This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? Or about the stories they tell?

Perhaps you’ll see a bank. Bank architecture in the 1920s typically follows traditions going back to the 18th century, in terms of what the architecture is supposed to convey and how. Neo-classical buildings speak of power and security. You can leave your money in one of these temple-like structures, and feel safe. The bank will not disappear, it will not collapse, it will not fall before the bombs of a robber or a revolutionary. That matters; in an age before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation the collapse of a bank can wipe out a depositor’s savings. And certainly this is an age that has recently seen many panics and controversies revolving around money and the economy; therefore often also revolving around politics, and around labour.

(Some disclaimers before we go further: I am neither American nor a historian, though I’ve written pop history in the past. These posts are reflections on things I’ve read about the 1920s, and things I’ve come to think about the time; things I find interesting, and things I think underlie the fiction in Weird Tales. If I repeat here points that are common knowledge among Americans, my apologies; I can only say they seemed relevant to me as a foreigner. This post deals, among other things, with the politics of the 1920s, and given how history rhymes, there’s a risk that the politics of that era will reflect on this one; I hope here only to give a sense of what certain things a hundred years ago look like to me.)

The overall economy’s good at the moment. These years will be called the Roaring Twenties (a phrase first recorded in 1930). People have put the Great War and the terrible 1918-1920 influenza epidemic behind them and are looking to the future with optimism. The economy’s strong; after a brief depression in 1920 and 1921 things have bounced back and then some, though agriculture’s still suffering and inequality’s becoming worse and more visible. But more and more people are getting rich: between 1924 and 1927 the number of Americans paying taxes on income of more than than a million dollars will increase 277 percent. Wages are rising. People are buying expensive goods (especially cars) on the newly-popular system of installment plans, increasing the sense of abundance. And the stock market’s rising, which matters to many more people in the wake of the Great War; the purchase of Liberty Bonds introduced a lot of Americans to stock investments, some of whom have continued to play the market — which is rising as though it’ll never drop again.

President Warren Harding’s administration is friendly to big business, backing away from enforcing anti-trust laws. The administration believes, as Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon will say, that “prosperity of the middling and lower orders depends upon the fortunes and light taxes of the rich,” and has cut taxes on top earners accordingly (in 1923 the top income brackets will have taxes lowered from 50 percent to 25). One notes that Mellon himself is a wealthy banker who has built a financial empire, owning or backing many large companies. Still, as Jill Lepore writes in her 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States,the years from 1922 to 1928 will see industrial production rise 70 percent, GNP 40 percent, per capita income 30 percent, and real wages 22 percent.

There are some dark shadows on the economic statistics. The Harding administration has raised tariffs on European goods, and in retaliation European countries have imposed tariffs of their own. And the concentration of wealth frightens some; 90 percent of the wealth of the US is owned by 13 percent of the population, and the richest tenth of a percent of the population have the same income as the bottom 42 percent. If the number of rich people keeps increasing, from 7000 millionaires in 1914 to 40,000 by 1928, unemployment is also rising, and will hit four million in 1928; it has been estimated that the jobless rate this decade is around 11 percent, at a time when there’s no unemployment insurance. The phrase ‘skid row’ was first recorded in 1921.

Basic commerce is changing. Chain stores like A&P are exploding, with cheaper prices than mom-and-pop general stores, and they’re putting those smaller retailers out of business; especially in the second half of the 20s, the process of “rationalization” favours large well-funded corporations over family stores. Woolworth’s variety store chain (also called ‘nickel and dime stores’ because everything costs 5 or 10 cents) is by now well-established, and Walgreen’s drugstore chain is growing — its original store was founded in 1909, it had 19 outlets by 1920, and by 1929 it’ll have 397. Advertising is expanding greatly as well, helping drive consumer demand.

