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? What do they say about the stories they tell?

And what might you hear? Cars, of course, and maybe the buzz of conversation around you. But perhaps you’ll hear the voice of a boy on a streetcorner, holding up a newspaper and crying out a still-famous phrase: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! For this is a time when newsboys are still a feature of urban life.

(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 things 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. For what it’s worth, I’m simply trying to describe what I think I have learned about what journalism and American politics looked like a hundred years ago.)

Newsboys, newsies, have been a tradition since 1833, when the New York Sun hired boys to sell papers; coincidentally or not, a year later it had the largest circulation in the United States. Technically, most newsies in 1923 are independents who buy newspapers wholesale to resell at retail price. The profession gives boys a way to make money; not great money, but for runaways, the homeless, or boys from desperately poor families, it can be a lifesaver. The problems are obvious, starting with issues around child labour, and extending to everything you might imagine when a literal child is left unsupervised on a city street corner for hours effectively announcing to passersby that he’s got a cash box full of change.

But you do have to get the news from somewhere. And with commercial radio in its infancy, newspapers are the primary source of news for most Americans. Newsreel films don’t really compare. One study will show that in 1925 there will be 2116 daily newspapers in the United States, with a combined circulation of 37,407,000, close to one and a half papers per American household. Add to this 6435 weekly papers, with a total circulation of 15,990,000. Most cities have 2 or 3 dailies; New York has 12; in 1925 Chicago will have over 30, half of them papers serving immigrant communities.

Some papers are sold starting in the morning, some in the afternoon or evening; evening papers tend to have more dramatic news and more spectacular design, which drive individual purchases as opposed to subscriptions. Some daily papers have Sunday editions, usually with extra sections and larger circulations. Sunday supplements, effectively small magazines in the form of a separate section within the Sunday paper, might include colour newspaper strips, serialised fiction, and puzzles. Daily papers circulate thirty miles or more, well into a city’s hinterlands, and extra editions, the source of the classic newsboy’s cry, are printed to report significant breaking news.

But there are dark clouds on the horizon. Papers are beginning to consolidate, and the merging of papers will be a trend through the 1920s and 30s. Which is to say that the number of papers is shrinking as businessmen try to rationalise the newspaper field. One example of these businessmen is Frank Munsey, who published the first pulp magazine in 1896. He’s stated a desire to build a chain of 500 papers, so far without much luck, though he has bought several papers in the New York area. As one of the men trying to consolidate the field, when he dies in 1925 a fiery obituary will state that he “contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meatpacker, the morals of a money-changer and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an eight per cent security. May he rest in trust!”

The Great War has also brought change to the newspaper business, as it has to so many others. After newspapermen stationed in the UK were exposed to British tabloid papers, the first North American tabloids appeared, starting with the New York Daily News in 1919. More traditional papers profess to be outraged by the tabloid focus on splashy graphics, celebrity gossip, sex scandals, and crime stories, but in fact newspapers have long tried to drum up sales with all those things (though admittedly not to the same extent). In particular, Joseph Pulitzer began publishing the sensationalist St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1878, then applied that formula to the New York World starting in 1883; this led rich young man William Randolph Hearst to try the same approach with the San Francisco Examiner starting in 1887 before trying to beat Pulitzer on his own ground with the New York Journal in 1896.

Both men aimed at the masses, with screaming headlines and big front-page graphics. They introduced new devices like the daily comic strip. And they were consciously at war with each other for the biggest circulation. The well-heeled Hearst had the advantage, able to buy out talent fostered by Pulitzer. In 1896 Hearst hired away the staff who put together Pulitzer’s Sunday supplement, including Richard Outcault, who wrote and drew the phenomenally popular comic strip Hogan’s Alley, featuring a character called the Yellow Kid. The popularity of the Kid gave a name to the style of newspaper that emerged from the Hearst-Pulitzer war: yellow journalism, meaning journalism that focussed on eye-catching headlines and sensationalised reporting.

Pulitzer turned away from yellow journalism after the Spanish-American war, which was allegedly fostered or at least encouraged by yellow journalists, and died in 1911, leaving instructions in his will for annual prizes to be established for excellence in journalism and writing. Hearst is still publishing, and owns over 25 papers. In 1924 he’ll open a tabloid of his own, the New York Daily Mirror.

