August in Washington, D.C., wound down in a very un-D.C. fashion, with moderate temperatures and low humidity, a far cry from the weather in late July when I went to the DC Open finals.* The women’s final, played in the afternoon after a long rain delay, felt like a battle to see which player could draw more of the humid air into her lungs. (Conditions were better for the men, who played at sunset after another long rain delay.)
DC Open winner Leylah Fernandez and finalist Anna Kalinskaya
I started my Labor Day weekend early by joining two friends for a swim at the Hearst Pool near the National Cathedral. This was my first visit to this pool, which opened in 2021, and only my second swim of the summer. As I swam leisurely laps and lazed on a lounge chair chatting with my friends, I regretted that I hadn’t spent more time at the pool.
I decided to cut myself some slack, though, given that my summer started out as a Cape Town winter and along the way featured COVID in Dublin, a week visiting family in Colorado, and Hurricane Erin, which didn’t come as far north as DC but brought cloudy skies and cool weather. I’d celebrate the last days of summer, I decided, by taking a look at swimmers on the magazine covers of 1925.
The New Yorker, in its first summer, went all-in on celebrating the joys of the surf.
H.O. Hofman, June 20, 1925Julian de Minskey, June 27, 1925H.O. Hofman, August 15, 1925
Judge was on board too.
Ruth EastmanGuy Hoff, August 1, 1925
Vanity Fair was not to be outdone by Judge in the red wrap department.
Miguel Covarrubias, July 1925
Kids joined in the fun at the Saturday Evening Post.
Elberg McGran Jackson, July 24, 1925Charles McLellan, August 1, 1925
It struck me that, while the men and boys are still covered up on top, the women’s suits aren’t all that different from what you’d see at the beach or the pool these days. When I was growing up, all girls’ and women’s suits had higher-cut legs (if you wanted to be modest, you had to get one with a little skirt, which was kind of pointless because it would float up when you got into the water), but now you see all different kinds of suits, including ones like these.
Women had to fight for the type of suits that you see on the 1925 covers. Twenty years before, bathing suits looked like this:
Martin Justice, July 1905Lafayette Maynard Dixon, August 1905
Stockings were on their way out by the mid-1910s,
Anne Harriet Fish, November 1915Harry Morse Meyers, July 18, 2015
but bare-legged swimming was still barred in some places. The outcry following the arrest of Olympic gold medalist Ethelda Bleibtrey for swimming “nude” (i.e. without stockings) at Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles in 1919 helped put an end to the leg-baring bans.
Ethelda Bleibtrey at Olympic Games, Antwerp, 1920.
By 1925, Life was poking fun at the similarity between men’s and women’s suits. (They would diverge again when men started bathing topless in the 1930s.)
Garrett Price, August 27, 1925
With Labor Day behind us and pools closed, swimming is a wistful memory.
Emile Aubry, September 1925
As this woman reminds us, though, you don’t have to go in the water to enjoy the warm weather while it lasts.
*The tournament is officially called the [Corporate Sponsor 1] [Corporate Sponsor 2] DC Open, but I don’t have either the mental energy to remember all that or the desire to advertise these companies every time I mention it.
This year, a lot of Americans will be celebrating Independence Day in a minor key. I’m one of them. I’m spending our country’s anniversary in COVID isolation at Trinity College, Dublin, a set of circumstances not conducive to riotous celebration even at the best of times. I felt like I should mark the day somehow, though, so I’m sharing some magazine covers from July 1925 that show some of the many ways our country’s unquenchable spirit can be celebrated:
spending the day at Coney Island,
Ilonka Karasz, July 4, 1925
lighting a festive lantern,
Conrad Dickel, July 1925
breathing in the sea air,
Georges Lepape, July 1, 1925
ringing the bell of freedom,
J.C. Leyendecker, July 4, 1925
and celebrating the diversity that always has been, and always will be, our country’s greatest strength.
I grew up with the New Yorker. My family had a subscription. We had a huge cartoon collection that I browsed through constantly. My high school English teacher explained the proper way to read the magazine: front to back, skipping the cartoons and ads, then back to front, reading them. I read books like James Thurber’s memoir The Years With Ross (Harold Ross was the magazine’s founding editor) and Brandon Gill’s Here at the New Yorker. I knew from all this reading that the magazine’s early issues were considered unfunny and sophomoric. So I approached the first issue, dated February 22, 1925, with low expectations.
Which were mostly, but not entirely, met.
Here are some bests and worsts from the 36-page issue. Actually, worsts and bests, because with the way everything else is going these days I’m in the mood to end on an upbeat note.
Worst Archetype
An editor’s note in the debut issue says that the New Yorker “is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” This now-famous bon mot also appeared in the magazine’s prospectus and, according to an article about the magazine in the March 2, 1925, issue of Time, “on cards which they tacked up about town.”*
Time claimed to have asked an old lady from Dubuque for her views on the New Yorker’s first issue. The old lady, who was actually Time (and, later, New Yorker) writer Niven Busch, replied, “I, and my associates here, have never subscribed to the view that bad taste is any the less offensive because it is metropolitan taste…there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity.”