And mail-order thrives, as a glance at the ads in Weird Tales will demonstrate. That speaks to the development of mail services generally. The Railway Mail Service carries a large fraction of the letters and packages mailed within the country, and that mail is sorted and processed en route in special train cars called Railway Post Offices (which advertise for employees in early issues of Weird Tales). The speed and spread of mail services has allowed mail-order businesses to flourish, especially after the inauguration of rural free delivery in 1892 (which brought the mail directly to rural houses rather than forcing people to pick up their mail at a post office), and of parcel post service in 1913 (which allowed for the delivery of packages of increasingly heavier size). Chain stores will eventually put even mail-order companies out of business — except Sears, who will cleverly open their own chain in 1925 — but for the moment mail-order’s expanding. 3.6 of American households received catalogs in 1902 and 15.2 percent in 1908; by 1928 the number will be 25.7 percent.

What sort of jobs are people working to get the money to buy things, whether with credit or not? In 1914, more than one-third of the American labour force still worked in agriculture. The 1920 census suggests that the most common jobs that year were as farmworkers, clerical workers, retail workers, servants, and salesmen; then came machinists, carpenters, and textile workers. White-collar jobs will only begin to outnumber blue-collar jobs in the 1950s (and indeed the phrase ‘white-collar job’ won’t even appear until the 1930s); look deeper into the 1920 statistics and you see industrialisation is a key driver of American jobs, with manufacturers and engineers and foremen turning up down the list. But that work isn’t necessarily as steady as one might expect.

In 1924 husband and wife sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd will start collecting data for Middletown, their pioneering 1929 sociological study of the white population of Muncie, Indiana; they will find that for many people work even in major industrial plants is seasonal, uncertain, and precarious with respect to long-term financial security and old-age pensions in a way that (it was believed) earlier generations did not have to face. Those who did have work had long hours. The Lynds note that according to the 1919 census, 33 percent of Muncie industrial workers worked more than 60 hours a week, and another 35 percent worked from 55 to 60 hours per week; they state that “the coming of the now almost universal Saturday half-holiday is the outstanding shift in industrial hours of work since 1890.” (The half-holiday was a 19th-century British innovation; the full two-day weekend wouldn’t become common until the 1930s.) Much of this industrial work is in fields largely or entirely unknown a generation before. As the Lynds write:

The sweeping industrial changes since the end of the eighties are suggested by the fact that the evolution of the iron and steel industry, second in the 1919 census in value of product, did not begin on a large scale until about 1887; the automobile industry, third in value of product in 1919, was non-existent in the late eighties; the motion picture industry was non- existent ; the chemical and electrical industries were in their infancy. “Ninety per cent. of the total growth of the electrical industry as a whole has occurred during the past twenty-five years.” (Electrical World, Fiftieth Anniversary Number, Vol. 84, No. 12, September 20, 1924, p. 640.) “In the early eighties there was no college in this country where one could take a course in electrical engineering.’ (Ibid. p. 566.)

I noted in an earlier post that more women are working in the 1920s than previously, and not only as domestic servants and teachers but as clerks and secretaries. The Lynds’ survey of high schoolers in 1924 will show that 89 percent of the girls in the upper three classes intend to find work after graduating, with only 3 percent specifically intending to become housewives. But the Lynds also will find that married women who worked were not accepted as easily, with a common belief that there was an “ethical” problem with working wives, as well as a frequent belief among husbands that if a wife worked it implied the husband was failing to be a “good provider.” But economic realities often lead married women, particularly among the working class, to take jobs; it is not difficult to find, as the Lynds did, wives who hold factory jobs while their laid-off husbands do housework for the family. Note also that segregation, a reality in work as in every other aspect of 1920s life, of course intersects with gender bias. Thus, for example, Kim Kelly (in her 2022 book Fight Like Hell) has observed that “During the 1920s, between 65 and 85 percent of Black women worked domestic service jobs — double the workforce participation rate of American-born white women, and triple the rate for immigrant women.”