It is worth noting that the New York newspaper scene in 1923 is also defined by the New York Times under the brilliant editor Carr Van Anda, who once detected a three-thousand-year-old forgery in a photograph of an Egyptian stele, and another time corrected a mathematics error in a talk given by Albert Einstein (who had erred in transcribing his equations on a chalkboard). The Times, growing in circulation and stature from its low point a quarter-century ago, will sometimes print stories for the sake of getting detailed facts into print as a reference — one cited example being a story naming the members of a new Peruvian cabinet — and in 1927 it will describe itself as a “Newspaper of Record.” The phrase will stick.

And of course outside the city journalists continue to cover important subjects. In 1908, the National Press Club was founded by journalists in Washington, D.C., who were fed up with having to constantly hunt about for locations to hold their poker games. It grew rapidly. In his 2018 book Bureau of Spies, Steven T. Usdin describes the 1925 construction of the National Press Building in Washington D.C. as coming at the beginning of the American capital’s “long, slow transition from sleepy, stagnant southern backwater to semi-sophisticated city.” He notes that the new skyscraper’s female elevator operators challenged norms in “a city that clung to to old ideas of decorum long after they’d been abandoned in more modern metropolises like New York and Chicago.” He quotes a 1927 Washington Post columnist observing that some men took off their hats for the operators, while “others keep on their Kellys until some other woman enters the car, and they uncover the old bean, although the passenger may be half as good looking or gracious as the elevator operator. … There is a third class of men who lift their hats neither for the female operator nor the woman passenger.” The building also will have a separate elevator for men only, and women will not be allowed into the National Press Club at the top of the building until 1971; the first Black man will be allowed to join the Club in 1955.

Parallel institutions did develop. African-American journalists would found the Capital Press Club in 1944. And in 1919 women journalists founded the Women’s National Press Club; excluded from the discussions and informal networking of the National Press Club, the women’s club did not admit men. But the year of the WNPC’s founding was significant. 1919 was the same year the 19th amendment of the United States Constitution was passed, recognising women’s right to vote.

At this point it is worth shifting focus from journalism to the political scene American journalism covers, starting with the immediate aftermath of the 19th amendment. As it turned out, the 35 to 45 percent of women who voted in the 1920 federal election were split between parties in similar proportions as men. This would hold true for some time, but in 1923 there is still speculation about (and fears of) a “female voting bloc.” Most candidates for office have been male, but not all; 1916 had already seen the first woman elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin, and in 1925 two women would win special elections for governorships. The first woman to serve in the Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton, appointed for one day in 1922; a supporter of lynching, she was also the last slave-owner to sit in the Senate.

The battle for suffrage has been won, but a further advance has not yet come to pass. After two years of discussion among activists, the Equal Rights Amendment will be first proposed in 1923 but find no groundswell of legislative support. Nevertheless, Sheila Rowbotham has since observed that “ex-suffrage campaigners did not lose the habit of organising because it proved hard to secure legislative change,” pointing to a range of organisations founded in the 20s, including the American Association of University Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs.

But it is also true that the political energy of the 1920s is changing. The first two decades of the twentieth century, and usually the last decade of the nineteenth with them, have been called the Progressive Era. During these years assorted political reforms were enacted forming the basics of a social safety net and welfare state. But the 1920s, in the eyes of many observers even at the time, will be a less idealistic time than the 1910s; thus, for example, Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel Babbitt struck a nerve with its depiction of a self-satisfied member of the bourgeoisie, who has become a symbol of society’s drive to conformity and complacency. If the reforms, intense political clashes, and controversial war experienced by America in the 1910s made the decade a loose equivalent to the 1960s, the materialistic 20s could be seen as parallel to the 1970s.

A general outline of American Presidential politics from 1908 to the 1930s might seem familiar to someone from the 21st century. After the idiosyncratic and occasionally populist administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Republican William Howard Taft (in 1923 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) was elected in 1908 and ran a business-friendly administration. He was succeeded by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who, among other policies, lowered tariffs and established the Federal Trade Commission to rein in unfair business practices. Wilson was followed by Harding, who after his death in August 1923 would be succeeded by Calvin Coolidge who in turn would be followed in 1928 by Herbert Hoover — all three of them pro-business Republicans. After a stock market crash in 1929 led to the Great Depression, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and brought in a New Deal of government programs. So it looks as though there’s a consistent pattern of right-wing pro-business Republicans and left-leaning pro-labour Democrats. But at the time it was not necessarily so clear that the parties would take these shapes.

