I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books lately,* and some of them feature magical adventures. This has left me longing for a magical adventure of my own. So I decided to set off on one, to the advertising pages of theJune 1922 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal.
Henry James Soulen
As my fellow magical adventurer Alice would be the first to tell you, even a magical day should start with a good breakfast,** so I’ll pour myself a bowl of Post Toasties.
I’ll celebrate my healthy food choice by having a doughnut fried in Snowdrift shortening.
After breakfast, I’ll wash up with Palmolive soap***
and dab on some some Woodbury skin products.****
Even magical adventurers have to do the laundry, but don’t worry, P and G white soap is as much fun as…arithmetic!
I’ll put on my L’Aiglon slip-over, which, get this, you just SLIP ON OVER YOUR HEAD,
walk the dog on the beach and take some snaps,
and spend a happy afternoon hanging out with friends on the Congoleum,
enjoying some Perfetto sugar wafers
and refreshing Coca-Cola.*****
Uh-oh, unexpected guests at dinnertime! No problem, we’ll scare them off by claiming that we’re having Libby’s canned meat
and then get out the real dinner, attractively served on Fry’s Oven Glass.
Washing up is a pleasure when you do it with Old Dutch Cleanser.
I’ll slip on my hair net and head out to a party.
My beauty powder is having its desired effect.
Could this be love????
I’m getting ahead of myself. For the moment, I’ll go home and, with the music still ringing in my ears, sit under the Mazda lamp with Mom****** and tell her all about my day.
She can’t believe her little girl who used to have nightmares about Jell-O is all grown up.
You might be thinking that these are not exactly Alice-level magical adventures. But I’m preparing to leave Cape Town for several months, and, although I’m looking forward to my trip, I’ve been savoring the time I have left here and thinking about how sometimes an ordinary day is the most magical thing of all.
*For a new project I can’t wait to tell you all about!
**Of course, the Queen would argue that you need to believe six impossible things first.
***Palmolive may be exaggerating the virtues of the “schoolgirl complexion” (see: Woodbury skin products).
****Note to Woodbury: you shouldn’t have to squint to see the name of the product.
*****Did it have cocaine in it, you ask? I did some research and learned that the original recipe, from 1886, did include cocaine, or more accurately a precursor chemical, although not all that much. This was reduced to a trace amount in 1902, and Coke became completely cocaine-free in 1929.
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.***
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
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 13th 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.
Percy Crosby, date unknown
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 published in 1978, but his life, and his long confinement, deserve a closer look.
3. Girl Scout badges through the ages
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.
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
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.
Jessie Redmon Fauset, date unknown
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?
Helen Dryden, July 1, 1921
How did Gordon Conway make it to the top of her profession without taking a single art class?
Gordon Conway, January 1918
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, 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.
In May 2018, I read a May 1918 New York Times article about the apparent death of popular aviator Jimmy Hall, who had been shot down behind enemy lines. I decided to Google him to see if by any chance he had survived. But James Hall is a common name, and I kept getting articles about the co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty. Eventually I realized that the courageous aviator and the successful writer were…one and the same!
First edition, 1932
Hall, it turned out, had been captured by the Germans. After the war, he moved to Tahiti, where he and co-author Charles Nordhoff penned Mutiny on the Bounty and other best-sellers.******* His wife was partly of Polynesian descent. Their son, cinematographer Conrad Hall, won three Oscars, including one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Amazingly, no one seems to have written a biography of this fascinating man. If I haven’t done enough to persuade you to take on this project, it would definitely require a trip to Tahiti, where his modest house is now a museum.
8. Edna Ferber biography and revival
Edna Ferber, date unknown (State Historical Society of Wisconsin Visual Archives)
Edna Ferber checks a number of boxes to spark contemporary interest: she took on racism and sexism in her novels and short stories, and she may have been a lesbian. On top of that, she was a wonderful writer, at least judging from the early novel and short stories that I’ve read, featuring the dreams, disappointments, and, very occasionally, triumphs of department store saleswomen and accountants and stenographers. Ferber was a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, which would make for entertaining research.********
Illustration by James Montgomery Flagg from Roast Beef, Medium, by Edna Ferber (1913)
Harper Perennial Classics has reissued some of Ferber’s novels, which is a good start, but she’s due the kind of revival that Tim Page sparked for novelist Dawn Powell a few decades back when he published her diaries, her letters, and a biography. Any volunteers?
