The Year That Was – Episode 24
“After You’ve Gone”
 
Here we are, 24 episodes into our study of 1919, hours and hours of content, and there is so much I haven't had a chance to tell you.
 
Western fashion, for one thing, was undergoing a revolution. Since the Middle Ages, women had worn clothing that reached at least the ankle, if not to the floor. Hemlines rose and fell by only a matter of inches. 
Then in 1919 skirts began to creep up to dizzying new heights. That year, fashion designers unveiled skirts that hit at mid-calf. By 1927, the clothing of the most adventurous women stopped about the knee and were sometimes slit even higher. 
 
This appalled more conservative members of society, who believed that civilization would be undone by such flagrant displays of shinbones. So alarmed was the justice system of the state of New York that in the spring of 1919, carpenters arrived at the state courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan armed with boards and nails. They built enclosed railings three feet high around witness stands. These new witness boxes allowed female witnesses to testify without any risk of the court getting a glimpse of stockings and stopping women from  perverting the course of justice with their sexy, sexy ankles.
 
This is the Year That Was: 1919.
 
 
 
 
I also haven't told you about women's hair, which was changing length as rapidly as hemlines. Before 1919, a woman cutting her hair short was a drastic decision, usually taken under duress. Think of all of the books for and about young women in the 19th century in which a female cutting her hair is a dramatic plot point. In Little Women, Jo cuts off her long, chestnut-colored hair and sells it to a wig-maker to obtain money to help her sick father. Mary in the Little House books has her hair cut short when she suffers from scarlet fever--this was common during illness, it was believed short hair helped relieve fevers. In all of these cases, short hair signaled that something had gone very wrong for the heroine.
 
By the end of 1919, short hair signaled something very different, that the woman in question was progressive, modern and refused to comply with old-fashioned notions of propriety. One of the first and most famous bobbed heads was that of dancer and actress Irene Castle, who cut off her long hair prior to entering the hospital for an appendectomy in 1915. She liked it so much she kept it short after her recovery. She was imitated by women who took up jobs during the war and who had little patience for the time commitment required to style long hair. After the war, the trend spread.
 
Women claimed bobbed hair cost less to maintain, since women no longer needed all of the pins and accroutrement to keep up-dos up, and for women wealthy enough to afford them in the first place, created less work for ladies maids. (Think of Anna in Downtown Abbey, who has to stand there for hours pinning and curling Lady Mary's hair while Lady Mary frets over her love life.) Critics replied that bobbed hair was actually more expensive, since bobs required frequent trips to the hair dresser. Incidentally, the bob utterly disrupted the hair styling and cutting industry. Women's hair salons had little experience actually cutting hair and often turned away girls eager for bobs. Frustrated women sometimes betook themselves to barber shops, a trend that discombobulated--get it, discombobulated?--barbers and male patrons alike.
 
Anyway. The Spanish Flu pandemic played a role in the short hair trend. Many women cut their hair when they fell ill. Like Irene Castle, they never went back. Doctors approved and wrote editorials applauding the hygenic advantages of shorter hair--one article I found declared "less hair carried on the head is a reduction . . . of infection carrying medium." 
 
The backlash really got going a few years later, and so the most hysterical reactions to bobbed hair date to later in the 1920s. In 1919, short hair was so new and so concentrated in East Coast cities in general and Greenwich Village in particular that critics in the heartland mostly ignored it. However, I did find one male critic who declared that for a woman to bob her hair was to give at least tacit approval to the Bolshevik cause, since, he claimed, the Russian government had forced the style on, quote, "the lowest type of Russian woman." He concluded that as a single man, he would never marry a woman with bobbed hair.
 
No word on the question of whether or not any short-haired women wanted to marry him. 
 
 
 
What else haven't I told you? So many things, and I'm devoting this episode to sharing some of my favorite stories that I couldn't fit in anywhere else.
 
For example, I haven't told you about the first trans-Atlantic airplane flight. 
 
You may think you know about this and credit Charles Lindbergh for the achievement. In fact, Lindbergh completed the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, in 1927. In 1919, the battle was on for a non-stop flight by a team of aviators. Both a pilot and a navigator were necessary for the feat.
 
On June 14th, Lieutenant Arthur Brown, navigator, and Captain John Alcock, pilot, embarked on an expedition from St. John's, Newfoundland, heading for Ireland and glory. The men were aiming for a prize offered by the London Daily Mail of 10 thousand pounds, roughly 50 thousand dollars, to the first aviators to complete the journey.
 
