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Hemingway | Ken Burns in the Classroom | PBS LearningMedia

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Weaving together Ernest Hemingway's biography with excerpts from his fiction, non-fiction, and personal correspondence, this six-hour documentary examines the visionary work and turbulent life of one of the most influential American writers.

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The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program

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The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program

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In the early 1920s, the United States government confronted a housing crisis. During the First World War, the government had rerouted domestic spending on housing units to military spending. At the same time, a growing urban population, comprised increasingly of rural transplants and international immigrants, put a squeeze on the existing housing system. The Great Migration of the 1910s, in which thousands of Black Americans left the South for the North, had also increased the northern population and heightened racial tensions around housing. By 1923, a Los Angeles Times article, quoting Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, reported the housing shortage at one million units.

The government, under the guidance of President Warren G. Harding, knew that the country needed a quick fix to its housing woes. But in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a deep distrust of communism meant that cooperative and state-run housing projects were off the table. Officials looked to the private sector for a solution, and found a willing and able partner in a new social enterprise: Better Homes in America.

Better Homes in America (BHA) was formed in 1922, a partnership between the Harding administration (Herbert Hoover in particular) and Marie Meloney, the editor-in-chief of the women's magazine The Delineator. The campaign encouraged home ownership as a financial, social, and patriotic undertaking, with homemaking and consumerism at its core. BHA presented itself as a traditionalizing force for good, one that would help stabilize the country and raise up the next generation of patriotic citizens.

The housewife in particular was called upon for service. In her magazine, Meloney extolled the virtues of homemaking as an act of civic duty, and, in the extreme, a bulwark against communism. "There is not another activity or industry comparable, in numbers employed, in value of effort or importance of production, with this one of the home. But America has left it to shift for itself, to get on any old way," she wrote in October 1922. "The housewife and her problems have been forgotten. It is time that she be remembered. For what matter it if a nation be great in industry, in commerce, in politics, if she be not also great in her homes?"

The program had a mission to establish and promote "the right kind" of American home.

To spread their message, BHA leaders established local chapters, and provided the chapters with information to disseminate to members and the public. In October 1922, they launched Better Homes Week, which included a campaign for local chapters to build their own "better" model homes in a BHA-approved style; national contests for the best model home; and the erection of a National Better Home in Washington, D.C. The National Better Home was designed in the style of a seventeenth-century home on Long Island, with a nostalgic eye turned toward a bygone era of wholesome family togetherness, but in a way that was achievable for a largely white middle-class. According to the urban historian Dolores Hayden, by 1930, the national BHA claimed that there were more than 7,000 local committees in operation.

The program was explicit in its aims to encourage home ownership and home maintenance for all Americans, but it also had a mission to establish and promote "the right kind" of American home. The historian Janet Hutchison in Perspectives on Vernacular Architecture that BHA aimed to "cure home neglect through an educational program that combined the nineteenth-century republican values of thrift and self-reliance with twentieth-century household technology."

The ideology behind BHA ultimately privileged a white, middle-class version of home ownership. In 1922, The Delineator began to devote multiple pages to BHA and its mission, including suggestions for home furnishing and contributions from the organizers. In the October 1922 issue, Herbert Hoover wrote an article called "The Home as an Investment," declaring that urban overcrowding and poverty "means a large increase in rents, a throw-back in human efficiency, and that unrest which inevitably results from inhibition of the primal instinct in us all for home ownership."

In Agricultural History, Hutchison :

The homes put forth by the national leaders varied somewhat in design but included new household technology that stressed convenience and room layouts that emphasized both family interaction and privacy... In front of the ideal house lay a green, well-tended yard, while behind it might be a small garden. In short, the prescription endorsed by the Better Homes leaders at the national level was that of a suburban dwelling replete with new technological amenities and private space.

Meloney ran "The Ideal Small House," a column by the architect Donn Barber, which stressed modernity, thrift, and American design for the entire home. There was also a "Rooms for Boys and Girls" column by Mrs. Charles Brady Sanders, dictating "dainty, bright and frivolous" furnishings for girls' rooms. In boys' rooms, "masculinity must be foremost." These columns reinforced the ideals of BHA and made it clear that, despite any structural or financial barriers, readers could and should pursue them.

However, while this ideal was encouraged in literature disseminated to Americans across class and race lines, the realities of achieving this goal were not addressed. Segregationist housing policies, discrimination by banks, and poverty among racialized Americans prevented many people from buying and maintaining homes the BHA way. But BHA rhetoric made it clear that, instead of addressing housing inequality or the shortage of affordable units, political leaders were presenting home ownership as an attainable choice for all Americans, implying that an inability to live the BHA way was a matter of personal, rather than institutional, failing.

On display at the national exhibition in D.C., the National Better Home included modern amenities like indoor plumbing and electricity, reflecting an attempt to encourage homeowners to purchase new appliances and embrace scientific thinking at home. Hutchison writes that the living spaces in the house were designed to "evoke sentimental images of family unity" while "the kitchen conveyed efficiency and cleanliness." That approach to home design was emulated in cities and towns around the country, as local communities vied for the title of Best American Home. These exhibitions were written up in newspapers across the country, and the movement's leaders emphasized thrift and sensibility over "commercialism."

For Black and immigrant homeowners (or would-be homeowners), BHA offered a kind of aspirational modeling that decried their current living conditions, but offered no substantial way out of their circumstances. In the " Guidebook for Better Homes Campaigns: Better Homes Week, April 25 to May 1, 1926," BHA leaders pitched local community representatives on starting their own Better Homes Week as a way to help racialized people, while assuming that guidebook readers were themselves white:

There may be in your community a large population of immigrants or of negroes, who because of limited education have not yet learned the ways of securing the best living conditions which are within their reach. Your demonstration may be made of particular value to such groups in the population through the work of special subcommittees. The best types of new and remodeled houses accessible to families in these groups may be shown, and helpful educational programs and demonstrations conducted, to show them how better homes may be secured and maintained.

The demonstrations encouraged Black Americans and immigrants to embrace white, middle-class aesthetics, home management systems, and scientific doctrines of cleanliness and hygiene-a kind of assimilation through architecture. The 1926 Guidebook celebrated the inclusion of these groups in demonstrations the year before in Atlanta:

A notable fact about the Atlanta demonstration was that special care was taken to arrange for educational work among the native white population, among the large negro population, and among the immigrants, whose knowledge of American standards of housing and home life is slight, and who may experience difficulty in adjusting themselves to American conditions.

The guidebook reported a successful "Americanization" demonstration for foreign-born women at a previously "gloomy and rather unattractive" apartment that rented for $35 per month and was transformed "in accordance with the best American standards for $794.66," likely far more money than the immigrant women could afford to invest on their own. A local American Citizenship chairwoman wrote a testimonial:

The Better Home in our section made us know, understand, and like each other better. It aroused a desire for cleaner and more attractive homes. It taught many that they could make over the old homes into far more attractive places in which to reside and rear their children.

The guidebook also celebrated the Atlanta demonstrations for including Black people. The caption for the photograph of the "negro home" enforced the distinctions between the housing possibilities for different groups: "This house, which contains four rooms, was furnished and demonstrated by a subcommittee of negroes, as a Better Home for people of their race. The cost of construction was $2,150." Local BHA competitions also were largely segregated, at first unofficially, and then officially beginning in 1924. In Agricultural History, Hutchison explains that certain homes on St. Helena, a Gullah Island in Georgia, were granted "special" BHA prizes in 1922 and 1923 alongside white contest winners, before the competition was segregated by race in 1924, "due to local community pressure throughout the South."