Consider what will happen in the 1924 election. Calvin Coolidge will run for the Republicans, pledging to continue Harding’s policies of cutting taxes (and immigration), and of limiting government. But the Democrats, running West Virginian John W. Davis, will promise a similar platform. The only option for the political left will be the Progressive Party, running Robert M. (“Fighting Bob”) La Follette, former governor of (and current Senator from) Wisconsin, on a platform that included nationalisation of railways and electric utilities, the abolition of child labour, and cheaper credit for farmers; he’ll be supported by the Socialist Party of America, then undergoing factional conflict and governmental repression, and by the American Federation of Labour.

Coolidge will win with 54% of the vote (and 382 of 531 Electoral College votes) compared to Davis’ 28.8% (and 136 Electoral College votes). But La Follette will take 16.6% of the popular vote (though only 13 Electoral College votes), nearly five million votes in an election that still holds the record for the lowest per capita turnout of any Presidential election. Davis will receive fewer votes than James Cox, the progressive Democrat who had lost to Harding in 1920 by a landslide; in 1928 the Democrats will swing back to the left under Al Smith, and then further left in 1932 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Progressive Party, meanwhile, will fall apart as its voters (by and large) turn to the Democrats, and will never run another Presidential candidate.

In 1923 one might be forgiven for wondering what exactly the future holds. Not only was the 1924 election still to come, Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party had won over 900,000 votes in both the 1912 and 1920 elections (though in 1916, when Debs did not run for President, the Socialists only drew 590,524 votes). The 1912 election marked the highest percentage of votes ever won by a Socialist Presidential candidate, at 6%, but then in 1920 Debs did suffer the minor inconvenience of being imprisoned for sedition in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

If this represents the general situation of the left and the right in American politics in 1923 (and 1924), one must go a step further and ask what ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean in general terms at this time. Broadly speaking, these terms align with the cause of labour and of capital (or business), respectively, somewhat as they do now; interlinked questions of taxation, government spending, labour laws, anti-trust laws, and the like. These are major issues in 1923, and I’ll discuss some aspects of them in two weeks. The point I want to make at the moment is: other issues were not necessarily correlated with those things.

In particular, Progressives were often uninterested in issues relating to race and what would come to be called social justice. Woodrow Wilson, the second Democrat and first Southerner elected to the Presidency since the Civil War, was considered friendly to Progressive causes and also segregated the federal bureaucracy. (Technically, Wilson, born in 1856, would also end up the only former Confederate elected to the Presidency.) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, a Supreme Court justice, liked to tease his Progressive friends by arguing, not necessarily incorrectly, that they cared more about Reds (Communists) than Blacks.

As for environmental legislation, that was almost nonexistent in 1923. You can find a few examples. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, protecting birds that migrated between the United States and Canada, was one of the first federal environmental laws and one of the first international environmental treaties. The United States Fish Commission, later the United States Bureau of Fisheries, had been set up in 1871 to manage fish populations. In 1885 the Section of Economic Ornithology was established, became the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy in 1886, in 1896 became the Division of Biological Survey then in 1905 the Bureau of Biological Survey, and under whatever name was dedicated to “the study of birds from the standpoint of dollars and cents … in short, it is the practical application of the knowledge of birds to the affairs of everyday life.” Did a given bird species eat more bugs (helpful to humans) or crops (bad)? Economic ornithology could tell you, and in the days before modern pesticides this was believed to be useful information. Eventually, the Division of Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries would be combined in the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Worth noting that the Bureau of Biological Survey also protects wildlife habitats. This was recognised as an issue (at least by some) beginning in the late nineteenth century, particularly in Alaska. Theodore Roosevelt began designating certain areas as National Wildlife Refuges in 1903. The idea of species extinction caused by human action was still relatively new; when the last passenger pigeon died in a zoo in 1914, a writer for the Washington Post was moved to reflect that “When we talk of extinct animals, we think of creatures like the mammoth or mastodon, which died out thousands upon thousands of years ago. We seldom realize that there are whole species which have vanished quite lately, and many which are at present just trembling in the balance.” The American bison was saved by a major popular campaign, eventually supported by government action, while the 1900 Lacey Act, enforced by the Bureau of Biological Survey, protected several species of birds which were becoming endangered by the trade in feathers for women’s hats.

