A presidential candidate who banked on support from the Ku Klux Klan. Blunt demands to ban certain religions and races from playing a full role in society. Violence and disorder at campaign rallies.

And a political party that tore itself apart not only over whom it would nominate for president, but also over whether religious and racial bigotry would be visible in its fabric.

Welcome to the 1924 Democratic National Convention, held at Madison Square Garden in New York, when the most powerful bloc in the Democratic Party was the Klan, fiercely opposed by the Tammany Hall Democrats. It was the longest political convention in American history, going 16 days and requiring 103 ballots before a compromise candidate was selected.

The convulsions of the Democrats in 1924 are, in broad movements, mirrored in the rived and bedraggled pilgrimage of the Republicans in 2016 as they stagger toward their convention behind Donald J. Trump and his rivals.

….

Four years later, Governor Smith won the Democratic nomination, but the Klan awaited him as he crossed the country, burning crosses and spreading lies. “The Grand Dragon of the Realm of Arkansas, writing to a citizen of that state, urges my defeat because I am a Catholic,” he said in a speech. “During all of our national life, we have prided ourselves throughout the world on the declaration of the fundamental American truth that all men are created equal.”

He lost to Herbert Hoover.

Excessive drinking doesn’t just result in a high bar tab, it also lowers productivity and costs the country billions….

They found that the most significant cost was the lost productivity of hungover workers who either showed up for work barely able to function, or who were unable to show up at all, which cost nearly $90 billion. In total, all forms of lost productivity accounted for about $179 billion of alcohol-related costs. The researchers estimate that the government, and thus taxpayers, cover about 40 percent of the total $250-billion bill.

It turns out the rumors were always true – America’s 29th president had a love child.

New genetic tests reveal Warren Harding fathered a child with Nan Britton during his presidency.
 

 
To some social observers, petting parties of the 1920s were a natural, post-First World War outgrowth of a repressed society. To others, the out-in-the-open hug-and-kissfests were blinking neon signposts on the Road to Perdition.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, women were fighting for their rights. The kind of propaganda that came out during that time is shocking to modern day society. Illustrations, like the ones listed here, were made to warn men against the dangers of women’s rights.

A great Quora response…

So why is jazz not as popular as it once was? I think it’s mostly due to hip-hop’s rise as the preferred authenticity-signaling genre for many white listeners.

Coolidge is, in American memory, a cluster of anecdotes, a minor legend embraced largely for its irony: the taciturn figure at odds with the jazzed-up, boozing, and crazily acquisitive decade over which he came to preside; a tortoise reigning over hares, cutting budgets while the citizenry bought their way, on margin, toward doom. Only a few years after the Great War turned the United States into a world power, he set out to shrink the size and reach of its government, to hark back instead of race forward.

William Allen White, the Kansas newspaperman, nicely captured the mismatch between President and nation in the title of his Coolidge biography, “A Puritan in Babylon” (1938). As White saw it, America felt moved to “erect this pallid shrunken image of its lost ideals and bow down before it in subconscious repentance for its iniquities.”

In Coolidge’s time, the nation had not yet piled high its commitments to the sick and to the poor and, especially, to the old, whom we will have with us—who will be us—for longer and longer stretches. Coolidge was indeed able to “swing it,” but in a world that we have since—gradually, deliberately, and with a fundamental bipartisanship—exchanged for another. If he did come back to us in a dream, and looked up at the fiscal cliff over which we teeter in mutual bad faith, he would likely offer no more than an uncomprehending shake of the head and a disbelieving question: “You built that?”

In the New Yorker, Thomas Mallon urges us to reconsider Cal

This documentary is worth a watch.

A cursory glance at the comments section makes it clear that this battle between modernists and traditionalists is alive and well.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

DEAR PIE:

I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy– but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.…

I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?…

Half-wit, I will conclude. Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship…
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

The Great Migration & The Harlem Renaissance

Culture Wars in the Roaring 20’s