These coded "considerations" reinforced segregationist attitudes and housing policies, encouraging white flight as a positive social and financial choice.

BHA also published the Better Homes Manual in 1931, in which readers learned about all of the physical and social requirements of a modern home. It was an extensive catalog of building and maintenance considerations, but also directed would-be owners to consider the neighborhoods they might buy in:

While a family may think that it would like to live close to relatives and friends, this factor should not be given too much weight. Nevertheless, the general type of people living in the neighborhood is important, especially if there are children in the family, who should be brought up in the right kind of surroundings.

These coded "considerations," writes Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, reinforced segregationist attitudes and housing policies, encouraging white flight as a positive social and financial choice.

By 1935, six years into the Great Depression, the Better Homes in America organization had lost a lot of money, and despite the participation of 10,000 communities in that year's Better Homes week, the corporation was liquidated. All research and publications were transferred to Purdue University's Housing Research Foundation, and the reformers and politicians who made up the organization's leadership turned their attentions elsewhere.

But BHA's central tenets of traditionalism were folded into the nascent New Deal housing policies of the 1930s, notably in the enactment of the 1934 National Housing Act, and the creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) as a government-run mortgage insurer. According to the economist James L. Greer in Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, "BHA's model of a single-family home equipped with a full array of structural amenities played a role in the wide-scale disinvestment in existing homes across the country." Further, Greer argues that these standards, once adopted by the FHA, "became... the basis of home mortgage redlining that adversely affected a huge share of already standing housing, especially in older cities."

John Kimble, the New Orleans Public Policy Director for the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, writes in the journal Law & Social Inquiry that:

...as the government body responsible for both insuring the market's operation and ensuring its growth, the FHA sought to eliminate all elements of risk that could potentially destabilize real estate development. By equating African Americans with risk, the FHA produced a lending drought in neighborhoods of mixed racial composition and directed the rain of capital to fall exclusively over homogenous, white suburbs.

This would make it almost impossible for Black families to put into practice the moral and consumer guidelines put forth by the BHA.

Further, as the economist Gerald Sazama in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, the 1937 United States Housing Act, designed to improve public housing conditions, did not include provisions for cooperative housing or other alternative housing models. Instead, it focused on public housing as a temporary measure, continuing to encourage single-family home ownership despite the realities of poor Americans' lives.

These FHA policies have continued to affect housing availability and affordability in the United States for decades. Rothstein points to FHA involvement in building all-white suburban developments in the postwar era as the department's "biggest impact on segregation." Urban public housing has been underfunded, and FHA's policies have Black Americans from building housing equity in many suburban areas. That in turn has reinforced racial wealth gaps and inequality. Despite the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, prohibiting housing discrimination based on race, Rothstein writes that the disparities remain:

The enormous black-white wealth gap, for example, responsible for so much of today's racial inequality, is in large part a product of black exclusion from homes whose appreciation generated substantial equity for white working-class families with F.H.A. and V.A. mortgages that propelled them into the middle class.

As large and mid-sized face heightened housing affordability crises, and more people are feeling rent-burdened across the income distribution, perhaps we don't need another BHA for the modern housing landscape. Some governments and individuals already have begun to reimagine what "" looks like in the twenty-first century. Some cities, for instance, are starting to their single-family zoning rules that prohibit small and large scale density, supported by groups like YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) that are fighting urban sprawl and supporting affordable housing initiatives.

While the BHA program might have encouraged some Americans to reach for the dream of home ownership, many more were shut out from the process altogether. By understanding the role of governments in shaping housing availability and affordability for citizens, we can work to change our conception of housing inclusivity for a new generation.

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The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program | JSTOR Daily

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In the early 1920s, the United States government confronted a housing crisis. During the First World War, the government had rerouted domestic spending on housing units to military spending. At the same time, a growing urban population, comprised increasingly of rural transplants and international immigrants, put a squeeze on the existing housing system.

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The Christmas Truce of 1914: A Heartening Story of Humanity in the Middle of War

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The Christmas Truce of 1914: A Heartening Story of Humanity in the Middle of War

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A symbolic moment of peace, grace, and humility amidst one of humanity's most violent and disgraceful events.

In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches, some even walked over to their opponents bearing gifts. The incident became one of the most heart-warming displays of humanity in the history of human conflict and was dubbed the Christmas Truce.

From the trenches, a 19-year-old British private by the name of Henry William Williams - a man of confounding contradictions himself, who would go on to become one of the most lyrical nature writers in the English language, an early admirer of Hitler, and an opponent of the Second World War - wrote to his mother on Boxing Day:

Dear Mother, I am writing from the trenches. It is 11 o'clock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite me a 'dug-out' (wet) with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench, but frozen elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe presented by the Princess Mary. In the pipe is tobacco. Of course, you say. But wait. In the pipe is German tobacco. Haha, you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh dear, no! From a German soldier. Yes a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday the British & Germans met & shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, & exchanged souvenirs, & shook hands. Yes, all day Xmas day, & as I write. Marvellous, isn't it?

This lovely short film captures the story and spirit of this symbolic moment of peace, grace, and humility amid one of history's most violent and disgraceful failures of humanity.

Complement with Eleanor Roosevelt's little-known children's book about Christmas and hope amid war.

HT @vcmcguire

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The Christmas Truce of 1914: A Heartening Story of Humanity in the Middle of War

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In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches, some even walked over to their opponents bearing gifts.

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All was quiet on the Riviera, and then the Fitzgeralds arrived, Scott and Zelda and Scotty. The summer season opened. There had been talk about their coming. They were coming; they were not. One day they appeared on the beach. They had played tennis the day before, and were badly burned. Everybody was concerned about their burns. They must keep their shoulders covered; they must rub on olive oil. Scott was too burned to go in the water, and much of the time, he sat aside from the rush of things, a reflective, staid paterfamilias.

That the Fitzgeralds are the best looking couple in modern literary society doesn't do them justice, knowing what we do about beauty and brains. That they might be the handsomest pair at any collegiate houseparty, inspiring alumni to warnings about the pitfalls ahead of the young, is more to the point, although Scott really looks more as the undergraduate would like to look, than the way he generally does. It takes some years of training as the best host of the younger set, and as a much photographed and paragraphed author, to be quite so affable and perfectly at ease with all the world.

Scott feels that he is getting on in years, that he is no longer young. It weighs upon him, troubles him. He is almost thirty. Seldom has he allowed a person of such advanced age to enter his books.

"I have written a story. It is not about the younger generation. The hero is twenty-nine."

It must be some comfort to him that he is so superbly preserved, so stocky, muscular, clear-skinned, with wide, fresh, green-blue eyes, hair, blond not grey, with no lines of worry or senility, no saggings anywhere. Mrs. Fitzgerald doesn't show her age either; she might be in her 'teens. Perhaps Scotty does. Yes, there is no denying she looks her four.

There were rumors that Scott had had a sip or two of something up in Paris, and had come South to rest. No one could have guessed it, but he is summary with any such doubts:

"Don't you know I am one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation?"

There have been whispers certainly. But the young man who drives his publicity manager into a lake, as Scott once did, is bound to get some reputation of that sort. There was no reason on this occasion why he should not have turned the car to the right as most people did, and as the publicity man comfortably expected, but having had perhaps a cocktail or two, it seemed more amusing to turn to the left off the road. The publicity man was not drowned however.

