“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, November 21, 1921, Girl Scout Tea House at Peirce Mill, Rock Creek Park, Washington, D. C.

Opening day at the tea house operated by the Girl Scouts of Washington, D. C., is going well.

This is the first time the public has visited the former restaurant, now redecorated with new curtains, furniture, and a fresh lick of paint, all in cheery blue and yellow. There was a nice write-up in the Washington Post yesterday, which is bringing out the crowds.

Peirce Mill, Rock Creek Park

The official grand opening was held two days ago for invited guests only, with the First Lady and honorary president of the national organization, Florence Harding, 61, doing the honors.

The specialty of the house is Florence’s “Harding Waffles,” made popular last year during her husband’s presidential campaign. President Warren G. Harding, 56, loves waffles—smothered in chipped beef gravy [although the Girl Scouts serve them with butter and syrup]—and Florence’s recipe swept the nation. She is particularly careful to use ingredients which were rationed during the Great War, to underscore her husband’s campaign theme of “Return to Normalcy.”

Florence Harding’s Waffle Recipe

Serves four

INGREDIENTS:
2 eggs.
2 tbls. sugar.
2 tbls. butter.
1 teaspoon salt.
1 pt. milk.
Flour to make thin batter. (I use about 2 cups flour)
2 large teaspoons baking powder

INSTRUCTIONS:
Separate the eggs.
Beat yolks and add sugar and salt.
Melt butter then add milk and flour and stir to combine.
Beat egg whites until stiff (but not dry) peaks form.
Stir one spoonful of whites into the mixture to lighten and then fold remainder of egg whites and baking powder.
Bake in a hot waffle iron.”

From the 1921 Atlanta Women’s Club Cookbook

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the Centenary of the Publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, November 11, 1921, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington Co., Virginia; and Westminster Abbey, London

Just across the Potomac River from Washington D. C., the first entombment of an American “unknown soldier” is taking place to commemorate the third Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the Great War.

Chosen randomly by a U. S. Army sergeant from four sets of remains taken from four cemeteries on the French battlefields, this soldier has literally had a stormy journey to get here.

On its way to France to collect the precious cargo, the USS Olympia was hit by a tropical storm in the Atlantic.

On the way back, the weather was even worse. The ship took on water and the Marine Guard assigned to the casket was almost washed overboard. Hit by the same tropical storm, the Olympia sustained 13-foot waves.

But the remains have arrived safely. Speaking at the ceremony, President Warren G. Harding, 56, remarked, “We know not whence he came, only that his death marks him with the everlasting glory of an American dying for his country.”

Armistice Day ceremony

*****

In London, this is the third year that the United Kingdom has commemorated Remembrance Day.

Last year the UK government, along with the government of their ally, France, buried remains of an “unknown warrior” and a “soldat inconnu.”

Lord Field Marshall Haig, 60, who commanded the British Expeditionary Force, has felt that the country’s reverence for the importance of the day is already waning. So he proposed asking his countrymen to remember those who are buried under the poppies in Flanders Field by buying and wearing commemorative poppies. And shaming those who don’t.

The first Poppy Day appears to be a success. They are on track for sales of eight million poppy pins.

Remembrance Day leaflet

Poppy Day continues to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the Centenary of the Publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, June 6, 1921, Lincoln University, Chester County, Pennsylvania

U. S. President Warren G. Harding, 55, just three months in office, spent the past weekend at the White House concerned about what message he needs to send. He decided to accept the invitation to give the commencement address at Lincoln University this Monday.

So before sunrise, he and his wife Florence, 60, drove about 45 miles from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they had stayed overnight with a friend, to this campus, outside of Oxford, Pennsylvania, the first all-Black degree-granting institution in the country.

The four cars carrying his entourage stop first at the granite arch on campus, where he helps to dedicate the memorial to Lincoln alumni who fought and died in the Great War.

President Harding at Lincoln University

The faculty and students of the “Black Princeton,” as the school is known, are immensely proud to have a sitting president of the United States deliver their commencement address. They feel it is the high point of their 67-year history.

Speaking without notes, Harding addresses the students as “my fellow countrymen” and stresses the importance of education in solving racial problems. But he cautions that government alone cannot “take a race from bondage to citizenship in half a century.”

Then he turns his remarks to the most pressing issue in the country:  the massacre of at least 39 citizens in the all-Black neighborhood—called “The Black Wall Street”—in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just five days ago. Offering a prayer for the city, Harding says,

Despite the demagogues, the idea of our oneness as Americans has risen superior to every appeal to mere class and group. And so, I wish it might be in this matter of our national problem of races…God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness, and the justice of this country, we never see another spectacle like it.”

When he is finished, the President congratulates and shakes the hand of each individual graduate.

