The 1920s are often remembered as one long party, but the true stories are stranger and more human than the postcards. A Prohibition agent went undercover as himself. A cartoon mouse got his break only after two silent films failed to sell. A busboy left three poems beside a famous poet's plate. These tiles gather the jazz, the flappers, the inventions and the crash, checked against museums, archives and libraries.
Every tile in a The Roaring Twenties game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Culture
nine stories
1The book so risky its publisher left its name off
On the tile: Crosswords1924
In 1924 Richard Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, who had just opened a publishing house in New York, made their very first book a collection of crossword puzzles and threw in a free pencil. The untested format worried them so much that the firm's name did not appear on the book, and the first printing was only 3,600 copies. It sold out quickly and eventually sold more than 100,000. Librarians complained that solvers swarmed reference desks for dictionaries, and a 1924 New York Times editorial called crosswords "a primitive sort of mental exercise."
Pianist James P. Johnson recalled first seeing the Charleston danced in 1913 at a New York dive called the Jungles Casino. Most of the dancers, he said, came from Charleston, South Carolina, and worked as longshoremen or on ships. To him the dance was a regulation cotillion step without a name, and he wrote a number of Charleston tunes for those dancers. In 1923 he composed the score for the Broadway hit Runnin' Wild, and its song The Charleston launched one of the wildest dance crazes of the century.
3The illegal bars named for keeping your voice down
On the tile: Speakeasy1920s
When Prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920, thousands of legal saloons that had catered only to men closed down. In their place came private, unlicensed bars nicknamed speakeasies, for how low you had to speak the password to get in without being overheard. New York City alone had an estimated 32,000. The change reshaped social life: men and women now drank together, and Italian-American speakeasy owners who served food with their wine sparked widespread interest in Italian cooking.
The flapper rebelled against the strict, old-fashioned ways of her Victorian mother, and her hemline tells the story. In 1920 skirts still reached the ankles; by the mid-1920s they had climbed to the knee, and by 1930 they were back below it. A bob was bold in its own way, because getting one meant walking into the barbershop, long a man's space. Close-fitting cloche hats were worn only by women with truly short hair, and some women who kept their long hair pinned it up with bobby pins to look in style.
Before 1920, some African American musical styles had reached records, but performed by white musicians. Songwriter Perry Bradford kept pressing record companies to record Mamie Smith, a Black stage singer with more than 25 years of experience. An audition at Victor went nowhere, but OKeh Records took a chance. On August 10, 1920, Smith and a group of African American musicians recorded "Crazy Blues," and it became a hit that fall, reportedly selling 75,000 copies in two months. Its success set off a rush to record women blues singers that lasted through the decade.
6The concerto Gershwin read about in the newspaper
On the tile: Gershwin1924
On January 4, 1924, the New York Tribune announced that George Gershwin was writing a jazz concerto. Bandleader Paul Whiteman had asked him for a piece months earlier, but the commission had completely slipped Gershwin's mind, and the concert was set for February 12. Gershwin wrote a two-piano score, and arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated it page by page as it was finished. The result was Rhapsody in Blue. Its famous opening was written as a clarinet scale; Ross Gorman turned it into a swooping glissando during a rehearsal, to Gershwin's delight.
Walt Disney's first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, were silent, and he could not sell a distributor on them. So he made a third, Steamboat Willie, with sound in mind from the start. His staff tested the idea by projecting a scene onto a bed sheet while animator Wilfred Jackson played harmonica behind it. Disney mortgaged the studio and sold his car to pay for it, and the first recording session went badly. Steamboat Willie opened in New York on November 18, 1928, and thrilled audiences.
8The pageant created to keep tourists past Labor Day
On the tile: Miss America1921
In 1920 Atlantic City's Businessmen's League came up with a plan to keep the fun, and the profits, going past Labor Day. In September 1921 the city staged the first Miss America Pageant. A crowd of 100,000 gathered on the boardwalk, and the festivities opened with King Neptune arriving on a barge. The winner, sixteen-year-old Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C., was chosen by the crowd's applause combined with points from a panel of artists. She took home the Golden Mermaid trophy and $100.
The Hollywood Sign started out as an advertisement. In 1923 Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler put up a $21,000 billboard for his upscale real estate development, and it spelled out HOLLYWOODLAND. It was intended to last just 18 months. Instead it became a giant marquee for a town that was always announcing its next premiere. Against the odds it survived decades of neglect, and a rebuilt sign still stands today.