Mary Hayford (Encyclopedia Dubuque)
In 1964, Dubuque, playing the long game, sent an actual old lady,** Mary Hayford, to New York to counter the hayseed image. “We have three fine colleges and everyone is studying for their master’s and Ph.D., so we’re very culturally minded,” she told the New York Times. Hayford appeared on the Tonight Show and went on to travel around the country as an ambassador for Dubuque. In her 1989 obituary, the New York Times said that Hayford “helped turn a New York snub into a symbol of pride.”
Best Archetype
Rea Irvin
Eustace Tilley,*** Rea Irvin’s cover fop, appears on the magazine’s anniversary covers to this day, sometimes in his original guise, sometimes with a twist. The hundredth-anniversary edition came in six different versions.
Worst Front of the Book Item
I’m not going to dignify it by reproducing it here, but there’s an item in the “Of All Things” department that manages, in just six lines, to be racist toward both American Indians and Jewish people. The rest of the section mostly consists of jokes about drama critic George Jean Nathan’s love life.****
Best Front of the Book Item
I’m obsessed with 1920s crossword puzzle books,***** so I was interested to read that, according to an anonymous writer in the Talk of the Town section, they’re falling out of fashion in the trendy New York circles where they first became popular. Simon & Schuster, isn’t worried, though; they’re publishing a new volume of puzzles by celebrities. The Talk of the Town writer says that he has a puzzle in the book, which, he tells us blushingly, “’they” say is one of the best. Through some literary detective work, I ID’d the writer/puzzle constructor as advisory editor Marc Connelly.******
Worst Description
A profile on Giulio Gatti-Cassaza, manager of the Metropolitan Opera, describes his nose as follows: “It is a fine, memorable feature, this Gatti- Cassaza nose. It is the sharpest, most assertive part of his wise, sensitive, melancholy face.” If this description leaves you feeling insufficiently well informed about G G-C’s nose, the profile includes two more sentences about it.
To this day, the New Yorker retains what a writer for the magazine described in 2012 as “a literary commitment to tiny details, combined with a comedic eye for social types.” Whether you think this is a good or bad thing depends on how much you want to know about people’s noses.
Best Description
A brief item in a section called “The Hour Glass” describes New York State Senate minority leader (and future New York mayor) James J. Walker thus: “His face is thin; his features sharp, and his cheeks have the perennially youngish tint of the juvenile who bounds onstage as the chief chorine shrills: ‘Oh, girls, here comes the Prince now.’” I feel like I’ve read a similar description somewhere before, but it’s more entertaining than reading about noses.
Worst Gossip
“In Our Midst” is a column of innocuous gossip that seems intended to let us know who is cool enough to be featured in the New Yorker.******* It’s all pretty boring, so I’ll arbitrarily choose this: “Jerome (‘Jerry’) D. Kern was in town one day buying some second-hand books.”
Best Gossip
Also from “In Our Midst”: “Those are pretty clever and interesting stories about married life that Mrs. Vi Shore is writing for Liberty. Yr. corres. wonders if Mr. Shore reads them.”
Hey, New Yorker, I’ve got an idea! Maybe, instead of boring gossip, you could publish interesting short stories! In the meantime, I’m going to track down Mrs. Vi Shore’s.
Worst Criticism
The Books section includes a rave review of God’s Stepchildren by Sarah G. Millin, “a powerful story, the story, simple, direct, unfailingly real and not for a sentence dull, of what comes of white-and-black mating in South Africa. It is, of course, tragic.” I have actually read this book, for my 1920s bestseller discussion group. Meanwhile, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which I have, more unremarkably, also read, is given this squib at the end of the section: “A foaming-up of India race hate, pictured with searching skill.”
If it were up to me, I’d highlight the book that comes out against, not for, race hate.
Best Criticism
The art columnist, bylined “Froid” and actually Murdock Penderton, has this to say about an exhibition of British paintings: “If you are a person who quit trading with the corner grocer because you believed him a German spy, you will enjoy this exhibit.…A placard with sufficient fairness warns you that this exhibit is held in the interest of further cementing the bonds of the English speaking races….If you care for anything later than Ingres, stay at home and let the cement of the English speaking races crumble away.”
Worst Going On
I want to attend almost all of the goings on on “THE NEW YORKER’S conscientious calendar of events worth while.” I do not, however want to go to “Dinner to Gen. Summerall, Hotel Plaza. Tuesday, Feb. 17, given by a citizens’ committee, Gen. John F. O’Ryan, chairman.” I’m sure the Gen. is a nice guy and all, but I was a diplomat for 28 years and I never, ever want to go to another dinner with speeches.
