Author Archives: Mary Grace McGeehan

About Mary Grace McGeehan

An American in Cape Town. Reading about the world of a century ago, blogging at My Life 100 Years Ago.

The Top 10 Posts of 1921

Children’s Books: Your 1921 Holiday Shopping Guide

Immersing myself in the children’s books of a hundred years ago has become one of my favorite holiday traditions, and it’s one that I especially appreciate during a season when many of our more extroverted traditions have to be set aside.

For my third annual children’s books holiday shopping guide (the previous ones are here and here), I turned first, as always, to pioneering children’s librarian and The Bookman columnist Annie Carroll Moore.

Who totally let me down. Her November 1921 holiday roundup starts out as a foray into incomprehensible whimsicality that seems to have something to do with an imaginary trip to France and England. Example: “Put a paper cover on John Farrar’s ‘Songs for Parents’ and paste up the title-page until you get to ‘Fairy London,’ then ask Rose Fyleman to give new titles to some of its enchanting verses and to the book itself while she autographs your last year’s copy of her ‘Fairies and Chimneys.’”

“What?” I asked in utter bafflement, and I’m someone who has actually read (some of) Fairies and Chimneys, which I recommended in last year’s holiday shopping guide.*

Moore, it transpires, actually made a trip to Europe. “I came back too late to do full justice to our own output of children’s books,” she tells us blithely, before rushing through the entire American national output, much of which she has not had time to read, on the last page. YOU HAD ONE JOB, ANNIE!**

Luckily, I had other help. Publishers Weekly’s November 5 Christmas Bookshelf issue included an encyclopedic children’s book roundup, penned by an uncredited writer whose task of reading through dozens of children’s books had left him (or her, but it sounds like a him) entertainingly grumpy.*** The Survey magazine, which was published by the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York but is way more interesting than that makes it sound, ran an article called “The Season’s Books for Children” that includes some charity-ish selections like “a group of health rhymes and jingles written by the children of Public School Fifteen in New York,” but others that looked promising. One, which wasn’t reviewed anywhere else, turned out to be my Children’s Book of the Year. I recommend that you check it out if you’re otherwise just scrolling through and looking at the artwork (which is fine! You’re a busy person!).

Also, the Newbery Medal for excellence in children’s literature was first awarded in 1922 for books published in 1921. There were some runners-up as well (later designated as Newbery Honor Books), so that provided several good candidates.****

Without further ado, here are the books of the season.

Fables, Folk Tales, and Songs

An Argosy of Fables

Moore says that “Paul Bransom’s fine illustrations for ‘The Argosy of Fables,’***** selected by Frederic Taber Cooper, bespeak special consideration for this book, which is to be issued in two editions, both too expensive for most libraries I fear.” I fear too! When I saw the price–$7.50—in the Publishers Weekly roundup, I thought that it must be a typo. That’s $116.46 in today’s money.

The illustrations are fine indeed, but there are only 23 of them in the 500-page book, way too low a ratio of pictures to text to be worth plowing through prose like “The mouse besought him to spare one who had so unconsciously offended.”

Cantilene Popolari and Grilli Canterini

Moore devotes a huge amount of real estate in her column to Cantilene Popolari and Grilli Canterini, two books of children’s songs published in Italy. She says of Grilli Canterini that “the pictures are so full of the detail children love as to tell their own story to children of any race.”

These books may not be quite the thing, though, for children who (unlike me) have not been studying Italian. Also, the dedication in Cantilene Populari to the “future defenders of the rights and honor of our nation,” which Moore finds “refreshing,” is chilling in retrospect.

American Indian Fairy Tales

Publishers Weekly calls American Indian Fairy Tales “enchanting,” and John Rae’s illustrations are lovely, but I’m leery of a book that depends on the research of an “ethnologist and government agent” from 1837, as this one does.

For Young Readers

Orphant Annie Story Book

Orphant Annie Story Book, written and illustrated by Johnny Gruell of Raggedy Ann and Andy fame, purports to be a collection of stories told by Little Orphant Annie, the household servant of the James Whitcomb Riley poem (and inspiration for the later cartoon character). Books featuring color pictures on every page hadn’t been introduced yet in 1921, but this one comes as close as any I’ve seen, so, even though the goblin illustrations freak me out, this is going on my list.

Bubble Books

Bubble Books are slender books that come with records. There are fourteen so far, Publishers Weekly tells us, with two new ones out for the 1921 holiday season. Cooooooool! “The happy owner of the ‘Chimney Corner Bubble Book’ may snuggle up on a rug, close to the warm fire, and listen to the howling of the winter wind as the phonograph plays ‘The North Wind Doth Blow,’” PW says. Throw in some cocoa and some snow and you have my ideal life. The Child’s Garden of Verses Bubble Book sounds cool, too, as does the cut-out Bubble Book that you can find on this website devoted to all things Bubble Book.

For Middle-Grade Readers

Midsummer

Katharine Adams’ Midsummer, which Moore called “a girl’s book of great charm,” seemed promising. It’s about two American children who visit Sweden, where I’ve spent a lot of time but, thanks to COVID and work, not lately. And it was a timely read, seeing that it was the summer solstice here in South Africa. But Midsummer started slowly, and also there was this,

so I was about to give up. But when a new day dawned (at 5:32, but luckily I slept later than that), I decided to give it another try. I figured that the sun might have been making me, like Audrey, our heroine, a little cranky. I skipped ahead to the chapter about the midsummer festival, and there were pancakes with strawberry jam, and slabs of sticky gingerbread, and a merry-go-round, and folk dancing, and a bonfire, and “Astrid wore her new pink and white dress and there were wide pink ribbons on her stiff little braids.” Also Swedish kids who think it would be much more exciting to visit Coney Island. I’m glad I gave it another try.

Modern Physiology, Hygiene, and Health

Survey magazine isn’t suggesting Mary S. Haviland’s Modern Physiology, Hygiene, and Health as a gift for a child; it’s more of a resource for teachers. I found it strangely compelling, though. First I checked out whether I was following the eleven steps to be a Modern Health Crusader.

I washed my hands before every meal to-day. Check!
I washed not only my face but my ears and neck and I cleaned my finger-nails today. Check! (Well, my finger-nails were already clean.)
I kept fingers, pencils, and everything likely to be unclean or injurious out of my mouth and nose. Check!

I was on a roll!

From Modern Physiology, Hygiene, and Health

I failed a few of the later steps, though, like being in bed for at least ten hours with the windows open, drinking no tea, coffee, or other injurious drinks, and trying to sit up straight. (I am slouching on the sofa with my laptop as I write this.) And I wasn’t sure what to make of “I went to the toilet at my regular time.”

Margaret F. Brown, from Modern Physiology, Hygiene, and Health

Most of the rest of the book consists of Ruth and Paul talking to Uncle George in great detail about what should be in your house. There’s a lot of sensible talk about the need for fresh air, and some fun activities like picking out furniture for your living room from pictures in a magazine.

Still, as much as I, personally, might find Modern Physiology, Hygiene, and Health a delightful gift, it’s the book equivalent of giving a kid socks for Christmas. Even though it’s a bargain at eighty-three cents, I’m going to have to give it a pass.

Games—School, Church, Home

Survey magazine says that George O. Draper’s Games—School, Church, Home is “a convenient volume for the play director,” but, unlike Modern Physiology, I think it would be an excellent gift for children as well. They can play some of the games on their own, like Fox Den, which involves chasing each other around this diagram marked on the ground or in the snow,

and they can devoutly wish that they went to the kind of school where complete chaos reigns and games like Seat Vaulting Tag are played.

For Older Children

The Story of Mankind

Last year, I was startled by Hendrik van Loon’s contemporary-looking illustrations in his 1920 book Ancient Man, and I found the narrative interesting, if dated.

Ancient Man by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 1920, pyramids on yellow background. — Hendrik van Loon, from Ancient Man

So I had high expectations for Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, which was awarded the first-ever Newbery Medal in 1922.****** The illustrations were less bold and less numerous than those in Ancient Man, though, and, despite Van Loon’s claim that “this is a story of mankind and not an exclusive history of the people of Europe and our western hemisphere,” the vast majority of the book’s 465 pages are devoted to Europe and the United States.