The damage to the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I covering 1920 is available on Amazon in print and e-book versions. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book formats.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends” 100 years ago, March 4, 1921, United States Capitol Building, Washington, DC

Ohioan Warren G. Harding, 55, is standing on the East Portico of the Capitol Building, waiting to take the oath of office to become the first sitting Senator and the first Baptist to be inaugurated President of the United States.

Inauguration of Warren G. Harding

Given the state of the nation’s economy, at his request the whole day will be relatively quiet. No parade. No inaugural ball.

However, at the insistence of his wife, Florence, 60, Harding is planning to announce that this week the White House will be open to the public for the first time since the start of the Great War. It’s time for his promised “return to normalcy.”

In keeping with tradition, his predecessor, President Woodrow Wilson, 64, has invited the Hardings to a small luncheon at the White House after the swearing in ceremony. Harding, a Republican, has greatly appreciated the professional courtesy Wilson, a Democrat, has shown during this peaceful transfer of power, despite Wilson having suffered a serious stroke just five months before.

But first, Harding is planning to break with tradition by going directly to a special executive session of Congress to personally present his nominees for his Cabinet (all agreed to by Florence), including Andrew W. Mellon, 65, for Secretary of the Treasury and Herbert Hoover, 64, for Secretary of Commerce.

Fingering a printer’s ruler that he keeps in his pocket for good luck—leftover from his days on the newspaper back in Marion, Ohio—the president-elect puts his right hand on the George Washington Bible and says,

I, Warren Gamaliel Harding, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I, covering 1920, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle formats.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, January 15, 1921, dahntahn Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Herbert Hoover, 46, is about to become Secretary of Commerce in the incoming administration of President Warren G. Harding, 55. He was an administer of food supplies during the Great War, but his concern right now is the technology.

Hoover is at Pittsburgh’s posh, private Duquesne Club, about to do a live broadcast which will be transmitted along a telephone line 10 miles to the two-month old first radio station in the country, KDKA, which will then broadcast it nationally.

KDKA logo

They did successfully broadcast a church service this way for the first time a couple of weeks ago. That went well. But Hoover is more worried about the technology than his speech, about the administration’s plan for humanitarian relief for postwar Europe.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, soon to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. Early this year I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, November 2, 1920, United States of America

Westinghouse-owned KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the first public commercial radio station in the U.S., is on air for the first time, broadcasting the results of the presidential election. The small percentage of the population in a large part of the eastern United States who own radio sets can hear the announcers read results right off the ticker tapes as they come in.

KDKA studio, November 2, 1920

And it’s also the first national election when women can vote. More voters than ever before—looks as though it will be a more than 40% increase over 1916—are creating a Republican landslide that is spilling into local elections as well.

Republican candidate Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding is about to be the first sitting senator elected president—on his 55^th birthday.

More voters also mean more votes for the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, just about to turn 65, although he is currently serving time in federal prison on charges of sedition. If he gets the predicted almost 1 million votes, it will still be a smaller percentage than the record 6% he got when he ran in 1912.

The first lady-to-be, Florence Harding, 60, tells a friend,

I don’t feel any too confident, I can tell you. I haven’t any doubt about him, but I’m not so sure of myself.”

In Cook County, Illinois, the State Attorney General, Hartley Replogle, 40, is about to be swept out in the Republican tide, and his whole team, working on prosecuting the Black Sox World Series scandal, will soon be replaced.

Harding victory in traditional print Taunton [Massachusetts] Daily Gazette

Click here to join the centenary celebrations of KDKA’s historic first broadcast, including a re-enactment of the Harding election results broadcast from a replica of the original studio.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

My “Such Friends” presentations, The Founding of the Abbey Theatre and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, are available to view for free on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

This fall I am talking about writers’ salons in Paris and New York after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. I will be talking about Perkins, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University early in 2021.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, July 22, 1920, Marion, Ohio

Three more weeks.

In three more weeks the state legislatures of both Tennessee and North Carolina will meet and vote on whether to ratify the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote in all elections in the country. A yes vote in either state will put the Amendment over the top, with 36 states ratifying.

More than 100 members of the National Woman’s Party, dressed in white and carrying purple, green and white banners, are marching through the streets of Marion, Ohio, to the famed “front porch” of the Republican nominee for the presidency, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, 54. They know that this is as close to victory as they have ever been.

Suffragettes in front of Warren G. Harding’s front porch

Alice Paul, 35, who helped draft the Amendment, points out to Harding that suffrage for women is the one plank in either party’s platform that they can act on even before the election. All Harding has to do is put pressure on the Republican majority in Tennessee for them to vote aye.

Just yesterday Harding had sent a telegram to the most prominent suffragette, Carrie Chapman Catt, 61, co-founder of the National League of Women Voters, pledging that, if the Tennessee Republicans asked for his opinion, he would “cordially recommend” that they vote yes.