There is considerable regional variation in what industries are prominent where — and note that it is only around this time that it becomes conventional to speak of the ‘regions’ of the country instead of its ‘sections.’ The country is still developing away from being an eastern core with southern and western hinterlands. So, for example, just last year, in 1922, the name of an area near the growing city of Los Angeles where farms have recently given way to movie studios started to be used for the film industry as a whole: Hollywood. More significantly, the area that will be nicknamed the Rust Belt in 1984 is still in 1923 becoming known as the Steel Belt, where manufacturing’s booming around the Great Lakes (the ‘belt’ terminology will spread; acerbic newspaperman H.L. Mencken will coin the phrase “Bible Belt” in 1924). The South in general is still largely agricultural at a time when agriculture’s going through a rough patch, though Texas is still in an oil boom, and textiles and coal also come out of the region. Note that it’s only been a couple of years since the end of the Coal Wars, a period of labour strife principally in the East that went on for decades. In 1920, a major gunfight in the town of Matewan, West Virginia, left at least 10 people dead including the mayor; smaller battles followed between miners and agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency in the employment of mine owners until in August of 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain broke out. Sometimes described as the biggest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War, 13,000 miners battled the Baldwin-Felts men, the local Sheriff’s department, and the National Guard. Private planes were hired to drop bombs on the miners. In the end federal troops were brought in, and almost a thousand miners were indicted.

The Coal Wars can be seen as part of a series of labour conflicts in the past few decades. Very briefly, and very broadly, as the United States industrialised in the late 19th century monopolies and trusts developed, making huge fortunes for men often already rich, like J.P. Morgan (banking), John D. Rockefeller (oil), and Andrew Carnegie (steel); organised labour unions grew, demanding things like 8-hour working days and five-day working weeks, and their strikes against the big business owners were frequently met with violence and government repression (railroad strikes in 1877, for example, left over 100 people dead); and, in the 1890s, some agricultural workers in the West and South formed the anti-monopoly People’s Party, soon renamed the Populist Party, calling for reforms including regulation of monopolies, an income tax, and direct election of Senators. The Populists in the rural states and the labour organisations of the more urban states never cohered into a bloc despite having overlapping ideals and political programs, but the Populists nevertheless carried four states in the 1892 election.

The Populists — Anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-immigration — soon fell apart as an organised party, with their voters largely absorbed by the Democrats; but many of the reforms they urged would become law in the following years. So before the Nineteenth Amendment enshrined women’s suffrage in the constitution came the Sixteenth (in 1913), which allowed the federal government to levy an income tax and which the Populists viewed as a necessary check on the rich; the Seventeenth (also 1913), which established the direct election of Senators by popular vote; and the Eighteenth (passed in 1919 to take effect in 1920), which established Prohibition in part as a way to prevent alcoholic husbands from drinking away their wives’ money and property. Along with these things came legislation such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Many of the activists and reformers involved in passing these amendments and laws, less radical than either the Populists or at least the anti-capitalists within the labour movement, called themselves Progressives (from about 1910 onward); so the period from roughly the 1890s to the 1920s will sometimes be called the Progressive Era.

There has been much written about the connections, similarities, and differences between Populists and the later Progressives. Broadly, Progressives believed in extending the government’s role in restraining the abuses of capitalism rather than in abandoning capitalism entirely, and indeed often supported the era’s drive toward efficiency and modernisation in business. Beyond politicians, notable progressives included social scientists and muckraking journalists (named from a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, muckrakers exposed corruption by searching through the muck). Jill Lepore writes that Progressivism was “the middle-class version” of Populism: “indoors, quiet, passionless. Populists raised hell; Progressives read pamphlets. Populists had argued that the federal government’s complicity in the consolidation of power in the hands of big banks, big railroads, and big businesses had betrayed both the nation’s founding principles and the will of the people, and that the government itself was riddled with corruption. … [W]hile Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies.”