Hendrik van Loon, from The Story of Mankind

Still, I kept coming across interesting facts as I flipped through the book, like that “Jesus” is a Greek rendition of the name that we know in English as Joshua, which is one of those things that everyone else probably knows but I didn’t. And, while I’m sure careful perusal would reveal some howlers, Van Loon’s treatment of non-Europeans is respectful by the standards of the day. Plus, no one can accuse Van Loon of dumbing down history for children. Here’s a sample:

If I ever decide to learn, for example, who exactly the Phoenicians were, I may turn to Van Loon. So might your favorite teenager, if he/she is of an intellectual bent.

The Old Tobacco Shop

Moore assures us that William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop “will give pure joy to boys and their fathers,” and it was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal. All of this did little to inspire my confidence in what I feared would be a heartwarming story about a boy’s coming of age as a smoker. The book’s opening—a father sends his little son, Freddie, out to buy tobacco for his pipe—didn’t help.

The Old Tobacco Shop turned out, far more weirdly, to be a trippy tale of why preschoolers shouldn’t smoke opium. Freddie disobeys the tobacconist’s warning never to smoke the “magic tobacco” stored in a pipe shaped like a Chinaman’s head, and tediously surreal adventures ensue. For anyone who’s on the fence as to whether to leave their head shop in the hands of a small boy, this is an instructive read. Everyone else can take a pass.

The Windy Hill

Another Newbery runner-up, Cornelia Meigs’ The Windy Hill is the story of a brother and sister who go to the country to stay with their uncle. He’s acting mysteriously, and they try to get to the bottom of it.

And presumably succeed, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I wasted an hour two years ago on Meigs’ The Pool of Stars, about a girl who goes to the country and tries to figure out why her neighbor is acting mysteriously, and I’m not going to make that mistake again.

The Scottish Chiefs

The period of 1890 to the 1920s is referred to as the golden age of illustration. No one has ever accused it of being the golden age of children’s literature, though,******* so there were a lot of reissues of classic books with new illustrations. One of them Moore mentions is Jane Porter’s 1810 book The Scottish Chiefs, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. I checked it out and it turned out to be a rip-roaring tale of Scottish nationalism, although not rip-roaring enough for me to commit to reading all 503 pages. (The Scottish Chiefs, like many books that make their way into the childhood cannon, was intended originally for adult readers.) There were a lot of “thees” and “thys” for a story that starts out in Scotland in 1296, and sentences like, “I come in the name of all ye hold dear to tell you the poniard of England is unsheathed!” But there are also strong women characters, and an Elizabeth and Darcy-like marriage between our hero, William Wallace, and his wife Marion: “Affection had grown with their growth; and sympathy of taste and virtues, and mutual tenderness, had made them entirely one.” And the Wyeth illustrations are wonderful and numerous.

More Newbery Runners-Up

Bernard Marshall, from Cedric the Forrester

If you don’t want your kid to grow up with a one-sided view of 13^th-century English-Scottish tensions, you can add Newbery runner-up Cedric the Forester, Bernard Marshall’s tale of an English nobleman and his squire in the days of Richard the Lionheart, to your gift list. Moore says that Cedric the Forester “is written in somewhat stilted style, but the idea of freedom is admirably brought out.” Apparently forgetting that she had just reviewed The Scottish Chiefs, she adds that “the historical period represented is one for which little story writing has been done.” Perusal of the first few pages includes the inevitable faux-Shakespearean dialogue and someone saying “gadzooks.” But there are also several aperçus by our narrator, Dickon (Cedric is the squire), like “My father laughed as one laughs at the sorriest jest when he is gay,” that left me inclined to follow him on his adventures.

Willy Pogany, from The Golden Fleece and the Story of the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles

Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Story of the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles sounded promising, seeing as it was illustrated by acclaimed artist Willy Pogany, but the illustrations are in black and white and the stories are flatly told, so I passed.

Charles Boardman Hawes’ The Great Quest is about a Massachusetts lad’s adventures fighting against slave traders in Africa. I figured that, despite the anti-slavery message, any 1921 book on this subject was going to be super-problematic. It was.

A Princeton Boy Under the King

“If Princeton is hovering in the background of your boy’s day dreams,” Publishers Weekly tells us, “he will want to read a story of student life at the College of New Jersey in the middle of the eighteenth century.”******* The history of my graduate alma mater is an interest of mine, so A Princeton Boy Under the King sounded like just the thing. I gathered from my own reading that the university’s early years consisted mostly of drunkenness and food fights in Nassau Hall, and I wondered whether A Princeton Boy Under the King would present a sanitized version. But no, that’s pretty much what goes down. It’s like an 18th-century This Side of Paradise.

The Children’s Book of the Year

Last year, I couldn’t find any books about people of color at all, so I recommended the magazine The Brownies’ Book, from the publisher of The Crisis magazine, which was described as being “designed for all children, but especially ours.” (I wrote about The Brownies’ Book in more detail during Black History Month this year.) Sadly, the magazine failed to meet its circulation goals and the December 1921 issue was the last of its two-year run.

Elizabeth Ross Haynes (photographer unknown)

As I learned in the Survey article, there’s a silver lining. “What is there in the autumn output to open up to the boy or girl any of the avenues of civic life; any of the nationalities with which we have been brought into greater contact since the war; of the Negroes, neighbors of the children of the South…?” the magazine asks. (Since almost no one else was asking this kind of question, I’ll skip over the “neighbors” issue.) The magazine points us in the direction of Unsung Heroes, by Elizabeth Ross Haynes, an African-American social worker, which was also published by The Crisis’ publishing company.

Each of the book’s seventeen chapters is a portrait of a notable person of African ancestry from the United States or elsewhere, including Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Haitian general Toussaint Louverture, Alexandre Dumas, and Alexander Pushkin. (I knew that Dumas was of partly African descent, but I didn’t know about Pushkin.)

The profiles in Unsung Heroes start out, like the children’s biographies of my youth, with fictional scenes from the subjects’ childhoods and go on to recount their later achievements. Some of the language wouldn’t make it into a book published today (“Many years ago a keen-faced little boy with protruding lips, Toussaint by name, was busy, day by day, tending a great herd of cattle on the Island of Hayti in the West Indies”), but I don’t care. The stories are compelling, and the fact that this book was written and published at all in 1921 is a small miracle.

Judging from Goodreads (0 ratings, 0 reviews) and Google Scholar (one hit, for a 1990 article on the history of African-American children’s literature that I had already read for my post on the children’s novel Hazel), Unsung Heroes is little remembered today. Haynes is my new unsung hero, and Unsung Heroes is my choice for Best Children’s Book of 1921.

Some Final Thoughts

Moore complains in The Bookman that “in robbing fairy tales of all their terrors and poetry of all its sadness, we have let loose a new sort of made-to-order story, which needs the cleansing wind, wide spaces, and hearty laughter created by Mary Mapes Dodge in her time.” My perusal of the Publishers Weekly roundup left me with some sympathy for Moore’s argument that children’s books were becoming generic. On the other hand, after all the morbid stories I came across last year, I was relieved to see 1921’s children better protected from the horrors of the world. There are worse things for a child than blandness.

Happy holidays, and happy holiday reading, to all of you!

*Further research revealed that 1) John Farrar, who later founded Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, was the editor of The Bookman in 1921, and 2) Songs for Parents is a truly awful book of poetry.

**I also checked out Moore’s other 1921 Bookman column, from May. It starts out with the magazine’s new editor (Farrar) saying, “Won’t you give us something new and different in place of the old omnibus review? Make it purely fanciful if you like.” Dangerous words when spoken to someone who had a puppet as an inseparable companion. My desperate cries of, “No! Do the old omnibus review!” failed to turn back time, and this column turned up nothing useful.

***1920s Publishers Weekly is one of those magazines where the ads are as good as the editorial content, and this issue had a treasure trove. This one left me scratching my head, though.

****Sadly for me, there were no more runners-up until 1925. One of the 1925 runners-up, in an act of blatant favoritism by the American Library Association, was Moore’s horrible book about her puppet.

Cover of Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, by Anne Carroll Moore

*****It’s actually An Argosy of Fables, not The. 1920s book reviewers make an amazing number of mistakes with the titles of books.

******I first came across The Story of Mankind at the top of the list of Newbery Medal winners that was posted in my school library, and it totally creeped me out. The 1920s seemed like the stone age back then. Now they’re twice as far away and they seem like yesterday!