9. The Illustrators of New Rochelle, New York
Coles Phillips in his New Rochelle Studio, ca. 1921 (saturdayeveningpost.org)
High on the list of nonexistent books I’m longing to read is a group biography of Norman Rockwell, Coles Phillips, the Leyendecker brothers, and the other illustrators who turned suburban New Rochelle, New York, into one of the country’s most important artists’ colonies. If you can believe Wikipedia, New Rochelle was the source of more than half of the illustrations in major publications in the early 1920s.
I want SO much to read about J.C. Leyendecker’s romantic relationship with the model for his Arrow shirt ads
J.C. Leyendecker (vogue.com)
and about his brother Frank’s short life and tragic death.
Frank Leyendecker, June 1915
I want to read about Coles Phillips’ apparently happy marriage (one of all too few I’ve read about in the period) to his wife Teresa, who served as his primary model, “making up in keen interest and endurance what I lacked in pulchritude,” as she wrote in the Saturday Evening Post after his death in 1927 at the age of 46.
Coles Phillips, October 1916
I want to read about Normal Rockwell’s…well, I can’t think of anything I want to read about Norman Rockwell. But, if you write it, I’ll read it!
Norman Rockwell, February 7, 1920
10. This one’s for me!
By now, you may be wondering why I’m asking the rest of the world to do all of these projects and not saving any for myself. Well, don’t worry—I’ve set aside a project, or two, or three. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to finish, or, um, start them, but I look forward to telling you more when I can.
In the meantime, get to work, everyone!
*Actually, this is mostly an amateur opinion. The academics I know who are working on this period have more than enough to keep them busy.
**That I know if. If I’m wrong, please let me know!
***I’ve noticed recently that some of my old posts have gone all Alice in Wonderland on me, with small photos suddenly huge, like this squiggle from the Thanksgiving 2019 post.
I’ll get with WordPress to see what this is about and in the meantime am resizing the giant photos as I come across them.
****Or at least the covers (currently up to 1925) that are out of copyright.
*****Actually, a 1916 Girl Scout badge. My logic in using 1919 in the title was that this was the Girl Scout book being used 100 years ago at the time of the post. If I had known that this would go on to be by far my most popular post, read by many people who didn’t have a clue about my 100 years ago project, I would have used the 1916 in the blog post title.
******Go for it yourself, you might reasonably say. I tried once, with some different texts, and it’s kind of hard.
*******Speaking of fake child authors, Hall confessed in 1946 that he had written the critically acclaimed 1940 poetry collection Oh Millersville!, supposedly the work of a 10-year-old girl named Fern Gravel.
********That’s Ferber on the bottom right corner, looking like she’s wearing a skeleton mask, in the Al Hirschfeld cartoon of Algonquin Round Table members. I can’t post it here because it’s still under copyright.
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 Journaland 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.
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.
So, having looked through the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, I present you with the best, worst, and various other superlatives of January 2021 advertising.
Cutest Old-Timey Product
Having this in the kitchen would ALMOST be worth the incredible hassle of cooking with it.
Ladies’ Home Journal
Least Cute Old-Timey Product
We can all be thankful that we don’t live in a world where linoleum rugs are a thing.
Ladies’ Home Journal
Ladies’ Home Journal
Worst Product Name
Merely dumb-sounding
Ladies’ Home Journal
and incomprehensible
Ladies’ Home Journal
lose out to pure evil.*
Good Housekeeping
Least Convincing Advertising Claim
There are plenty of dubious claims, like this
Ladies’ Home Journal
and this
Good Housekeeping
and this,
Good Housekeeping
which, if you can’t read the small print, is about a woman who decides to go to a party based solely on the quality of the inviter’s stationery. Strong contestants all, but I’m taking an Italian class at the moment, and one of my classmates recently sent us pictures of his Italian grandma’s gnocci preparations,
Karl Robert Schaberg
so I know whereof I speak when I award top honors in this category to
Good Housekeeping
Most Absorbing Narrative
Helen and her friend muse about men, gas mileage,** and socialism on their way to pick up Helen’s husband Harry at the station.