1The pilot who had to go to France to learn to fly
On the tile: Bessie Coleman1921
Bessie Coleman, born in Texas in 1892 to a family of sharecroppers, was a manicurist in Chicago when she set her sights on flying. No American flight school would accept her, so she trained in France. On June 15, 1921, she became the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Back home she flew stunts at air shows as a barnstormer, and she would perform only if the crowds were desegregated. She died in a crash in 1926, before she could open the flight school she dreamed of.
2The busboy who left his poems beside a famous plate
On the tile: Langston1925
In 1925 Langston Hughes was a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington when the celebrated poet Vachel Lindsay came to read there. Hughes knew the hotel did not admit Black people to the auditorium. So he copied out three poems, including The Weary Blues, and laid them beside Lindsay's plate at dinner. Lindsay read them at his reading that night, and reporters soon photographed Hughes holding a tray of dirty dishes. The discovered-busboy story had a twist: Hughes had already published poems and signed a contract for his first book.
3The Prohibition agent who went undercover as himself
On the tile: Izzy and Moe1920-1925
Izzy Einstein, a former postal worker with a gift for languages, and his friend Moe Smith were the most famous Prohibition agents of their day. They posed as farmers, gravediggers and street cleaners, and in Hollywood they raided a speakeasy dressed as movie extras in suits of armor. Izzy liked to buy a drink and then announce, "There's sad news here. You're under arrest." He even went undercover as himself, saying "I'm Izzy Einstein" to bartenders who laughed and served him anyway. The pair arrested nearly 5,000 people before their bosses split them up in 1925.
4The Prohibition chief who did not support Prohibition
On the tile: Willebrandt1921-1929
Appointed by President Harding in 1921, Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt became the most prominent enforcer of Prohibition and the highest-ranking woman in three administrations. Privately, she did not support Prohibition. She started with three assistants and built a staff of 100. A 1924 Collier's article said the way to make a bootlegger shiver was to whisper, "Mrs. Willebrandt is after you." In 1927 she successfully argued before the Supreme Court that income from illegal activities was subject to income tax, opening the door to tax cases against gangsters such as Al Capone.
On August 6, 1926, Gertrude Ederle, a 20-year-old New Yorker, became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Her time of about fourteen and a half hours beat all five earlier successful crossings, every one made by a man, and stood as the women's record until Florence Chadwick broke it in 1950. Her father had promised her a small roadster if she succeeded. New York welcomed her home with a ticker-tape parade, and the city's official greeter later recalled that the crowd at City Hall surged so wildly that a policeman lifted her up and carried her back inside.
6The scheme that needed more coupons than the world had
On the tile: Charles Ponzi1920
Charles Ponzi told Boston investors he could profit on international postal reply coupons, buying them cheaply abroad and redeeming them in the United States. He promised 50 percent in 45 days, and about 20,000 people handed him roughly $10 million. The Boston Post did the arithmetic: covering those investments would have taken some 160 million coupons, and only about 27,000 were in circulation. The Supreme Court later put it plainly, finding that Ponzi "made no investments of any kind." The Post's series won the paper its first Pulitzer Prize.
7The magician who took on fortune-tellers in Congress
On the tile: Houdini1926
In 1926 Harry Houdini went to Washington to push a bill that would fine or jail anyone telling fortunes for pay in the District of Columbia. The hearing room filled with mediums, psychics and astrologers who had come to fight it. Houdini held up a telegram and offered $10,000 to any medium who could say what it contained; none could. His undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg, named senators whom Washington mediums had claimed as clients, and the room erupted. The hearings ran four raucous days, from February to May, and the bill failed.
8The speakeasy hostess who welcomed guests as suckers
On the tile: Texas Guinan1920s
Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan, born in Waco, Texas, in 1884, had played a gun-slinging cowgirl in three dozen silent films before she became one of Prohibition's most famous speakeasy hostesses. From 1922 she presided over New York clubs such as the El Fey, where her trademark greeting called the customers suckers. Raids kept closing her clubs, and she kept moving. Arrested in 1927, she sang the Prisoner's Song at the police station, then told the jury she was only a hostess and was found not guilty. She drank coffee, not alcohol.
