced her into early retirement in 1937. She returned to the United States as World War II approached, moved to a family estate in Virginia, and died in 1956.

Here’s how Vanity Fair described her in a contributors column in August 1919:

She is one of the more temperamentally inclined of the younger artistic set; she finds it absolutely impossible to get any real stuff into her sketches unless she is sitting in the midst of her pale lavender boudoir, and wearing a green brocaded robe de chambre lined with dull gold and having a single rose on the shoulder. Miss Conway is justly proud of the fact that she draws entirely by ear—never had a lesson in her life.

Here are two of her covers for the magazine,

here is one that Condé Nast lists as “artist unknown” but sure looks like her,

and here is an illustration that Vanity Fair rejected but was later used as a Red Cross poster:

The “new women” Conway portrayed helped shape an era.

Thank you, Gordon!

Georges Lepape

Georges Lepape, born in 1887 in Paris, was a regular cover artist for Vogue. He lived in France, aside from a brief stint at Condé Nast in New York. He died in 1971.

Here are some of his Vogue covers from 1919,

and here’s one from Vanity Fair.

Merci, Georges!

John Held Jr.

John Held Jr. was born in Salt Lake City in 1889, the son of a British convert to Mormonism. He went to high school with future New Yorker founder Harold Ross, a lifelong friend and associate. Held had just about the best job you could have as a soldier in World War I, supposedly copying hieroglyphics from Mayan ruins in Central America but really drawing maps of the coastline and keeping an eye out for German submarines.*

My family had an anthology of New Yorker cartoons when I was growing up, and Held’s woodcuts used to give me the creeps.** So I was surprised to see that he was the artist behind some of Vanity Fair’s cheeriest covers, like these:

Held would go on to do cover illustrations for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Like a Fitzgerald character, he lived a riotous life, marrying four times, earning a fortune, losing most of it in the 1929 stock market crash, and suffering a nervous breakdown. Fitzgerald notwithstanding, his life did have a second act: he designed the sets for the phenomenally successful 1937 Broadway revue Helzapoppin and served as an artist-in-residence at Harvard. He died in 1958.

Thank you, John!

Frank Walts

Last year, my favorite leftist artist was Hugo Gellert, who did several cover illustrations for The Liberator. I couldn’t find a trace of him in 1919, though. Luckily, the progressive press had another talented illustrator, Frank Walts.

Walts was born in Indiana (like a surprisingly large number of people I’ve come across in 1919***) in 1877. His art appeared frequently on the cover of The Masses, which shut down in 1917 amid legal problems and was succeeded by The Liberator. He drew the January and February 1918 covers for the NAACP magazine The Crisis,

The Crisis cover, January 1918, drawing of African-American woman and daisies

both of which I featured on my blog without paying much attention to Walts because I was new at this and not focused on who drew what.

In 1919, Walts drew the cover illustration for the annual children’s issue of The Crisis in October

as well as the magazine’s July 1919 issue

and the December 1919 issue of The Liberator, which shines in an otherwise mediocre year of Liberator cover art.

Walts, who also worked as a civil engineer, would go on to illustrate many more covers for The Crisis and The Liberator. He died in 1941.

Thank you, Frank!

Helen Dryden

Photograph of illustrator Helen Dryden, 1914.

I wrote about Dryden in my post for Women’s History Month, so you can read about her life there and enjoy more of her Vogue covers here:

Thank you, Helen!

Coles Phillips.

I first noticed Coles Phillips as the artist behind this haunting hosiery ad:

1919 ad for Luxite hosiery. Woman with dress blowing, showing hose, standing with man in wheelchair.

He was born in Ohio in 1880, moved to New York after a few years at Kenyon college, took night classes in art for a few months, and soon established his own advertising agency, because that’s how life worked in 1919, for some people, anyway. Among his employees was the young Edward Hopper. He joined the staff of Life magazine in 1907 and drew his first “fadeaway girl” cover the next year.

He repeated this technique on many subsequent covers of Life and other magazines, including Good Housekeeping, where he was the sole cover artist from 1912 to 1916.

By 1919, though, he was focusing mostly on advertising, and specifically on women’s legs.****

Coles Phillips Luxite Hosiery ad, woman in pink dress in front of stained glass window sticking out leg, 1919.

He contracted tuberculosis in 1924 and died of a kidney ailment in 1927, at the age of 46.

Thank you, Coles!

Eric Rohman

Remember Selma Lagerlöf, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author I wrote about in September? In the course of researching her life, I came across some amazing Swedish posters for silent films, some of them made from her books. Digging around, I discovered that most are the work of the incredibly prolific Eric Rohman.