Ladies’ Home Journal
Most Distinctive Advertising Trend
Trompe-l’oeil curling pages were apparently all the rage.
Ladies’ Home Journal
Good Housekeeping
Most Retro Ad Design
As I’ve mentioned, the perfume industry hasn’t gotten the memo that Art Nouveau*** is over.
Ladies’ Home Journal
Least Cute Kid
In this always-competitive category, here are the runners-up
Ladies’ Home Journal
Good Housekeeping
and the winner.
Good Housekeeping
Least Appropriate Literary Reference
Because what says “let’s go whitewash some fences!” like a necktie?
Ladies’ Home Journal
Most Diet-Busting Ad
If I hadn’t been so hungry when I was judging this category, the prize probably would have gone to this,****
Ladies’ Home Journal
but after seeing this
Ladies’ Home Journal
I yelled out desperately to my husband, who had just returned from the grocery store, asking him if he had bought any bread. Which, given that we had vowed to abstain from it, he hadn’t. All I could think about was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and my Swedish-inspired smoked salmon salad,
which I normally love, just wasn’t doing it for me. This didn’t help.
Ladies’ Home Journal
If you needed proof that advertising, even 100-year-old advertising, works, there it is.
Least Diet-Busting Ad
Good Housekeeping
Creepiest Ad
Creepiness was a surprisingly popular advertising trend a hundred years ago. I first took note of it in my least popular post of 2018. It’s still with us in the form of these corn medicine drop people
Ladies’ Home Journal
and, the winner, this giant wall baby.*****
Good Housekeeping
Best Good Riddance
I’ve been meaning to do a post on Aunt Jemima for months, and have done a huge amount of research, which is a sign I’ll probably never get to it. So I’ll just say that after years of ads where she’s constantly ordered to make pancakes as an enslaved person
Good Housekeeping, December 1919
and hassled for free pancakes even after emancipation,
Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1920
I’m pleased to see her heading up north to finally earn some money.******
Best Multiculturalism
This isn’t a highly competitive category, with only one contestant featuring people of color in non-servant roles. Here it is:
Ladies’ Home Journal
Most Revolutionary Ad
There I was, flipping idly through the Ladies’ Home Journal, when I saw this.
Ladies’ Home Journal
“Wait, what?” I said. I had never seen an ad for a sanitary product in a 100-year-old magazine before. Deodorant was about as personal as advertising got.
Ladies’ Home Journal
I did some research and found that, while disposable sanitary napkins had been around in various forms since the 1880s, this was indeed the first advertisement for them in a major magazine and, therefore, their debut as a large-scale commercial product. The ad, which never explains exactly what these newfangled things are for, says that they’re made of a material that was first used for soldiers’ bandages during the war. This struck me as probably bogus but turned out to be true.
Best Ad Artistry
I read an interview with Lionel Messi once where someone asked him who the best player in soccer was. He said that there were himself and Ronaldo and then there was everyone else, and he went on to rank-order everyone else. In 1920s advertising terms, that would be Old Dutch Cleanser and Indian Head cloth. Old Dutch Cleanser is absent from LHJ and GH this month, so the winner by forfeit is
Ladies’ Home Journal
On to February!
*Actually there was a worse product name, which was (unintentionally) an ethnic slur, but it was disqualified from inclusion for that reason.
**Twenty-five miles per gallon!
***Which I love, don’t get me wrong. Missing the heyday of Art Nouveau is one of my greatest regrets about the timing of this project, up there with coming along after Jessie Willcox Smith replaced Coles Phillips as Good Housekeeping’s regular cover artist.