*******UPDATE 12/28/2021: Well, this syllabus for a class on the Golden Age of Children’s Literature dates it from 1865 to 1926, but the latest book on the reading list is Pollyanna, from 1913.

********Publishers Weekly’s holiday roundup includes a “Books for Boys” section and a “Books for Girls” section, along with a section for both boys and girls and others for younger readers. I was fuming about the sexism of this until I came across three books in a row on railroads in “Books for Boys.” “Fine, I admit it, I’m a girl!” I said. “Just give me a story about two friends who make a cake on a snowy day and leave out the baking powder, with disastrous consequences.”

Giving Thanks for the Friends I’ve Met Along the Way

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On Thanksgiving every year, I’ve taken the opportunity to give thanks for some aspect of my adventures in the world of a hundred years ago. In 2018, I expressed gratitude for ten of the extraordinary people I’d come across during my year of reading as if I were living in 1918, like scholar/editor/activist W.E.B. Du Bois, food safety pioneer Harvey Wiley, and bra inventor Mary Phelps Jacob. The next year, I paid tribute to ten wonderful illustrators. The year after that, it was three women illustrators. (I had meant to cover more, but Neysa McMein proved to have such a fascinating life that I had to stop or the turkey wouldn’t have been done on time.)

As I was contemplating what to give thanks for this year, my thoughts turned to one of the best parts of this project—the twenty-first century people I’ve encountered along the way. I’ve given them shout-outs before, but now they’re front and center. Here they are, roughly in order of when I “met” them.

Pamela Toler and History in the Margins

One morning in February 2018, just five weeks into my project, I noticed a spike in my traffic. I soon discovered that Pamela Toler had recommended my blog, then titled My Year in 1918, on her own blog, History in the Margins. We’ve kept in touch through our blogs and Twitter since then.

Cover of "Women Warriors" by Pamela D. Tonder.

Pamela has a job—“freelance writer specializing in history and the arts,” as she describes it—that I can imagine having in a parallel universe. She takes her readers down fascinating, little-known byways of history. Sometimes it’s a quick dive on a subject like the history of microphones, which end up being newer than she (or I) thought. Sometimes it’s a whole book, like Women Warriors, a fascinating history of women soldiers through the ages that combines the expertise of a Ph.D. historian (which she is) with the flair of the natural storyteller. Here’s a sample from the introduction: “As a nerdy tweenager I read everything I could find on Joan of Arc, from biographies designed to give young girls role models to George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.* As a less obviously nerdy graduate student, I was fascinated by Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, who led her soldiers onto the battlefield to fight the British in the Indian mutiny of 1857.”

I’m thankful to have discovered Pamela the writer, and even more thankful to have gotten to know Pamela the online friend.

Connie Ruzich and the Forgotten Poets of the First World War

World War I Twitter led me to Robert Morris University professor Connie Ruzich and her blog, Behind Their Lines, which originated with a Fulbright project on World War I poets. She describes her blog as “a site for sharing lesser known poetry of the First World War, what I think of as lost voices and faded poems.”

Connie’s book, International Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology of Lost Voices, came out late last year. Even though it wasn’t priced for general readers, I was seriously tempted to use some of my COVID stimulus check to buy it. I left the U.S. for South Africa shortly after it was published, though, and didn’t get around to it. So I was thrilled to discover while writing this post that that a paperback edition is on the way.

Connie still posts occasionally on her blog—her most recent post combines a number of my interests, including Amy Lowell, Harvard, and T.S. Eliot/Ezra Pound snarkiness—and she links to older posts on Twitter on poets’ birthdays, National Beer Day, and other relevant occasions.

Connie, like Pamela, has become an online friend. When I drove across the country last October,** pre-vaccination, it gave me a pang as I passed through Chicago and Pittsburgh not to be able to stop by and see Pamela and Connie.

Frank Hudson and the Parlando Project

Early on in this project, when I was posting several times a week, I’d occasionally feel overwhelmed. Whenever this happened, I’d give myself a little lecture, saying, “Well, Frank Hudson posts as often as you do AND writes a song for every post AND sings it.”

Amazing guy, that Frank.

For the typical Parlando Project post (tag line: “where words and music meet”), Frank takes a poem that’s in the public domain, puts it to music, and shares his thoughts about the writer and the poem. He covers a much wider time period than I do, all the way back to classical Chinese poetry, but he often records poems from 1910s and 1920s, including a multi-year serial performance of The Waste Land to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868)

Maybe I’m biased because it was my idea (okay, there’s no maybe about it), but my favorite of Frank’s songs is his interpretation of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem “Snow-Flakes,” featuring the wonderful line “This is the poem of the air.” In Frank’s rendition, recorded on Christmas 2018, “Snow-Flakes” and another Longfellow poem, “A Psalm of Life,” are being performed in a Beat Generation-era jazz club. If you’re in the mood for something seasonal but weary of the holiday standards, check it out!

Witness2Fashion and Century-Old Styles

Susan, the creative force behind the blog Witness2Fashion, is, like Frank, only a part-time resident of the world of a hundred years ago, but she stops by often. She’s a former theater costume designer who casts an expert eye on the fashions of the past while also tackling broader societal issues.

Witness2Fashion rang in the current decade, for example, with a visit to the January 1920 issue of Delineator magazine, showing us some Butterick patterns but then moving on to an article on sexual harassment called “It Won’t Do! A Warning for Business Women.”

Sometimes the posts take a more personal turn, like this one, featuring her detective work about the life of a TB patient named Ollie, a friend of her mother’s, whom she came to know through family photographs. My favorite Witness2Fashion post, with the irresistible title “Prudery in Advertising Used to Confuse Me,” is a mix of the personal and the historical.

Susan and I check in with each other in the comments sections of our blogs every once in a while. When I wondered, a few months back, why hand-washing wasn’t one of the many uses listed for P and G White Naptha soap, she explained, “Naptha is a petroleum product, akin to mineral spirits (aka “Paint thinner,”) so you wouldn’t want to use it on your skin.” Mystery solved!

On a Witness2Fashion post about the evolution about corsets, I posted this comment: “I just came across a fascinating article in a 1922 issue of Printer’s Ink magazine, aimed at panicky corset sellers, assuring them that going corsetless is just a fad and reminding mothers to educate their daughters on the health benefits of corsets, including supporting internal organs and strengthening back muscles.” The actual Printer’s Ink article is unfortunately, as I have noted, lost in the mists of time.

It’s nice to have a kindred spirit!

Patty Stein and Rita Senger

Rita Senger Vogue cover, July 15, 1917, woman drinking tea under tree.

Rita Senger cover, Vogue, June 15, 1916, woman walking dog.

Last year, I was wondering what happened to Rita Senger, a talented illustrator who disappeared from the covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair in 1919. A Google search led me to the blog of quilter Laurie Kennedy, who mentioned that Patty Stein, a fellow quilter, was Senger’s granddaughter. I e-mailed Laurie one night last November telling her of my interest in Rita Senger, and by morning I had heard from Patty.

Soon after that, I called Patty, who, while baking a cake, shared her memories of her grandmother, who traded her artistic career for marriage to a wealthy businessman. Rita came to life through Patty’s vivid stories, and hearing and writing about her was one of the high points of this project.

Old Books and New Friends

Last October, when I was out in Colorado, I spent two happy days virtually attending the annual meeting of the International T.S. Eliot Society. “Annual meeting” makes it sound like people introducing motions and voting, but it’s actually an academic conference. This was the year of the unveiling of the Emily Hale Archive at Princeton, which consists of over a thousand letters from Eliot to Hale, his long-distance companion of many years. The Eliot world was abuzz! But I digress.***

After the meeting, I followed some of the people I’d come across on Twitter. Just a few days later, one of them, Birkbeck/University of London lecturer Peter Fifield, tweeted that he was planning to start a 1920s best-seller discussion group. Needless to say, I was thrilled. In the year since, the group, which spans three continents, has read good books (The Home-Maker, So Big****) and not-so-good books (The Middle of the Road, The Green Hat) and problematic books (The Sheik, God’s Stepchildren), and we’ve had a great time talking about them all. (Sometimes, the worse the book, the better the discussion.) It’s become a group of friends that I look forward to seeing every month.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

I haven’t met any of the people mentioned here (yet) in person, but my interactions with them, on Twitter, in blog comments, on the phone, and on Zoom, have greatly enriched my life—a silver lining to the virtual world we’re living in. So, to all of them, and to the rest of you who have shared my adventures in the world of a hundred years ago, happy Thanksgiving!*****

*This is me, except Eleanor of Aquitaine.