Alcock had been flying for just about as long as anyone who wasn't a Wright brother. He had won his first aviation competition in 1913, achieving a record speed from London to Manchester. During the war, he was stationed in the Aegean Sea and ran bombing raids against the Ottoman Empire. In October 1917, Alcock lost an engine and was forced to ditch in the Sea of Marmara. He was captured by the Ottomans and remained a prisoner of war until the signing of the Armistice. 
 
After the was, he found an able partner in the navigator, Brown. While born in America, Arthur Brown had been raised in Manchester. He served in the trenches at Ypres and the Somme, then enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. He too went down behind enemy lines and spent fourteen months in a German POW camp. The two met soon after each man returned to England.
 
Five teams were competing for the Daily Mail contest that summer, and they were all working out of Newfoundland. The first team took off on May 18, promptly flew into dense fog over the Grand Banks, ran out of fuel and crash-landed not halfway across the Atlantic. Thankfully, they were rescued by a small cargo vessel and made it home. The second team took off a few days later and crashed on takeoff. Flying was risky business in 1919.
 
Alcock and Brown were flying a new aircraft, a modified Vickers Vimy IV bomber with two 350 horsepower Rolls-Royce engines. The plane had been designed for long-distance flights with the goal of bombing Berlin, but the war had ended before it could be used. Alcock and Brown had stripped out the bombing apparatus and installed extra gasoline tanks that could be jetisoned after use. 
 
The team took off at 4 pm on June 14th. They carried 870 gallons of gasoline, a dozen sandwiches, numerous chocolate bars, two thermoses of coffee, a flask of brandy, and, inexplicably, two black cats, named Lucky Jim and Twinkletoe. Odd choice, but they were considered the mascots of the flight. 
 
Actually, the whole thing about the cats is very confusing--one account that I read clearly described them real cats and said spent the flight in an enclosed cupboard nestled in some warm material.  But the flight was going to take hours, cats have to do their business somewhere, and it gets very, very cold up in the sky. Another account claimed the cats were in fact stuffed animals, which is less charming but far more practical. I could have pursued the matter, and I have gone down extended research rabbit holes for less. (When I wrote my first book, I spent hours trying to determine if Eduoard Manet had his left leg or his right leg amputated. I never did learn the answer.) I decided in this case to let it go. There were two cats on the flight, like Schrodinger's, either living or dead.
 
Anyway. The men wore electrically heated suits, since as I said, it gets very cold up that hight. They took off against a strong wind, across a bumpy field, and the overloaded aircraft barely cleared the treetops at the end of the makeshift runway. 
 
Things went wrong almost immediately. The radio gear in their flight caps failed right away, and the men had to scribble notes to communicate. They soon hit a thick fog that made it impossible for Brown to determine their position accurately. The only tools Brown had available for navigation would have been familiar to a ship captain in the 1850s: maps, a watch, a compass, and a sextant, which only works when the user has a clear view of the horizon. In the fog, Brown couldn't see the horizon, so he used dead reckoning to calculate their position through a combination of compass bearings and calculations of the speed and height of the plane and the wind velocity. Brown was an excellent navigator, but dead reckoning is a notoriously unreliable method, as the two men well knew. For hours they flew in a haze of nothingness, the only indication they were heading in the right direction Brown's compass and their own confidence. 
 
Flying was risky business in 1919, and a punishing amount of work. Alcock had to keep his feet on the rudders and his hand on the joystick for the entire flight. About 3 a.m., so eleven hours into the journey, the fog grew so thick Alcock could no longer see the front of the fuselage or the end of either wing. With no external clues, his internal sense of his position in space went askew. In a state of complete spatial disorientation, with his senses telling him one thing and his instruments something totally different, he lost control and the plane went into a spiral dive. They plummeted toward the North Sea. Then, suddenly, the plane emerged out of the cloud and the men could see their position--no more than a hundred feet above the ocean. Alcock yanked the joystick and the plane leveled out 50 feet above the water. 
 
Brown recalculated their position and realized they were at that moment headed back toward America. They corrected course and keep going. In the hours that followed, they hit more clouds, then a snowstorm. They were only able to confirm their position every few hours when they briefly encountered a patch of clear sky. 
 