Rohman was born in Sweden in 1891. He became an actor and illustrator in the mid-1910s and opened an art studio in about 1920, where he designed posters for Swedish and foreign films. By his own estimate, he produced 7000 posters over the course of his career. He died in 1949.

Here are some of my favorites:

Tack, Eric!

George Brandt

House & Garden is one of those 1919-era magazines that consistently punches above its weight in terms of cover art, but in an unassuming way, so it had never occurred to me to ask who the artists behind my favorite covers were.

One of them, I learned, is Henry George Brandt. (The other is Harry Richardson, but there is even less information available about him online than there is about Brandt, so Brandt it is.) Brandt was born in Germany in 1862, immigrated to the United States in 1882, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1911 to 1916. (Yes, in his fifties!) He was a painter and muralist as well as an illustrator. He died in Chicago in 1946.

Here are some of his House & Garden covers:

Thank you, George!

9. Erté

Erté is a repeat–he was one of the people I was thankful for last year. But you can’t talk about illustration in 1919 without talking about him. He was born in Russia in 1894 (real name Romain de Tirtoff–his father wanted him to be a naval officer and he adopted the pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his family*****). He moved to Paris as a young man and began a career as an illustrator and costume designer; Mata Hari was among his clients. Harper’s Bazar hired him in 1915; he would go on to illustrate over 200 covers for the magazine. He later went into theater, designing sets and costumes for ballets, revues, and films. He died in Paris in 1960.

I wasn’t able to find most of Erté’s 1919 Harper’s Bazar covers–they’re missing from Hathitrust, the most reliable source of online magazines, and few and far between on the internet. Here are two I was able to find:

Спасибо (and merci), Erté!

10. Norman Rockwell

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Norman Rockwell. In 1919, his iconic 1943 Thanksgiving picture Freedom from Want was still far in the future, but he did do a Thanksgiving cover for the November 22 issue of Literary Digest:

Rockwell is one of those people I was surprised to come across in the 1910s because he lived well into my lifetime. (Anthologist Louis Untermeyer and poet Marianne Moore are others.) And he was pretty young then, born in New York in 1894. An early bloomer, he became the art editor of Boy’s Life magazine at the age of 19. His first cover for the Saturday Evening Post appeared in May 1916;

322 others were to follow.

The humor magazines Life and Judge published some illustrations apparently deemed not wholesome enough for the Saturday Evening Post, like this one

and this one, which I featured as one of the best magazine covers of February 1918 and which has lived on as by far my most repinned Pinterest pin.

By the time of his death in 1978, Rockwell was one of America’s most beloved artists.

Thank you, Norman!

And last but definitely not least, thanks to all of you who, over the past two years, have turned a personal project into a community. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

(UPDATE 11/30/2019: They had turkey–with cranberry sauce–at the work event. So I had my Thanksgiving dinner after all!)

*Although I wonder how many people were fooled into thinking that copying hieroglyphics was a real soldier job.

**They’re still under copyright, but there are lots of them posted online by less scrupulous people than me.

***Others: author Booth Tarkington, food safety pioneer Harvey Wiley, The Little Review founder Margaret Anderson, and African-American painter William Edouard Scott. Hoosier poet James Witcomb Riley had died in 1916 but still loomed large.

****UPDATE 12/3/2019: I originally included this ad, which I’d seen identified as being from 1919. I had my doubts, because it seemed too risqué for 1919, plus would Phillips really have been working for competing hosiery companies? But I was in a rush so I put it in. Turned out I was right: it’s from 1924.

*****No doubt unaware that it would gain him immortality as a crossword puzzle clue.

Can you beat me at this 1919 intelligence test? Probably!

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My quest to earn a 1919 Girl Scout badge (here and here) got my competitive juices flowing. And what’s more competitive than an intelligence test? I set out to track one down.

Last year, I could only find one intelligence test from 1918. It equated intelligence with vocabulary, because of course familiarity with this

and this

isn’t class-dependent AT ALL. I did pretty well, scoring in the Superior Adult range.*

By 1919, magazines were full of intelligence tests. A test called the Army Alpha had been widely used on American soldiers during the war, and psychologists and business leaders were eager to use ability testing in civilian life. I settled on a bevy of tests in the March 1919 edition of American Magazine.** “Try these tests on yourself and others,” the magazine urges us, although, in my experience, the “others” tend to flee.

Tests like this are, we learn in an accompanying article, completely scientific—it’s possible to give a job applicant or a soldier a set of tests that will accurately predict his job success. (“His” being the operative word. No one’s wasting time testing women’s intelligence.)

In the past, American Magazine tells us, soldiers were sorted into units based on where they lived rather than by skills. So, during the Civil War, all the men from one neighborhood would be assigned to the remount squad (the unit responsible for supplying horses), when it would have made more sense to staff it with people who know something about horses.