That was after one of those Long Island parties which established his place before the world as a host. If he is worried now about the advancing years he had better buy up two or three Biltmores before he extends that general invitation:

"Grow old along with me!

"The best is yet to be-."

This popularity on two continents may explain something of the financial mystery which so appals him. Ever since "This Side of Paradise", money has poured in upon this young couple, thousands and thousands a month. And just as fast it has poured out. Where it goes, no one seems to know. Least of all evidently, the Fitzgeralds. They complain that nothing is left to show for it. Mrs. Fitzgerald hasn't even a pearl necklace.

According to Scott he has known poverty. There was the terrible winter after the war, when he wanted to marry Zelda, and had only a ninety-dollar-a-month advertising job and no prospects. He had gone South to see her, and when they parted at the station he hadn't even enough money for a Pullman. He had to climb into a Pullman, and then sneak through into the day coach.

It was then that he saw that advertising did not pay, and he threw up that job, and went home to St. Paul to write a novel. Statistics show that 12,536 young men annually throw up their jobs and go back home to write a novel. This has all come about since Fitzgerald set the example, for the book he wrote that winter was "This Side of Paradise", and he was launched.

His success as an author was a great surprise to the home circle. He had always lived in St. Paul, but the Fitzgeralds were not what is known as literary people, in spite of their descent from the author of the "Star Spangled Banner". Scott's father was in business, and Scott was never addicted to prowling about the public library. He was much too attractive a boy to be allowed much seclusion.

However he did enjoy scrawling note-books full of various suggestions and impressions and witticisms, when the other faithful students of the St. Paul Academy and later those of the Newman School as well were busy adding and subtracting and wondering over what takes the ablative. In the Newman School he decided to run off a musical comedy, and two years later he spent his whole Freshman year at Princeton writing the Triangle Show, which left him no time for algebra, trigonometry, co-ordinate geometry and hygiene. But the Triangle Club accepted the show, and he tutored his way back to college and acted in his own work as a chorus girl.

The war came next, and as Aide-de-Camp to General J. F. Ryan he was able to spend his Saturday afternoons writing a hundred and twenty-thousand word novel, "The Romantic Egotist", which was merely a preparatory exercise apparently. Publishers thought it original and very well written but not quite what they were looking for at the moment. A great many publishers were in that frame of mind about it, but they did not manage to extinguish the writing impetus in him. The winter after the war, before he took up advertising, he collected 122 rejection slips, and by way of encouragement sold one story for $30.

Never has he lived that amorphous affair known as the literary life. He is too active for that, and too gregarious. To the younger set of St. Paul he was known as a dining-out, dancing-out country-club boy, and it was a surprise when it was said about that he wanted to write. But literary people there didn't take his ambitions as a joke. He became a great friend of Charles Flandrau's, who twenty years ago published "Harvard Episodes", stories of freshmen and sophomores, done somewhat in the Henry James manner. There is no resemblance between the Flandrau book and Fitzgerald's, but with Mr. Flandrau, Scott found a sympathetic and intelligent critic, someone who could understand why he chose rather to write than to sell bonds. He had already begun to work with an energy unflagging in spite of his invitations to dinner. It sustained him even through the arduous business of rewriting "This Side of Paradise", changing it, at his publisher's advice from the first to the third person.

Such application, of course, is not associated with the temperament of any merely clever young man. The popular picture of a blond boy scribbling off best sellers in odd moments between parties is nonsense. He's a very grave, hardworking man, and shows it. In fact there is definitely the touch of the melancholy often obvious upon him.

He is wary of the limitations of his experience.

Very deliberately he has taken as the field for his talent the great story of American wealth. His research is in the chronicles of the big business juntos of the last fifty years; and the drama of high finance, with the personalities of the major actors, Harriman, Morgan, Hill, is his serious study. He saw how the money was being spent; he has made it his business to ferret out how it was cornered.

Although Mrs. Fitzgerald once bought a bond, no young people, with such an income, are more far removed from the ordinary affairs of business. A twenty-dollar-a-week clerk must know more of the practical business world than Scott Fitzgerald who can not live on thirty thousand a year, and yet who earns every cent he has.

His information, to be sure, on the general history of this American phase is remarkable. His most trivial stories have a substantial substratum of information.

It should yield more and more revealing, penetrating pictures of American life as he settles gravely down in the twilight of the thirties. ♦

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John C. Mosher's 1926 Profile of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Named for another famous American, a distant cousin who authored the Star Spangled Banner, Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. The son of a failed wicker furniture salesman (Edward Fitzgerald) and an Irish immigrant with a large inheritance (Mary "Mollie" McQuillan), Fitzgerald grew up in a solidly Catholic and upper middle class environment.

1935 Portrait by David Silvette, courtesy National Portrait Gallery.

Fitzgerald started writing at an early age. His high school newspaper published his detective stories, encouraging him to pursue writing more enthusiastically than academics. He dropped out of Princeton University to join the army and continued to pursue his obsession, writing magazine articles and even musical lyrics.

At 21 years of age, he submitted his first novel for publication and Charles Scribner's Sons rejected it, but with words of encouragement. Beginning a pattern of constant revising that would characterize his writing style for the rest of his career, Fitzgerald decided to rewrite "The Romantic Egoist" and resubmit it for publication. Meanwhile, fate, in the form of the U.S. army, stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, where he met and fell in love with an 18-year-old Southern belle - Zelda Sayre. Scribners rejected his novel for a second time, and so Fitzgerald turned to advertising as a steady source of income. Unfortunately, his paltry salary was not enough to convince Zelda to marry him, and tired of waiting for him to make his fortune, she broke their engagement in 1919. Happily, Scribners finally accepted the novel after Fitzgerald rewrote it for the third time as "This Side of Paradise", and published it a year later. Fitzgerald, suddenly a rich and famous author, married Zelda a week after its publication.

In between writing novels, Fitzgerald was quite prolific as a magazine story writer. The Saturday Evening Post in particular served as a showcase for his short works of fiction, most of which revolved around a new breed of American woman - the young, free-thinking, independent "flapper" of the Roaring Twenties.

The Fitzgeralds enjoyed fame and fortune, and his novels reflected their lifestyle, describing in semi-autobiographical fiction the privileged lives of wealthy, aspiring socialites. Fitzgerald wrote his second novel - "The Beautiful and the Damned" a year after they were married. Three years later, after the birth of their first and only child, Scottie, Fitzgerald completed his best-known work: "The Great Gatsby."

The extravagant living made possible by such success, however, took its toll. Constantly globe-trotting (living at various times in several different cities in Italy, France, Switzerland, and eight of the United States), the Fitzgeralds tried in vain to escape or at least seek respite from Scott's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness.

Zelda suffered several breakdowns in both her physical and mental health, and sought treatment in and out of clinics from 1930 until her death (due to a fire at Highland Hospital in North Carolina in 1948). Zelda's mental illness, the subject of Fitzgerald's fourth novel, "Tender is the Night," had a debilitating effect on Scott's writing. He described his own "crack-up" in an essay that he wrote in 1936, hopelessly in debt, unable to write, nearly estranged from his wife and daughter, and incapacitated by excessive drinking and poor physical health.