Then again, Mary Elizabeth Lease, a famed Populist orator — when a journalist falsely claimed she told farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” she chose not to issue a public correction as she felt “it was a right good bit of advice” — argued in 1914 that “The Progressive party has adopted our platform, clause by clause, plank by plank.” The Progressive Party she was referring to was a third party created by former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, whose earlier “square deal” program had included some progressive ideas. Nicknamed the Bull Moose Party after Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt and declared himself as fit as a bull moose, it’d dissolve by 1920 only for a different Progressive Party to emerge in 1924 and then break up in 1927.

Despite the Progressives, the monopolists continued to attempt to crush the labour movement, often in collusion with various levels of government. In 1894, for example, when the American Railway Union conducted a strike against the Pullman Company, who manufactured railway cars, the federal government sent in the army, killing 30 workers and arresting the head of the ARU, Eugene V. Debs. This backfired, as Debs read radical literature during his prison stint and emerged a convinced socialist. As labour unions grew — the American Federation of Labour, for example, expanded from 265,000 members in 1897 to over 4 million in 1920 — fears among the wealthy about socialism and anarchism grew as well.

The reality is that the AFL was never particularly radical. Founded in 1886 under President Samuel Gompers (still president in 1923, he’ll die in 1924), it accepts capitalism while others in the labour movement believe in anarchism, socialism, or communism. For example, anarchist speaker and organiser Emma Goldman was described, with her lover Alexander Berkman, as “beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country” by a young J. Edgar Hoover; in 1901, after one of Goldman’s admirers named Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley, she refused to disavow him, leading the press to describe her as the ‘high priestess of anarchy.’ Goldman, an atheist and a feminist who worked with Margaret Sanger to promote birth control, was also described by Hoover as “the most dangerous woman in America,” thereby succeeding to a title formerly held by labour organiser Mary Harris Jones. “Mother” Jones had been given the title by a prosecuting attorney during a 1902 trial in West Virginia following one of her numerous arrests.

One of Jones’ most lasting actions came when she joined with many other union leaders in 1905 to found the International Workers of the World. The IWW, or ‘Wobblies,’ was intended as not only a more radical alternative to the AFL but a more inclusive one, welcoming women, non-whites, and immigrants. The IWW and its leaders swiftly became famous, celebrated or feared depending on one’s political sympathies; the Wobblies were not shy about fighting back when attacked. The colourful “Big Bill” Haywood was known for his ability to get across complex ideas to a mass audience (stating in one speech “tonight I am going to speak on the class struggle and I am going to make it so plain that even a lawyer can understand it”). Songwriter and poet Joe Hill wrote popular songs for the IWW, until his execution following a highly questionable murder trial in 1914. Famous disability rights activist Helen Keller, a socialist from 1909, became an IWW member in 1912. In 1923 the IWW’s still at the height of its influence, though it’ll decline in 1924 due to governmental repression and a schism within the organisation over Russian communism; it had already split with the socialists in 1913 over the IWW’s preference for strikes and direct action over electoral politics.

The IWW faced many incidents of violence. Tarring-and-feathering (as in Tulsa in 1917); the 1916 murders in Everett, Washington, of five Wobblies by 200 vigilantes led by the local sheriff; the 1917 vigilante hanging of organiser Frank Little. In July of 1917 1200 Wobblies in Bisbee, Arizona were rounded up by local authorities, forced onto cattle cars, and made to take a 16-hour trip with no food and little water. If the Wobblies enjoyed a reputation for violence, they did sometimes win their fights or help strikers win fights for better conditions; as at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, in 1909, when at least 12 people died in gunfights and riots, and in the ‘Bread and Roses’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when the Wobblies worked with an ethnically-diverse and largely female workforce to organise during a bitterly cold winter and successfully press for the workers’ demands.