U.S. Army poster of remount depot, Fort Reno, Oklahoma, 1908.

Remount Depot, Fort Reno, Oklahoma, 1908 (U.S. Army poster)

When the United States entered World War I, some psychology professors were convinced that there must be a better way. They came up with

three great developments which have been not only factors in victory but will be of enormous importance to business, now that peace is here. They are:

The Qualification Card
The Intelligence Test
The Rating Scale

The Qualification Card is, like it sounds, a card with a soldier’s qualifications listed on it. When the pipes froze at a military base, all of the plumbers in town were out on calls, so

in desperation, the quartermaster telephoned the Personnel office:

“Have you any plumbers on the list?”***
“How many do you need?”
“Forty or fifty.”
“We’ll send you a hundred,” said the Personnel officer. And in less than an hour he had done so.

This scheme makes sense, although I don’t see why it required a team of brainiacs to come up with it.

The Intelligence Test and Rating Scale, are, American Magazine assures us, equally useful.

Take a hundred men in the same line of business, whose incomes vary widely, and give the same tests to all of them. If, generally speaking, it rates them in about the same order in which the judgment of the business world has rated them, then the test is pretty likely to be a good one.

So the test is accurate because people who make more money do better. Logic doesn’t get more airtight than that!

The Tests

On to the tests! They work best on paper, and you can download and print them out from the magazine. (Hit “Download this page (PDF)” in the box to the left of the text.) If you can’t be bothered, you can do most of them by looking at the questions on the screen. The answers, where needed (most are self-evident), are provided below.

TEST 1

TEST 2

TEST 3

TEST 4

(On #14, note that there are two spaces between “beggar” and “money.”)

TEST 5

That’s it! Put down your pencils.

The Answers (and My Results)

TEST 1

The answers are self-evident, but here are my 3’s, x’ed out in pink, in case you missed some:

The first time I took this test, I got 2 minutes, 23 seconds. This is well into the Poor range, which starts at 88 seconds. I took it again and was almost at the 3-minute mark when the phone rang, putting me out of my misery.

I tried to come up with justifications for my sorry performance. The 3’s look so much like 8’s! Especially this one with a line through it (sixth row, fifth column),

which cost me about ten seconds.

Then it occurred to me that the numbers, when printed out on standard printer paper, are way smaller than they would have been in the magazine. I copied them into a Word document, enlarged them, and got 2 minutes, 10 seconds. I put them into landscape mode and stretched them out even bigger. 2 minutes on the dot, still well within the Poor range. I gave up.

This didn’t come as a huge surprise. Rapid visual processing is not my forte. I would, I accepted long ago, be the world’s worst air traffic controller. But there are lots of tests to go!

TEST 2

There are no answers provided, but they should be self-evident—speed is the issue here.

Words are much more my thing, and I did well: 19 seconds, two seconds into the Excellent range. Feeling better!

TEST 3

Again, no answers needed.

I’m better at dealing with numbers when they’re not hiding in a jungle of other numbers. I remembered eight numbers, in the Good range.

TEST 4

American Magazine doesn’t provide answers, but I found the same exam in the April 1926 issue of Popular Science, with answers. Here they are:

Popular Mechanics, April 1926

Add up the number of words you got right for your score. (This isn’t exactly fair, because the 1926 test imposes a four-minute time limit, but, well, life isn’t always fair.)

Here are my answers:

I got 51 out of 69, well above the average score of 36, and bumped it up to a 53 because of confusion about the beggar sentence. But I’ve got some serious issues.

#10, “She ____ if she will,” is the only one that truly stumped me. After considerable thought, I wrote “knows.” I wasn’t thrilled with this, though, because “she knows whether she will” would be better syntax. The actual answer? “She CAN if she will.” Which made no sense to me until I figured out that “will” is being used in the sense of “wants to.” This struck me as archaic even for 1919.

Roderick Hudson, first edition, photo of 3 volumes.

Roderick Hudson, first U.K. edition (peterharrington.co.uk)

A Google search for “she can if she will” comes up with this quotation from Roderick Hudson, an 1875 Henry James novel that I never heard of:

Excerpt from Roderick Hudson by Henry James.

Roderick Hudson, 1917 edition

You see, Roderick, a young, impoverished sculptor studying in Rome, is engaged to Mary back home, but he falls in love with Christina, and Rowland, his patron, is in a quandary because he’s in love with Mary himself but feels obliged to break up the Roderick/Christina liaison because, well, I’m not sure why.

Never mind. My point is, just because someone says something in a Henry James novel doesn’t make it normal.

Then there’s #7, “The poor baby ______ as if it were ________ sick.” I wrote, “The poor baby cried as if it were very sick.” The “correct” answer: “The poor baby looked as if it were real sick.”