Things were looking up for Fitzgerald near the end of his life - he won a contract in 1937 to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. He had started writing again - scripts, short-stories, and the first draft of a new novel about Hollywood - when he suffered a heart attack and died in 1940 at the age of 44, a failure in his own mind. Most commonly recognized only as an extravagant drunk, who epitomized the excesses of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's work did not earn the credibility and recognition it holds today until years after his death.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
Artist, Writer, Dancer and Wife

"By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future." -Zelda Fitzgerald

This quote perfectly illustrates Zelda Fitzgerald's lifelong struggle to create her own artistic identity. Born in 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, she entered a world that was just starting to consider the possibility that women might have the right to be independent citizens capable of making their own decisions. The youngest of six children, her parents raised Zelda as a free-spirited, imaginative and thoroughly spoiled little girl. By the age of eighteen, when she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the many parties she attended, she embodied the quintessential southern belle.

Zelda as a young girl.

A constant stream of passionate and argumentative love letters punctuated the period of their engagement while Scott worked in Manhattan and Zelda remained at her parents' home in Montgomery. For Zelda, marriage represented a new lease on life, the only way out of her small-town existence as someone's daughter, without any rights of her own. For a year, Scott struggled unsuccessfully to make his fortune in the advertising business, but Zelda grew tired of waiting. When he professed that he could not be successful without her by his side and proposed, she broke the engagement because she felt too much pressure. She insisted that he find success first on his own.

His first novel made Scott rich within the year, and Zelda married him a week after its publication. As his wife, she embarked on a new life as a flapper - a freethinking woman with the world at her disposal. She was a huge influence on his writing, providing much of the material for his novels and short stories throughout their engagement and marriage. Scott frequently quoted her and her letters directly, using her words as the voice for several of his female characters.

Zelda bore her first and only child at 21, naming Scottie after her husband. By 1924, Zelda's influence on Scott's writing had become less positive. An affair with a French naval aviator strained their marriage, so Zelda sought fulfillment in other venues.

In 1928, she decided to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a professional ballerina, and began taking lessons in Paris from a famous dancer. At the late age of 27, three years of intense ballet work (eight hours a day) damaged her health, and prompted her first mental breakdown, diagnosed as "nervous exhaustion", in 1930. Zelda was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and would reside in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life.

During her stay at Johns Hopkins hospital in 1932, she wrote her first and only novel: "Save Me the Waltz." A fairly prolific writer, Zelda also wrote eleven short stories and twelve articles during her lifetime.

Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, circa 1921.

Writing was not Zelda's only form of artistic expression - she was also a painter. She painted brilliantly colored whimsical, sometimes fantastical works of art. Her granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, describes Zelda's paintings as "theatrical. They're like on a raised stage floor, and the characters are actors who are before you, waiting to perform." Several different areas of Zelda's life influenced her choice of subject matter. She painted one series based on children's fairy tales such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "The Lobster Quadrille," from Alice in Wonderland. The Bible and Zelda's strong religious beliefs inspired another series of illustrations. She also painted from life, creating portraits of both herself and her husband, and depicting scenes from New York in the 1940s. A fire destroyed most paintings, and Zelda even donated some to the army during World War II to be painted over and used as canvas.

Perhaps if Zelda had focused on just one form of artistic expression, she would have found her own success and fame independent of her marriage to a famous author. Her accomplishments are still impressive, especially when one takes the context of her life into consideration. As an icon of the Jazz Age, she struggled against her traditional southern upbringing and its societal constraints to create a new, independent identity not just for herself, but for all American women.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Named for another famous American, a distant cousin who authored the Star Spangled Banner, Fitzgerald was born in St.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896 - 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald, novelist, short story writer and scenarist, died at his Hollywood home Dec. 21, 1940. His age was 44. Mr. Fitzgerald in his life and writings epitomized "all the sad young men" of the post-war generation.

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American Masters, public television's award-winning biography series, brings unique originality and perspective to exploring the lives and illuminating the creative journeys of our most enduring writers, musicians, visual and performing artists, dramatists and filmmakers - those who have left an indelible impression on our nation's cultural landscape.

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Days after Arkansas pushed back on legal challenges and carried out its first execution in more than a decade, officials there are heading back to the execution chamber Monday hoping to carry out two more.

The back-to-back lethal injections would be the country's first double execution since 2000, when Texas executed two convicted murderers, and the first time a state has attempted to carry out two death sentences in one night since a widely publicized botch in Oklahoma in 2014.

Arkansas hoped this month to resume executions by carrying out eight death sentences in 11 days, an unprecedented schedule that has been thwarted by court orders blocking half of those lethal injections.

[Arkansas executed one death-row inmate. Three more executions are planned this month.]

Jack H. Jones Jr. and Marcel W. Williams, both of whom have been on Arkansas death row since being convicted of brutal murders two decades ago, have sought to delay their lethal injections, scheduled to take place in a state prison southeast of Little Rock. On Monday afternoon, both appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking stays of execution.

These lethal injections are part of a schedule in Arkansas that would have been without parallel in modern capital punishment. Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) set eight executions to occur in pairs, scheduling them back-to-back on four nights this month, and while most executions occur with little public notice, the timetable in Arkansas drew unusual attention and some criticism.

Attorneys for the inmates filed a volley of appeals seeking to delay the executions, while two dozen former corrections officials wrote a letter to Hutchinson asking him to reconsider the schedule. They warned that the schedule was "needlessly exacerbating the strain and stress placed on" the people carrying it out and saying the timetable could "increase the chance of an error occurring."

Arkansas officials have defended this schedule as necessary because their stock of midazolam, a common sedative that has provoked controversy after some executions, expires at the end of April. Leslie Rutledge (R), the state's attorney general, pledged to fight attempts to delay the remaining executions, saying that "families have waited far too long to see justice."

As the execution dates approached, both sides engaged in a multifaceted legal battle, with death-row inmates and Arkansas officials appealing to state and federal courts. Drug companies also weighed in, unsuccessfully asking judges to prevent the state from using their products, which at least one company suggested was obtained through dishonest means.

Death-row inmates in Arkansas also appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court as a group, but those requests have been rebuffed, most recently Monday, when the high court denied a request to rehear a case from Arkansas inmates that the justices had already denied. No explanations were given, though Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she would have granted the petitions in that case.

Last week, the Arkansas Supreme Court blocked the first two executions on the schedule. One of two executions planned for last Thursday also was stayed, while the U.S. Supreme Court denied a late stay request and allowed another that same night to go forward. Another execution is also planned for Thursday night, while a second originally set that night was stayed this month by a federal judge.

[Arkansas carries out first execution since 2005 after Supreme Court denies stay requests]

While two executions per night had been the original plan in Arkansas, if Jones and Williams are executed as scheduled, Monday would be the only day this month with a back-to-back execution in the state.

Jones, 52, was sentenced to death in 1996 for raping and killing Mary Phillips. According to court records, Jones stalked and killed Phillips, a bookkeeper, and before killing her, he beat her 11-year-old daughter so severely that police thought she was dead when they got to the scene.

Jones's attorneys have argued in court that he has medical conditions that could result in the Arkansas execution method causing him severe pain, according to court records. In a filing, his attorneys said Jones has diabetes, hypertension and several other conditions that cause him to be on medication that could bring intense or painful suffering because of a possible tolerance to the sedative used in the lethal injection.

State officials argue that Jones's challenge involves "guesswork" about the sedative and "is no different than the many lethal-injection challenges" he has filed before. U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker denied that motion Friday, saying Jones's case did not show "a significant possibility" that the lethal injection process could cause that pain and suffering.