Congressman John F. Lacey, who introduced the Lacey Act, was a Republican. But his Act was strongly opposed by business — specifically, hat makers, who complained that it threatened to drive them to bankruptcy. Again, issues were not linked in the same way they often are now, were not necessarily conceived of in the same way (use of the word ‘environment’ in an ecological sense did not start until the 1950s), and were not necessarily divided along party lines the way they might be now.

On the eve of the 1916 Presidential election, a 34-year-old Progressive named Felix Frankfurter, who would later help found the American Civil Liberties Union and still later become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, wrote a 23-page memo for circulation among his friends and mentors outlining what he saw as the virtues and defects of Wilson and Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes. This was not a one-sided document, but a serious attempt to analyse which man would be better for Frankfurter’s preferred causes. Woodrow Wilson had been in power for four years, but it wasn’t immediately obvious which candidate was better for Frankfurter’s Progressive ideals.

Again, I’ll write about many of Frankfurter’s issues and ideals in the post two weeks from now. As we’ll see, there’s a lot to discuss. For the moment I want finish off this post by talking about corruption and President Harding.

This is a time when political corruption is common, and not just in the form of outright bribery. Many American cities are run by political patronage machines, hierarchical but non-democratic organisations that provide jobs and other favours in exchange for votes, continued power, and, often, money. Notorious examples include Chicago’s Gray Wolves — corrupt aldermen including the memorably-nicknamed “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Mike Kenna — and New York’s longstanding Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall’s power will only begin to decline after the death of its current boss, Charles Francis Murphy, in 1924.

Corruption’s rife at the federal level, too, though Americans won’t know how bad things are for a few years. In early 1923 President Warren Gamaliel Harding is recovering poorly from a bout of influenza in January. He’s been in poor health for years, and will die in August from a heart attack. After his death a series of corruption cases involving members of his administration will emerge, including the notorious Teapot Dome scandal, often considered the worst scandal in American federal politics before Watergate, in which oil companies bribed a member of the cabinet to get rights to oil fields on government land. Many of the worst examples of this corruption are the work of the Ohio Gang, a group of politicians who entered Harding’s orbit during his days as a state-level politician; allegedly they did most of their illegal dealings in ‘the Little Green House on K Street,’ a club described by one historian as “part brothel, part speakeasy.”

Harding is well-liked, notwithstanding the corruption scandals about to break, and notwithstanding the fact that his nomination in 1920 as the Republican candidate for President only came after intense behind-the-scenes negotiations among party power brokers in the original smoke-filled room. (The modern primary system is decades away from its creation.) That sympathy will dissipate after his death. In 1927 his lover Nan Britton will publish a tell-all book revealing that she had an illegitimate daughter by Harding (and decades later DNA tests will prove she told the truth). Even Harding’s personal charisma will be forgotten, his deportment remembered now for things like his having sex with Britton in a closet near the Oval Office, or an incident during a conversation when he casually pissed into a White House fireplace. At the moment, he’s still regarded fondly; when he dies later this year, Vice-President Calvin Coolidge will actually not know for several hours, as Coolidge will be visiting his home in Vermont — which has no telephone or electricity.

Coolidge is a very different man from Harding, famous for his recalcitrance and nicknamed “Silent Cal.” One story, which Coolidge himself will deny, will claim that his neighbour at a dinner party told him that she — in most tellings of the story the neighbour’s a woman — could get more than two words out of him; Coolidge supposedly thought for a moment and said “You lose.” (There are other, odder, anecdotes about Coolidge’s wit.) Part of the difference between them may be that Harding was a newspaperman, with a media professional’s understanding of charisma.

In 1884, at the age of 18, Harding bought his bankrupt hometown newspaper, the Marion Star, and built up its circulation. He loved the paper, and maintained ownership until June 1923, not long before his death in August. This mixture of politics and journalism wasn’t unusual; Joseph Pulitzer had been a state representative in Missouri and a Congressman in New York, while William Randolph Hearst twice won elections to Congress and tried for the 1904 Democratic nomination for President. In particular, James Cox, who Harding thumped handily in the 1920 Presidential election, had bought a paper in Dayton, Ohio in the 1890s, and acquired another in Springfield in 1905; after his election defeat he’d buy more papers, and later radio stations, forming a media conglomerate that still exists.

In other words: both Presidential candidates in 1920 had been newspapermen at a time when newspapers were a major part of the American media diet. It’s possible to draw parallels to later politics. But what I want to suggest here is simply that it is worth pondering how in the early 1920s journalism and politics could bleed into one another as related routes to power.

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.