REAL sick? That’s just wrong. And, I was convinced, was just as wrong in 1919. Looking for examples of this usage from that era, I found this semi-literate letter, which was, for some reason, entered into the record of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate the Election of William Lorimer in 1912.****

Letter in record of Senate Select Committee to Investigate the Election of William Lorimer, 1912.

Proceedings of Senate Select Committee to Investigate the Election of William Lorimer, 1912

Other answers just seem arbitrary. Like #20, where I say “When one feels drowsy and tired…” and the “correct” answer is “When one feels drowsy and sleepy…” Either way, you’re using a pair of redundant adjectives.

But everyone else is presumably being judged by the same capricious standards, plus I had that time advantage, so I’ll stop quibbling.

TEST 5

There are no official answers, but they’re easy to figure out once you remove the time constraint. Here are mine:

I had fun with this one. It engages your mind and is tricky in the best way. At 101 seconds, I fell into the Good category. Shaving off a couple of seconds for setting and shutting off the timer bumped me up to Excellent.

Except—what’s this?

A horse has HOW MANY feet? What was I thinking? Even given my dubious grasp of animal physiology, I know better than that. I was trying to go too fast, that’s my problem. I could argue that it says fill in a number, not the correct number, but that’s grasping at straws.

The quiz doesn’t say how to score yourself if you get something wrong, but this is a definite fail.

So, bottom line:
TEST 1 – Poor.
TEST 2 – Excellent.
TEST 3 – Good.
TEST 4 – No categories, but I say Good.
TEST 5 – Poor.

There’s no overall scoring system, but if you scale Poor at 1, Fair at 2, Good at 3, and Excellent at 4, I average out at exactly 2. You can’t get more mediocre than that.

So What Does it All Mean?

To buck myself up, I turned to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 1919-1921. Maybe I could, among the dozens of articles on intelligence tests, find one saying that they’re a bunch of nonsense.

And I did!

To wit, an article in the May 10, 1919, Literary Digest called “Flaws in ‘Intelligence Tests,’” excerpted from Engineering and Contracting magazine. Halbert P. Gillette, the magazine’s editor, says that

an engineer, being trained to use mathematics, knows that before he can calculate the combined effect of different energies, he must reduce them to a common unit. He knows that one hundred horse-power plus ten British thermal units per second does not make 100 units of any kind whatsoever. Yet the same engineer will probably read, without criticism, an article in which a military officer is ‘rated’ thus:
            Physical qualities…………….……….9
            Intelligence……………………….……..12
            Leadership…………………………….…15
            Personal qualities……….…….…….9
            General value to the service….24
                                                              —–
           Total rating in scale of 100      69

Comparing men (them again!) by “adding” up their different qualities, Gillette concludes, is nonsense.

Some such calculation of the relative number of mental units in ‘character’ and in ‘knowledge’ may possibly be made by psychologists a century hence, but not until that is accomplished will it be rational to rate ‘character’ at twenty-four and ‘knowledge’ at fifteen. Any such rating is nonsense.

Halbert Gillette pointing to globe, Popular Science, 1930.

Halbert Gillette, Popular Science, 1930

These five tests are all about intelligence, but they measure very different types of mental ability. So maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe I should let the people who excel at finding 3’s be air traffic controllers***** and content myself with doing things that people who excel at shouting out antonyms are good at, like writing blogs about 100 years ago.

Plus, I reassured myself, there’s still my Superior Adult rating on last year’s vocabulary-based intelligence test.

Literary Digest, February 16, 1918

Except that Gillette pooh-poohs that test as well. “It is claimed to give results approximating those obtained by applying the Binet-Simon psychological tests,” he says. (IQ tests, that is.) “But if the Binet-Simon tests are not satisfactory, the vocabulary tests cannot be more so.”

Oh, right. Good point.

Gillette is worried about Columbia University’s plan to use ability tests, rather than tests of general knowledge, as entrance exams. “To put it mildly, this is a radical experiment,” he says.

Postcard of Columbia University library, 1917.

Columbia University library, 1917 (librarypostcards.blogspot.com)

Gillette seems like a sensible guy. He might be disappointed that, in the “century hence” he ponders, we haven’t developed more accurate measures of intelligence. And he’d no doubt be appalled that we use standardized tests that correlate highly with wealth as a gateway to higher education—although now it’s your parents’ money, not yours, that counts.******

Still, I’ll never be able to resist an intelligence test. As I mentioned, there are lots more out there. Next time, I swear, I’ll know how many feet a horse has.

In the meantime, let me know if you have better luck than I did tracking down those pesky 3’s!

*Apparently there are lots of other test-taking fans out there—this ended up being my most popular post of 2018.