****Unless I DQ’d it out of annoyance over its sexism.
*****In fairness, Nujol also has one of the best ads ever:
Woman’s Home Companion, January 1918
******Of course I realize that the whole thing is still highly problematic.
On Thanksgiving 2018, the first year I had this blog, I wrote about ten people I was thankful for. They were all over the map—a social worker, the designer of the first bra, and a food safety pioneer, among others. Last year, I narrowed my focus to ten illustrators I was thankful for. This year, I’m narrowing the focus further, to women illustrators. I’m also reducing the number, because ten illustrators was exhausting for me and, let’s face it, maybe you too.*
Neysa McMein
Neysa McMein, 1918 (Library of Congress)
You know those implausible historical movies where the main character is involved in every notable event of the era? Like, if the heroine were living a hundred years ago, she’d be a suffragist and also entertain troops during the war and also be best friends with Dorothy Parker and also be a famous painter whose studio was a salon where people like George Bernard Shaw and Charlie Chaplin and Noel Coward and H.L. Mencken would party on while she painted away at her easel, ignoring them?
That’s Neysa McMein.
McMein was born in Quincy, Illinois in 1888, with the much more prosaic first name of Marjorie. Her father, who owned a printing company, was an alcoholic, and the family was not a happy one. McMein studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then moved to New York in 1913, working briefly as an actress before turning to illustration. Commercial success eluded her until, at the advice of a numerologist, she changed her name to Neysa, after a favorite racehorse. She soon sold her first cover to the Saturday Evening Post.**
May 13, 1916
Nearly sixty other Saturday Evening Post covers followed.***
When the United States entered the war, McMein was, according to her hometown paper, one of seven artists chosen by the Division of Pictorial Publicity of the War Department’s Committee on Public Information to go to France to illustrate the American war effort. Except, oops, she was a woman, a fact that had eluded the Division. What to do? McMein solved the problem by volunteering to go overseas as a YMCA volunteer instead. She entertained troops with Dorothy Parker,**** to considerable acclaim, and was saluted by a soldier with a poem that included this verse:
She’s a lady of fame, this Neysa McMein,
And she numbers her friends by the host;
She’s the party that places
Those wonderful faces
On the Saturday Evening Post.
In her downtime, McMein managed to contribute to the war effort artistically as well.
Neysa McMein,1918 (Library of Congress)
After the Armistice, she returned to New York, sold more magazine covers, became part of the Algonquin Round Table set, moved in with across-the-hall neighbor Dorothy Parker when Parker’s marriage broke up, hosted the aforementioned salon, and, in 1923, married John Baragwanath.***** Their daughter Joan was born the next year. It was an open marriage that allowed for affairs with Charlie Chaplin, Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley, and others.
McMein was McCall’s magazine’s regular cover artist from 1923 to 1937. She also worked as the magazine’s film reviewer.
April 1924
June 1925
She also did advertising work.
Neysa McMein, 1918 (metmuseum.org)
Motion Picture Classic, 1920
McMein painted portraits as well, and this allowed her to continue working when magazines turned from illustration to photography. Among her subjects were Herbert Hoover, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charlie Chaplin, and, of course, Dorothy Parker.
Portrait of Dorothy Parker by Neysa McMein, ca. 1922 (dorothyparker.org)
Oh, and I almost forgot, she drew the original Betty Crocker.
bettycrocker.com
McMein died in 1949 at the age of 61.
McMein wasn’t among the most technically accomplished illustrators of her era. A large percentage of her covers could be described as “woman who looks kind of like Neysa McMein in hat in front of white background.” But she was one of the most popular and highly paid illustrators of her time. And what a life she lived!
Thank you, Neysa!
Edna Crompton
If you’re thinking about how this is all very interesting but you have a kitchen full of Thanksgiving dishes to` get to, don’t worry, I could hardly find any information about the other two women we’re celebrating today. The sum total of what I’ve been able to find about Edna Crompton (mostly from this website) is that she lived from 1882 to 1952 and that she painted portraits and created calendars in addition to her magazine illustrations. As the 1920s progress, we’ll be seeing more of her as a regular cover artist for Redbook. If you know anything else about her, please let me know!
In the meantime, we’ll have to content ourselves with enjoying her art.
Vogue cover artist Harriet Meserole also kept a low profile. I found a Find a Grave entry for a Harriet A. Meserole (1893-1989) buried in a Brooklyn cemetery, who, date of birth-wise, could be our Harriet. I learned on a website about the history of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that the Meseroles were a prominent Greenpoint family, descended from French Huguenots who arrived in 1663. No mention of Harriet, though.
