1921 TIMELINE

Unsorted 1921 Events [New Page]

JANUARY

00 - |Film ?+ |USA ?| Douglas Fairbank's The Mark of Zorro
02 - |radio ?+|PITTSBURGH, PA| First radio broadcast of a religious service aired by KDKA: The Calvary Episcopal Church, Rev. Edwin Jan. Van Etten.
15 - |PITTSBURGH, PA| Hoover speaks on KDKA from the Duquesne Club.
25 - |ECONOMY|U.S.| 3.5 million unemployed.

FEBRUARY

The Kid

06 - |Film ?+ |USA ?| Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan star in The Kid.
17 - U.S. reports 9 million autos in U.S. in 1920.
18 - |AVIATION| French Aviator Etienne Oehmichen makes first helicopter flight.
18 - |radio ?+|PITTSBURGH, PA| Harding on KDKA, first President on radio.
22 - 6:14 a.m. - |AVIATION|U.S.| The first day/night U.S. transcontinental flight begins, delivering mail from New York to San Francisco.
23 - Russian navy mutinies at Kronstadt on the Baltic Sea to protest food shortages and the ongoing economic crisis. The Bolshevik government crushes the revolt, which nonetheless helps prompt Lenin's later capitalistic-tinged economic policy reforms.

MARCH

00 - First Thomson Submachineguns come off the assembly line.
06 - Police in Sanbury, PA call halt to rising skirts; issuing edict requiring skirts to be at least four inches below the knee
06 - |Film ?+ |USA ?| Premiere of the World War I film melodrama Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, starring Rudolph Valentino ?+¢. It cemented star Valentino's hold on the filmgoing audience and became one of the biggest hits of the decade, earning $3.8 million for Metro Pictures.
17 - Lenin introduces capitalist-style economics with his New Economic Policy(NEP), in reaction to the collapse of the Russian economy that occured because of ongoing civil war and an Allied blockade of the country designed to end Bolshevism.
17 - Dr. Marie Stopes opens first family planning clinic in London.

APRIL

00 - First Havana-Key West deep sea cable
23 - Charley Paddock sets world record in 100-meter dash at 10.4 seconds

MAY

00 - A mass famine in Russia begins.
02 - The Met presents a modern art exhibit featuring Matisse, Manet, Degas, and Jean-Francois Millet.
08 - Sweden abolishes capital punishment.
10 - |Teapot Dome Scandel +| Harding issues executive order transferring management of emergency oil field deposits to the Department of the Interior.
15 - NY state legislature passes law giving state commissioner right to censor dances
19 - Immigration Quota Act severely limits immigration, to no more than 3 percent annually of each nationality, based on the number of that nationality already residing in the U.S. as of 1910.
31 - Trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti begins.

JUNE

00 - Samuel Gompers and Frank Morrison attend a meeting called by railroad union leaders and Senator Robert LaFollette to establish a People's Legislative Service to aid Congress. Gompers opposes the plan, however.
01 - Oklahoma race riots kill 60 blacks and 25 whites.
11 - First women engineer graduates from Penn State
30 - First switching machine office using Western Electric equipment is installed in Dallas.

JULY

00 - U.S. experiences a short, but severe, post-war recession due to industrial overproduction and elimination of defense-related industries, marked by widespread wage cuts and unemployment that reaches 5.7 million in aug.
02 - |SPORTS|USA ?| Dempsey knocks out french heavyweight Georges Carpentier. Radio Station WJY broadcasts the title bout from Jersey City, N.J. It's the first heavyweight fight aired, though several lesser prize fights had already been transmitted in 1920. This is also the first time that box office receipts for a boxing match reached $1 million.
14 - Sacco & Vanzetti + convicted of first-degree murder in Massachusetts.
18 - American Astronaut John Glenn born.
27 - Canadian biochemists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best discover insulin

AUGUST

00 - |POLITICS|INDIA| Gandhi ?+! leads campaign for a boycott of foreign cloth and lights a bonfire of foreign cloth in Bombay.
00 - Mass famine, with an estimated 18 million in danger of starvation, underway in Russia due to continuing economic crisis. On August 21, the U.S. signs an agreement with Russia to provide relief, and by year's end, 1 million children are getting emergency food rations.
02 - Opera tenor Enrico Caruso dies in Naples, Italy.
05 - |radio ?+|PITTSBURGH, PA| First baseball game with a "play-by-play" description airs on KDKA. The National League Pittsburgh Corsairs beat Philadelphia 8-5, called by Harold Arlin.
22 - Hair bobbing gains national attention as State Barber's Commission of Connecticut rule that women that bob hair must have a barber's license

SEPTEMBER

00 - The Ohio Bell Telephone Company is formed.
00 - First Miss America Pagent + in Atlantic City.
07 - Tarzan of the Apes opens on Broadway.
08 - Angry members of the National Women's Party entered the U.S. capitol, with buckets, brushes and soap, to clean a statue of Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that had been stored away in a dirty storage closet.
19 - First stretch of the autobahn completed in Germany.
25 - Chaplin's The Idle Class opens.

OCTOBER

07 - |SPORTS|USA ?| Babe Ruth hits 59 home runs in a season.
16 - |SOCIETY|USA| 100% divorce rate increase since 1896; St. Louis Court of Domestic Relations contribute this to women's growing feeling of independence

NOVEMBER

02 - Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie premieres on Broadway.
02 - |SOCIETY|USA ?| American Birth Control League is formed from the merger of Margaret Sanger's National Birth Control League and Mary Ware Dennet's Voluntary Parenthood League.
11 - Tomb of the Unknown Soldier established, with burial of the unknown soldier at Washington, D.C.'s, Arlington National Cemetary.
"Here rests in honored glory an American soldier, known but to God."
"Under the wide and starry skies of his own homeland, America's unknown dead from France sleeps tonight, a soldier home from the wars.
Alone he lies in the narrow cell of white stone that guards his body; but his soul has entered into the spirit that is America.
Wherever liberty is held close to men's hearts, the honor and the glory and the pledge of high endeavor poured out over this nameless one of fame will be told and sung by Americans of all time..."
--Kirke L. Simpson

14 - |Film ?+|USA| German Psychiatric film Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opens in U.S.
21 - Little Folks Magazine bought commercial time on Eunice Randall's children's story hour on WGI. Could be first radio commercials.

DECEMBER

00 - Britain's post-war recession (a.k.a. "the slump") worsens, with unemployment reaching 2 million (18 percent).
02 - Otis Dudley Duncan born in Nocona, TX
06 - Southern part of Ireland declared a British dominion, with the same home rule status as Canada, and named the Irish Free State with the signing of a peace treaty between Britain and the Irish parliament, ratified on jan 1922
24 - |POLITICS|INDIA| Mahatma Gandhi granted full control of the Indian National Congress at Ahmendabad.
25 - |POLITICS|USA ?| Eugen V. Debs, socailist presidential hopeful is released from prison, following a spirited amnesty campaign.

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