**American Magazine has an interesting history. It rose from the ashes of several failed magazines in the Leslie empire in 1906 and became the home of muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. By 1919, it was a general interest magazine. It folded in 1956.

Ida Tarbell (Pelletier Library, Allegheny College)

***I’ve often wondered whether people actually talked in this inverted way or if it’s just a journalistic/literary convention.

****Lorimer, a Chicago politician known as the “Blond Boss,” was eventually booted out of the Senate for vote-buying in the state legislature. This was right before the ratification in 1913 of the Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for election of senators by the popular vote, making it more expensive, though still possible, to buy elections. A lot of people in Chicago thought that Lorimer’s ouster was politically inspired, and there was a parade for him on his return.

William Lorimer, ca. 1921

*****Which wasn’t a job in 1919 but would become one in 1920, when Croyden Airport in London pioneered commercial air traffic control.

Croydon Airport, 1925, control tower at left (airportofcroydon.com)

******Less so than in the past, though. More and more colleges are making standardized tests optional for undergraduate admissions. Princeton, my graduate alma mater, recently announced that 14 of its departments will, in the interest of diversity, no longer require the Graduate Record Exam.

My Quest to Earn a 1919 Girl Scout Badge, Part 2

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Part 1 of my quest to earn a Girl Scout badge from a hundred years ago did not go well. In a world of runaway horses and ornithopters and captain ball matches, I was a washout.

While I was catching my breath after this dispiriting exercise, I read more of the 1916 edition of How Girls Can Help Their Country, the Girl Scout handbook of the time.

I learned, among other things, that

in Europe, Girl Scout Patrols are sometimes formed by grown women who wish to carry out the Girl Scout program of preparedness. Members of such Patrols are called Senior Scouts.*

So I’m a legit Girl Scout! And you all are my patrol. Senior Girl Scouts don’t have regular meetings, so we can dispense with rules like this one:

How Girls Can Help Their Country

And I thought taking away the Cyclist badge if you ceased to own a bicycle was harsh!

All right, on to the next 18 badges.

PERSONAL HEALTH

I nailed a few of the requirements, like

#3. Walk a mile a day for three months

Mary Grace McGeehan walking at Gamla Uppsala, Sweden, 1916.

Me, Gamla Uppsala, Sweden, 2016

and

#5. Take a bath daily for a year, or sponge bath.

Williams' talc powder ad, woman sitting by tub with maid, 1919.

Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1919.

(Well, a shower.)

Unfortunately, there’s also

#1. Eat no sweets, candy, or cake between meals for three months

and

#2. Drink nothing but water, chocolate, or cocoa for a year.

I love cocoa at least as much as the next person,

but I doubt it would be good for my personal health, and it definitely wouldn’t be good for my diet, to swap it for my morning tea. Besides, a year? I’m on a timeline, people!

FAIL.

PUBLIC HEALTH

For this badge, they make you write a 500-word essay about the country-wide campaign against the housefly, and that’s just the beginning. It’s too tedious for words. But I pledged that in this round I would try to fulfill at least one requirement for each badge, so for this one I decided on

#6. Tell how her community cares for its garbage.

The City of Cape Town’s solid waste management department turns out to have a lot of interesting information online. Here is a map of the waste disposal infrastructure

Map of Cape Town waste disposal infrastructure.

iwmsa.co.za

and here is a photo of one of the landfills, which could be titled “Cape Town: Where Even the City Dump is Photogenic.”

Photograph of Cape Town landfill site with Table Mountain in the background.

iwmsa.co.za

So I’ve learned where my trash goes, which is a good thing to know, but

FAIL.

HORSEMANSHIP

#1. Demonstrating riding at a walk, trot and gallop.

I have no horse, so this is not to be. But I can do this:

#6. State lighting up time, city law.

South Africa requires drivers to drive with headlights on between sunset and sunrise and when visibility is less than 150 meters.

FAIL.

HOME-NURSING

#1. Must pass test recommended by First Aid Department of the American Red Cross. These tests may be had from Headquarters, upon request.

Yeah, if you pay thirty bucks!

#4. Know how to prepare six dishes of food suitable to give an invalid (p. 114).

I had already thrown up my hands on this when I was doing the Invalid Cooking badge, but out of curiosity I turned to page 114, where there’s a recipe for kumyss.**

Recipe for kumyss (sour milk) in Girl Scout book, 1916.

How Girls Can Help Their Country

Which, it occurred to me, is basically the same thing as amasi, a sour milk drink popular among African people in South Africa. Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom that, when he was hiding out in a safehouse in a whites-only area in Johannesburg before his arrest, he used to make amasi and leave it on the windowsill to ferment. One day, he heard two men talking outside in Zulu. “What is ‘our milk’ doing on that window ledge?” one of them asked the other. He moved to another safe house the next day.

