Not the Beer! Anything but the Beer! Oh, and U.S. Gets Their Hands Dirty!

The events spanning the years of 1916-1919 were filled with the extremes of war, to major technological advancements. The year 1916 had market the most prosperous year in United States history to date with celebrity John D. Rockefeller gaining the economic worth and label of a billionaire. However, females were strongly seeking equality and pushing for their own personal rights concerning reproduction, the United States began being plagued by anarchist bombings, and Oregon became the first state to issue a tax on gasoline as motorcars were on the rise (one cent per gallon!). Amongst these events were also the following influential happenings of the early 1900’s…

Arts & Culture:

June 4, 1917: the very first Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the French Ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand for With Americans of Past and Present Days.

February 14, 1918: Leon Forrest Douglass, a forerunner for Technicolor, introduced a new method of production that would create motion pictures in color by filming with “natural color” rather than using the coloring technique of hand-tinting. Douglass was a major innovator for the industry and helped pave the way to how the world now experiences film.

Jan 29, 1919: Prohibition is finalized and ratified into the Constitution of the United States. It would become effective January 16th of the following year (1920). Cities were to run dry spawning the cult Speakeasy movement where all classes of people tried to find themselves.

July 1, 1919: Benito Mussolini published his Fascist Manifesto after recently breaking from the Italian Socialist Party. The demands of the manifesto are as follow: universal suffrage (beginning at 18 years), the right for women to vote, proportional representation, autonomy for local governments, the disbanding of the Senate and the political police force, the creation an army concerned only with defense, the confiscation of church property, retirement at age 55, an eight-hour work day, a minimum wage, amongst others which can be viewed by the above link.

Science, Technology, & Ideas:

January 1, 1916: The first successful blood transfusion using refrigerated blood  was performed by Oswald Hope Robertson, a medical researcher and U.S. Army officer, who served in France during WWI where he performed the transfusion. This was a milestone for how the world now stores and transfuses blood.

May 21, 1916: Britain initiates daylight savings time which is followed by the US two years later on March 19, 1918 when The U.S. Congress approved official times zones and daylight savings.
February 9, 1919: The first commercial (passenger) round-trip flight form Paris to London was successfully completed  greatly altering travel, especially in Europe. It took the aircraft, Goliath, three hours and thirty minutes. The aircraft had two engines and could reach the peak speed of ninety-seven miles per hour. Though this date is debated, this year still marks the successful completion of a scheduled flight where passengers could buy tickets. The aircraft and structure of aviation was a pioneer for travel.

Social Change:

On November 7, 1916, Jeannette Rankin, a Montana Republican, was the first Congresswoman elected into the United States Congress amid female suffrage, the arrest of Maragaret Sanger (advocate for female birth control), and Henry Ford awarding equal pay to women ($5 per day). After being elected Rankin proudly proclaimed:

“I may be the first woman member of Congress but I won’t be the last.”

October 16, 1919: Adolf Hitler gave his first speech (current pictures of location- scroll down) for the German Worker’s Party. Hitler remarked on his first public speech in his Mein Kampf:

“I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak! After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice of those present led to the donation of three hundred marks.”

War, Politics, & Nature:

April 6, 1917: The U.S. declared war on Germany (WWI) as President Woodrow Wilson signed into law “the declaration of war” which had been approved by Congress that week. Wilson’s reasoning for entry into the war: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
On June 28, 1919, five years after the war had begun in Sarajevo, WWI officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in France. However, the meeting only increased friction and hostility between the countries present. The treaty explains US President Wilson’s plan for a League of Nations, but also the terms of punishment for Germany.

In 1918 the Flu Pandemic, known as the “Spanish Flu” (influenza) was first oberserved in the United States. By October 31, Public health officials of the US and abroad warned that the epidemic, which had become global, may cause twenty-million deaths. In total, it had infected 500 million people worldwide, and killed 50-100 million of those that were diseased. With WWI occurring and the Spanish Flu, the world population was severely depleted.