9The founder who brought the league charter to the meeting
On the tile: Rube Foster1920
Andrew "Rube" Foster was one of the best pitchers of his era before he built the Chicago American Giants into the dominant team in Black baseball. When club owners met at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City on February 13 and 14, 1920, Foster surprised them by arriving with a corporate charter for the Negro National League already drafted. The owners agreed on a constitution, made Foster president, and adopted a motto adapted from Frederick Douglass: "We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea." His American Giants drew nearly 200,000 spectators in 1921.
Earle Dickson, a cotton buyer at Johnson & Johnson, had a wife, Josephine, who often cut and burned herself while cooking. Around 1920 he made her a ready-to-use bandage: cotton gauze on adhesive strips covered with crinoline, which peeled away to expose the sticky side. Johnson & Johnson took up the idea. The first Band-Aids were handmade strips 18 inches long and 2.5 inches wide, meant to be cut to size, and first-year sales came to just $3,000. By 1924 the company was making them by machine.
Otto Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, had a bread-slicing machine ready for production by 1917, until a fire destroyed his Illinois factory along with his plans and equipment. Years later his old friend Frank Bench agreed to test a machine at his bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri. Sliced bread went on sale to the public on July 7, 1928. The newspaper ad hailed it as "the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped." Within two weeks, sales at the bakery had jumped 2,000 percent.
Until the 1920s, frozen food in America was a last resort, mushy once it thawed. Clarence Birdseye knew it could be better. Years earlier in Labrador, he had watched Inuit fishermen pull trout through holes in the ice, where the fish froze almost instantly in air 30 degrees below zero and still tasted fresh when cooked. The secret was freezing fast. In 1922 he quit his job to build an industry around the idea, in 1924 he founded a company to sell quick-frozen foods, and in 1927 he applied to patent a multiplate freezing machine.
4The schoolboy sketch that helped prove who invented TV
On the tile: Television1927
At sixteen, Philo Farnsworth drew a design for his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, explaining how electricity could become pictures by controlling the speed and direction of fast-flying electrons. Tolman kept the drawing. Farnsworth later moved to California and, with no training in high-vacuum physics, found a new way to seal the end of his camera tube, the image dissector. In September 1927 he demonstrated his television system. That schoolboy drawing later helped him establish his claim to be the first to conceive the basic technology of television.
5The station that beat the newspapers on election night
On the tile: KDKA1920
Frank Conrad, a ham radio operator near Pittsburgh, liked to play records over the air for his friends. Westinghouse, a major maker of radio equipment, saw a way to sell more radios: give people something to hear. It had Conrad set up a regular station, KDKA, and chose election day, November 2, 1920, for its first commercial broadcast. Listeners heard the results of the Harding-Cox presidential race before they could read them in the newspaper. Within four years there were 600 commercial stations around the country.
Garrett Morgan is often credited with inventing the traffic light, but signals were already directing traffic before his, with just two positions: stop and go. Morgan, a Cleveland inventor and businessman, patented a signal in 1923 that added a third, cautionary position between them. He sold it to General Electric for $40,000 that same year, and he also bought a farm near Wakeman, Ohio, where he established a country club for African Americans.
7The frozen treat an 11-year-old is said to have invented
On the tile: Popsicle1905 and 1920sLegend
The story goes that on a cold night in 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson of the San Francisco Bay Area left a soda-powder drink out with its stirring stick, and found it frozen solid by morning. What is documented comes later. In 1923 he began selling his Epsicles at Neptune Beach, an amusement park, and by 1924 he had applied for a patent on a frozen treat on a stick. His children called it Pop's 'Sicle, and in 1925 he sold the rights to the Joe Lowe Company.
8The tunnel its engineer did not live to see finished
On the tile: Holland Tunnel1927
Car exhaust was the problem. Clearing fumes from a tunnel under the Hudson River the way railroad tunnels did, by blowing air end to end, would have taken gale-force winds of more than 70 miles an hour. So engineers designed a new system that fed fresh air in below the roadway and drew fumes out above it, with 84 fans able to change the tunnel's air every 90 seconds. Chief engineer Clifford Holland died in October 1924, two days before the tubes were joined, and the tunnel that opened in 1927 was named for him.
9The first transatlantic phone service went by air
On the tile: Call to London1927
On January 7, 1927, AT&T opened the first commercial telephone service across the Atlantic. AT&T president Walter Gifford spoke with Sir Evelyn Murray of the British Post Office, and business leaders were soon talking trade across the ocean; some reports put that day's deals at more than $6 million. Yet no cable carried their voices. The calls traveled by radio waves through the air, which could be unreliable and depended on conditions such as the weather.