[Arkansas had shifted its focus to remaining executions after court losses]

Williams, 46, was sentenced to death in 1997 for abducting, robbing, raping and killing Stacy Errickson, who was 22 and was living at the Little Rock Air Force Base while her husband was serving overseas. Arkansas officials, in court filings opposing a stay in his case, said he forced her at gunpoint to take cash from ATMs before raping, beating and strangling her.

Attorneys for Williams have argued in court filings that he had poor counsel during his trial in both his guilt and penalty phases, which they said meant he was sentenced to death despite the jury not hearing any mitigating evidence arguing against the death penalty.

In another filing, they pointed to health issues, saying he weighs 400 pounds and suffers from several medical maladies that meant the planned lethal injection "was more likely to maim than kill him." His attorneys argued for stays on both counts, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit rejected both requests on Friday.

The Arkansas Supreme Court also rejected stay requests from both men.

[Arkansas courts had briefly blocked the use of a lethal injection drug]

The 8th Circuit, which had denied an appeal filed by the eight inmates facing execution that challenged the Arkansas method of execution, also denied another challenge Friday that was filed by some of the inmates - including Williams, but not Jones - and focused on the state's clemency procedures.

The planned double execution would be the country's first since August 2000. Texas was in the midst of carrying out 40 death sentences that year, the most for any state in a single year since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. (Executions nationwide have fallen since that time, and last year, 20 death sentences were carried out nationwide.)

Texas corrections officials keep records of the final statements made by death-row inmates. Before the double execution in 2000, the first inmate's last words were an admonition against racism targeting black people. He then said, "Let's do it." The second inmate apologized to his victim and his family before saying, "I am ready. I love you all."

[Drug companies take aim at Arkansas executions and demand lethal injection drugs back]

Arkansas is not the first state to plan a double execution since then. Perhaps the most highly publicized botched lethal injection in recent memory occurred the last time a state tried carrying out two executions in one night.

In 2014, Oklahoma authorities attempted to execute Clayton Lockett, a convicted murderer, in the first of two lethal injections planned that night. They bungled the process: Lockett writhed and grimaced on the gurney, prompting the execution to be called off, and he died 43 minutes after it began. A review later blamed this on a misplaced IV. (The second execution scheduled for that night was delayed; when it was carried out months later, Oklahoma officials used the wrong lethal injection drug. The state has yet to resume executions.)

The lethal injections planned Monday come just four days after Arkansas resumed executions, carrying out the death sentence for Ledell Lee after the Supreme Court declined stay requests.

What unfolded during Lee's lethal injection provides a glimpse of what could occur for the two inmates scheduled to be executed Monday night. Lee's execution was witnessed by 21 people, not including staffers involved in carrying it out, according to the Arkansas Department of Correction.

Authorities in Arkansas have released new details about Lee's final hours, beginning with a nine-minute shower he took at 2:23 p.m. For his last meal, Lee took communion and had a regular tray of food, according to an internal log provided by the Arkansas Department of Correction.

Lee was dressed in "clean whites" at 6:18 p.m., at which time legal appeals and orders were still pending in federal court. He was brought to the execution chamber at 11:21 p.m. and restrained, a process that took five minutes.

At 11:27 p.m., officials began inserting the intravenous catheters that deliver lethal drugs. That took until 11:39 p.m., at which point witnesses began to enter the viewing room, which had its doors locked at 11:42 p.m.

The curtains to the viewing room opened at 11:44 p.m. Lee was asked for his last words, but he declined to give any, so the execution got underway with the first injection beginning at 11:45 p.m.

At 11:54 p.m., officials logged an "absence of respiration and pulse." The coroner was summoned, and at 11:56 p.m., pronounced Lee dead. The curtains to the viewing room were closed, and witnesses left the room at midnight, with Lee's body being removed at 12:10 a.m. A reporter in the area saw a hearse leaving the prison grounds not long after.

On Friday, the day after the execution, Lee was discharged by the Arkansas Department of Correction "due to death by Lethal Injection," Wendy Kelley, the corrections director, wrote in a letter to a circuit court clerk.
Further reading: Executions and death sentences declined last year in the U.S. After divided Supreme Court allows Alabama execution, inmate heaves and coughs during lethal injection The state Supreme Court justice who stepped down to protest the death penalty

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Arkansas prepares for the country's first back-to-back executions in almost two decades

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Days after Arkansas pushed back on legal challenges and carried out its first execution in more than a decade, officials there are heading back to the execution chamber Monday hoping to carry out two more.

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Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing the six-word story "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." Hoping to cash in on that story's success, Hemingway wrote some six-word sequels.
For sale: baby shoes. Really big.

For hire: giant baby. Very amusing.

Rent baby for fun, scary evening.

Have you seen enormous baby? Escaped.

Please help. Huge baby at large.

Authorities warn: beware of monster baby.

Baby crushes pickup truck. Bare hands.

Gigantic baby terrorizes Greenville. Townspeople helpless.

Dick Prowdy reporting live: Baby Situation.

Cooing baby loves the ticklish tasers.

Oh, God. Oh, God. He's growing.

Hostage taken. Baby on the move.

Playful baby delighted by military helicopters.

America transfixed by Greenville Baby Terror.

Wait, what's happening? Baby slowing down.

Nap time. Reclining baby crushes Winnebago.

Sleepy baby trapped in net. Hooray!

National Guard drags snuggly baby home.

Now everything is back to normal.

Everything except for the house-sized baby.

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Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing the six-word story "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." Hoping to cash in on that story's success, Hemingway wrote some six-word sequels. For sale: baby shoes. Really big. For hire: giant baby. Very amusing. Rent baby for fun, scary evening.

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Bernice Bobs Her Hair (FULL Audiobook) by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) Pretty but socially clueless Bernice lets her know-it-all cousin push her around, but eventually, something's gotta give! (Introduction by BellonaTimes)

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bernice bobs her hair cut 1920's scott fizgerald

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Bernice Bobs Her Hair [w/ intro by Henry Fonda]

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Bernice Bobs Her Hair. This is a short story film about Bernice who visiting her cousion, and she tries to teach her how to "fit in." The year is 1920 where Men find jobs and Women finds marriage/housewife. Also a scene where she went to a mens barbershop to cut her hair.

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Say you've matched with someone on Tinder. You both had to swipe right, so it's safe to say you find each other attractive or intriguing-or maybe one person's hand slipped. Regardless, it gives you a boost of confidence when chatting with them. So when they send you a text, you reply almost immediately. (We all know how attached we are to our smartphones, so it's silly to pretend you didn't see their message.) Plus, we're all big boys and girls here: No need for those petty, childish games where you wait 10 minutes or maybe an hour to text them back, right?

Actually, science would say you should wait, at least a little. Here's the basic explanation, care of a quick excerpt from Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance:
In recent years behavioral scientists have shed some light on why waiting techniques can be powerful. Let's first look at the notion that texting back right away makes you less appealing. Psychologists have conducted hundreds of studies in which they reward lab animals in different ways under different conditions. One of the most intriguing findings is that "reward uncertainty"-in which, for instance, animals cannot predict whether pushing a lever will get them food-can dramatically increase their interest in getting a reward, while also enhancing their dopamine levels so that they basically feel coked up. If a text back from someone is considered a "reward," consider the fact that lab animals who get rewarded for pushing a lever every time will eventually slow down because they know that the next time they want a reward, it will be waiting for them. So basically, if you are the guy or girl who texts back immediately, you are taken for granted and ultimately lower your value as a reward. As a result, the person doesn't feel as much of an urge to text you or, in the case of the lab animal, push the lever. Texting is a medium that conditions our minds in a distinctive way, and we expect our exchanges to work differently with messages than they did with phone calls. Before everyone had a cell phone, people could usually wait a while-up to a few days, even-to call back before reaching the point where the other person would get concerned. Texting has habituated us to receiving a much quicker response... When we don't get the quick response, our mind freaks out.
To learn why our brains are primed to fill the gaps between texts with the worst case scenario and how all of that pinging back and forth is like a gambling addiction, check out the full excerpt over on Nautilus.