At 8:15 in the morning of June 15, they spotted land in the distance. And at 8:40, they landed near Clifden in County Galway—and then sank propeller-first into a bog. Well, it was Ireland. Alcock and Brown scrambled out, grabbing their instruments, and a flare gun. I can only assume that if the cats in question were in fact real cats and not stuffed animals, they also saved Twinkletoe and Lucky Jim, because these men weren't monsters.
 
A few minutes later, a group of bewildered Irishmen converged on the spot. They asked the aviators where they had come from. "America," said Alcock, and the whole group burst into laughter. 
 
It took some time to convince the men that they had really, truly just flown from America to Europe. They had traveled 1890 miles or 3040 kilometers in 15 hours and 57 minutes. Their average speed was 115 miles per hour. 
 
There is a photo, a poor quality, extremely blurry photo, of the plane, nosedown in a peat bog , surrounded by a dozen or so Irishmen in soft caps and coats and accompanied by a few dogs. Before the plane stand the two aviators in their military hats and long dark coats. It is impossible to see the expressions on their faces. The men would be surprised in the coming days by all of the hysterical press attention. At the moment, I can imagine they were somewhere between exhaustion and exhilaration, but surely incredibly proud.
 
No cats, living or otherwise, are visible.
 
 
 
What else, what else?
 
We talked, in more than one episode, about the struggles of African-Americans in 1919. One other story from that fight is the tale of Mabel Emiline Puffer and Arthur Garfield Hazzard.
 
Miss Puffer was an educated white lady from a good family of moderate wealth long-established in New England. She had graduated from the Emerson College of Oratory in Boston, then returned home to Ayer, Massachusetts to live with her family. She had never married, had no siblings and was the sole heir of her father's multiple properties and sizable bank account. In 1919, she was 49 years old, her parents were dead, and she spent most of her time living in relative seclusion at the family country house outside of Ayer in a lakeside community named Sandy Pond. There was nothing weird or gossip-worthy about the seclusion; she just kept herself to herself.
 
The Sandy Pond estate employed a man who went by the nickname Honey Hazzard. He was African-American, about eleven years younger than Mabel. His family had lived in the community for several generations, and his father William W. Hazzard, had fought in the famed Civil War B Troop, 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, one of the North's all-black regiments. Honey Hazzard was a respected man in the community and had a reputation as a hard worker and skilled craftsman. He maintained the home and grounds of the Puffer estate. 
 
At some point, Honey and Mabel fell in love. We don't know much about the timing of this relationship, or how it progressed, but Honey later recalled night-time walks around Sandy Pond when the moon was full. The two would hold hands and talk, or be silent together. It sounds very sweet.
 
In 1919, the couple decided they would make it official. Mabel had always wanted to be married in June, so they planned a June wedding in Concord, New Hampshire. Mabel was a devoted practioner of Christian Science, and Concord was where the founder of the religion, Mary Baker Eddy, had died and was buried. 
 
Now, there was no law in New Hampshire—or, for that matter, in Massachusetts--that barred interracial marriage. New Hampshire did, however, mandate a five-day delay between requesting a marriage license and holding the wedding. On June 16, the couple arrived in Concord and took two separate rooms, naturally, at the Phenix Hotel. They requested a marriage licence and planned to spend the next five days relaxing and enjoying themselves while they waited for the wedding. 
 
Those five days would ruin their lives. 
 
It's hard to know what Puffer and Hazzard were thinking. Puffer must have known that she, as a wealthy woman, was violating numerous social norms by marrying her younger handy man. Eyebrows would be raised, and she would no doubt be ostracized from Sandy Pond society. She might have figured that she lived a private life anyway, and with Honey by her side, the disdain of her neighbors wouldn't matter.
 
But how could the couple ignore the potential ramifications of a wealthy WHITE woman marrying her younger BLACK handy man?  It's true that New England prided itself on it progressive race relations and on being nothing like the South. Many African American families lived in peace alongside their white neighbors in the Northeast, and lynchings were unheard of. But that doesn't mean that blacks and whites socialized, or, god forbid, married. But Puffer and Hazzard seemed to think they could brazen it out.
 
The week began well enough. The couple strolled the streets and shopped in local stores; they were noticed, and widely discussed, but not shunned. It wasn't until Thursday, two days before the wedding, that storm clouds began to gather. Someone in Concord had gotten in touch with the newspapers in Boston, and several reporters showed up and interviewed the couple. Early news coverage reflected perturbation more than outrage, and the reporters were willing to let the couple tell their story. Mabel told the Boston Evening Globe, "I love Mr. Hazzard, and love doesn't stop at the color line."
 