Best Going On
“Lady, Be Good—Liberty Theatre. A nice little musical comedy, with the enviably active Astaires and the most delightful score in the city.”
Adele Astaire, Fred’s sister and dance partner, called the story line “tacky” and “weak,” but who cares? The Astaires! A Gershwin score! Sigh. I had to satisfy myself with a 1966 broadcast of Fred Astaire singing the show’s two big hits (“Fascinating Rhythm” along with the title track) and shuffling around a little.
Worst Ad
“What’s wrong with this friendly welcome?” you might be asking. But there’s Sarah G. Millin again, who has written, the ad says, a “strange, great, darkly beautiful novel.” I’ll give them strange.********
Best Ad
If the map is as stylish as this ad, I’ll pay $1.50 for it.
Worst Cartoon
There were only six cartoons, and they were all okay, so I’ll yield the floor to Time magazine, which complained that the magazine contained “one extremely funny original joke, tagged, unfortunately, with a poor illustration.” Given the absence of other contenders for extremely funny original joke, it has to be this one, by Ethel Plummer, who only submitted a few more cartoons to the magazine.
Best Cartoon
Oscar Howard
I wouldn’t say this had me in stitches, but it’s a quintessential New Yorker cartoon, the type you might expect from Helen Hokinson in the 1940s.********* Like Plummer, though, cartoonist Oscar Howard only made a few appearance in the magazine.
All in All…
Harold Ross and Jane Grant, his wife and collaborator, ca. 1920-1925 (New York Public Library)
The critics were right: the magazine is sophomoric and trying too hard. It’s difficult to tell whether it’s celebrating or skewering its subjects. And it’s horribly racist. Looking at the first issue, though, you can see flashes of what’s to come. It’s there in the typeface (designed by Irvin), in the drawings, and in the sections, many of which have survived. (There’s even one of those pieces of filler with a newspaper headline and a snarky comment. Not a funny comment, but it’s a start.)
Ross was frank about the New Yorker’s flaws, writing in the first issue that the magazine “recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it is impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number.”
It will take a while, but the bones of a great magazine are there.
*Time itself had debuted two years earlier, on March 3, 1923. I read the first issue but didn’t get around to doing a post. The highlight for me, as an amateur T.S. Eliot scholar, was an article reporting speculation that The Waste Land was a hoax.
**That is, if you think 60 is old, which I, with skin in this game, don’t.
***According to a piece on Tilley in the New Yorker’s 80th anniversary issue in 2005, his name came from a series of humorous pieces by staff writer Corey Ford during the magazine’s first year.
****Not that I’m in a position to criticize this choice of material, having written an entire blog post making fun of George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken’s love lives.
*****As I noted in my post on children’s books of 1924, publisher Simon & Schuster called them “cross word puzzles.” The New Yorker, in its first issue, calls them cross-word puzzles. On the other hand, they write “teen-ager” to this day, so they’re not exactly my go-to source on hyphenation.
******Connelly, like several of the magazine’s other advising editors, was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. The other advisory board members on the masthead were Ralph Barton, Rea Irvin, George S. Kaufman, Alice Duer Miller, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott. (In 1925, “celebrity” meant someone who was notable, not hugely famous.)
******* Other people whose mundane activities the New Yorker deems worthy of mention include writer Don Marquis, Bookman editor John Farrar, humor writer Donald Ogden Stewart, actress Norma Talmadge, and bunch of people I’m not enough of a sophisticate to have heard of. To be fair, the definition of “gossip” at the time was more along the lines of “bits of news” than “delicious scandal.”
New York Times, December 21, 1913
********Millin is, the ad says, the literary editor of the Cape Town Times. Except that’s not the newspaper’s name—it is, and was, the Cape Times. I realize that this is an extremely niche complaint.
*********Hokinson made her debut in the magazine’s July 4, 1925, edition.
Belated happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to the (can it be?) eighth year of My Life 100 Years Ago.*
J.C. Leyendecker, January 3, 1925
This year’s J.C. Leyendecker New Year’s baby apparently just registered his new car and immediately has to repair it, which I gather is par for the course for ca. 1925 vehicles.
John Held Jr., January 5, 1925
Cars can be fun, though, as you can see from the most Roaring Twenties magazine cover ever. You can cavort and smoke and…well, let’s just say don’t base your driving behavior on hundred-year-old magazine covers.
Cars were also celebrated on the covers of Vogue**
Georges Lepape, January 1, 1925
and Life (“We got one now,” the family exults in the caption),
F.G. Cooper, January 8, 1925
while, over at Motor, ironically, cars are a mere afterthought.
Coles Phillips, January 1925
On to the top posts of 1924!
Which is not a very competitive category because my productivity this year was less than stellar, with a mere three posts. Here they are:
Highlights of 1924 include When We Were Very Young, A.A. Milne’s first collection of Christopher Robin poems; a fun book of poems about a day in the life of two Parisian kids; and, for older kids, two Agatha Christies and The Cross Word Puzzle Book, the first-ever crossword collection, which, infuriatingly, I can’t download from South Africa.