**Okay, sat in the passenger’s seat. My brother did all the driving.

***The T.S. Eliot gang almost got its own entry, but my interest in Eliot precedes this project, so they were disqualified.

****Going out on a limb here—this is next month’s selection so I’m only speaking for myself. But it’s Edna Ferber! And it’s wonderful!

*****I was going to round up this post with some charming Thanksgiving magazine covers, but this Norman Rockwell Literary Digest cover doesn’t look at all like a Rockwell,

and this pilgrim/Indian warfare-themed Rockwell Life cover leaves me scratching my head,

and what the hell, J.C. Leyendecker?

I think someone spiked the Thanksgiving cider over in New Rochelle.

10 books, articles, and PhDs about the world of 100 years ago that are just sitting there

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People sometimes complain that the world of a hundred years ago is so picked over that there’s nothing left to write about.* After spending a year reading as if I were living in that period, though, I can tell you that there’s a treasure trove of subjects just waiting to be turned into books, articles, dissertations, or academic projects. Here are ten topics that I’m mystified that no one has gotten to yet.**

1. Archiving Erté’s Harper’s Bazar covers

Over the (yikes!) almost four years of this project, I have spent many happy hours finding online copies of Harper’s Bazar covers by Erté, the legendary art deco artist, designer, and crossword puzzle clue stalwart who worked as the magazine’s regular cover artist from 1915 to 1936. I included him in my Thanksgiving lists of 10 1918 People I’m Thankful For and Ten 1919 Illustrators I’m Thankful For.***

Erté Harper's Bazar cover, February 1918, masked woman looking out window at man.

But I have also spent many unhappy hours searching for Erté covers in vain. HathiTrust, the Google Books online archive, is missing some issues from 1918 and doesn’t have any at all for 1919 (or from 1923 to 1929, but I’ll worry about that in the future). I’ve found images for some, but not all, of these covers elsewhere, often on Pinterest, which is the source of most of my magazine cover images anyway. Those images that do exist aren’t at the level of quality that these important cultural artifacts deserve.

Roman Petrovich Tyrtov (Erté), date unknown

Someone needs to make high-quality digital scans of the full collection and archive them online**** before the original covers deteriorate any further. (Maybe Harper’s Bazaar—the extra A was added in 1930—has done this, but, if so, the archive isn’t available online, as Vogue’s is.) A book or scholarly article about the covers would be good, too. Get on this, digital humanities people!

2. A biography of cartoonist Percy Crosby

Rookie from the 13th Squad cartoon, Percy Crosby — From The Rookie from the 13th Squad, 1918

One of the most intriguing people I’ve written about for this blog is Percy Crosby, who penned the cartoon The Rookie from the 13^th Squad. The hapless but ultimately stouthearted Rookie was the Sad Sack of World War I. Crosby, who received a Purple Heart after being hit in the eye with shrapnel, went on to create the popular cartoon Skippy, which the Charles Schulz website cites as an influence for Peanuts. He also, I kid you not, won the silver medal in the 1932 watercolors and drawing event in the 1932 Olympics.

Crosby’s personal life was troubled, though. He ran with a hard-drinking crowd that included Jerome Kern, Ring Lardner, John Barrymore, and Heywood Broun. Following a violent episode, his wife divorced him and got a restraining order, and he never saw her or their four children again. He began taking out two-page ads in major newspapers, espousing left-wing views and taking on targets like the FBI, the IRS, and Al Capone. After a 1948 suicide attempt, he was confined to a mental hospital and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. One of the purported symptoms of his paranoia was his endless ranting about how Skippy Peanut Butter had violated the trademark on his character’s name. Now, I’m no intellectual property rights lawyer, but that doesn’t sound all that paranoid to me. Crosby himself believed that his left-wing views contributed to his prolonged confinement. He died in the mental hospital in 1964.

A biography of Crosby was publis hed in 1978, but his life, and his long confinement, deserve a closer look.

3. Girl Scout badges through the ages

Cover of How Girls Can Help Their Country, Girl Scout handbook 1916

What gives you a better sense of what was expected of girls in a given era than its Girl Scout badges? Well, lots of things, probably, given that the 1920 edition of Scouting for Girls included badges for telegraphy (“send 22 words per minute using a sounder and American Morse Code”), bee keeping (“have a practical knowledge of bee keeping and assist in hiving a swarm…”), and rock tapping (“collect two or three scratched or glaciated pebbles or cobblestones in the drift”). But, as I discovered during my quest to earn a 1919 Girl Scout badge,***** Girl Scout badges do provide an interesting window into the era. I learned all about caring for sick relatives and found out what a cruel practice plucking egret feathers for women’s hats is.

Pictures of girl scout uniforms, 1960s. — Junior Girl Scout Handbook, 1960s

My own Girl Scout book was written closer to 1920 than to today (it had been around a while, but still!). There are some cool badges in that book, like Observer, where you learn about constellations and rock formations and make a conservation exhibit. Others, like Indian Lore and Gypsy, wouldn’t pass muster today.

The current badges look kind of trippy and feature topics like cybersecurity, coding, entrepreneurship, and preparing for STEM jobs. That all sounds way too stressful and careerist for me. Personally, I’d rather learn telegraphy.

Well, I’d better stop before I end up writing the book myself.

4. Did Daisy Ashford really write The Young Visiters?

Daisy Ashford, frontispiece, The Young Visiters (1919)

The Young Visiters, nine-year-old Daisy Ashford’s unintentionally hilarious account of sometimes unsavory high-society goings-on, became a runaway bestseller following its 1919 publication. The manuscript, written in 1890 or so, was discovered by the adult Daisy and circulated among her friends until it reached novelist and publisher’s reader Frank Swinnerton, who arranged for its publication, with an introduction by L. Frank Baum.

Or so the story goes. Some reviewers at the time were skeptical, and there was speculation that Baum himself was the author. When Ashford died in 1972 at the age of 90, her obituary in the New York Times mentioned the doubts about her authorship.

Here is the opening paragraph. You decide for yourself whether you buy it as the work of a preteen or if, like me, you’re with the skeptics.

Except you don’t have to leave it at that! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can figure out the authorship for yourself. In recent years, researchers have used computer software that analyzes similarities between texts to discover new sources for Shakespeare’s plays and help unmask J.K. Rowling as the author of the mystery novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. I wonder what a comparison between The Young Visiters and the works of L. Frank Baum (or maybe Frank Swinnerton) would reveal. Go for it!******

5. The Crisis Press, The Brownies’ Book, and Jessie Redmon Fauset

Brownies' Book cover July 1920, July 4 scene. — The Brownies’ Book, May 1920

The Brownies' Book cover, May 1920, girls dancing around maypole. — The Brownies’ Book, May 1920

The life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois is not exactly lost to history. To cite only one recent example of his place in the culture, the novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was an Oprah book club pick and was long-listed for this year’s National Book Award. The Crisis, the NAACP magazine that he edited, is rightly celebrated as a groundbreaking publication for and about African-Americans. Less well-known are the side projects of the magazine’s publishing company, including books like Hazel, by Ruth White Ovington, the first children’s book to figure an African-American protagonist, and The Brownies’ Book, an all-too-short-lived magazine “designed for all children, but especially for ours.” Recent high school graduate Langston Hughes published his first poems in the magazine. There have been a number of academic articles about The Brownies’ Book, as well as a 1996 anthology, but the magazine and the Crisis Publication Company’s other ventures deserve to be better known today.

While you’re at it, how about a biography of The Brownies’ Book managing editor Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance?

6. Women Illustrators of the 1920s

Career opportunities for talented women in the 1920s were limited, but magazine illustration was one field where women could, and did, succeed. Their work and their lives are worth revisiting.

Why did Helen Dryden, once the highest-paid woman artist in the United States, end up living in a welfare hotel?

How did Gordon Conway make it to the top of her profession without taking a single art class?

Why did talented illustrator Rita Senger disappear from the covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair in 1919? (Well, I told you all about that here.)