News had also gotten back Concord, and old friends were definitely outraged. Some were so upset they hurried to Concord to urge Mabel to stop this nonsense. Their issues seem to have been more about class than race. Miss Puffer couldn't marry her handy man, it was beneath her. Mabel, politely, told them to mind their own business. 
 
Nevertheless, by Friday, the day before the wedding, the people of Concord were getting nervous about their town's sudden infamy. Suddenly the mayor had to go out of town the day of the wedding. The city clerk, asked to perform the ceremony, declined the offer. No one else in the local government was ready to step in. Hazzard knocked on the door of every parsonage in town asking for help and was refused. 
 
Then, Friday afternoon, Puffer's relatives showed up and all hell broke lose. These were the children of Puffer's half-sister, and Puffer repeatedly informed everyone within earshot that she had no contact with these people, she hadn't seen them in years, and their relationship was next to non-existant. The half-niece and nephew were not primarily concerned about class but were definitely, 100 percent horrified at the idea of acquiring a black uncle. If they were also concerned about other facts, they did not mention it, although it occurs to me that they might have been upset that their wealthy aunt was likely to favor her husband in her will over the relations that she didn't even like. 
 
It was not easy to find a legal reason to block a properly issued marriage license, but Puffer's relatives found one. They filed an application to declare Mabel Puffer mental incompetent. On what grounds was this well-educated, well-read women, who had managed her own affairs successfully in the decade or so since her father's death, mentally ill? She was insane, self-evidently, because she wanted to marry a, quote "Negro servant."
 
Just let that sink in.
 
Late afternoon before the wedding, the Ayer, Massachusetts police chief arrived--without extradition papers, but who lets legal quibbles get in the way in a time like this--and arrested Hazzard for "lewd and lascivious cohabitation"--because who knows what they were doing at that house at Sandy Pond. He also took Puffer into custody relying on hastily issued committal papers. The next morning, instead of marrying her true love, Puffer met with her attorney in the basement jail of Ayer City Hall. 
 
I wish I could tell you that she fought for love and won, married Honey and lived with him in peace and harmony. Instead, matters became increasingly confusing as the behavior of Mabel Puffer became . . . odd. I'm not going to go into the details because they are hard to follow. The whole thing got dragged into the courts, and Puffer's statements stopped making sense, as when she announced under oath that her putative fiance was, somehow, both a black man named Hazzard and a white man named Charles McKee. It's impossible to know what was going on. Had the strain actually broken her mind and driven Puffer insane? Or was she pretending to be insane, like an ill-judged latter-day Hamlet? Was she trying to protect Hazzard and somehow, through fair means and foul, squirm out of the trap in which she found herself? No one knows. 
 
All charges against Hazzard were eventually dropped, but Puffer was committed to a mental hosptial. She died there in 1937. For many years, Hazzard continued to live in Ayer; he disappears from the record shortly after the U.S. entered World War II. 
 
Let's focus once again on the key fact in this case. The justice system of Massachusetts declared Mabel Puffer insane solely because she wanted to marry a man of a different race. 
 
Lynchings and mob violence were terrifying crimes that spilled the blood of hundreds of African-Americans in 1919. But let us also remember Mabel and Honey, who simply wanted to walk hand in hand around Sandy Pond in the daylight.
 
 
 
Another marginalized group deserves attention here, and their story echoes the experience of African Americans. You'll recall that African Americans returned from their service in World War I with a new sense of pride and accomplishment. Similarly, Native Americans who fought in the Great War felt they had courageously answered the call of a nation that was more likely to oppress them than honor them.
 
More than 12,000 American Indians served in the war, most of them volunteers. They were used primarily as scouts and snipers. Some were also employed as code-talkers, a little known fact--most of us are familiar with the code-talkers of World War II, and I had no idea a similar strategy was employed many years before.
 
During the Meuse-Argonne offensive in autumn 1918, American commanders were struggling to communicate with troops on the front line, since the Germans were so good at tapping their telephone lines. One night in camp, two Choctaw soldiers were chatting by a fire when a captain walked by and heard them. He asked what language they were speaking and instantly realized the potential for secure communications. The Choctaw soldiers knew another tribe member based at company headquarters, and soon orders and information were flying back and forth in complete security. The Germans were utterly baffled hearing a language that few Americans, let alone Europeans, even knew existed. 
 
