TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/20s/20sedit

Text File | 1990-10-27 | 3KB | 49 lines

Editor's Note


  The 1920s was the first decade of modernism; the world more or less
as we know it today emerged from the carnage of World War I and the
disillusionment that followed an armistice that did not bring real
peace. It was a time of flux, of flappers, flasks and the frenetic
activity of the Jazz Age. Economic prosperity caught up with millions
of Americans for the first time, making them able to buy automobiles,
refrigerators and radios, and speculate in the stock market; but it
passed millions of others, especially farmers, by.

  Elsewhere in the world, the consequences of the war were far harsher
than for Americans. The advent of Communism had wrecked the Soviet
Union and Despot Josef Stalin had to let the country recover from
civil war and widespread starvation before consolidating his
tyranny. Germany, devastated by war and economic collapse, lurched
from one political crisis to another. War debts and reparations
hindered economic activity and trade and guaranteed that, when the
1929 stock market crash ended America's prosperity, many countries
would share in the resulting Depression.


  TIME CAPSULE/THE '20s has been adapted and condensed from the
contents of TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine. The words, except for
connecting passages in brackets [] are those of the magazine itself.
The date at the beginning of each excerpt is the issue date of
the magazine.

  The world into which TIME was born in 1923 and survived its first
years was enormously different from that of the 1980s. The magazine's
style, concerns, assumptions and prejudices reflect a much smaller,
simpler, more parochial and much less well-informed world. The people
who made news and those who read about it had much in common or even
overlapped. There were large areas of national and international life
with which that elite, and hence TIME, never concerned itself; indeed,
in the 1920s the magazine had no newsgathering staff but simply
digested, albeit with style and skill, the contents of New York City's
newspapers. Seeking its journalistic niche, it tried out various forms
of organization: an early department called "Imaginary Interviews,"
for example, gradually evolved into the much-read People section.

  For these reasons, the selections in this TIME CAPSULE, while
reflecting the way the magazine looked and read then, have emphases
and priorities quite different from those that Founder-Editors Henry
Luce and Briton Hadden would have brought to bear. The acts of
selecting the texts and writing the bridging passages necessarily
reflect the assumptions and attitudes, conscious or unconscious, of
this decade and of its editor.