Big of him.

In Marion, Ms. Paul says that, if Senator Harding

contents himself merely with ‘earnestly hoping’ and ‘sincerely desiring,’ how can he expect the country to take seriously the other planks in his platform?”

Alice Paul at Republican National Convention

Louisine Havemeyer, 64, patron of the arts and suffragettes, asks

Is it fair that a woman should make the flag and only the men should wave it?…When President Abraham Lincoln wished to pass an amendment…did he say, ‘I have done enough,’ or…‘I will urge,’…or ‘Ladies, don’t bother me, I have done all I could.’ No….Isn’t it time to end the struggle?”

Senator Harding is polite to the women.

Fifteen weeks until the general election.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

My presentation, “Such Friends”:  Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, is available to view on the website of PICT Classic Theatre. The program begins at the 11 minute mark, and my presentation at 16 minutes.

This fall I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, after June 20, 1920, Marion, Ohio

A strange presidential campaign.

No rallies. No crowds. No door knocking. No hand shaking. No baby-kissing.

The candidate is staying at home, although making good use of new technology to communicate to voters.

Ohio Senator and recently nominated Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, 54, has decided to run a “front porch campaign” like three of his predecessors in the late 19^th century.

Warren Harding greeting crowds from his front porch

Marion, Ohio, has become a mecca for business leaders, politicians, supporters, protesters—and celebrities! Newlywed movie stars Mary Pickford, 28, and Douglas Fairbanks, 37, show up.

The New York Times reports that Harding’s wife Florence, 59, who controls the queue of those who want inside, ate waffles for breakfast. Now everybody wants some.

Florence’s own recipe, which cleverly features ingredients that had been rationed during the recent Great War, signals Harding’s promised “return to normalcy.” It’s gone viral.

Harding’s campaign is taking advantage of nationwide radio to keep his “America first” message in front of the public.

And the last three presidential candidates to use the “front porch” strategy? They all won.

Florence Harding’s waffle recipe is here.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

Tomorrow, Friday, June 26^th, 2020, I will be giving a webinar, “Such Friends”:  Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, hosted by PICT Classic Theatre, at 2 pm EDT. Register for free here.

This fall I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 12, 1920, The Coliseum, Chicago, Illinois

The 940 delegates at the Republican National Convention have been through four long days and ten long ballots. They finally have a compromise candidate, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, 54, the result of negotiations in what his supporters refer to as a “smoke filled room.”

His plea for a “return to normalcy” in a recent speech had made him palatable to both the conservative and progressive wings of the party. Although he has been called “the best of the second-raters.”

Ticket to the 1920 Republican National Convention

Baltimore Sun reporter H. L. Mencken, 39, has said that the smell in the overheated Coliseum is like that of a

third rate circus.”

Sitting with the other reporters, Edna Ferber, 34 [but she only admits to 31], novelist, playwright and former full-time journalist, now here on special assignment for the United Press, is melting in the heat. In one of her reports she has described how all the bald, sweating delegates had,

shed collars, ties, even shoes in some cases…It was the American male politician reduced to the most common denominator.”

Edna Ferber

Ferber has been watching the spectacle and listening to the endless speakers. In his acceptance speech today, Harding says,

We mean to be American first, to all the world…We must stabilize and strive for normalcy.”

The country is just months away from having the 19^th Amendment ratified by the last few states, and, for the first time, women will be able to vote in a presidential election. So, probably after the persuasion of his wife, Harding throws a bone to the suffragettes:

By party edict, by my recorded vote, by personal conviction, I am committed to this measure of justice.”

After suffering through Harding’s speech, Ferber describes him thus:

Here is a living cartoon of the American Fourth of July stuffed shirt order.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

 

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 14, 1920, Home Market Club, Boston, Massachusetts

Ohio Senator and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Warren G. Harding, 54, has just finished his speech before the Home Market Club, publisher of The Protectionist magazine.

His campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, 60, had urged him to go ahead with this speech. They were both very disappointed by the results of last month’s Ohio primary. He won his own state by only 15,000 votes, gaining only 39 out of the 48 delegates. And then he came in fourth in Indiana with no delegates at all.

A fortune teller had told his wife Florence, 59, that Warren would become president and then die in office, but both Florence and Daugherty had convinced him to stay in the race anyway.

Warren and Florence Harding campaigning

In his speech, Harding told the conservative crowd,

My countrymen, there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational…America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy…If we can prove [to be] a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government and country rather than what the country may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded…My best judgment of America’s need is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet…Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war…”

Harding will record this and all his speeches for sale as phonographic discs.

You can listen to Harding’s full “Return to Normalcy” speech—only five minutes long—on the Library of Congress site here.

 

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.