As far as I can tell, Meserole illustrated exclusivly for Vogue, and 1920s issues of Vogue are infuriatingly hard to access. They’re not archived at Google’s Hathitrust Digital Library, my main source of hundred-year-old magazine. Vogue has an online archive, but you need to be a subscriber to access most of it.****** Luckily, fashionmodeldirectory.com, which is much more intellectual than its name suggests, has a page about Meserole. FMD couldn’t find much biographic information either, but they say that her work appeared inside the magazine as well as on the cover, and they provide the following 1923 quote from her, presumably from Vogue: “”I like simplicity in all things and people. I hate prettiness and ice cream. I also like being one of your younger artists.” Questionable taste in desserts aside, she sounds charming!
Here’s Meserole’s first cover for Vogue, from February 1, 1919.
This is all from 1920, as far as I know, but there are many more to come.
July 15, 1924 (vogue.com)
October 1, 1924 (vogue.com)
I’m thankful to have Meserole’s bright future to look forward to.
Thank you, Harriet!
I’m thankful, too, for all of you who have shared my time travels with me over the past three years. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
*It was originally going to be five, but life and Thanksgiving cooking got in the way. Sorry, Cornelia Barnes and Jessie Willcox Smith, I’ll get to you at some point! My good intentions live on in the photo at the top of the post, from Smith’s November 1920 Good Housekeeping cover.
****When they invent time travel, this is going to be one of my first stops.
*****They met at the house of dancer Irene Castle.
Irene Castle, Cosmopolitan, March 1918
******I’m severely allergic to perfume, so subscribing to Vogue would be like subscribing to the Tear Gas Canister of the Month Club.
New on the Book List:
There’s quite a lot new on the book list because I keep forgetting to do this. The newest entry is Mary Marie, by Eleanor Porter. (UPDATE 11/29/2020: I’ve just added a writeup of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, which I finished listening to as an audiobook a few days before Thanksgiving.)
My years of reading as if I were living 100 years ago haven’t turned me into much of a nostalgist. In general, whatever is awful in the early 21st century was even worse in the early 20th century. Back then, the United States was a racist, sexist, war-scarred country. The white supremacist violence of the Red Summer of 1919 was far worse than what we’re experiencing now. We lost half a million more lives to the Spanish influenza than we’ve lost so far to COVID, among a population a third the size of today’s.
Poster, United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation, 1918 (Free Library of Philadelphia)
Not that I’m minimizing what we’re going through now. We’re supposed to be better than our predecessors, and the fact that we can even draw parallels between that terrible time and our own shows that we haven’t done a very good job of learning lessons from the past.
Still, as this awful summer crawls to an end, I’m starting to feel like I wouldn’t mind spending some time in 1920.
Women have the vote!
League of Women Voters poster, 1920
Corsets are going out of fashion!
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
The pandemic is over, and people are free to go places and do things!
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? The perfect destination for an imaginary vacation. You can come too!
A house at the seaside is just the thing, wouldn’t you agree?
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
We’ll pack our clothes,
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
making sure not to forget to bring along our white shoes,
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
or our maid, whose greatest joy in life is cleaning them.
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
We’ll round up the kids,
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
but not the scary-looking ones,
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
and set out overland in the Overland.
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
Whew! That was quite a journey.
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
I need to freshen up.
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
I brush my hair,*
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
sprinkle on a little talcum powder,**
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
dab on some Odorono,
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
and I’m all set to go.
Of course we brought along the Grafonola.
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
Or the Victrola. Whatever! It’s party time!
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
We’ll go swimming
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
and play games
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
and watch fireworks
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
and go on picnics
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
and Sunday drives.
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
If it gets too hot, we’ll just loll around in fetching outfits.
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
The fresh air will do the children a world of good
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
and maybe wean them off their weird obsession with bread.
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1920
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
And of course it wouldn’t be summer without some romance.
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
Enjoy it while you can! All too soon we’ll be cleaning up the summer house
Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1920
(just kidding, that’s the maid’s job),
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1920
heading back home,
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
and sending the kids off to school.
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1920
But it’s nice to get away for a while, isn’t it?
*I try to keep this a family blog, but oh 1920, you test me sometimes.