The 19 Choctaw soldiers who served as code-talkers were fully aware of the irony of the situation. As they were using their language to win the war for America, that language was being stomped out at home by the American government. This was the era of state-run boarding schools, when Native American children were ripped from their families and forced to assimilate under stern White eyes. Children who attempted to speak their Native languages were often beaten.
 
When Indian soldiers returned home, they hoped that the government would recognize their service by granting them, and their tribes, citizenship. Here's another little known fact, and one of far greater proportions: most Native Americans were not U.S. citizens in 1919. A patchwork of laws governed indigenous citizenship, and some tribes and tribal members had it, while many others didn't. 
 
This is one story with a semi-happy ending. In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act conferring citizenship on all Native Americans born with the United States. It wasn't all sunshine and flowers, because the law did not include the right to vote. Many states continued to ban or limit voting by American Indians until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. One milestone had been achieved.
 
 
 
Let's look outside of the United States for other stories we missed. 
 
I had intended to devote an entire episode to the Mexican Revolution, but I could never really get my arms around the topic. This period of Mexican history is complex and confusing and overwhelming and deserving of far more attention from those of us north of the border. 
 
What I will tell you now is a single snippet from the much broader story, one about Emiliano Zapata. 
 
Zapata was born in Morelos, a landlocked state in central Mexico south of Mexico City, with its capital at Cuernavaca. The central political conflict in Morelos was the abusive behavior of the hacendados. These were wealthy landowners who owned the haciendas that controlled most of the land. Haciendas were large estates that forced locals to work for them under dire conditions by trapping them into debt peonage, a form of coerced labor similar to sharecropping but much worse. The system bore strong resemblance to slavery in the antebellum American South or serfdom early 19th century Russia. 
 
In Morelos, the haciendas existed alongside farms operated by the residents of small villages. Often these villages had rights, sometimes granted many centuries previously, that accorded them land and access to water and other resources. But the haciendas didn't respect these rights and often seized land belonging to the villages. It appeared to many in Morelos that the hacendados would not be satisfied until they had taken all of the land and driven all of the farmers into peonage. Many villages began agitating for justice. In 1909, one such village elected as its representative Emiliano Zapata.
 
Zapata was then 30 years old. While not handsome per se, photos reveal an arresting intensity in his gaze--and he had a magnificent mustache. His family wasn't wealthy, but they were comfortably established. Zapata had an entrepreneurial streak and ran a team of mules hauling supplies from village to village; he operated a small farm and grew watermelons. He was a skilled horseman who competed in rodeos and races, and he often dressed as a charro, a traditional Mexican horseman, in tight black pants with silver buttons running down the side of each leg, a fine linen shirt, a silk scarf, and a short jacket, usually embroidered. Women found him irresistable and men inspirational. 
 
He was man accustomed to violence and comfortable employing it. He rarely traveled outside his home state and had little interest in other parts of the country--and zero respect for the middle and upper classes who lived in fine houses and ate fine foods in Mexico City. Zapata's greatest virtue was that he understood the suffering of the ordinary people of Morelos. Zapata knew the lives of his neighbors would be ground out in in endless toil on the edge of ruin. He was not an ideological person; he would eventually be introduced to socialism and communism and anarchism and he had no use for any of them. 
 
Fundamentally, he believed that the government should be a force for good, not evil. The state should grant its citizens a measure of justice and human dignity rather than connive with the rich and powerful. As a farmer from a farming culture, he believed equality would best be achieved by ensuring everyone who wanted to work the land had land to work. That was his core belief, and on it he would not budge. Zapata ignored anyone who began sentences with, "Well, yes, but it's more complicated than that."
 
Not long after Zapata assumed leadership in his village, the Mexican revolution broke out. Exactly how and why are beyond the scope of this narrative. In short, a venal and corrupt president who had maintained power for 31 years lost control and saw his army defeated by rebel troops that included soldiers from Morelos under the command of Zapata. 
 
A new, more progressive leader stepped into the gap promising democracy and justice, and Zapata, now recognized as one of the leaders of the rebellion, pressed him to agree to a major land redistribution program. The new leader balked, so Zapata pulled his support. He, Zapata, retreated with his advisors and drafted a reform agenda known as the Plan of Ayala. It called for, among other things, the break up of the haciendas and the handover of land to those without it.  
 
