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.
Happy new year, everyone! I’m sure you’re as glad to say good-bye to 2020 as I am.
It is, incredibly, my fourth New Year’s here at My Life 100 Years Ago. That’s four Saturday Evening Post covers by J.C. Leyendecker. In 1918 we had a baby soldier,
in 1919 a baby celebrating peace,
and in 1920 a shushing baby,
which didn’t make much sense until I realized that it was a censored version of this original:
sotheby.com
This year we have a baby coal miner.
This puzzled me, because the violent conflicts in the mining industry seem more up The Liberator’s or The Crisis’s* alley than the business-friendly Post’s. The magazine’s website explains that “the 1921 cherub anticipates an end to the bitter coal miners’ strike in Alabama.” If Leyendecker were still at it (his streak ran from 1907 to 1943), this year’s baby would be getting a vaccine.
Meanwhile, Good Housekeeping and Sunset have New Year’s babies of their own, going for cute and creepy respectively.
Jessie Willcox Smith
Robert Kearfott
The Top 10 Posts
I only published 15 posts total this year, and the top ten were the first ten. This struck me at as strange and a little alarming at first, but when I looked more closely at the numbers it made sense. Four out of the top five were from March, April, and May—i.e. peak COVID lockdown time, when everyone was desperate for entertainment.
I thought you all might want some diversions during those grim first weeks, so I compiled some quizzes I’d published over the years. Except, oops, I forgot What’s Your 1918 Girl Job?
Smart Set co-editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan may have been the greatest critics of their era, but their attitude toward woman left a lot to be desired. I had a wonderful time writing this post on July 4 and managed to finish it just in time to watch the fireworks from the roof of my building. This is probably my favorite post ever as far as the pictures go.
It was fun comparing magazine covers from 1915 and 1920, and I enjoyed hearing about your favorites. Rita Senger’s winning 1915 Vanity Fair cover took me in a fascinating direction that you’ll be hearing about soon.
This Valentine’s Day post started out with idle curiosity—what happened to four aspiring actresses after they won a movie magazine contest? It turned into a bit of an obsession as I delved into the lives of popular Follies girl Helen Lee Worthing and her husband Eugene Nelson, a prominent African-American physician. Of all the posts I’ve done, I may be proudest of this one, and I’m glad it found so many readers.
I celebrated my return to the northern hemisphere with some wintry cover art, not suspecting that another winter would be on the way by the time I returned to South Africa.
Okay, I get the hint! I’ll do another ad roundup soon.
Honorable Mention
A Pioneering Gay Novel of 1919. Not that being #11 out of 15 is such a spectacular achievement, but I can’t resist giving this post a plug. Finding a novel about a loving gay couple who just wanted to live like normal people was my biggest surprise of the year.
Dishonorable Mention
Helen Dryden
December 1920 Magazine Covers Bring Holiday Cheer. As I mentioned, the last five posts were the least popular, and the last post of all is on trend with the fewest views. Also: I see I’m in a bit of a blog title rut.**
Best-Performing Post from a Past Year
How Girls Can Help Their Country
My Quest to Earn a 1919 Girl Scout Badge. This was my most fun post ever, and it lives on, with more than twice as many views in 2020 as the #1 post published during the year. In the meantime, a new edition of the Girl Scout handbook has been published—I should get on it.
Best Readership News
You know how when you’re just starting out in your profession you work like crazy, and then when you get more senior you can just coast? Yeah, me neither, but blogging works like that. In 2018, when I was reading full-time as if I were living in 1918, I published 94 posts. In 2019, I had 21. This year, 15. But here’s what happened to the numbers.
There are technical and highly boring reasons for this having to do with the impact of longevity on how search engines assess websites, but whatever! I’ll take it!
Happy 2021! May it be better than your 2020.
*The January 1921 Liberator and Crisis covers:
Cornelia Barnes
**Although not as bad of a rut as the time back in 2019 when four out of five posts in a row started with “Celebrating.”
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 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 graduating from 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 for two years beginning in 1912.
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
I’ve been busy with non-blog-related writing projects lately, and over Easter weekend I found myself feeling homesick for 100-year-old artwork. So I looked through the April 1919 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal in search of some springtime color.