When a new decade begins, there’s usually a period when people have a sense that it will be different from the last one, but they don’t yet know how. (Okay, this decade is a bad example.) Having spent my Easter morning looking through ads from the Ladies’ Home Journal from January to April 1920, I’ve caught glimpses of the 1910s dying and the 1920s being born.
I imagine that this woman’s flowing locks will disappear soon,
to be replaced by something along these lines:*
Dance parties like this are so 1916;
this proto-Charleston is more like it.
Will a corset stand it?
No is the answer. More relaxing underwear is on the way.**
Ad styles are changing too. The fragrance industry hasn’t gotten the memo that Art Nouveau is over,***
while these companies are ahead of the pack with bold colors and clear lines:
There are some constants. Ads for dried and canned fruit
and, God help us, cannned meat
are as popular as ever. Maids are at the ready to help their mistresses get dressed,
and fix breakfast for the little master,
and change the baby,
and hold up cans of wax.
Husbands, though? Not so helpful.****
African-Americans are almost always shown as hardworking servants,*****
although this guy looks like he’s had it up to here and is about to heave the family’s breakfast at them.
I’ve done an excellent job of not mentioning you-know-what, but I can’t stop myself from ending with an ad that would never have caught my eye at any other time. A thousand old linen handkerchiefs indeed!
*Yes, I do realize she may have her hair tied up in back. Besides, she’s eating shortening, so I don’t want to hold her up as too much of a role model.
**Although you could wear a corset with this underwear, of course. For a fascinating and hilarious look at what goes under what, read this witness2fashion post.
***I just read Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, a wonderful novel about a woman who worked in advertising in the early to mid-20th century, based loosely on the life of Margaret Fishback. In it, I learned that the advertising style where the product is portrayed as being enormous was known as “hellzapoppin’.”
****In case the print is too small for you to read, the ad says, “‘Now see what you’ve done!’ But careless hubby lacks concern, for he knows that offending cigar ashes are quickly and easily whisked off the rug by the ever handy Royal.” I hate hate hate this guy.
*****The exception: the man in the Cream of Wheat ads, real-life chef Frank L. White, whom I’ve written about before.
The beginning of a new decade is a good time for a fresh start. A time to review your diet, and your exercise routine, and your blog title. When I launched My Year in 1918 on January 1, 2018, I expected it to be a one-year journey to the world of a hundred years ago. Which it was, in the sense that I spent that year reading ONLY as if I were living 100 years ago. Since this is not something one can do indefinitely, I reentered the 21st century at the beginning of 2019. I found I didn’t want to leave the 1910s behind, though, so I continued reading and writing about the world of 1919.
Which, since I didn’t listen to my friend Emily, who warned me about this exact scenario, left me with an outdated blog name. I didn’t worry about this too much in 2019, seeing the year as an extended victory lap. But, as the 1920/2020s approached, I was growing tired of having to give long-winded explanations about why my blog was called My Year in 1918.
So I’m excited to announce this blog’s new, non-expiring, name: My Life 100 Years Ago.*
Now on to the most popular posts of the year.
The Top 10 wasn’t as competitive a category in 2019 as it was in 2018, when, posting with monomaniacal zeal, I ended up with 94 contenders. Last year I only published 21 posts. Still, thanks to the magic of Google search engine optimization—the more you’ve written the more important Google thinks you are, so you end up being, say, the go-to person on glamorous spy ring leader Despina Storch—I ended up with a slightly higher number of views in 2019 than in 2018.**
Here are the top 10 posts, starting with #7 because there is, weirdly, a four-way tie in that position.
I had a great time learning about the lives and art of these illustrators. My favorite discovery was Coles Phillips, who pioneered the Fadeaway Girl technique.***
Last year, I took a vocabulary-based intelligence test from 1918 and did pretty well. This year, I took a series of intelligence tests from 1919 and, well, the title says it all.
I woke up one day in D.C. to find it was a miraculously beautiful August morning, then spent the whole day inside writing this blog post. It was worth it, though. For one thing, I now know way more than I used to about 1919 deodorant.
Good news—clickbait works! So I won’t tell you what it is here either. Hint: it’s based on the real-life woman pictured with her family in this photograph.