Zapata also expanded his military efforts. Between 1911 and 1913, his forces seized a sizable territory in South Central Mexico. Within this territory, Zapata immediately began to put the Plan of Ayala into effect, delighting the villagers who found their farms enlarged and the haciendas shuttered. To them, Zapata was a hero, a savior.
 
Up in Mexico City, coup succeeded coup. Opposition movements came together and broke apart. Many rebel leaders tried to ally with Zapata, the undisputed authority in the south. Zapata's sole condition was that his allies committed to the Plan of Ayala. This was a hard sell, in part because some of the rebels were themselves hacendados. Perhaps more critical was the fact that Zapata only really understood, and only really cared about, Morelos. Mexicans in the Yucatan Peninsula, or in the northern desert states, lived under different conditions and had different problems. Miners in Chihuahua, for example, had their own issues, and the Plan of Ayala wouldn't solve them. 
 
Nevertheless, in 1914, Zapata decided that one northern faction showed enough commitment to his Plan to admit them as allies. This brought him in contact with the other folk hero of the Revolution, the fierce fighter Pancho Villa. In 1915, Villa's troops from the north and Zapata's troops from the south converged on Mexico City, and the combined force seized the capital. Zapata could have claimed the presidency himself, or formed some sort of power-sharing agreement with Villa. But Zapata was in a hurry to get back to Morelos. He never wanted supreme power. 
 
Without a strong hand at the center, the Zapata-Villa alliance collapsed. In 1916, a new president seized power, regained the capital and forced Zapata's troops to retreat. The new president also moved quickly to hold elections and promulagate a new constitution. This document incorporated the Plan of Ayala, a clever move that took some wind out of Zapata's sails. The government could now say to Zapata's supporters, what are you fighting for, you got what you wanted? In any case, many Zapatistas were exhausted after years of war, tired of supporting an army that couldn't seem to win any more, tired of burying their sons. The land under Zapata's control shrank to a small core in Morelos, and his soldiers slipped away.
 
The Spanish Flu swept through Morelos in the winter of 1918, and a quarter of the population died. Families couldn't feed their children. Zapata couldn't help them. He was out of resources and out of options.
 
In April 1919, one of the president's colonels sent a note to Zapata asking if they could talk. He explained that he might be willing to change sides and ally with the Zapatistas. If true, this would be a game-changer, because the colonel would bring not only men, munitions and money. Some of Zapata's followers warned it was a trap, but what was new? Zapata had lived in mortal danger for decades. 
 
On April 10, Zapata joined the colonel for a meeting at the colonel's headquarters. Zapata arrived with 150 men and spent some time lingering outside of the gates, wary of attack inside its walls. The colonel's men warned that some enemy troops were approaching from the hills, so some of Zapata's forces went to take a look. The colonel urged Zapata inside, where they would be safe and they could talk. Zapata agreed and walked through the gate into the courtyard at the front of the compound. 
 
A group of guards stood inside, presenting arms--a sign of respect. A bugle sounded three times--a call of honor. And then, as the last note fell silent, the guards opened fire. Emiliano Zapata fell dead in a hail of bullets. 
 
The colonel had been in the pay of the president all along. Zapata's bloody body was carried on horseback through village after village and then put on display in a small town so the people of Morelos would understand their hero was really dead. Thousands came to view the body. A gruesome photo was taken of the corpse and run in all of the newspapers.   
 
A year and a month later, another coup put another president into power, and this time many of Zapata's followers obtained key posts in the government. But land reform at the scale Zapata envisioned was never carried out. Zapata remains a hero in Mexico. For example, in 1994, rebels in the southern state of Chaipas seized sizable territory and ejected government authorities. To this day, the Zapatistas hold about half of Chiapas as a de facto autonomous state. 
 
It is difficult to fit Zapata into the bigger picture of 1919. His struggle had nothing to do with colonialism or communism, at least not exactly, and wasn't a matter of self-determination except on a very individual scale. But that was the scale at which Zapata operated. He had no interest in big abstract entities like states and nationalities. He was concerned only with the individual's right to self-determination, and to justice.
 