Rita Senger Vanity Fair cover, April 1918, Pierrot holding unconscious woman. — Rita Senger, April 1918

As for Neysa McMein, suffragist, Saturday Evening Post illustrator, best friend of Dorothy Parker, lover of Charlie Chaplin, Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley, and others, I just want to spend a winter afternoon reading a gossipy account of her life.

Saturday Evening Post Neysa McMein cover, 1916, woman wearing hat. — Nisa McMein, May 13, 1916

And there are lots more! Edna Crompton!

Metropolitan cover, September 1920, Edna Crompton, woman serving at tennis. — Edna Crompton, September 1920

Harriet Meserole!

Anne Harriet Fish!

Summer 1921 Magazine Covers, Viewed Longingly from Wintery Cape Town

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Objectively speaking, winter in Cape Town is not all that bad. The temperature rarely dips below the high 40s, and a cold day is one when it doesn’t make it into the 60s. Subjectively speaking, though, winter in Cape Town is miserable. It rains a lot, and houses don’t have central heating, so we sit around freezing and grumbling.*

What I needed to improve my mood, I decided, was some summer fun from the covers of 1921 magazines. I could pretend I was somewhere hot, hanging around at the beach**

J.C. Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover, July 2, 1921, toddler with bucket. — J.C. Leyendecker

or the pool

or fishing

or playing golf

or camping

or basking in the moonlight

or canoodling

or cavorting about in the altogether,

or just hanging around,

maybe at the summer house.

Margaret Harper August 1921 House & Garden cover, country house aerial view. — Margaret Harper

Henry George Brandt June 1021 House & Garden cover, window of cottage with flowers. — Henry George Brandt

(Okay, these are not all ACTUAL wishes. I’m not much of a fisherman, for example.)

Lo and behold, I did actually make it to the northern hemisphere in time for the last few weeks of the summer. It turns out, though, that my image of Washington in August was a teeny bit romanticized. Life has been more like this

and this

than this.

But I’ve had a great time hanging out with my friends,

and even though I haven’t spent much (okay, any) time working on my manuscript

I swear that’s going to happen before the fall sets in.

But fall is weeks away, so let’s not think about it right now. After all, in the words of the #1 hit song of late summer 1921, “In the meantime, in between time…”

*Of course, I always keep in mind how fortunate I am compared to most people in Cape Town.

**If we were rerunning the Best Magazine Cover of a Woman Swimming with a Red Scarf on Her Head competition, we’d have some good contenders here.

New On The Book List:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

Magazine Ads of 1921: Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, and Meh

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I’ve looked at hundred-year-old ads from a lot of different angles over the years: admiring their artistry, seeing how they rang in the 1920s, expressing total befuddlement, and planning my perfect 1919 summer morning and dream 1920 vacation. One thing I’ve never done, though, is evaluate them in terms of their fundamental purpose: getting people to buy stuff.* So I decided to look at the ads in the June 1921 Ladies’ Home Journal and decide what does, and what doesn’t, capture my fancy.

Thumbs Up

Turns out that you can use this soap for laundry, dishwashing, and cleaning around the house. No mention of washing your hands, surprisingly. (UPDATE 7/2/2021: As Susan of witness2fashion points out in the comments, naphtha is a petroleum product and not suitable for use on the skin.) I don’t know how the ship fits into the story, but the illustration is appealing. I’ll take it!

Mmm, a can of fat! But look at those baked goods. Plus, you can send away for a free book of recipes by Mrs. Ida C. Bailey. I’m in!

I love this cozy scene, complete with a bedside bookshelf. The text brags that “wamsutta” made it into the dictionary, which sounds to me like the first step toward losing your trademark, but if Wamsutta’s happy I’m happy. I’ll take a set of percales!

I’m not sure why the owners of this mansion need a fold-out sofa, and if they do why it needs to go in the doorway, but this one is nice-looking as sofa beds go, and I’m impressed that it opens by one easy, well-balanced motion.** Yes, please send me handsome illustrated booklet and name of nearest dealer!

I’m a little freaked out by the clown, but real food, what a novelty!

I’m not QUITE convinced that the men looking downward in their dinner partner’s direction are admiring her vanilla dessert. But look at that cake! I’ll go to my grocer and insist on Burnett’s.

More cake? It would be rude to say no!

I know I’m supposed to be focusing on the products, not the ads, but I looked at this, said, “Coles Phillips!”, zoomed in, and saw his initials under the seat of the rocker. I’ll take the polish and buy the white shoes later.

If I were in D.C., I would be saying, “Are you out of your mind? It’s 95 degrees! I don’t even want to THINK about black stockings!” But I’m in freezing Cape Town–well, in the 50s, but no one here has central heating–so bring on the hosiery!***

Thomas Edison is offering $10,000 to whoever can come up with a phrase of no more than four or five words to convey the idea that his phonograph is not a mere machine but “an instrumentality by which the true beauties and the full benefit of music can be brought into every home.” That doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, so I can see why he’s looking for help. I’ll get on it.

If it’s not a corset, I’m all in.

The small print says you have to send them a name of a new LHJ subscriber, and I usually balk at selling out my friends to corporations. Plus, I already have a copy. Still, I love the idea of this giveaway.

I’ll take all the gingham! And sure, what the hell, send me the free book about Mrs. Prentiss’s humorous gingham-related experiences.

Can I skip the camera and buy the dress?

The Meh

Brown soap is so 1919.

Sure, I WANT an olive spoon and a pickle fork. But do I NEED an olive spoon and a pickle fork?

This bedspread is the definition of meh.

Thumbs Down

No! Nooooo! Traumatic flashbacks of the awful government-issued furniture that I had in my Foreign Service housing, and that my friend Emily once took the desperate step of jamming into a spare bedroom. Granted, they’re not selling furniture here, they’re selling Congoleum. Which, as attentive readers will remember, is actually tar paper.

This canned meat picnic might be fun for Mother, but it’s not going to be much fun for anyone else.

No offense to exploding fairies, but this is “fragrantly Parisian” and I have fragrance allergies.

Ditto for giant perfume bottle worshipers.

Not buying the “corn syrup is health food” claim.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not conditional on what kind of soap you use.

As an expert on Italy–as in, I’ve never been there but I’m taking a beginning Italian class–I take offense at this.

“They are fresh peaches…” Yeah, and I’m a debutante.

This one almost made “Meh” but was a victim of its placement in the magazine, right next to this story,

which made me wonder why she’s living the laundry dream all alone.

Speaking of helpful husbands, this one is so beguiled by this cabinet that he comes to the kitchen to give his wife a hand with the dishes. “What matter a few smashed pieces? Think how quickly he will learn.” Not even the nifty flour dispenser would make me willing to put up with this nitwit.

If I were judging artistry, this one would get kudos for the surprisingly modern graphics. However…prunes.

I don’t believe judging anyone by their appearance, let alone a baby, so I’m strictly commenting on the skill of the artist in replying “That it has a nice personality?”****

*Well, there was the time when this ad left me desperately craving bread.

Welch Grapelade ad, Ladies' Home Journal, January 1921, grape jam on white bread. — Ladies’ Home Journal

**But frankly a little skeptical given my life-endangering experiences with ca. 1970 sofa beds at childhood sleepovers.

***The guy with 34 children who provides a testimonial for Durham Hosiery turns out to be real.

****Hideous-looking kids were surprisingly popular in 1921 advertising.

I Read a Random 1920 Book

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In the three and a half years since I started this blog, I’ve read fifty-six books from a hundred years ago. Many of them, like The War-Whirl in Washington and Mary Marie, aren’t read much today.* But every one, no matter how obscure, was chosen by someone—me—with a contemporary sensibility. What if there were a way around this, I would occasionally wonder—a way to meet the world of a hundred years ago on its own terms, rather than through a 21^st-century lens.

Last year, I thought of a way to do this: I’d read a random book. I picked up my copy of the 1920 Book Review Digest, flipped through it a few times, stopped, and, with my eyes closed, pointed to a place on the page.

And got…Elements of Retail Salesmanship, by Paul Wesley Ivey, Ph.D.!**

I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I could have ended up with anything—Hugh Temple Sheringham’s Trout Fishing Memoirs and Morals, for example, or Newell Dwight Hillis’s Rebuilding Europe in the Face of World-Wide Bolshevism. But no, I got a book about a topic I find fascinating, and that I had so far encountered only in Edna Ferber’s short stories about exhausted department store saleswomen.