Longing for sun in rainy, wintery Cape Town, I took refuge in a rainbow of summer 1924 magazine covers. (Now, in sunny, summery Cape Town, I’m wistfully scrolling Facebook for my DC friends’ photos of the recent snowstorm.)
In spite of my slack production, this blog had by far its most views ever in 2024, proving, depending on your world view, either that 1) sticking to something, however intermittently, pays off, or 2) life is unfair.*** The most popular posts this year overall were from past years. (The #1 new post was only #15 overall.) To make this a real Top 10, here are seven of them.
Parker’s “Any Porch,” her first published poem, is one of my favorite a hundred years ago things ever. It’s been a while—I’ll have to catch up with her in 1925.
For this Thanksgiving post, I was going to write about ten women I was thankful for, but Neysa McMein (who was Dorothy Parker’s best friend) ended up being so fascinating that I never would have gotten dinner on the table if I hadn’t cut back.
Langston Hughes wrote one of his greatest poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” as a teenager—and also wrote about fairies and Mexican children’s games.
This is part one in my two-part quest to earn a Girl Scout badge from 100 years ago. Sadly, Part 2, where I actually succeeded in earning a couple, is less popular.
In last year’s most popular new post, I wrote about McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” and the confusion over whether it was entered into the Congressional Record, and if so, by whom.
It took a while for the twenties to start roaring, but halfway through the decade flappers are everywhere, Art Deco has come into its own, and the Jazz Age is well underway. I’m looking forward to what 1925 will bring.
*If you want to get technical, for the first two years it was My Life in 1918.
**The first few websites I saw attributed this cover to Sonia Delaunay, which surprised me since as far as I knew she was an artist, not an illustrator. The cover’s definitely by Lepape—you can see his signature in the top left hand corner—but according to this website it’s a portrayal of Delaunay’s “simultaneous” technique.
***Or, I guess, 3) search engine algorithms are weird.
I recently went on on a trip from Cape Town to Washington, D.C., Seattle, North Cascades National Park, Seattle again, Denver, D.C. again, and then back home to Cape Town, all in three weeks. It was wonderful, but it was too much: too many airports, too many suitcases, too many weird bathroom setups. (Well, two, but that was two too many.) I kept saying to myself, “I’ll be so happy to just be able to hang out at home,” forgetting to take Cape Town winters into consideration and add, “provided that it doesn’t rain nonstop so that staying at home is the only option.”
I went out walking every day when the rain let up, hoping to make it home before the skies opened again. On one of these walks I looked up and saw a double rainbow, which lifted my spirits tremendously. Cape Town is unfortunately not a place where it’s wise to to take out your phone and start snapping away while walking along a busy road, so I don’t have a photo of it. But I assume you’re familiar with the concept.
I haven’t done a magazine illustration post in a while,* so I decided to pay tribute to that moment, and to summer from a Cape Town winter, with a rainbow of summer 1924 magazine covers.
First up in vivid red is Spanish illustrator Eduardo Garcia Benito’sJune Vanity Fair cover.**
Eduardo Garcia Benito, June 1924
Imposing a constraint, like “it has to be orange,” makes you expand your horizons. I wasn’t familiar with The Designer, although it must have had a large circulation if it was serializing Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.*** I wasn’t familiar with the cover artist, American illustrator Charles Allan Winter, either.
You can’t expand your horizons much further than to a short-lived Spanish sports magazine for which the only online reference I could find is a Catalan-language Wikipedia page that has been flagged for possible deletion. The illustrator, Spanish artist Rafael de Penagos, is new to me. He received a gold medal at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, from which Art Deco got its name (surprisingly, not until the 1960s).
Rafael de Panagos, July 1, 1924
In vibrant blue, a House & Garden cover by French artist André Édouard Marty. Marty, not to be confused with leading French Communist Party member André Marty, was another leading figure in the Art Deco movement.
André Édouard Marty, June 1924
I’m not of the school of thought that indigo is a color of the rainbow, since squeezing it in between blue and purple throws off the symmetry, but I couldn’t resist these flower-strewing children, drawn by an artist I couldn’t identify.**** This issue of Woman’s Home Companion includes an essay on parenthood by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the last installment of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-Maker, an ahead-of-its-time novel about a stay-at-home dad,***** and an illustrated story by N.C. Wyeth. Not bad for fifteen cents.
July 1924
Here’s the purplest cover I could find, from Vogue regular Pierre Brissaud.******
Pierre Brissaud, July 1924
To wrap things up, here’s a cover by John Holmgren, yet another new-to-me artist, who managed to fit every color of the rainbow onto this Judge cover.
John Holmgren, July 5, 1924
But wait! This is just a SINGLE rainbow.