I found it in abundance. With wartime paper restrictions lifted, the magazine had swollen to 190 pages, up from 128 in April 1918, and the number of pages in color had increased from 30 to 50. As usual, the best part of the magazine was the ads.*
The women of 1919 were hard at work, cleaning up their (or their employers’) homes,
choosing summer fabrics,
and cooking disgusting-looking food,
maybe for a big party
at which people would stay all night, dancing to dashing music that sets a swift and joyous pace.
For more simple fare, there’s delicious-looking bread
and Cream of Wheat.**
In an ad for Nashua woolnap blankets, the child is, for a change, not packing heat.
Soap and perfume ads feature rich people
and Japanese people***
and the Middle Eastern oasis where Palmolive soap was born.
Fairies leap out of cars
and flitter around****
and chewing gum ingredients appear to movie stars in crystal balls.*****
The war was over and the world was celebrating.
Then I saw this ad, drawn by Coles Phillips.
It’s been haunting me, a reminder–in a hosiery ad!–that peace, for some, came at a terrible price.
Not to end on too sad a note, there were signs of social progress. The young woman in this Lady Sealpax ad leaps joyfully, wearing underwear that gives her “the same ‘Free as the Air’ feeling that ‘brother’ enjoys.” Cast off those corsets, so constraining to your golfing or nursing! The Roaring Twenties are on the way.
*The best illustrations, anyway. There are also a lot of surprisingly feminist articles that I haven’t had a chance to read yet.
**The model for the photograph on the poster was, apparently, Frank L. White, who was born in Barbados and was working as a master chef in Chicago when it was taken. It’s still used on the Cream of Wheat box today. (I say “apparently” because, while he said in later life that he had posed for the photograph, his name wasn’t recorded at the time.) Some early Cream of Wheat ads doctored the photograph in racist ways or used racist language, but the photograph as used here is, for the time, an unusually realistic depiction of an African-American.
***Jap Rose soap had a racist name but gorgeous illustrations.
****I wondered about Djer-Kiss, the unusually named French perfume. Unlike Bozart rugs and Talc Jonteel, it isn’t a fractured French spelling. These people, who have given considerable thought to the matter, aren’t sure what it means either, although they provide interesting information about the Parisian company that produced Djer-Kiss.
*****This is, if memory serves, the first celebrity endorsement I’ve seen.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been posting some of my favorite images from 1918 on Twitter while I regroup after spending 2018 reading as if I were living in 1918. Here’s this week’s batch.
On Martin Luther King Day, I posted the April 1918 cover of The Crisis, featuring a painting by William Edouard Scott of a couple making their way to a new life in the north. The painting is now in the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia (although not currently on display).
Poet George Sterling posed for this illustration in an edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam featuring photographs by Adelaide Hanscom (later Leeson). The original 1905 edition was in black and white; the photographs were tinted in a 1914 reissue. I wrote about Sterling, who founded Carmel, California as an artists’ colony and was known as the “Uncrowned King of Bohemia,” here.
I’m intrigued by the short-haired, drop-waisted woman on the cover of the July 1918 issue of Vanity Fair. She looks like a time-traveling flapper from 1923. The artist is Georges Lepape.
“Haunting” isn’t a word we typically associate with cleaning products, but I was haunted by the tiny cleaners in the Old Dutch Cleanser ads. Here are two of my favorites, from the February and May 1918 issues of the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Women in 1918 were apparently easily startled by insects. This one’s from George Wolf Plank’s cover for the August 1 issue of Vogue.
I’m not a car person, but I love 1918 cars (and car advertisements). The Marmon 34 set a coast-to-coast speed record in 1916: 5 days, 18 hours, 30 minutes. This ad is from the February 1918 issue of Harper’s Bazar.
I found the word “farmerette” hilarious when I started my reading-in-1918 project, but now I see a picture of a woman in overalls and think, “Oh, a farmerette.” Italian-American painter Matteo Sandonà drew the farmerette on the Sunset cover; I couldn’t find the artist for the Life cover.
Maybe I’ll be ready to move on to 1919 soon. If not, there are lots more great pictures from 1918.