I have had a huge amount of fun doing this blog. The intelligence tests! The quizzes on What’s Your 1918 Girl Job? and Did College Shrink Your Breasts?! The search for 1918 love! But setting out to earn badges from the 1916 Girl Scout handbook was the most fun of all. In this second round, I polished silver and translated Proust and played the recorder and…well, read for yourself!
This was another of my favorite projects of the year, and readers must have agreed—this post shot up to #3 in only twelve days. One surprise was the amount of violence in children’s books of 100 years ago. The illustration here is from a NURSERY RHYME.
The humongous success of this post—it had three time as many views as the next most popular post of the year—shows that readers had as much fun as I did with the Girl Scout badge quest. Luckily, there are more badges to be earned this year, with a new edition of the Girl Scout handbook out in 1920. And if you missed the second installment, it’s just a click away at #4!
Honorable Mentions:
Exploring Provo–and Mormon History: Sometimes initial popularity hurts a post in the stats, because if you read the post at the top of the blog without clicking on it then it’s credited to the home page. This is what happened with this post, which tied the record for daily views when first published but ended up as #18 of 21 for the year.
More beautiful images from 1918: I always hope that the least-viewed post of the year doesn’t turn out to be a labor of love that I spent days and days on. Luckily (and perhaps not coincidentally), this hasn’t been the case so far. 2019’s worst performer, with 10 views**** (which is at least better than last year’s two), is one of three posts of images that I published in the first weeks of 2019, when I was shell-shocked after emerging from 1918. So I guess the “people only want to look at pictures” rule isn’t infallible.
Best-Performing Post from 2018
In search of a good mother poem: Posts originally published in 2018 didn’t qualify for Top 10 honors. Which is bad luck for this one, which only came in 17th last year but was this year’s second most viewed overall. I hope that all these visitors weren’t seeking inspirational Mother’s Day verse, since they would have been disappointed. That is, I think “Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” William Carlos Williams’ tribute to his fierce grandmother, is inspiring, but I can’t imagine it on a needlepoint sampler.
All the best for the new year! I’m looking forward to sharing the Roaring Twenties with you.
*UPDATE 1/2/2020: This blog’s URL is now officially mylife100yearsago.com. Myyearin1918.com redirects to this site, so everything should happen seamlessly from your end regardless of how you access it, except maybe RSS feeds. (Drop me a line if it doesn’t.) Everyone on the internet made this process sound incredibly scary–“you’ll want to brush up on your FTP skills,” etc.–but it ended up taking five minutes on WordPress.
**Another thing about search engine optimization: Google severely punishes broken links, which my blog suddenly has lots of. The Modernist Journals Project recently revamped its site, breaking my many links to magazines such as The Smart Set, The Crisis, and The Little Review. I’m fixing them one by one. If you encounter a broken link to something you need (or just want) to see, send me a message on the Contact page and I’ll send you the link. (To the person who clicked eight times last week trying in vain to get to the issue of The Smart Set with H.L. Mencken’s review of My Ántonia in it, here it is.)
***Phillips seems to have been the inspiration for Grace Lin’s children’s book A Big Bed for Little Snow, which was just reviewed in the New York Times, with a fadeaway illustration from the book of a mother and child. In the book, Lin writes, “Little Snow listened to Mommy’s footsteps fade away,” which I suspect is a shout-out. (UPDATE 1/18/020: I sent a message to Grace Lin’s website to ask about this and got a response saying that Lin discusses the connection in this video. It’s well worth watching if you’ve got five minutes, and not just because of the Phillips connection.)
****But, remember, more people read it on the home page.
I have been very lazy about updates. I’ve recently added mini-reviews for the latest (and last) entries for 2019:
The Girl from the Marsh Croft, by Selma Lagerlöf (1908; translated 1910) Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1916) Pictures of the Floating World, by Amy Lowell (1919)
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, date unknown (fashionmodeldirectory.com)
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,
January 1918
August 1918
here is one that Condé Nast lists as “artist unknown” but sure looks like her,
October 1918
and here is an illustration that Vanity Fair rejected but was later used as a Red Cross poster:
sites.utexas.edu
The “new women” Conway portrayed helped shape an era.
Thank you, Gordon!
Georges Lepape
Georges Lepape, date unknown (babelio.com)
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,
January 15, 1919
June 15, 1919
July 15, 1919
and here’s one from Vanity Fair.