Plus, Elements of Retail Salesmanship got the equivalent of two thumbs up in Book Review Digest, which classifies each excerpted review as +, +-, or -. “The information is put clearly and intelligently and the book is a good one of its kind,” the New York Evening Post said.

Book Review Digest, 1920

Next step: acquiring a copy. These days, you can buy just about any out-of-copyright book online. Some companies put the text into Word documents and bind them, generally with a tiny font and/or horrible formatting. Some do OCR scans of book texts, with unintelligible results. Other companies just print out the scanned text from Google Books. This, I have learned from experience, is the best, even though you often end up with people’s underlining and marginal comments.***

That is, you can get almost anything unless it’s the first wave of COVID, which it was, plus something weird was going on in the printing industry. My favorite out-of-print publisher, Forgotten Books, finally admitted defeat and cancelled my order, so I tried again with my second-favorite, Scholar Select. Elements of Retail Salesmanship arrived in late August, just before my brother and I set off from D.C. by car for a month-long stay in Colorado.****

Ivey was thirty years old and just starting out his career as a professor at the University of Nebraska when Element of Retail Salesmanship was published. He sets out his ambition for the book on the first page. “If it serves to make the salesperson see the educational possibilities in her[1] work and the relation of better service to community welfare,” he says, “it will have served the purpose for which it was intended.” The “her” struck me as surprisingly woke for 1920, but Ivey explains in the footnote that “the feminine gender is used throughout this book because ninety-five percent of the customers and salespeople in department stores are women.”

Sometimes the idea of reading a hundred-year-old book is more exciting than the actual reading. And, to be honest, Elements of Retail Salesmanship dragged a bit at the start, while Professor Ivey walked us through the history of merchandising. There were some high points even here, though, like learning about how retail establishments used to employ “barkers” to lure people in from the street. Once the customer was inside, the retailer—who didn’t charge a fixed price, so every interaction was a bargaining session—was reluctant to let customers out until they bought something. I’m not sure how this was enforced, but it sounded alarming.

John Wanamaker, ca. 1890 (Frances Benjamin Johnston, Library of Congress)

I was relieved, then, when John Wanamaker came along in the late 1800s, with his low-pressure sales tactics, fixed prices, and money-back guarantees. Like many visionaries, he was regarded as a lunatic at first, but eventually the mentality whereby, as Ivey puts it, “each merchant tried to climb to success over the dead body of his opponent” disappeared and the modern age of efficiency began.

In the next chapter, Ivey moves on to “Knowing the Goods.” This is, in his philosophy, the salesperson’s most important obligation. Take congoleum, for example. Few people, he says, know that it is merely tar paper printed on both sides. I consider myself one of the world’s foremost experts on congoleum by virtue of having heard of it, but I did not know this interesting fact!

Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1921

Or take corsets. Ivey tells us that

during the reign of Catherine de Medici of France, no woman in her court could find favor in her eyes whose waist measure exceeded thirteen inches; that in order to reduce the waist measure to this figure corsets were laced by serving men while in some cases the figure was placed in a steel cage or corset frame which held the victim’s body in a vise-like and perfectly rigid grip; that the death rate increased among the women due to this custom, and, finally, Henry IV of France stamped out the injurious fashion by an imperial order.

Engraving of an iron corset held by the Musée de Cluny, 1893

This is a fascinating bit of history (or, actually, mythology–it’s been debunked), but it leaves me wondering what exactly the salesperson is supposed to do with it. “Did you know these things can kill you?” doesn’t seem like much of a sales pitch, as opposed to, say, claiming that women need an artificial exoskeleton to keep their internal organs in place.*****

Overall, though, Professor Ivey makes a convincing case for knowing the goods. You wouldn’t want to be like the salesperson who, asked why one pair of gloves cost $2.00 and a similar-looking pair cost $2.50, thought intensely for a few seconds and then answered, “I guess it is because they are marked that way.” Another giveaway about lack of product knowledge: excessive use of terms such as “nifty,” “swell,” “classy,” “great,” and “fine.”******

Harper’s Bazar, February 1918

Professor Ivey has high hopes for retail merchandising as a profession, musing that

four to six years of continuous study after graduation from high school is the rule rather than the exception for those entering law and medicine and in some cases dentistry. If a similar period of time was spent in study and laboratory work by those entering retail selling they would become just as truly expert in their line and would command incomes proportionate to their effectiveness.

I mentally debated the microeconomics of this with Professor Ivey for a while, then forced myself to move on.

Luckily, there are ways to learn about the goods even without sitting in a classroom. For example, Ivey tells us, you can take home the informational material that manufacturers send with the merchandise and peruse it in your leisure hours. Or you can go to the library and read the encyclopedia entries on textiles, shoes, household furnishings, novelties, and other goods, which, he promises us, are “both entertaining and of an educational value.”

I decided to give this a test run. I found the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica on HathiTrust, opened the 15^th volume, which luckily had the entry for “Jewelry,” and picked a passage at random.

Excerpt from entry on Jewelry in 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition, vol. 15

I thought about Edna Ferber’s saleswomen, heading back to the boarding house, exhausted after being on their feet all day. My thoughts turned, too, to my younger self, tired out after a long day at the embassy in Phnom Penh, trying to read Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, and just not having it in me. And the ambassador let me sit in a chair! I had my doubts about whether the extracurricular encyclopedia reading ever actually happened.

Luckily, Professor Ivey presents us with more enjoyable ways of improving our salesmanship. You can, for example, challenge yourself to engage as many of the customer’s senses as possible. You don’t just show her the aluminum kettle, you “ring” it. In the hands of a clever salesperson, he claims, silk can be made to “talk.’”

Picture of kettle in Mirro Kettle ad, Ladies' Home Journal, 1920.

Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1920

Then there’s the psychological angle. Ivey walks us through the different types of customer: the Impulsive or Nervous Customer, the Deliberate Customer, the Confident or Decisive Customer (“she walks into the store as a general would march into the camp of a defeated army”), the Silent or Indifferent Customer, and the Distrustful Customer. Selling to each type requires different tactics. One caveat, though, applies to all types: if a customer is considering an item of clothing, don’t say that you bought it yourself and are happy with it. Because who wants to dress like a salesclerk?

Salespeople, too, can be distinguished by personality. The ideal salesperson combines the traits of Enthusiasm, Honesty, Promptness (which turns out not to mean showing up for work on time but rather hopping to it when a customer needs help), and Cheerfulness.

Man talking to woman at store counter, Roast Beef Medium by Edna Ferber

Illustration by James Montgomery Flagg from Roast Beef, Medium, by Edna Ferber (1913)

Too often, Professor Ivey tells us, salespeople ask questions like, “Is there anything today,” “Waited on?” “Do you wish anything?” “Can I show you something?” or merely “Something?” Syntax aside, these seemed to me like normal salesperson inquiries, but Professor Ivey says that they indicate suspicion that the customer is a “looker” as opposed to a serious shopper. Better: “Do you desire service?” or “Do you wish attention?”

Cheerfulness, Professor Ivey, tells us, is not merely a matter of smiling. There are smiles and there are smiles. There is “the pitying smile, when the customer signifies a desire to look at a cheaper article than the first shown her,” as well as the sarcastic, knowing, idiotic, and bored smiles, and, lastly, the “Heaven-help-me” smile, exchanged with a colleague when the customer finds difficulty in deciding between two silverware patterns. Oh, I know those smiles all too well!

Department store floor, Detroit, ca. 1910.

Department Store in Detroit, Michigan, ca. 1910 (Universal History Archive)

Enthusiasm, according to Professor Ivey, is not something that can be feigned. “All salespeople should have a feeling of admiration for the store in which they are working or else seek opportunities elsewhere,” he tells us. “Disloyalty can never be justified within an organization because sincerity would thereby be violated.”

And if you don’t wake up full of happiness? No problem. You just say to yourself, “This is a wonderful world. It’s great just to be alive,” or, “I feel fine, I feel happy.” Or you sing, or whistle.

With all due respect to Maria von Trapp, I’ve got some problems with this. I’m not expecting a marketing professor at the University of Nebraska in 1920 to be a Marxist, but seriously? “A feeling of admiration for the store in which they are working?” Have you ever HAD a job, Professor? (This is a rhetorical question–Ivey tells us that he has, in fact, worked in sales.) Also—where’s the chapter on what the salesperson can expect from her employer in exchange for all this expertise, psychological acumen, and sincere admiration?