A notorious example of the terrible conditions the labour movement fought against came in 1911. The owners of the Triangle Waist Company had a factory in New York City in which roughly 500 seamstresses and 100 men worked. On the afternoon of March 25 a fire broke out, and feasted on the cloth in the factory. Doors had been locked to prevent theft, there was no sprinkler system, and the fire escape collapsed under the weight of fleeing workers. 129 women and 17 men died. The factory owners, notorious for underplaying workers and for using police as strikebreakers in 1909, were indicted for manslaughter but acquitted; the owner of the building paid $75 in compensation to the families of some of the victims, while the factory owners received the equivalent of more than $400 per dead worker from their insurance company.

Still, by 1923 the labour movement has seen some gains. The demand for an eight-hour day has gained traction over the decades, and 1923 will see 12-hour days for steelworkers eliminated. On the other hand, while 15 states have passed minimum wage laws, this year they’ll be ruled unconstitutional and struck down by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. The Court has often stood against Progressive ideas these past years, and that looks likely to continue as Harding has been able to appoint four justices, including Chief Justice William Howard Taft. But several years ago eight-hour days and living wages found an unexpected ally, in the form of Henry Ford.

In 1913 Ford began using the relatively new technique of the assembly line to construct his cars, giving workers repetitive tasks involving interchangeable parts. The monotony led to high employee turnover and dissatisfaction. With the price to produce his cars plummeting due to the efficiency of his process, Ford announced in January 1914 that he’d provide all his employees with wages of at least $5 for an eight-hour day (previously the lowest pay grade had been $2.34 for nine hours of work per day). The Wall Street Journal called this economic madness; it drew thousands of job-seekers, in chaotic crowds that led the police to turn fire hoses on the crowd (again, this in January). To earn the full $5, employees had to maintain a standard of behaviour, ranging from not abusing their spouses to staying away from drink to keeping their homes clean, and Ford investigators did keep watch. But turnover dropped and productivity increased. Ford lowered the retail price of his cars, enough so that his workers were able to afford cars of their own. The automobile became the first large machine Americans would commonly own; and Ford’s rivals had to match his employment terms or lose workers.

Ford’s assembly line system is part of a general fascination with the new idea of efficiency in business and manufacturing. When a Pennsylvania steel plant hired a consultant named Frederick W. Taylor to increase production, he timed the workers, found which of them were most efficient, calculated the fastest time individual jobs could be done, and had all the workers maintain that pace or be fired. Taylor had made up many of his numbers, and when he overcharged his employer he was let go; but his system, as explained in his 1911 book Principles of Scientific Management, spread widely nevertheless. Across the country in 1923 offices are experimenting with ‘scientific’ processes, analysing efficiency, and keeping new kinds of records. Note that this is a time when the use of the cash register is still becoming widespread.

And note that the Lynds’ Middletown study will find that this desire for efficiency is having the effect of increasing the value of younger workers, who are better able to perform mechanical tasks swiftly for longer periods of time, while older workers are given lower-value tasks in their shop or simply let go. Workers and their families are aware that as they age their pay is liable to drop and their employment to be jeopardised, and that awareness often creates a long-term haunting dread.

Tensions between labour and capital escalated with the outbreak of the Great War, then again with American entry into the war, then again with the Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. The Socialist Party declared US entry into the War to be “a crime against the people of the United States,” and saw a short-term increase in attendance at rallies and in electoral success. This did not last, as the federal government reacted to the Socialists’ antiwar position with a major crackdown on the party. In June of 1917 the government passed the Espionage Act, which gave them the power to jail people who spoke against the war. The Postmaster general refused to allow Socialist literature to be distributed through the mails. In 1918 a set of amendments to the Espionage Act, collectively known as the Sedition Act, was passed; hundreds of people were jailed for speaking against the war, among them many Wobblies and Socialists, including Eugene Debs.