If I ever have to serve amasi to an invalid, though, I’ll just buy it at the store.

Pick ‘n Pay

I’ve got this one, though:

#3. Know how to take temperature; how to count pulse and respirations.

FAIL.

HOUSEKEEPER

#2. Know how to use a vacuum cleaner, how to stain and polish hardwood floors, how to clean wire window screens, how to put away furs and flannels, how to clean glass, kitchen utensils, brass, and silverware.

I have no idea how to put away furs or stain hardwood floors. And I’m starting to suspect that the authors of How Girls Can Help Their Country are just out to get free child labor. I do know how to polish silver, though. With toothpaste! It’s super-easy.

Before:

After:

(Not the greatest photographs, but look closely at the tines.)

#4. Tell how to choose furniture.

I’d just go to the furniture store and say, “Make my house look like this!”

Bozart Rugs ad, 1918, bedroom with colorful rug and furnishings.

Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1918

So I have clean silver, but

FAIL.

INTERPRETER

Over the course of my Foreign Service career, I was certified as proficient in five languages: Spanish, French, Afrikaans, Khmer (Cambodian), and Lao. So I was excited to see that there was an Interpreter badge.

Mary Grace McGeehan at Angkor Wat, 1996.

Me, Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 1996

Excited, but not cocky. After failing to earn the Civics badge despite having majored in government in college, I take nothing for granted.

#1. Be able to carry on a simple conversation in any other language than their own.

Here I am speaking Khmer:

Translation: “Hello, my name is Mary Grace. I’m American, but I live in South Africa. I used to live in Cambodia. Good-bye!”

Check!

#2. Write a letter in a foreign language.

A few years ago I took (and passed) the French government’s official language test for foreign language speakers at the Intermediate 1 and Intermediate 2 levels. For the Intermediate 1 test, we had to write a letter. I got a 22/25 on that section.

Check!

#3. Read or translate a passage from a book or newspaper in French, German, Italian, or in any other language than her own.

The second volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time, as the young folks call it) was published in 1919. In a fit of linguistic ambition, I bought a copy in French a while back.

Here’s my translation of the first page. (Summary: Whom should Marcel’s parents invite to dinner with M. de Norpois? There’s the unquestionably distinguished Professor Cottard, but he’s away. And Swann, but he’s a name-dropping upstart. Although some would argue that it’s the other way around. Added complication: Swann’s social stock has tanked since–SWANN’S WAY SPOILER ALERT–he married Odette.) I only got stuck once, on the word “esbroufeur,” which turns out to mean something along the lines of “twit” or “self-promoter.”

Check!

SUCCESS.

Well, that was anticlimactic. Let’s try it again, in library hand.

I could stop right here, proud to have finally earned a badge, but that wouldn’t be in the Girl Scout spirit. Plus, I always found it kind of sad when girls would wear vests with just a single badge. Onward!

LAUNDRESS

#2. Press a skirt and coat.

“What is a skirt and coat?” was my first question. I know what they are separately, of course, but together? Fashion blogger Vintage Dancer helpfully explains that, ca. 1918, matching skirts and coats were sold together, like these:

Simpson’s Catalogue, 1918

I don’t have one of those, but I do have this beautiful Lao outfit that has been wadded up in my dry cleaning/ironing bag for several years.

Before:

After:

Check!

#3. Know how to use soap and starch, how to soften hard water, and how to use a wringer or mangle.

FAIL.

MARKSMANSHIP

#2. Know how to load pistol, how to fire and aim or use it.

Let’s just skip this one, okay?

MUSIC

By the time I was a Girl Scout, I’d given up my ambition to be an artist and shifted my interest to music. I took piano lessons, then guitar lessons. I learned to play the recorder on my own and would sit in my room tootling for hours. In eleventh grade or so, it dawned on me that I had no musical talent whatsoever, and I gave it all up.

Until now, that is.

There are three alternative paths to earning the Music badge: playing a musical instrument, singing, and bugle calls. I decided to dust off my recorder.

#1. Know how to play a musical instrument. Be able to do sight reading. Have a knowledge of note signs or terms.

The first challenge was to FIND my recorder, last seen in an immense pile of junk. Which I failed at, but a relative turned out to have one, luckily for you all because otherwise you would have had to hear me try to sing.

How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree) sheet music, 1919.

Library of Congress

I downloaded and printed the sheet music for that quintessentially 1919 song, “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”. Not having sight-read in three decades or so, I approached the task with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I sat down, stood the music in front of me, and…

It was all blurry! Sigh. I went to get my reading glasses.