December 1919
Merci, Georges!
John Held Jr.
John Held Jr. (Judge magazine, 1923)
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:
October 1919
November 1919
July 1919
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,
January 1918
February 1918
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
American Club Woman, October 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:
March 15, 1919
July 1, 1919
June 1, 1919
Thank you, Helen!
Coles Phillips.
Coles Phillips (Bain News Service, date unknown)
I first noticed Coles Phillips as the artist behind this haunting hosiery ad:
Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1919
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.
May 21, 1908
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.
January 1916
October 1916
December 1916
By 1919, though, he was focusing mostly on advertising, and specifically on women’s legs.****
Ladies’ Home Journal, October 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:
Out West, 1918
Bound in Morocco, 1918
Komtesse Doddy (Countess Doddy), 1919
We Can’t Have Everything, 1918
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:
July 1919
September 1919
December 1919
Thank you, George!
9. Erté
Erté, date unknown
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:
March 1919
May 1919
Спасибо (and merci), Erté!
10. Norman Rockwell
Portrait of Norman Rockwell, date unknown
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.
April 26, 1919
March 22, 1919
The humor magazines Life and Judge published some illustrations apparently deemed not wholesome enough for the Saturday Evening Post, like this one
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.
****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.
When I talk to readers of My Year in 1918,* they often say, “My favorite thing about your blog is…” I wait eagerly for their next words: “the razor-sharp, witty writing,” maybe, or “your profound understanding of the era.” But in my heart I know what’s coming:
“The pictures.”
I don’t blame them. I love the pictures too.
It’s a beautiful August morning in Washington, D.C.,** and I’ve decided to use those pictures to imagine myself into an equally beautiful summer morning in 1919.
Like the woman in this Pears Soap ad, I wake up, turn my cheeks to the first clear rays of dawn, and say, “I am beautiful!”
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1919
Then I roll over and go back to sleep for a few more hours.
When I finally get up, I take a bath, then dust myself with talcum powder, which is quite the thing in 1919.
Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1919
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 2019
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1919
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1919
I’ve read all the horror stories about women who lack daintiness,
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1919
Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1919
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1919
Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1919
plus I don’t want to mess up my dress,
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1919
so I dab on some deodorant powder. I get dressed
Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1919
and have a nice healthy breakfast,
Swift’s Premium Bacon ad, Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1919
with orange juice made from this recipe from Sunkist: “Just squeeze juice from an orange.”***
Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1919
Over breakfast, I flip through my August magazines,
Rita Senger
George Wolfe Plank
Alex Bradshaw and W.H. Bull
Harry Richardson
stopping for a moment to wonder whether that’s a woman or a parrot on the cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal.****
But there’s no time to linger–there’s tennis to play,
Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1919
and beaches to relax on,
Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1919
and romance in the air!*****
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1919
Meanwhile, back in 2019, the morning has come and gone, and so will the afternoon if I don’t get a move on.
Enjoy what’s left of the summer, everyone!
*That is, friends who read the blog. It’s not like I’m recognized on the street.
**I know, it sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true:
Yahoo Weather
***If you’re wondering, like I was, why Sunkist was explaining such an obvious concept, it’s because orange juice wasn’t very popular yet. There was a huge oversupply of oranges early in the 1910s, leading to the chopping down of 30% of the citrus trees in California, and the citrus industry was desperate to find more uses for its product. They turned to advertisers, who came up with the slogan “drink an orange,” which debuted in 1916.
UPDATE 9/5/2019: After an extensive search, I identified the artist as Carton Moore-Park, whose name is, um, written under the cover illustration. (As Moorepark, which is how he signed his paintings, but he’s referred to elsewhere, including in this undergraduate thesis, as Moore-Park or Moore Park.)
None of Moore-Park’s other paintings of birds for the Ladies’ Home Journal (or, as it turns out to have been briefly and ill-advisedly named, the New Ladies’ Home Journal) show signs of being optical illusions, so I guess the parrot was just supposed to be a parrot.
Carton Moore-Park, New Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1916
Carton Moore-Park, Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1916
Carton Moore-Park, Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1917
Carton Moore-Park, Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1919
My Life 100 Years Ago 