The War ended but political tensions did not. In April 1919 three dozen bombs disguised as department store packages were mailed to the homes of various powerful men, believed to have been sent by a radical anarchist faction. Most were intercepted, but one package maimed the maid who opened it and burned the face of the wife of the Senator to whom it was sent. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who had urged a peacetime equivalent to the Sedition Act, launched a major campaign against anarchists, which grew into a nationwide crusade dubbed the Red Scare. On June 2, 1919, anarchists launched nine assassination attempts against nine different targets, including Palmer. (Large-scale strikes continued during these months, often repressed violently; in February, 1919, a general strike shut down the city of Seattle, while in September in Pennsylvania 100,000 steelworkers went on strike with 250,000 other workers walking out in sympathy.)

Palmer and his office, including 24-year-old lawyer J. Edgar Hoover, opened files on various ‘subversive’ individuals and organisation, began a series of investigations, and on January 2, 1920, launched a coordinated series of raids against bookstores, print shops, and union halls. Thousands of people, mostly immigrants, were arrested; many of them were starved or tortured. Palmer wanted to deport all of them, but the secretary of the Department of Labor allowed only 500 deportations, including Emma Goldman. On January 12 the American Civil Liberties Union was formed in response to the raids. Ultimately, Hoover and the Red Scare became the subject of mockery after Hoover warned a major terrorist campaign would take place on May 1 only for nothing to happen.

The violence did not entirely stop. On September 16, 1920, a bomb (most likely a bomb, though cause and perpetrator were never certainly established) went off in New York City at 23 Wall Street, in a horse-drawn wagon outside J.P. Morgan’s bank. Thirty people died, along with the horse, and 150 were injured. But, with the fever of the Red Scare broken, the response from officials and the press was relatively measured. The Sedition Act was repealed in December of 1920.

If that level of paranoia was mostly coming to a close, so was the Progressive Era. By 1923 the labour movement has declined; the Lynds quote a national labour organiser as stating that in the 1920s “the organized labor movement in [Muncie] does not compare with that of 1890 as one to one hundred.” (As the Lynds point out, this is a numerical exaggeration, but might roughly represent the decline of the political power of labour.) Perhaps this is in part because labour unions in previous generations had a social aspect, organising balls and banquets and games; by the 1920s, this has largely ended. Either way, if the beginnings of the social safety net and modern welfare state have been established by 1923, much is still missing. Child labour laws have been passed, but will be struck down by the conservative Supreme Court. There is no social security for seniors, leaving many of the aged dependent solely on their families. And, as noted, the two-day weekend is some distance away.

At the same time, some basic financial structures are not yet in place. Harding has established the Bureau of the Budget (which will become the Office of Management and Budget), and the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, but there is no Securities and Exchange Commission, no Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And it is important to recognise that although women can now vote, they are not necessarily allowed equality to men in handling money. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act is decades in the future. Banks routinely refuse women credit, or require a husband to co-sign a credit application.

Money, politics, and recent history are the sort of subjects that are often just below the level of consciousness as one takes a walk through a city, as for example one might to buy a magazine. But they don’t always remain buried when you reach the newsstand. In the January 1924 issue of Weird Tales there will be a two-paragraph space-filling non-fiction text headlined “Rule Of Terror Threatened,” describing a planned action in the fall by the IWW against a judge in Sacramento who has ruled that IWW membership will be punished by six months in jail. The piece further claims there are plans for a general strike. I can’t find any reference to an IWW action in Sacramento late in 1924; but as I noted above, the organisation would decline over the course of that year. The article’s a sign of how the IWW was seen in that historical moment, I think. And so it is an example of how the magazine’s embedded in its time, and in the controversies of its time.

Find all my posts about Weird Tales here!

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Matthew David Surridge is the author of “The Word of Azrael,” from Black Gate 14. You can buy collections of his essays on fantasy novels here and here. His Patreon, hosting a short fiction project based around the lore within a Victorian Book of Days, is here. You can find him on Facebook, or follow his Bluesky account, @bookofdays.