July slipped into August as I was working on this post, which gave me another month’s worth of magazine covers to work with. Now August is slipping away as well, and I’m back in Washington. At this rate, the leaves will be falling off the trees by the time I post this if I write about each one, so here they all are:
House and Garden: Joseph B. Platt. Vanity Fair: Warren Davis (back to his old tricks). Vogue (green): George Wolfe Plank. Vogue (purple): Harriet Meserole. Other artists unknown.
Enjoy the end of summer (or, if you’re in Cape Town, FINALLY the end of winter), everyone!
*Or any other post, for that matter.
**There’s a truly bonkers essay by D.H. Lawrence in this issue called “On Being a Man.” It starts out with a racist account of sitting on a train with an African American man and segues into a discussion of why marriage is literally hell.
***Lewis won, and rejected, the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith. In a written statement, he objected to the criteria for which the prize was awarded: “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” I’m with Lewis on this, although some said that he was just miffed that he hadn’t won the award for Main Street, published in 1921.
****ChatGPT claimed that the cover artist was Charles Dana Gibson, which I didn’t buy. I asked for a source for this information, and it said, oh, sorry, it’s actually Frances Tipton Hunter. This sounded more plausible but I still wasn’t convinced, so I asked again for the source, at which point ChatGPT threw up its hands and admitted that it was just making stuff up.
I don’t know if there’s some symbolism behind this year’s J.C. Leyendecker New Year’s baby that I’m missing, or if it’s just a baby knight riding a mechanical horse and using a feather as a lance. Any insights would be welcomed.
Elsewhere, Life waxes whimsical,
a skating duo rings in the new year at St. Nicholas,*
Fruit, Garden and Home (soon to be retitled, much more sensibly, Better Homes and Gardens) has a snowy scene,
and Motor magazine features the most scantily dressed Coles Phillips woman I’ve ever seen.
The Top Posts
As was the case last year, I didn’t have enough posts to fill out a top 10 list, but I did slightly better (8) than last year (7). Something must be going on with the Google algorithm, because 1) despite my lackadaisical posting schedule, my total views have shot up to unprecedented levels in recent months, and 2) almost all of the most popular posts, other than the home page (which makes up the vast majority of views), are from previous years. Pre-2023 posts don’t qualify for the Top 10, but I’ll mention the most popular ones after the countdown.
In researching my fifth annual children’s book shopping guide, I found a moral panic among magazine writers about children reading inappropriate books (Dare-Devil Dick! Seven Buckets of Blood!) and a couple of treasures: a beautifully illustrated alphabet book and an excellent poetry anthology.
In May, I announced that my friend Deborah Kalb and I were starting a podcast, Rereading Our Childhood, where, just like it sounds, we reread books we enjoyed as children. Six months in, we’ve published sixteen episodes, had a great time with our rereads, and, as I wrote this week in the top 10 countdown on the podcast blog, learned that producing a podcast is way harder than writing a blog. If you’re interested in following along, you can find us at rereadingourchildhood.buzzsprout.com.
I had a lot of fun doing this countdown of the best magazine covers of winter 1923, and discovering some not-so-artistic but still fascinating ones.***
This post was by far the most popular new one of the year. I wrote about the critical reception to McKay’s poetry and about the confusion over whether “If We Must Die” was entered into the Congressional Record, and if so, by whom. This was the second year in a row, after last year’s post on Langston Hughes, Teenaged Poet, that a post about an African American poet rose to the top.
On January 1, 2018, the day that I started this project and stopped reading anything from less than 100 years ago, I only expected it to last a year.**** (When I looked at my e-mail inbox this morning and found blog posts from Frank Hudson (talking about how Robert Frost is misunderstood) and witness2fashion (sharing some 1898 Delineator illustrations of women riding bicycles in very cumbersome clothing), I was reminded on the seventh New Year’s Day of this project of the wonderful community I’ve found along the way. I look forward to what 1924 will bring.*****
*Speaking of which, I went ice skating in Cape Town a few days ago. If you’re a skater of average ability and want to feel like Michelle Kwan, go to a skating rink in South Africa.
**I skipped 2022, apparently.
***I still love the giant pencil.
****For any new readers who may be concerned about my sanity and my status as a well-informed citizen, the part of the project where I ONLY (with a few exceptions) read from 100 years ago did only last a year.
*****A housekeeping issue: For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I’ve stopped posting there. You can find me on BlueSky at @marygracemcgeehan.bsky.social.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Or, to be more precise, happy day after Thanksgiving. As I was cooking yesterday, I was mildly stressing out about whether I would have time to post this on the actual day. Then it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely that anyone would stop in the middle of cooking, eating, watching football, or whatever and say to their loved ones, “I have to check to see if there are any late-breaking blog posts.”