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Why You Should Stop Yourself From Texting Back Right Away (It's Science!)

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Say you've matched with someone on Tinder. You both had to swipe right, so it's safe to say you find each other attractive or intriguing-or maybe one person's hand slipped. Regardless, it gives you a boost of confidence when chatting with them. So when they send you a text, you reply almost immediately.

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New short haircuts announced the wearers' break from tradition and boosted the hairdressing industry

smithsonian.com

On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald's " Bernice Bobs Her Hair," a short story about a sweet yet socially inept young woman who is tricked by her cousin into allowing a barber to lop off her hair. With her new do, she is castigated by everyone: Boys no longer like her, she's uninvited to a social gathering in her honor, and it's feared that her haircut will cause a scandal for her family.

In the beginning of the 20th century, that's how serious it was to cut off your locks. At that time, long tresses epitomized a pristine kind of femininity exemplified by the Gibson girl. Hair may have been worn up, but it was always, always long.

Part and parcel with the rebellious flapper mentality, the decision to cut it all off was a liberating reaction to that stodgier time, a cosmetic shift toward androgyny that helped define an era.

The best-known short haircut style in the 1920s was the bob. It made its first foray into public consciousness in 1915 when the fashion-forward ballroom dancer Irene Castle cut her hair short as a matter of convenience, into what was then referred to as the Castle bob.

Early on, when women wanted to emulate that look, they couldn't just walk into a beauty salon and ask the hairdresser to cut off their hair into that blunt, just-below-the-ears style. Many hairdressers flat out refused to perform the shocking and highly controversial requestAnd some didn't know how to do it since they'd only ever used their shears on long hair. Instead of being deterred, the flapper waved off those rejections and headed to the barbershop for the do. The barbers complied.

Hairdressers, sensing that the trend was there to stay, finally relented. When they began cutting the cropped style, it was a boon to their industry. A 1925 story from the Washington Post headlined " Economic Effects of Bobbing " describes how bobbed hair did wonders for the beauty industry. In 1920, there were 5,000 hairdressing shops in the United States. At the end of 1924, 21,000 shops had been established-and that didn't account for barbershops, many of which did "a rushing business with bobbing."

As the style gained mass appeal-for instance, it was the standard haircut in the widely distributed Sears mail order catalog during the '20s-more sophisticated variations developed. The finger wave (S-shaped waves made using fingers and a comb), the Marcel (also wavy, using the newly invented hot curling iron), shingle bob (tapered, and exposing the back of the neck) and Eton crop (the shortest of the bobs and popularized by Josephine Baker) added shape to the blunt cut. Be warned: Some new styles weren't for the faint of heart. A medical condition, the Shingle Headache, was described as a form of neuralgia caused by the sudden removal of hair from the sensitive nape of the neck, or simply getting your hair cut in a shingle bob. (An expansive photograph collection of bob styles can be found here.)

Accessories were designed to complement the bob. The still-popular bobby pin got its name from holding the hairstyle in place. The headband, usually worn over the forehead, added a decorative flourish to the blunt cut. And the cloche, invented by milliner Caroline Reboux in 1908, gained popularity because the close-fitting hat looked so becoming with the style, especially the Eton crop.

Although later co-opted by the mainstream to become status quo (along with makeup, underwear and dress, as earlier Threaded posts described), the bob caused heads to turn (pun!) as flappers turned the sporty, cropped look into another playful, gender-bending signature of the Jazz Age.

Has there been another drastic hairstyle that's accomplished the same feat? What if the 1990s equivalent of Irene Castle-Sinead O'Connor and her shaved head-had really taken off? Perhaps a buzz cut would have been the late 20th-century version of the bob and we all would have gotten it, at least once.

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About Emily Spivack

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The History of the Flapper, Part 4: Emboldened by the Bob

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smithsonian.com On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald's " Bernice Bobs Her Hair," a short story about a sweet yet socially inept young woman who is tricked by her cousin into allowing a barber to lop off her hair.

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The New Woman of the 1920s: Debating Bobbed-Hair

The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: "To Bob or Not to Bob?" The short, sculpted hair of the "bob" marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as "America's Sweetheart"), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.
I Bobbed My Hair and Then-
by Irene Castle Treman

There has been so much controversy over the bobbed-hair craze that I feel I ought to put some of the world right, as to my side of it at least. I do not claim to be the first person to wear bobbed hair; in fact, I believe there are a number of people who, like myself, picture Joan of Arc with shorn locks! There have been several periods in history when women wore short hair. It is easier to be the first person to do a thing than the first to introduce it, and I believe I am largely blamed for the homes wrecked and engagements broken because of clipped tresses. I do not wish to take the blame, because in a great number of case I find the responsibility a serious one and the results a "chamber of horrors."
Don't Bob Fine Hair
Don't think I am knocking those who may have followed in my footsteps; I am indeed honored, and in four cases at least that I know of it has been the making of a very individual and even beautiful person out of one who would not have attracted attention before. To start with, one must have the right sort of hair; and rather small features also help to bring about satisfactory results. There is, however, no hard and fast rule to be followed, for I have often been fooled myself and delightfully surprised. The girl with coarse and straight hair, however, is likely to ruin a perfectly good disposition by cutting it.

I first cut off my hair while at boarding school-too many years ago to tell!-so that I could go swimming during a vacant forty-minute period and appear in my next class without visible proof that I had been frolicking around on a springboard when I should have been growing wiser and better fitted to become an interesting dinner partner.

In a very few days I was shocked to see the outcome of my "sacrifice of convenience." New bobbed heads popped up regularly each morning at breakfast, and, as the truth leaked home, irate parents wrote indignant letters to the principal, so that the joy and comfort I had found in my short hair became short-lived. I was sent for and the style of my coiffure made very plain to me. As a result, I went through a very trying period, with no knot at the back of my head and hairpins, since they could find no place to cling, falling like hailstones around me. What was still more serious, I had to get up at least fifteen minutes earlier to get to breakfast, for I could no longer shake my head like a puppy after a bath and called it a day.

The next time I heard the call of the scissors was just before I was going into the hospital to be operated on for appendicitis. I never liked having anyone comb my hair, so, to assure as little combing as possible, I cut it all off. I say all; it never fell much below my shoulders.

After I came out of the hospital I tried to cover up my clipped head by wearing, whenever I appeared in public, a tight turban or toque under which I tucked every spear of hair except some little square sideburns. Those of my friends who saw me in the country without a hat begged me to wear my short hair in public, and so one night when we were going to town to dinner I wore it down, and in order to keep it in place wrapped a flat seed-pearl necklace around my forehead-which was, I think, the beginning of what they afterwards called the "Castle Band."
The Disadvantages
I want to let my hair grow, but lack the courage to face that dreadful in-between stage. I have started many times, but always weakened when my hair looked too long and straggly to wear down and was not long enough to put up. Then, too, I cannot resist the scissors, I love to cut other people's hair, and have bobbed at least twenty heads. I have often thought I should like a little shop of my own, where I could snip to my heart's content. It must have started with my early desire to cut up the curtains or anything else I could lay my hands on.