When I started playing, it was as if no time had gone by. I was sixteen all over again, playing in my room instead of doing my trigonometry homework. After a few runthroughs, I was able to produce this rendition:

My eleventh-grade assessment of my talent was not wrong. I am not Frank Hudson, nor was meant to be.*** But the requirement says nothing about playing a musical instrument well.****

Check!

#2. Name two master composers and two of their greatest works.

Beethoven: Fifth Sympony and Ninth Symphony.
Mozart: Così Fan Tutte and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Check!

#3. Be able to name all of the instruments in the orchestra in their proper order.

Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1920 (csoarchives.wordpress.com)

There’s an order? What for? With a little digging, I found a guy on Quora who explains that there’s a set order in which instruments appear on a musical score, which goes like this.

Flute
Oboe
Clarinet
Bassoon
Horns
Trumpets
Trombones
Tuba
Timpani
Percussion
Harp and/or Keyboards
Soloists or Choir
Violin I
Violin II
Viola
Cello
Contrabass

After idly wondering for a few minutes how often 1919 Girl Scouts were called upon to score a symphony, I got down to business and memorized the list. It wasn’t too hard once I broke it down into reeds, woodwinds, percussion/vocal, and strings.

And now for the absolute, no question, best Girl Scout badge requirement of all time:

#4. Never play rag time music, except for dancing.

Check!

NATURALIST

#1. Make a collection of sixty species of wild flowers, ferns and grasses, and correctly name them.

Or,

Colored drawings of wild flowers, ferns, or grasses drawn by herself.

Like everyone else, probably, I went for the second option. Here are my drawings of wild flowers in Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch Nature Reserve. (Well, of photos of them on the internet.) Criticial reaction: “Definitely better than the dog.”

#2. Twelve sketches or photographs of animal life.

Speaking of the dog, I think we can all agree that photography is my best bet here. The neighborhood cats and dogs kept running away before I could unlock my phone to take their pictures, though, and all I had after several outings was this photo of a pigeon:

I was starting to worry that the neighbors would think I was crazy, so I decided to waive my policy of not giving myself credit for past work.

Kruger Park, South Africa, 2009

Kunene region, Namibia, 2013

Boulders Beach, Cape Town, 2018

Two in a row! I’m on a roll!

NEEDLEWOMAN

#1. Know how to cut and fit. How to sew by hand and by machine.

#3. Bring two garments cut out by herself; sew on hooks and eyes and buttons. Make a button-hole.

Longtime readers may remember the dress that I presented as evidence that Seamstress should not be my 1918 Girl Job:

Mary Grace McGeehan in homemade dress, 1983.

Me, 1983

I don’t think any more cotton needs to die to underscore this point.

#2. Know how to knit, embroider, or crochet.

I do know how to knit! I learned at the Girls’ Club, which I belonged to at the same time that I was in Girl Scouts.***** Here I am wearing a shawl that I knitted myself:

Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2012

#3. Produce satisfactory examples of darning and patching.

“Satisfactory” is pushing it. I think I’ll skip the patching. Luckily, we have Witness 2 Fashion to fill the seamstress/historian niche.

FAIL.

PATHFINDER

#2. Know how to use the fire alarm.

Why is this in the Pathfinder badge, I wondered. It turns out that if there was a fire a hundred years ago you ran down the street to an emergency call box that worked by telegraphy.

Photograph of policeman at call box, Washington, D.C., 1910s.

Police call box at corner of D St. and 13½ St. NW, Washington DC, 1912 (Library of Congress)

In modern-day South Africa, you contact the fire department by calling the emergency number, which for cell phones is—and I’m ashamed to say I did not know this—112.

Check!

#4. Know the distance to four neighboring towns and how to get to these towns.

Google Maps

Stellenbosch: 45 km via the N2 and R310.
Hermanus: 115 km via the N2 and R43.
Paarl: 60 km via the N1.
Worcester: 115 km via the N1.

Check!

#5. Draw a map of the neighborhood with roads leading to cities and towns.

I drew a very nice map, but you’ll have to take my word for it. I know you’re not a robber, but putting a map to my house on the internet is a recipe for getting my bike stolen.

A solid performance, but sadly there’s also

#1. Know the topography of the city, all the public buildings, public schools, and monuments.

Seriously, Girl Scouts? Even taking into account the growth of cities in the past hundred years, you’re stretching the limits of the human capacity to memorize. Here is a list of the high schools in ONE of Cape Town’s districts:

Wikipedia

I did visit a monument for this blog, though: the Cape Town Cenotaph, memorializing soldiers who died in World War I, on the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice.

FAIL.

PIONEER

This one only has two requirements.

#1. Tie six knots.

I skipped over the knots in the Boatswain badge, but here they are, back to haunt me. Girl Scouting is all about knots—leaders are even advised to have a knot-tying session during their troop’s first meeting—so I should get on this.