1The trial a small town arranged to get on the map
On the tile: Scopes Trial1925
The Scopes Trial was hatched in Frank Robinson's drugstore in Dayton, Tennessee, a town whose population had fallen from 3,000 to 1,800. Local leaders hoped a test of the state's new law against teaching evolution would put Dayton on the map. They summoned John Scopes, a 24-year-old general science teacher and part-time football coach who had assigned evolution readings while filling in for the biology teacher. He agreed to stand trial, and two local attorneys who were his friends agreed to prosecute. Scopes was fined $100, but the verdict was later reversed on a technicality.
2The pilot who flew to Paris without a front window
On the tile: Lindbergh1927
To compete for Raymond Orteig's $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, Charles Lindbergh ordered a custom plane from Ryan Airlines in San Diego. For safety, the Spirit of St. Louis carried its fuel tanks ahead of the cockpit, so Lindbergh could not see straight ahead except through a periscope or by turning to look out a side window. He took off alone on May 20, 1927, and 33 hours, 30 minutes and 3,610 miles later landed near Paris before a crowd of 100,000.
3The crash that followed a permanently high plateau
On the tile: Black Tuesday1929
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose six-fold, from 63 in August 1921 to 381 in September 1929, as ordinary people bought stock with borrowed money, typically putting down just 10 percent. After prices peaked, economist Irving Fisher said stocks had reached "what looks like a permanently high plateau." Then came Black Monday, October 28, 1929, when the Dow fell nearly 13 percent, and Black Tuesday, when it dropped nearly 12 percent more. By mid-November it had lost almost half its value.
4The footrace across America won by a Cherokee runner
On the tile: Bunion Derby1928
On March 4, 1928, 199 runners left Los Angeles in promoter C. C. Pyle's 3,423-mile race to New York, which the press nicknamed the Bunion Derby. The route followed Route 66 to Chicago, and one day the runners logged 74.6 miles. Only 55 reached Madison Square Garden on May 26. The winner was Andy Payne, a young member of the Cherokee Nation from Foyil, Oklahoma, with an elapsed time of 573 hours. He used the $25,000 prize to pay off the mortgage on his family's farm.
5The awards dinner whose winners were already known
On the tile: First Oscars1929
The first Academy Awards dinner, in 1929, held no suspense: the winners had been announced a full three months earlier. About 270 people attended, mostly Academy members, and members paid $5 to bring a guest. Twelve awards were presented, along with 20 certificates of honorable mention, and Warner Bros. received a special award for The Jazz Singer as the pioneer talking picture. The statuette itself had been designed in 1928 by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, and sculptor George Stanley made it for $500.
Prohibition, which began in 1920, had a loophole: doctors with a federal permit could prescribe liquor as medicine. A patient could get up to a pint, usually whiskey, every ten days, paying about $3 to the doctor and $3 more to the pharmacist. In 1917 the American Medical Association had declared that alcohol had no scientific value as a tonic, but two years into Prohibition it endorsed liquor for nearly 30 ailments. The Walgreens chain grew from 20 drugstores in 1920 to 525 in 1929, though the company credits its ice cream and malted milkshakes.
In September 1921, Babe Ruth spent three hours being tested at Columbia University to measure his athletic and psychological abilities. Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton reported the findings in Popular Science Monthly. Ruth's eyes, the tests showed, were about 12 percent faster than the average person's, and his nerves were steadier than those of 499 out of 500 people. The psychologists also found that he did not breathe during his entire swing, and said he could hit with even more power if he did. That season he set a new record with 59 home runs.
During the Mississippi River flood of 1927, New Orleans bankers and business leaders concluded that only dynamite would restore confidence. They targeted a levee in the Poydras area, 13 miles below Canal Street, forcing nearby residents to evacuate. The first three blasts on April 29 did not do the job; it took 10 days and 39 tons of dynamite. Afterward 2,809 people received an average of $284 each, and more than 1,000 other claimants got nothing. A levee break upriver later showed the blasting had not been needed to protect the city.
Route 66 got its official start in 1926, when the Bureau of Public Roads launched the nation's first federal highway system. Like the other new routes, it was stitched together from existing local, state and national roads, running 2,400 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles through eight states. Its diagonal path linked farm towns to Chicago and appealed to truckers. Paving took another 12 years: a 1929 Texaco road report found it entirely concrete in Kansas, 66 percent paved in Missouri and just 25 percent improved in Oklahoma.