J.C. Leyendecker is best known for his New Year’s babies, but his Thanksgiving covers were also a regular feature at the Saturday Evening Post. This one is titled “Trading for a Turkey.” Thanksgiving is a more fraught holiday than New Year’s, though, and, even though the story about the Dutch buying the island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of beads turns out not to be true, this reminder of it still made me uncomfortable.
J.C. Leyendecker, December 1, 1923
Speaking of the New Year’s babies, this J.F. Kernan Country Gentleman cover recalls Leyendecker’s 1922 cover, also featuring a bird’s tail being salted.
J.F. Kernan, November 14, 1923J.C. Leyendecker, December 31, 1921
For those of you who haven’t been following along, salting a bird’s tail is supposed to render it temporarily incapable of flying. So the New Year’s baby is trying to make sure the dove of peace doesn’t fly away. The Country Gentleman boy is presumably, more prosaically, trying to get the bird to stay still so he can eat it for Thanksgiving dinner. Or maybe he’s just pre-salting it.
With Leyendecker doing the honors at the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell was over at Life depicting a svelte Pilgrim in the stocks for gluttony.
Rival humor magazine Life took a more risqué approach to the holiday with an Enoch Bolles cover titled “Turkey with Very Little Dressing.”*
Enoch Bolles, November 24, 1923
That was all I could find as far as actual Thanksgiving covers go, but this Fruit, Garden and Home cover has a nice autumn feel.**
And last but not least, happy 50th anniversary to St. Nicholas magazine! “Is there any doubt that in the thoughts of thousands and thousands, old and young, who have read and to-day are reading its pages, ST. NICHOLAS will be numbered among the blessings for which they are grateful on Thanksgiving day?” the magazine asks, not stopping to wait for an answer.***
As for me, I’ll take a moment to give thanks for the wonderful magazines of 1923–yes, including you, St. Nicholas!
*When I was working on the post on summer 1923 magazine covers, I went down a research rabbit hole about Enoch Bolles (whose Judge cover I didn’t end up using) and learned that we were once neighbors of sorts—he was a long-term patient at a psychiatric hospital a few miles away from where my family lived in New Jersey in the 1960s.
**Again for those of you who haven’t been following along, this excellent title was changed to Better Homes and Gardens in 1924.
***Speaking of rabbit holes, I tried to figure out the vintage of the magazine (presumably from her own childhood) that the woman is reading, and therefore whether she is Mom or Grandma, but I couldn’t find any covers that resembled this one.
Belated happy summer, everyone! I’ve been so busy working on Rereading Our Childhood, the podcast that my friend Deborah Kalb and I launched back in May, that I’ve been woefully neglecting the world of a hundred years ago. But I’ve missed it. Summer is peak nostalgia season, so this feeling intensified after I left an especially cold and rainy Cape Town winter for summer in California, Colorado, and, now, Washington, D.C. I missed the trips to the beach of years past,
but as far as artistry went I was underwhelmed. I worried, as I occasionally have, that magazine covers had peaked sometime in the 1910s. My fears were unfounded, though—the summer 1923 covers revealed summer, and magazine artistry, in all their colorful glory.
Summer kicked off in June with a “school’s out” celebration
Norman Rockwell
and graduates taking wing.
Percy Crosby
There were dips in the sea
Anna Harriet Fish
and fishing at the lake
Pierre Brissaud
and flowers galore.
Georges LepapeGeorge Brandt
Also, chickens.
J.C. LeyendeckerFrank Walts
July
July started off with a celebration of the Glorious Fourth,
B. Cory Kilvert
and then we got in the car
Ruth EastmanWalter Beach Humphrey
and headed off to the beach
George Wolfe PlankRobert Patterson
and then to the countryside.
Frank Walts Bradley Walker Tomlin
In August, we’ve been savoring the last few weeks of the season—spending time with the kids,
Thomas WebbR.B. FullerJ.C. Leyendecker
enjoying the last peaches of the season,
Katherine R. Wireman
and wishing that summer would stay with us for just a few more weeks.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a magazine cover post, and last time I was kind of snarky, so I decided to set out in search of the top 10 magazine covers of January and February 1923.
Except that it was really hot outside (I’m in Cape Town), and I wasn’t feeling all that energetic, so I thought maybe ChatGPT could find them for me.
In other words, do your own blog post, I’m too busy writing term papers!
Feeling slightly chastened, I set out on my search.
I started out with a round of disqualifications, beginning with covers that reused illustrations that had originally appeared elsewhere. This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out whether the Jessie Willcox Smith illustration from Little Women that appears on the cover of the February 1923 issue of Good Housekeeping is from the edition of the book that she illustrated. I tentatively decided that it isn’t.
Jessie WIllcox Smith
I had an even harder time figuring out the provenance of Smith’s January 1923 cover featuring Hans Brinker. Irritated, I summarily disqualified Smith. I was looking for edgier covers in any case.