There are wonderful advantages in short hair, of which I need not tell you-too many of you have tried it; but these are, to me at least, some of the disadvantages: There are so few ways to dress short hair that one is practically limited to parting it on the side or in the middle. And then, can one grow old and gray, still with short hair? Gray hair is charming short, but during the in-between years, will it not seem a bit kittenish and not quite dignified?

****
Why I Bobbed My Hair
by Mary Garden

Why did I bob my hair? For several reasons. I did it because I wanted to, for one thing; because I found it easier to take care of; because I thought it more becoming; and because I felt freer without long, entangling tresses. But above and beyond these and several other reasons I had my hair cut short because, to me, it typified a progressive step, in keeping with the inner spirit that animates my whole existence.

In one way, whether I wear my hair short or not is of little importance. But viewed in another way, bobbed hair is not just a trivial, independent act of hair-dressing separate and apart from my life itself. It is part and parcel of life-one of the myriad things which by themselves may apparently mean nothing, but which in the aggregate help to form that particular complexity of expression which is myself.

This sounds a bit cryptic; but let me elucidate a little. Whether we know it or not, every single thing we do has a relationship to our lives as a whole, for the simple reason that what we do is the expression of what we think-consciously or unconsciously. You may say that it matters very little whether a woman wears her hair long or has it cut short, but that is really not true.

Bobbed hair is a state of mind and not merely a new manner of dressing my head. It typifies growth, alertness, up-to-dateness, and is part of the expression of the élan vital! [spirit] It is not just a fad of the moment, either like mah jong or cross-word puzzles. At least I don't think it is. I consider getting rid of our long hair one of the many little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom. Whatever helps their emancipation, however small it may seen, is well worth while.

Bobbing the hair is one of those things that show us whether or not we are abreast of the age in which we find ourselves. For instance, can you imagine any woman with a vivid consciousness of being alive, walking along the street in 1927 with skirts trailing on the ground, wearing elastic-side shoes, a shawl, and also a mid-Victorian bonnet? If you saw such a sight you would instantly put her down as one who had ceased to grow, as one who was passé [out of style] and very far from being an up-to-date woman.

Well, I carry that thought a little further in my whole scheme of things. I do my best to be constantly on the alert and up to the moment. On my toes, as the boys say. I could no more imaging myself wearing a long, trailing skirt in 1927 when all the world was wearing short skirts than I could wear long, trailing tresses when all the world (or nearly all of it) had wisely come to the conclusion that bobbed hair was more youthful, more chic, and, if I may say so, much more sanitary.

This attention to what is of the living present has a special application, I think, to those of us who are what the world designates as creative artists. We, of all people, must be very careful not to allow ourselves to stagnate in any manner whatsoever-mentally, artistically, or physically. To be an artist means to grow. An artist can not afford to do anything else. To stand still means, paradoxically enough, to go backward, and for an artist that is fatal. To keep on growing means the constant necessity for getting a correct perspective of ourselves. We must stand off, so to speak, and look at ourselves through very critical glasses. If we once lose our perspective we lose all.

Life itself is growth, and the minute we allow ourselves to stop growing we really stop being vitally alive. And it is so fatally easy for people to get into a rut, to bask in the noonday sun of self-satisfaction[,] to cease to grow. Take my own profession, for instance. In the realm of grand opera, ignoring precedent and striking out into new paths is one of the hardest things to achieve. How easy it is for the producers of opera to be content with age old traditions, to go on going the easy thing. The antiquated thing that has become so much a matter of habit that thinking about it becomes unnecessary!

And how deadening and monotonous a thing to the singer a continual round of roles of the old order can become! Did I say "Deadening and monotonous"? Stagnating rather, I would sooner pass into oblivion than to cease progressing and growing while I possessed the impetus to live and to work. And if I didn't look at myself every now and then in perspective I too would stop growing.

As a concrete example of what I mean, last summer I paid a visit to the Opera House in Paris for the first time since I left it in 1906. I asked for this one and that one of my old associates, and in more instances than I care to think of they had all retired from active work. Not from old age either, be it said. They had simply stopped growing, and the inevitable sliding backward had taken place, until the positions they had once held were no longer theirs.

You may wonder what all this has to do with my having bobbed my hair, but as I said above, every seemingly single act we perform is really a small square in the whole mosaic of life, and when all the little pieces are put together they form the complete pattern of existence. Many of the trivial daily happenings of life are so subtle and so deceiving in their significance that very frequently we do not catch their meaning until long after they have occurred. Then, too late alas! We find that these petty affairs, so infinitesimal by themselves, have by accumulation assumed a most important influence in our lives.

When I consider the achievements of women in the past few years in the field of athletics I find it impossible to do so without taking into account the tremendous freedom-giving changes in fashion that have accompanied them. And enjoying the blessings of short hair is a necessary part of those fashion changes. To my way of thinking, long hair belongs to the age of general feminine helplessness. Bobbed hair belongs to the age of freedom, frankness, and progressiveness.

This is my view of the situation, but I should like to state most emphatically that I have no desire to lay down any fixed arbitrary rule for any one else to follow. Whether a woman wears her hair long or short, is her individual affair. I only know which I prefer. I can see nothing but what is progressive or beneficial in bobbed hair for women, altho I must admit there is one very tragic situation that is the direct result of women bobbing their hair, and that is, of course, the sorry plight of the hairpin manufacturers.

****
Why I Have Not Bobbed Mine
by Mary Pickford

In the epidemic of hair-cutting which has swept the country I am one of the few who have escaped. That does not mean that I have been inoculated by the germ, but that I have resisted valiantly. It has been a hard-fought battle, and the problem has occupied many of my waking and sleeping hours. I say "sleeping" because it often intrudes itself into my dreams.

Sometimes it comes in a pleasant guise, where I gaze enraptured at the mirrored reflection of my sleek bobbed head, and sometimes it is a dreadful nightmare, when I feel the cold shears at the back of my neck and see my curls fall one by one at my feet, useless, lifeless things to be packed away in tissue-paper with other outworn treasures.

I suppose almost every woman in the world has had a moment of trepidation before she made the final and momentous decision to part with her crowning glory; but in my case there are, perhaps, more reasons for hesitation than in the case of most people.

In the first place, my curls have become so identified with me that they have become almost a trademark, and what old-established firm would change its trade-mark without giving considerable thought to the matter? Perhaps I am not quite fair to myself when I say "a trade-mark." I think they mean more than that-in some strange way they have become a symbol-and I think shorn of them I should become almost as Samson after his unfortunate meeting with Delilah.

It seems, no matter what my desires, that I am dedicated to little-girl roles for the rest of my screen life, and the curls here, of course, are invaluable to me. Curls are the one distinctive attribute left to little girls. Their older sisters, mothers, and grandmothers have robbed them of everything else. It is true that there are many small girls with short hair, but where could you find a mother or grandmother with long curls?

I could give a lengthy and, I think, convincing discourse about long hair making a woman more feminine, but there is some doubt in my mind as to whether it does or not. Of one thing I am sure: she looks smarter with a bob, and smartness rather than beauty seems to be the goal of every woman these days.

Whenever I go to the theater and see the rows of heads in front of me, I send up a little prayer of thanksgiving that we no longer have to view great masses of false hair, curls and puffs of varying shades, and that dreadful abomination once known as the "rat." But I can not confess to any liking for shaved necks. They are dreadful and take away all charm and femininity from the most attractive woman.