 
 
That turned out to be a long story. Let me tell you a shorter one that deserves to be longer. I haven't talked much about South America in 1919, but it was not free from conflict. In January 1919, a series of riots of massacres shook Buenos Aires. The conflict originated as a cluster of labor disputes, including massive strikes, that were inflamed by the action of anarchists. Order broke down in the city, and mobs rampaged through the streets. The government didn't know how to respond—at one point, members of the Argentine Congress started hurling their notebooks at one another when they couldn't come to agreement. It took the combined efforts of two cavalry regiments, one marine regiment and an artillery regiment to get the city under control. Estimates of those killed in the week range from about 100 to more than 1500. This series of events became known in Argentina as the Tragic Week.
 
Argentina wasn't the only nation hit with labor unrest. We talked at length about what happened in the U.S. Other conflicts broke out in Scotland, at the Battle of George Square on January 31, when the British Army was called into to put down riots over working hours in Glasgow. In Canada, more than 30,000 strikers brought economic activity to a halt for six weeks in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The strike was eventually put down through violent action by Royal North-West Mounted Police, and many of its leaders wound up in prison. However, the Canadian labor movement ultimately emerged stronger and more united after the strike, in contrast to the U.S. labor movement, which was so demoralized after the failure of strikes in 1919 that it took a decade to truly recover.
 
 
 
What else? In 1919, the U.S. military returned home with new appreciation of the importance of motorized vehicles in war. Horses and mules had played a major role in the Great War, but it was obvious trucks and tanks were the future. The challenge with such vehicles is that they require roads to travel on (well, a tank can go wherever it wants, but its going to get there a lot faster on a paved surface.) 
 
What if, some officer said, staring at a map of the United States, we needed to get a men and supplies from, say, Chicago to Los Angeles? Or Atlanta to Seattle? Could we do it?
 
They had a suspicion the answer would be no, but they wanted to test it out. So on July 7, 80 vehicles carrying 24 officers and 258 enlisted men set out from Washington D.C. for San Francisco. 
 
The journey was endlessly frustrating, but I hope some of the troops could also see the humor in it. No lives were at stake, so the series of unfortunate events that followed could only have been laughed at. The vehicles were less than reliable. The very first afternoon one truck broke a coupling, and a car broke a fan belt. More frustrating was that the road system had been designed for horses and buggies. On the second day of the journey, the convoy was delayed for two hours by wobbly bridges too dangerous for cars and covered bridges too low for trucks. 
 
The convoy averaged about 6 miles an hour. Many of the drivers had little experience with internal combustion engines and routinely gave commands to the vehicles while driving them. (This seems to have been common to drivers whose first experience was with horses or mules. A great uncle of mine once busted through the barn door bellowing "WOAH" with his foot firmly on the accelerator.)
 
They traveled on paved roads until somewhere in Indiana, but gravel roads were manageable until they reached western Nebraska. That was when the trucks started bogging down in sandy roads, often becoming stuck up to their hubcaps. One day it took seven hours for the entire convoy to travel 200 yards. The further west they traveled the worse it got. Utah was a disaster. In August, a delightfully cool time of the year to cross the desert, the team was at one point so incapacitated they ran low on water and fuel. They had to be rescued--by teams of horses.
 
They finally pulled into San Francisco on Sept. 7, having traveled 3251 miles in 62 days. According to Google, you could do the same trip today in 42 hours, on interstate 80 the entire way. The directions literally have you get on the interstate in D.C. and exit 2800 miles later at Market Street. 
 
Back 1919, the convoy had proved its point. If an enemy invaded California, they would have weeks and weeks to wipe out local forces and dig in before anyone arrived from the east. (I mean, assuming they knocked out rail travel--don't bother me with facts, this is a hypothetical situation.) One official involved in the trip reported, "The officers of the Convoy were thoroughly convinced that all transcontinental highways should be constructed and maintained by the Federal Government." 
 
And so, in 1921, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act to develop a national highway system. But it was far too small a project with far too small a budget for the job. America's roads would have to wait until 1956 and the creation of the interstate highway system to get a road network that really could move trucks and cars across the nation quickly and efficiently. The president who promoted that program was Dwight D. Einsenhower. He had had been arguing for a national highway system for decades--since 1919, in fact, when, as a young Lieutenant Colonel, he had joined the convoy on their long journey west. 
 
 
Just a few more things to say. 
 
In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died. So did the remarkable African-American entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, Henry Heinz of ketchup fame, and Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Born blinking into the light of the sun were baseball player Jackie Robinson, singer Nat King Cole, mountaineer Sir Edmund Hilary and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
 
The highest grossing movie of the year in the U.S. was "Daddy-Long Legs," a comedy staring Mary Pickford. The top selling song was the heart breaker "After You've Gone" by Marion Harris, followed by "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."
 