Jessie Willcox Smith
Next to go was the February Ladies’ Home Journal cover, which turned out to be a painting by French artist Gabriel Émile Edouard Nicolet, who died in 1921.
Gabriel Émile Edouard Nicolet
Then I eliminated covers that gave me the creeps, regardless of their artistic merit.
Frank WaltsA. M. Hopfmuller.
Ditto, covers with guns,
Georges Lepape
especially covers with babies with guns.
Next up are the covers that captured my interest for reasons other than the quality of the art, like this one from Fruit, Garden and Home, which, fascinatingly, turns out to be the original name of Better Homes and Gardens, from its founding in 1922 until August 1924, when sanity prevailed and the magazine was renamed.
And this one from Popular Mechanics, illustrating an article called “Down Popocatepetl on a Straw Mat.” As someone who rode up Popocatepetl (a volcano outside Mexico City) in a car and struggled to walk up a tiny bit of it, I have a great deal of admiration for anyone who accomplished this.*
And this intriguing cover illustrating the article “Stopped by a Pencil” in Personal Efficiency magazine. What the heck is going on here? A metaphor for bureaucracy? An actual giant pencil on the rampage? Sadly, Personal Efficiency is not available online, so I’ll never know.
And now for the Top 10! Ranking them was a challenge, not for the usual “it was so hard to decide, everyone deserved to win” reason but because of the lack of standouts. Most of the covers struck me as deserving to be ranked #5. Here’s what I came up with, after a lot of hemming and hawing.
10. Popular Science, January 1923, artist unknown
I toyed with the idea of relegating this cover to the same category as the giant pencil, but it’s just too cool. I mean, it’s a monster new airship that will carry passengers across the continent! Called the San Francisco Express! Okay, it might be a dubious bit of futurology at a time when transatlantic airplane flights had already taken place,** but still…cool!
9. Shadowland, February 1923, A. M. Hopfmuller.
A. M. Hopfmuller
I can never figure out what exactly is going on in A.M. Hopfmuller’s Shadowland covers, but I’ll miss them when the magazine ceases publication in November 1923.
8. Vanity Fair, February 1923, Anne Harriet Fish
Anne Harriet Fish
I’m a fan of Fish’s Vanity Fair covers, and this one might have ranked more highly if I could figure what exactly was going on. A woman is looking through store receipts??? and is crying??? or holding another receipt up to her face??? while her husband smokes nonchalantly??? Or something??? Plus, what’s the deal with that chair?
7. Vogue, George Wolfe Plank, February 1, 1923
George Wolfe Plank
This cover, of a woman feeding a sugar cube to a dragon, is done with Plank’s usual artistry, but it just didn’t particularly grab me the way some of his other covers did.***
6. Saturday Evening Post, Coles Phillips, February 17, 1923
Coles Phillips
My love for Coles Phillips knows no bounds, and I’m always happy to see him pop up, but the Saturday Evening Post’s limited color palate doesn’t play to his strengths.
5. McCall’s, January 1923, Neysa McMein
Neysa McMeen
I’m normally more of a fan of Neysa McMein as a fascinating 1920s figure (salon hostess, suffragist, Dorothy Parker’s best friend, etc.) than as an artist, but there’s something that haunts me about this woman. “Who are you?” I keep asking myself. “And what’s wrong?”
4. The Crisis, February 1923, Louis Portlock
Louis Portlock
I’m not familiar with Louis Portlock and I couldn’t find out anything about him except for one other cover for The Crisis, from 1922. I like the simplicity of this illustration.
Erté’s never not brilliant, but, as with Plank, I wouldn’t say he was at his best here.****
2. Motor, January 1923, Howard Chandler Christy
Howard Chandler Christy
I was struck by this Motor cover, although I can’t figure out what’s going on in the lower left corner, where the woman’s dress seems to turn into a wall, or something. I didn’t think I was familiar with Christy, but it turns out that he was the artist behind some of the most famous World War I recruiting posters, like this one:
Howard Chandler Christy
1. The Liberator, January 1923, Frank Walts
Frank Walts
I almost disqualified this Liberator cover because I featured it with other New Year’s covers in last month’s top posts of 1922 post, but that just seemed unfair, especially given the lack of top-quality covers.***** It wasn’t a shoo-in for #1, but I like the simple artistry.
Even though I wasn’t wowed by this batch of covers, I had fun seeing what some of my favorite artists were up to, discovering a few new ones, and pondering the mystery of the giant pencil. In retrospect, I’m glad ChatGPT wasn’t up to the task.
*Although I have more admiration for the Mexican guy steering with the stick than for the the guy holding on for dear life in the back, who I assume is the writer of the article.
**If, like me until recently, you thought Charles Lindbergh was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, he was just the first person to do it SOLO. British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the first transatlantic flight in 1919.
***Like this one
George Wolfe Plank, Vogue, June 15, 1921
and this one,
George Wolfe Plank, August 1, 1918
for example.
****As opposed to here
Erté, February 1918
and here.
