Thread by @Millicentsomer

Just randomly picked up forty or so old issues of the Nation from the 20s and 30s and are just sitting down with them and there’s so much, wow

The answer to this turned out to be my god, yes

Like, here is Dreiser’s last graf

This excerpt from Hapgood’s response to one of Dreiser’s letters will give you a general idea of his other arguments

what’s up Nov. 30, 1927

(random side thought re: Dreiser—I finally read House of Mirth and found it to be one of the best portrayals of a certain kind of anxiety I’ve read and so anti-Semitic that I had to check to see whether the treatment of that character was part of its send-up of society. Nope.)

basically, as an ex-Catholic ex-scholar of early modern British lit, I guess I hadn’t fully appreciated the extent of anti-Semitism in American letters in the early 20th c.

December 13, 1933 article on reporters unionizing! (“At first there was considerable resentment on the part of employers. ‘Are editorial craftsmen ready for unionization?’”)

"For years every effort to organize the brain workers in newspaper offices has failed, reporters and sub-editors being too cowed. But as we have already reported, the NRA [National Recovery Act] has made it possible for these white-collar slaves to organize with complete safety."

(result: birth of the Newspaper Guild in the US: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsGuild…)

I know so little about this period in the U.S. that I'm reading these like a martian would (insight from folks who know this stuff is v. welcome) but Rose Bradley's Dec. 13, 1933 article "Back of the Maryland Lynching" is startling not just for its content but for its approach

For example, Bradley’s few references to George Washington treat him primarily as a slaveowner, for ex—drawing particular attention to how jarring it is to have images of such a person adorning “every public building” but the kind of thinking that enables

the last line of this graf did what it’s supposed to, I am furious

just the agony of this whole thing

reading old magazines is two parts mystifying one part pleased recognition and one part screaming at the woman in the horror film not to go down those stairs LOOK I HAVE A CANDLE RIGHT HERE

I mean.

1933 review of The Crown

revising my remarks from 2 tweets back: sometimes the old magazines are the candleholders and they’re just screaming their heads off at you and you know what, it’s rude. what of civilit—

ok I recommend muting this thread because I've found an article that begins "Friends have been showing us their new dishes" (what a lede!) and it's a July 13 1932 longread by Douglas Haskell about whether dishes should have decorations on them and I plan to LINGER on this text

what is HAPPENING

“The dish must be plain.”

“But when it comes to a dish, I am not so cautious.”

“A dish is first of all a problem in washing and breaking”

THIS IS GOOFY DEPRESSION-ERA THEORIZING ABOUT DISPOSABILITY AND DECOR and I am just so here for it

“That is the paradox of the dish. Fragile as it is, if it doesn’t break, it will never wear out. And on this paradox, in the past, rested in large part, the subjugation of women. They played the little game.”

I want this on my gravestone

the next graf begins "Now that women have freed themselves anyway, what is the use?"

stopping there because I'm overstimulated and have a glee-headache