And I think that's it.
 
 
 
In the very first episode of this podcast I asked question: Was 1919 a time of hope or a time of despair. I pointed to two very different works of literature to make my point. One was the poem "The Second Coming" written by W.B. Yeats in 1919. The other was the book Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery, which was published in 1921, although the events of the book conclude in 1919.
 
The poem certainly ends on a note of horror, wondering what rough beast is now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. The novel ends on a note of possibility, with our heroine in the arms of her beloved. I said when I wrote that episode, so long ago--I just checked, I started the draft in March 2019, goodness, how young we all were then. Anyway, I said that the two works offer two views of the future. With which view would I agree when I was done?
 
Well. Here's what I think now. I think that was a stupid question.
 
1919 was a time of hope and optimism and possibility. At the exact same instant, it was a time of despair, uncertainty and loss.
 
But wasn't it ever thus? Dickens was right. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It's always the best of times and worst of times. The arc of the universe is long, so long that we can't perceive which way it is bending without centuries of perspective. So let's just let that question go. 
 
I still find it amazing that it all happened in one year, and I can flip through images like a kaleidescope in my mind. Woodrow Wilson, who began the year with glorious purpose and ended it paralyzed in a dark room. The Czechoslovak Legion stuck on train in Siberia desperate to return to a homeland that was now free. Iraqis cowering in the ruins as the British bombed their villages, and Armenians fleeing genocide. I think of the suffragists standing vigil outside of the White House, and J. Edgar Hoover poring over his index cards. The man who would come to be known as Ho Chi Min borrowing a suit and delivering a petition to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, and then waiting for a reply that would never come. 
 
The dirigible Wingfoot Express crashed in flames through the ceiling of a bank. A wall of molasses flooded the streets of Boston. People in Ireland, in India, in Germany and Russia, China and Korea, New Zealand and South Africa, Morelos, Mexico and Elaine, Arkansas mourned their dead.
 
I have two favorite images, both happy ones. One is William Monroe Trotter carefully typing up a rowboat and climbing a ladder at Le Havre. As he walked through the port, he shed his identity as a ship cook's assistant and resumed that of the Harvard educated publisher and activist on his way to the Paris Peace Conference.   But he did not forget to mail the letters the crew had entrusted to his care. 
 
And I think of Arthur Eddington. Not so much during the eclipse--although who can forget that--but later, working in the cool dark of the basement of the borrowed estate, alone, surrounded by crates and barrels, as he studied the photographs he had taken of the stars. It was then he realized he had verified Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He alone in all the world knew human understanding of the universe had changed forever.
 
 
 
I want to thank everyone who has listened to this show, and especially those who have left ratings and reviews, told your friends, and written me emails and Facebook messages. And more than I can ever say, I want to thank those who have contributed. You leave me humbled. Most of all, to Maggie, Laura and Roger, who continued to donate after I went completely off the grid, my deepest thanks. You seemed to believe in this endeavor even when I didn't.
 
And that brings us, here. Y'all, it's been hard. Not the work--that's the fun part. Everything else, and you must imagine me waving my arms wildly, has been hard. It's been hard for most of you. One thing I think we all appreciate now more than ever about 1919 is how much a global pandemic takes out of you. I've come along way since I started in 2019, and now I'm in a different place. I'm being deliberately vague here, but you don't need to know my personal life, and none of it is very interesting anyway. But my life has changed and I no longer have my head in the game. 
 
I had always intended to wrap up 1919, pick a new year, with your help, take a few months off to start research, and then dive back in. A week or so ago, I let the thought into my brain, what if I just . . . didn't do that? And that's when I realized I was done. I actually just typed "dumb" instead of "done," and if that isn't a Freudian slip. 
 
Am I done with the podcast forever? I have no idea. Probably not? But for now I'm going to say, in my terrible French accent, au revoir, and close up shop like a grownup rather than ghost away.
 
I will keep the website up, and the old episodes should remain out there but inactive, at least for quite awhile. But I will shut down the Patreon and PayPal accounts. And when I figure out what I'm going to do next, I'll let you know. 
 
Thank you. Take care of yourselves. Send me a line sometime to say hello.  
 
I'm Elizabeth Lunday, and this is The Year That Was.