Wanamaker Building, 1920 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

I went back to my post on “What’s Your 1918 Girl Job?” to see what the Ladies’ Home Journal had to say about opportunities for women in sales:

The average pay is low, hours long, and the work is not easy, but employment is steady for the competent worker. Hours have been shortened, however, and conditions improved by the activity of the Consumers’ League. Chances for advancement are good, however, for the ambitious girl in the employ of a good firm. (July 1918)

Jane Addams reading to children at Hull House.

Jane Addams at Hull House (Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago)

The National Consumers’ League was an organization, founded by pioneering social worker Jane Addams and others, that advocated for better conditions for workers. Some of their causes seem odd today, such as their defense of an Oregon law that limited working hours for women, but not men, to ten hours a day (the case went to the Supreme Court and the law was upheld), but they were effective in combating poor working conditions, especially in sweatshops. We don’t hear a word from Professor Ivey about the National Consumers’ League. Or about trade unions, either.

Paul and Stella Ivey, date unknown (findagrave.com)

Politics aside, I had developed a fondness for the affable professor, and I set out to learn more about him. He was born in Bessemer, Michigan, in 1890, and attended Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois, with a thesis titled “The Liquor Industry and Industrial Efficiency,” and went on to the University of Michigan for his doctorate. In 1915, a year after his arrival in Michigan, he married Stella Walker, a widow whose first husband, a dentist, had died of typhoid fever in 1912 at the age of 27. Ivey completed his dissertation, “The Pere Marquette Railroad,” in 1919, and started teaching at Nebraska that year. Here he is on the business administration department’s page in the university’s yearbook, bottom right, jokily captioned “Ivey-covered column.”

Photographs of Business Administration staff, University of Nebraska, 1920.

The Cornhusker, 1920 (yearbooks.unl.edu)

A new marriage, a professorship at a rapidly expanding university, and a book that was serialized in Publishers’ Weekly: all in all, a promising start. What was next? Mostly more of the same, as it turned out. Ivey left Nebraska for Northwestern University a few years later, and by 1932 he was teaching at the University of Southern California, where he would spend the rest of his career.

More books followed: Principles of Marketing in 1921, Salesmanship Applied in 1925, Getting Results in Selling in 1934, Successful Salesmanship in 1937, and Human Relations in Banking in 1941. His work was mentioned in the sermons of Lloyd Cassell Douglas, the minister and best-selling author of Magnificent Obsession and The Robe.

Professor Ivey died in Los Angeles in 1950, at the age of 60. Stella lived until 1967. They didn’t have any children, or at least any that I was able to track down. (UPDATE 2/19/2021: A relative of Stella’s says in the comments below that they had no children but were part of a large and close extended family on Stella’s side.) Professor Ivey’s work outlived him; the fourth addition of Successful Salesmanship, updated by a co-author, was published in 1961.

As chance would have it, Lincoln, Nebraska, was my brother’s and my first overnight stop on our drive back to D.C. from Colorado, so I had an opportunity for a Professor Ivey pilgrimage. Or more of a mini-pilgrimage, rather. I hadn’t done enough research yet to find the building where he taught,

Drawing of business administration building, University of Nebraska, 1920

The Cornhusker, 1920 edition (yearbooks.unl.edu)

and a house built in 1925 now stands at the address of his Lincoln home (which I found online and subsequently lost). Besides, it was pouring, and we needed to get a move on. I did sense Professor Ivey’s presence, though, as I had breakfast in a coffee shop in the historic Haymarket district near the university.*******

I’ve decided to make reading a random book an annual tradition, so stay tuned! I can’t imagine, though, that my 1921 book could possibly be as much fun as Elements of Retail Salesmanship.

Problems from Elements of Retail Salesmanship

*Although “aren’t read much” doesn’t mean “aren’t read at all.” One effect of the proliferation of free public-domain e-books is that people come across century-old books at random and post reviews on Goodreads that say things like “the writing was kind of old-fashioned.”

**I set a few ground rules: no books over 400 pages, no books I was already aware of, and no books about history, because reading a 1920 book about, say, Elizabethan England seemed beside the point. In any case, Elements of Retail Salesmanship won fair and square on the first try.

***This can actually be quite entertaining, as in this online copy of William Carlos Williams’ 1917 poetry collection Al Que Quiere!:

Al Que Quiere by William Carlos Williams, with handwritten note "Why the awful Spanish?"

HathiTrust

****This was, in case you’re wondering, a necessary trip and not an irresponsible pleasure jaunt.

*****When I was Googling around for a source for this, I found this comment from me from 2019 on witness2fashions’s website: “I just came across a fascinating article in a 1922 issue of Printer’s Ink magazine, aimed at panicky corset sellers, assuring them that going corsetless is just a fad and reminding mothers to educate their daughters on the health benefits of corsets, including supporting internal organs and strengthening back muscles.” The actual Printer’s Ink article is lost in the mists of time.

******This reminded me of the time I was trying on a dress in a Cape Town boutique and the salesperson said, “That’s a stunning dress!” I was mildly flattered, the way one is by even the most transparently insincere compliments, until I heard her say to a woman who was looking at a sweater, “That’s a stunning jersey!,” and then, to a woman standing in line to buy perfume, “That’s a stunning scent!”

*******One good thing about the Midwest (of many!) is the spaciousness, indoors as well as out. The coffee shop was huge, with tables at a safe distance from each other.

The Brief, Brilliant Career of Rita Senger

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Remember Rita Senger, who illustrated the winning cover in the 1915/1920 Magazine Cover Smackdown? “Next time I write about illustrators I love, I’m going to write about Senger,” I promised.

September 1915

And I tried! As I prepared for my Thanksgiving post on 1920 women illustrators I’m thankful for, I scoured the internet for illustrations by, and information about, Senger.

And came up with…almost nothing. Just a handful of magazine covers, most of which I’d already seen, the last one this August 1919 Vanity Fair cover.

Vanity Fair cover, August 1919, Rita Senger, harlequin and woman on bridge.

Armed with the last name Stein, I found a listing for a Mrs. Rita Senger Stein of Highland Park, Illinois, among the life members of the Art Institute of Chicago in its 1925 annual report. That was it.

Cover, Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1925.

If I wanted to find out more about Rita Senger, I realized, I was going to have to do something almost without precedent for this blog: contact an actual living person.*

So, one evening back in November,** I sent a message to Lori Kennedy asking if she could put me in touch with Patty Stein. By the time I woke up the next morning, there was an e-mail from Patty.

Patty turned out to be a delightful person, and we talked on the phone for almost an hour. She was making a cake as we talked, which I found extremely impressive, since I consider myself a decent baker but I can’t even focus if there’s music on in the background.

Rita Senger was born in New York City in 1893, the daughter of Adolph and Barbara (Ehrlich) Senger. (The name was sometimes spelled “Sanger.”) She was an art prodigy as a child, and she went to art school at the age of sixteen or seventeen.

Senger illustrated one cover for each magazine in 1916,

Rita Senger cover, Vogue, June 15, 191, woman in hoop skirt.

June 15, 1916

July 1916

two Vogue covers in 1917,***

July 15, 1917

September 1, 1917

one Vanity Fair cover in 1918,

Patty is not sure how Rita met her husband, Joseph Stein. It was an unusual match for the time; he was Jewish and Rita, who came from a non-religious family, was not. Stein’s grandfather was one of the first Reform rabbis in Chicago, but he himself was not a practicing Jew. He was a wealthy businessman, the owner of Lucien Lelong, Inc., the U.S. affiliate of the Paris-based Société des Parfums Lucien Lelong. (The two companies were sold to Coty in 1953.)

These drawings of Lucien Lelong’s Paris office appear on a blog about the company’s history. The magazine and date are unidentified, but they look like ca. 1920s Vanity Fair to me.****

Illustrations of Lucien Lelong studio, Paris, possibly from Vanity Fair, 1920s?

Joseph had a keen artistic sense himself, and he paid a great deal of attention to the appearance of his products. Here is his patent for a Lucien Lelong perfume bottle:

Patent application for Lelong perfume bottle, Lelong.