Erté, May 1918
*****J.C. Leyendecker’s Saturday Evening Post cover was disqualified, though, because it came out on December 30. Besides, it was confusing.
Happy New Year, everyone! I’m full of New Year’s resolutions, including to do enough posts this year to actually do a Top 10 a year from now.*
Halfway through his Saturday Evening Post New Year’s baby cover run, J.C. Leyendecker weighs in with a cover that left me baffled. A prosperous gentleman with a treaty in his pocket is conversing with the baby. But the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 and went into effect in 1920, so what treaty is this? A Google search revealed that the Treaty of Lausanne, which cleaned up some remaining Turkey-related bits and pieces from World War I, was signed in 1923. But the United States wasn’t a signatory, so why the U and S on either side of the baby? I have no idea.** The baby, on the other hand, seems totally up to speed.
J.C. Leyendecker
Meanwhile, they’re ringing in the new year at Pictorial Review
Nell Hatt
and Liberator in ways that you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in history to understand.
Frank Walts
Vogue is celebrating its 30th anniversary, with Miss 1892 and Miss 1922 holding the cake.
Pierre Brissaud
The Top Seven
Now on to the Top Seven! As was the case last year, they’re pretty much in chronological order, with the last post in the last spot, etc., except that the Top 10 Posts of 1921, which was the first post chronologically, politely steps back to the sixth position to make way for more substantive fare.
As I do every year, I took a look at the latest crop of children’s books. I found a few that are now regarded as classics, some more deservedly so than others, along with some intriguing lesser-known books like one illustrated by a teenaged American Indian artist and one illustrated by Freud’s gender-nonconfirming niece.
A roundup of magazine ads took the top spot last year, with one of my favorite posts ever, a profile of illustrator Rita Senger featuring an interview with her granddaughter, in second place.
I scaled my ambition way back from my previous quest to earn all the badges from the 1916 Girl Scout book and set my sights on just one badge this time—Pathfinder, where you learn all about your community, Washington, D.C. in my case. But even that turned out to be an ambitious goal, so I focused on one requirement. Then I went to Belgium for six weeks, then back to D.C., then to Cape Town, where I am now. I’ll wrap this up with some long-distance pathfinding soon.
Reading a bunch of children’s books for a project I look forward to telling you about soon inspired me to take a magical journey to the advertising pages of the June 1922 Ladies’ Home Journal.
I loved loved loved writing this post about a 1920 book about Jane Austen by eccentric professor and critic Oscar Firkins. Firkins on Mansfield Park: “We feel that Edmund is overstarched, that Fanny is oversweetened, and that the two Crawfords are unfortunate in their resemblance to unstable chemical compounds.” For more, read the post, or better yet, Firkins’ book.
I was delighted to see this post, about Hughes’ first published writing in the children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book, in the top spot. His contributions included not just poems but also articles on Mexico, where he was living. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which became his signature poem, was submitted to The Brownies’ Book but ended up in The Crisis instead.
The Best of the Rest
Meanwhile, the backlist was going strong, with the top eight pre-2022 posts outperforming the top 2022 post. (This isn’t a fair comparison, though, since views of current posts are credited to the home page.) Here are the top three. The Rita Senger post, mentioned above, was the fourth most read.
This post about the eventful and tragic life of poet George Sterling, who founded the artists’ colony in Carmel-by-the-Sea, bumped My Quest to Earn a 1919 Girl Scout Badge out of its traditional top perch. Fame has its price: it also attracted my first angry reader, who didn’t appreciate my flippant tone.
This post, which started out with my idle curiosity about what happened to a young woman who won one of those star of tomorrow contests in a movie magazine, turned into an obsession as I tracked down the fate of Helen Lee Worthing and her African-American husband, Eugene Nelson. I’ve never worked harder on a post, and I’m pleased that it’s still finding readers.
The Journey Continues
This month marks five years since I set off on my journey to 1918. It’s been more rewarding than I could have imagined. I’ve made a number of online friends, including my fellow members of a 1920s bestsellers book discussion group. Some of them became real-life friends when I joined them in Bristol, UK, over the summer for a roundtable at a conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies. I spoke about Edna Ferber and Dorothy Canfield Fisher (that’s me in the mask).
*Who knows how that resolution will go—not very well, if the timeliness of this post is any indication—but I can tell you about one that’s a rousing success so far: to lift 3-pound weights every day while listening to a Taylor Swift song. This is a hybrid of my failed weight-lifting resolution of last year and my aspiration to improve my credentials as a Taylor Swift fan. I’m catching up on the pre-Red era, starting with the first song on the first album. Best song so far: Our Song.
**Apparently there was a side agreement with the United States called the Chester Concession, but my interest in understanding this magazine cover does not extend to learning what this was all about. Besides, it was never ratified by the Senate.
New on the Book List: The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie
My Life 100 Years Ago 