Some gray-haired women look well with a bob. I think it depends upon the shape of the head and the size of the woman. If she is large, bobbed hair will make her head seem disproportionately small and will cause her neck to look too large for the face above it. After all, there is nothing more feminine than a beautiful head of well-cared-for hair simply coiled. Men admire it. They like the Greek line which some women are able to achieve with their smooth, shining coils of hair.

Then, too, in spite of the great variety of hair-cuts, one can achieve many more effects with long hair. This is, to me, of vital importance. A wind-blown bob or boyish bob has to remain just what it is until the next visit to the barber or until nature repairs the damage, but long hair can be dressed according to mood or circumstance. For instance, there are days when it gives me great pleasure to part my hair in the center and wear it drawn back smoothly and demurely over my ears. This is usually when I am feeling rather subdued and that life is not treating me just as it should.

On the other hand, there are mornings when I waken feeling very frivolous, and nothing will express this mood as well as a myriad little nodding curls all over my head. A dozen different moods can be interpreted by the hair-dress, and for a woman to have a way of giving an outlet to her mood is very valuable indeed.

Of course, in doing a costume-picture, bobbed hair would be utterly out of place and would necessitate wearing a wig, which to my way of thinking, never looks entirely natural, and which certainly must be most uncomfortable. All the lovely ladies of history and romance have had long hair. Can you imagine a fairy princess with short, bobbed locks? It is unthinkable and almost shocking. Can you picture Elaine, the lily maid, floating down to Camelot on her barge without her golden curls over her shoulders? How could the prince have climbed to Rapunzel, "let down your hair"? And what a predicament Lady Godiva would have been in!

Then there is my family to consider. I think I should never be forgiven by my mother, my husband, or my maid if I should commit the indiscretion of cutting my hair. The last in particular seems to take a great personal pride in its length and texture, and her horror-stricken face whenever I mention the possibility of cutting it makes me pause and consider. Perhaps I have a little sentimental feeling for it myself. I have had my curls quite a while now and have become somewhat attached to them. Besides, there is no use denying the fact, no matter how much I should like to do so, that I am not a radical.

I am by nature conservative and even a bit old-fashioned, which is a dreadful thing to admit in this day and age.

But the real reason why I do not bob my hair is undoubtedly on account of the requests received in my "fan" mail. Every day letters come in from the children saying, "Please do not bob your hair." "Please do not cut off your curls." I should feel that I was failing them if I ignored such an insistent plea. I haven't the courage to fly in the face of their disapproval nor have I the wish. If I am a slave, at least I am a willing slave. For their love and affection and loyalty I owe them everything, and if curls are the price I shall pay it.

Now, after giving all these arguments against the bob, I feel the old irresistible urge, and it is quite likely that some day in frenzied haste casting all caution to the winds, forgetting fans and family, I shall go to a coiffeur and come out a shorn lamb to join the great army of the bobbed.

Source: Irene Castle Treman, "I Bobbed My Hair and Then-," Ladies Home Journal, October 1921, 124; Mary Garden "Why I Bobbed My Hair," Pictorial Review, April 1927, 8; Mary Pickford, "Why I Have Not Bobbed Mine," Pictorial Review, April 1927, 9.

See Also: Bobbed Hair Blues: A Mexican-American Song Laments "Las Pelonas"

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The New Woman of the 1920s: Debating Bobbed-Hair

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The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s.

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Use our free chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis of Bernice Bobs Her Hair. It helps middle and high school students understand F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary masterpiece.

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Ernest Hemingway wrote a haunting rendering of Christ's crucifixion in a little known four-page play entitled "Today is Friday," originally published in the collection Men Without Women. The play begins in archetypal Hemingway fashion. The action is off-stage, has already happened. Three men enter a "drinking-place" at eleven o'clock at night, and immediately they talk liquor: "You tried the red?" the first man asks. "No, I ain't tried it," the second says. Soon their conversation is consumed by the day's events. "He was pretty good in there today," the first man contends. He could be describing a superior matador or a boxer. But he is not. And these are not the mob men of "The Killers" or the bull-fighting aficionados of "The Undefeated." Nor are they the World War I-jaded soldiers of In Our Time. Rather, these three men are Roman soldiers, and we soon recognize them as those who crucified Christ. "Why didn't he come down off the cross?" the second soldier asks. "He didn't want to come down off the cross. That's not his play," the first suggests. "Show me a guy that doesn't want to come down off the cross," says the second soldier. As Matthew Nickel notes in his recently published Hemingway's Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway:

The first [soldier] champions Jesus as the ultimate exemplar of grace under pressure with his litany repeated six times about how Jesus was "pretty good in there today"; the second soldier sees Jesus as a "false alarm," mocking the first soldier as a "regular Christer" and finding nothing special in their day's work; the third soldier seems to empathize the strongest with the crucified victims, expressing how he does not enjoy the "nailing them on" how it "must take some of them [the victims] pretty bad," and how after the whole scene with Jesus he feels "like hell" (Nickel 90).

For Nickel, the hero of the short play is the third soldier, the man so sick he cannot drink. The everyman whose very life has been eclipsed by the revealed identity of Christ. The draft-title of the play was "One More for the Nazarene." One more what? Nickel argues that the third soldier is this one more, one more soul salvaged by the cross. But to gain the full effect of the play, we must return to Hemingway's final title: "Today is Friday." The present tense is crucial, for it emphasizes "the present moment, today, as each time one revisits the story, like each annual celebration of 'Good Friday,' one relives the original Friday. Likewise, in the re-enactment of the Passion through the Mass on Good Friday, participants symbolically relive the moments of Christ's passion and crucifixion" (Nickel 90-91).

In keeping with Hemingway's masterly subtlety, the story defies explicit resolution. Ordinary, even banal conversations clash with the day's horrific, salvific events. As the soldiers leave the drinking place the wine-seller asks the "Lootenant" whether he might be able to "have something on account," to which the second soldier replies: "What the hell George! Wednesday's payday." The third soldier insists that the men return to the barracks. He is extremely weary. When this apparent hero articulates his agony the second soldier says, "You've been out here too long." No, the third soldier says, "It ain't just that. I feel like hell," an insistence the second soldier smolders out with his "You've been out here too long. That's all." His relentless refusal to take the third soldier seriously elicits in the keen reader an even greater empathy and sorrow-for misfit amidst the soldiers, yes, but also, and perhaps more so for those who, beholding the paradox of Christ's death-by-asphyxiation, subject what happened there to their own standards and measurements rather than subjecting themselves to the measurement of the crucified. As we approach the wood of the cross, today and every today that inhabits that Good Friday, may we know our own capacity to unknowingly nail Him there. And our only strength. To, like the third soldier, be made perfect in weakness.

-Joshua Hren

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Today is Friday: Hemingway's Crucifixion Story

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Ernest Hemingway wrote a haunting rendering of Christ's crucifixion in a little known four-page play entitled "Today is Friday," originally published in the collection Men Without Women. The play begins in archetypal Hemingway fashion. The action is off-stage, has already happened. Three

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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. Over nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a result of the war, a casualty rate exacerbated by the belligerents' technological and industrial sophistication, and the tactical stalemate caused by gruelling trench warfare. It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history and precipitated major political change, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. Unresolved rivalries at the end of the conflict contributed to the start of the Second World War twenty-one years later.
The war drew in all the world's economic great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, it did not join the Central Powers, as Austria-Hungary had taken the offensive against the terms of the alliance.

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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history.