Here are the knots in How Girls Can Help Their Country

and here are my knots:

Check!

#2. Build a shack suitable for three occupants.

What?

FAIL.

PHOTOGRAPHY

(The badge isn’t illustrated, but they tell us it’s a camera.)

1919 Kodak ad, girls looking at photo album.

Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1919 (Hathitrust)

#1. Know use of lens, construction of camera, effect of light on sensitive films and the action of developers.

#2. Be able to show knowledge of several printing processes.

#3. Produce 12 photos of scout activities, half indoor and half outdoors, taken, developed, and printed by herself, also 3 pictures of either birds, animals, or fish in their natural haunts (3 portraits and 3 landscapes).

I could quibble with the confusing math in #3, or I could reuse my animal photos from the Naturalist badge, admit defeat on the rest of the requirements, and declare myself done here.

FAIL.

SCRIBE

A literary badge! And me with a master’s degree in creative writing! I’ll skip the journalism option, which involves a lot of tedious memorizing and the writing of 12 news articles, and go straight to the creative one.

#3. Write a good story.

Good timing! I just had my first post-MFA publication, a short story in this anthology:

Check!

#2. Write a good poem.

A poem, maybe. A good poem? Not going to happen.

FAIL.

SIGNALING

#1. Send and receive a message in two of the following systems of signaling: Semaphore, Morse. Not fewer than twenty-four letters a minute.

#2. Receive signals by sound, whistle, bugle or buzzer.

I think I’ll stick with WhatsApp.

FAIL.

SWIMMER

#1. Swim fifty yards in clothes, skirt and boots.

Again with the swimming in clothes! Can’t these people just wear life preservers? And I’m not going to put someone’s life at risk so I can check off

#6. Saving the drowning.

FAIL.

TELEGRAPHY.

#1. Be able to read and send a message in Morse and in Continental Code, twenty letters per minute, or must obtain a certificate for wireless telegraphy. (These certificates are awarded by Government instructors.)

I think they’re starting to run out of ideas–this is an awful lot like the Signalling badge. And we have to learn Morse Code AND Continental Code? As nice as it would have been to go out on a high note,

FAIL.

But I’ve earned three badges, a huge improvement over my previous score of zero. I’m an interpreter, a musician, and a naturalist!

I’ve done some things I’ve been putting off doing for ages: mending my shirt, polishing the silver, and ironing my Lao outfit. I know what number to dial in an emergency and where my garbage goes. And I’ve opened my mind to a huge array of new (or newly rediscovered) activities. I’ve drawn flowers, played a song, and translated Proust.

Being an adult is way better than being a kid in most ways. There’s a satisfaction that comes with having reached a high level of skill in your professional specialty or personal area of interest. You have autonomy. And no one natters away at you anymore about keeping yourself pure.****** But one thing we lose is that endless sense of possibility. Kids play the recorder and tie knots and draw pictures of flowers because it’s fun and, who knows, it might lead to something someday. Or might not. That’s okay too. Why worry about the future when there’s a whole afternoon to while away?

This has been my most enjoyable My Year in 1918 project yet, and I say that as someone who had a LOT of fun taking a 1918 IQ test and searching for 1918 love and going on a 1918 diet. Now that I’ve finished earning badges, I’ll try to hold on to some of that that Girl Scout spirit in my day-to-day life.

Finished earning badges for now, that is. There’s an all-new 1920 handbook, full of new badges, to look forward to next year!

In the meantime, I promise never, ever to play rag time music, except for dancing.

*As opposed to this ca. 1963 Senior Girl Scout in a spiffy stewardess-like uniform. Seniors were in the upper grades of high school in those days. In theory, anyway—I never met anyone who stuck it out that long. I quit in seventh grade, a few months into Cadettes, because we spent all our time brainstorming about what we were going to do as opposed to actually doing anything. Besides, no one wore uniforms and badges were suddenly uncool, so what was the point?

Junior Girl Scout Handbook, 1963

**Along with the wackiest omelet-making method ever:

Text from 1916 Girl Scout handbook about someone dropping eggs on the floor when making omelets but still using them.

How Girls Can Help Their Country

***Blogger in-joke.

****For a more competent rendition of this song, here’s Arthur Fields singing it in 1919, with lots of cool pictures:

*****Don’t worry, How Girls Can Help Their Country assures us that Girl Scouts are allowed to belong to other organizations.

******Girl Scout Law #6.

My Life 100 Years Ago

A journey back in time

Monthly Archives: November 2019

Ten 1919 Illustrators I’m Thankful For

Can you beat me at this 1919 intelligence test? Probably!

My Quest to Earn a 1919 Girl Scout Badge, Part 2