When I saw a picture of Rita with her extended family on Lori Kennedy’s website, I hoped that, having given up her career, she had gained a fulfilling life of a different sort. Life is rarely so simple, unfortunately. Like many parents of their time and class, she and her husband sent Tom to boarding school from an early age. Living outside of the hustle and bustle of the city, she felt isolated. “I believe she was a very frustrated artist and wife,” Patty said.

Rita did appreciate the benefits of wealth, though. In addition to their home in Highland Park, she and her husband owned, over the course of their marriage, an apartment on the Champs-Élysées and houses in Maine and in the Long Island town of Oyster Bay.

New Yor Times Headline, 6-Acre Estate Sold in Nassau County, 1-22-1942.

When their son Tom grew up, he wanted his own family to be very different from the one he was raised in. He married Pauline Blume, the daughter of Ernest Blume, a Marshall Field’s home goods buyer. Ernest and Joseph had had a nodding acquaintance before the couple met. The two men, who shared an appreciation for aesthetics, saw each other occasionally at lunch at Marshall Field’s.

Rita Senger Stein with her son and daughter-in-law, cutting cake, at their wedding.

Art was an important part of the family’s daily life. “I did not grow up with a mom who had crocheted doilies on the sofa,” Patty said. When the family went to an exhibition of Bertoia’s work, Patty’s sister was told to stop touching the tree sculptures. “My grandmother lets me,” she said.

Rita died on December 30, 1990, at the age of 97. For her descendants, her art collection, her furniture, and her own art work serve as tangible reminders of her artistic sensibility and her talent. For the rest of us, her art lives on online. The Library of Congress, which has the original of the July 1916 Vanity Fair cover in its collection, featured it in a 2002 exhibition titled “American Beauties: Drawings from the Golden Age of Illustration.”

If Rita had enjoyed that same freedom in her own life, the world would be the richer for it. Still, I feel lucky to have discovered the work she did leave us, and, through Patty, to have learned this remarkable woman’s story. I can think of no better way to celebrate Women’s History Month than telling it here.

*The “almost” being because in 2018 I called the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia and talked to a very nice woman who confirmed that the museum still owned the painting “Lead Kindly, Light,” by William Edouard Scott, which was featured on the cover of the April 1918 issue of The Crisis. Also, I e-mailed the Library of Congress in 2019 for a post that’s still on my to-do list. But contacting people whose job it is to answer your questions is very different from reaching out to a stranger and saying, “Tell me all about your grandma!”

Crisis cover, April 1918, black couple on wagon going north.

**I know, not exactly lightning speed. In my (feeble) defense, I left Washington, D.C., where I’d unexpectedly spent almost a year, for Cape Town shortly after my conversation with Patty, and after that I had some time-specific posts to do for the holidays, Black History Month, etc. Still!

***Or possibly three. Vogue’s website identifies this September 15, 1917, cover as being Senger’s,

Vogue cover, September 15, 1917, woman with purse.

but credits the September 1 cover, which is definitely hers, to Alice De Warenn Little, so it’s possibly that they flipped the attributions. Vogue published two issues a month at that point, and I’ve never come across two covers by the same artist during the same month.

****The life of Lelong, who was also a prominent couturier, makes for fascinating reading. During his marriage (possibly of convenience) to Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley, she had a messy entanglement with the writer Jean Cocteau, who was gay. Another one of Lelong’s wives later married Collette’s widower.

The Brownies’ Book: A pioneering magazine for African-American children

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I spent much of today binge-reading the first fourteen issues of The Brownies’ Book, the NAACP’s magazine for African-American children. Doing this on the last day of Black History Month is the blogging equivalent of cracking open the textbook for the first time on the night before the final exam, but I had a wonderful time taking in the stories for and about African-American children, reading the poems and games chosen especially for them, and, most of all, hearing from the children in their own words.

In 1919, W.E.B. Du Bois, the editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, announced the upcoming launch of a new magazine “designed for all children, but especially for ours.” The Crisis ran a children’s issue every October, featuring African folk tales, stories and poems about African-American children, and photos of cute babies; The Brownies’ Book included these and many other features. Jessie Redmon Fauset, the literary editor of The Crisis, served in this position at The Brownies’ Book as well, and later as its managing editor.

Jessie Redmon Fauset, date unknown

There’s no way I could do justice to this wonderful magazine in one blog post, so I’ll just share a few of my favorite items.*

“The Jury,” a page of letters from young readers, is the part of The Brownies’ Book I enjoyed the most. In the January 1920 inaugural issue, a boy named Franklin Lewis, who dreams of being an architect but isn’t sure if this is possible, writes in asking “if you will please put in your paper some of the things which colored boys can work at when they grow up.”**

The Brownies’ Book, January 1920

This photograph of children in the “Silent Parade,” the famous 1917 march protesting violence against African-Americans, also appeared in the inaugural issue.

Children marching in Silent Parade, 1917, The Brownies' Book.

The Brownies’ Book, January 1920

A profile of child violinist Eugene Mars Martin, with this accompanying photo, ran in the “Little People of the Month” feature. Mars, I was saddened to learn, died suddenly at the age of 22 while working as the director of a music school.

Eugene Mars Martin, The Brownies' Book, Januar 1920.

The Brownies’ Book, January 1920

This cri de coeur by a reader, addressed to The Crisis but printed in “The Jury,” is both sad and hilarious. “P.S. I’m only fifteen years old, so please have a little pity,” she concludes.

Letter to the editor, The Brownies' Book, 1920

The Brownies’ Book, April 1920

Here are some drawings sent in by readers.

The Brownies’ Book, May 1920

The pageant in this photo took place at Atlanta University, where Du Bois had formerly served as a professor.

Pageant, Atlanta University, The Brownies' Book, 1920

The Brownies’ Book, September 1920

The Brownies’ Book encouraged readers to send in their high school graduation photos and printed them all. Check out the graduate in the middle row on the right.

The Brownies' Book graduation photos Langston Hughes.

The Brownies’ Book, July 1920

Here he is with a byline, describing games children play in Mexico, where he had gone to live with his father after his graduation. (UPDATE 5/1/2021: After reading this post, Frank Hudson of The Parlando Project put the words of a Langston Hughes poem from The Brownies’ book to music.)

The Brownies’ Book, December 1920

I also love “The Judge,” the monthly column where a wise elder (could it be Du Bois? (UPDATE 5/1/2021: no, it was Fauset)) teaches lessons to children in a nuanced and non-preachy way. I was sorry to see the Judge explaining to children why they shouldn’t have done the things that led to whippings, but happy to see him back in the next issue gently telling the parents that there are more effective ways to discipline children.

Particularly popular among readers were the stories of African-American role models like Frederick Douglas, surveyor and almanac writer Benjamin Banneker, and Katy Ferguson, a freed slave who founded the first Sunday school in New York.

Katy Ferguson, The Brownies’ Book, June 1920

And then there were the covers. Unlike The Crisis, which frequently used well-known white illustrators as cover artists, The Brownies’ Book featured work by African-American illustrators, including many women.

Albert Smith

Laura Wheeler

Albert Smith

As ahead of its time as it was, The Brownies’ Book was of its time as well. There were some head-scratching features, such as the stories about babies who scored impressively on eugenics tests.*** I didn’t know quite what to make of the story of how Mississippi Senator Blanche Bruce saved his former owner from the poorhouse by intervening with the President to get him a shipyard job, and then, to save him from the humiliation of knowing he had been rescued by his former slave, asked Mississippi’s white senator to make the nomination in his place. (UPDATE 2/1/2021: The blogger at Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, who writes about the New York Times of 100 years ago, points out in the comments that Bruce’s owner was also his father. This sheds a fascinating new light on the story.)

The Brownies’ Book, March 1920

These are minor quibbles, though, about a magazine that, in the face of the uniform whiteness of children’s literature, gave African-American children stories about children who looked like them, and about adults whose achievements they could aspire to emulate.

The Brownies’ Book only lasted two years. The magazine wasn’t able to meet its circulation target, and the December 1921 issue was its last. As much as that breaks my heart, it seems like a small miracle that it existed at all.

I’ve only scratched the surface. For more, you can read the magazine here.

*I’d promise to return to The Brownies’ Book later but fear invoking the Promised Post Curse.

**I do have my doubts about whether Franklin was real. This and some other letters strike me as suspiciously on the nose in espousing the magazine’s beliefs. Others are unmistakably from real children.

***One baby was declared perfect except for a slightly imperfect left tonsil.