1919 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

The American Legion is founded at Paris in mid-March by delegates from combat and service units of the American Expeditionary Force and granted a national charter by Congress September 16 (see VFW, 1913). Avowedly nonpolitical and nonsectarian, the Legion is open to anyone who has served honorably in the U.S. military and received an honorable discharge, it will push for the establishment of hospitals and other services, champion the cause of compensation and pensions for the disabled and for widows and orphans, and grow to have some 3 million members enrolled in 16,000 posts nationwide (see Veterans Administration, 1930).

The pogo stick patented by Ellenville, N.Y., inventor George B. Hansburg, 32, is a bouncing metal stick that thousands will ride in the 1920s and will be the basis of a dance number in The Ziegfeld Follies. Chorus girls at New York's Hippodrome will perform on them, contests will be held to see who can make the most consecutive jumps, and Hansburg will continue to make the sticks until he sells his SBI Enterprises in the early 1970s to another Ellenville company that will continue making pogo sticks into the 21st century.

Cooper Underwear Co. of Kenosha, Wis., introduces knitted undershirts and boxer shorts to make up for falling sales of its patented Kenosha Klosed Krotch union suit introduced 9 years ago (see 1911). The U.S. military issued woven shorts to recruits beginning in 1917, the men found them far more comfortable than "long-handled" underwear (especially in warm weather), and increased use of central heating is contributing to the demand for lighter, less bulky underwear. Cooper also produces pajamas and nightshirts, company sales soar, and Cooper will continue to make innovations (see 1935).

Suzanne Lenglen appears at Wimbledon wearing a one-piece pleated dress without a petticoat, a shocking departure from the traditional tennis dress.

London-born couturier Edward Molyneux, 27, opens a Paris fashion house that he will head until 1950, gaining an international reputation.

Paris-born couturier Lucien Lelong, 29, opens a Paris fashion house. Awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery during his service from 1914 to 1917, he joined his father's dressmaking firm in 1918 after recuperating from severe wounds and will show designs under his own name beginning in 1923.

Paris couturière Evelyn Vionnet reopens the salon she ran briefly just before the Great War and will soon dominate the fashion scene with her bias-cut dresses and skirts of pointy handkerchief draperies. Paris holds its first fashion shows since the war, displaying feminine styles that in many cases show the influence of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, doing without corsets, using soft materials and panniers to emphasize hips, and introducing skirts that hang seven to eight inches from the ground. American visitors call the skirts too short and fill in backless evening gowns with lace.

The song "Alice Blue Gown" takes its title from a color named for the outspoken Washington hostess Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now 35, whose late father, the former president, has died in January.

Hattie Carnegie, Inc. is incorporated by New York designer Carnegie, who has dissolved her partnership with Ruth Rose Roth and made her first trip to Paris (see 1909). She brings back sample fashions, redesigns them to satisfy American tastes, will open a shop in East 49th Street in 1925, add a ready-to-wear line in 1928, and in 10 years will have annual sales of $3.5 million (see 1942).

Hair-straightener millionaire Madam C. J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove Walker) dies at her Irvington, N.Y., villa May 3 at age 51, leaving two-thirds of her fortune to charitable and educational institutions (including a girls' academy that she has founded in West Africa) (see Johnson Products, 1954).

Advertisements for the deodorant cream Odo-Ro-No introduce the term "B.O.," meaning body odor, to lure women concerned about armpit perspiration odor.

Mitsouko is introduced by the Paris perfumer Guerlain, whose managing director Raymond Guerlain has given it the Japanese word for mystery (see l'Heure Bleue, 1912; Shalimar, 1925).

The Hoover vacuum cleaner invented in 1907 arrives in British stores; Hoover will become a generic vacuum cleaner in Britain and hoover will become a verb. The Electric Suction Sweeper Co. in America will become the Hoover Co. in 1922, and by 1926 more than half the households in Zanesville, Ohio, will have vacuum cleaners.

Johnson's Wax founder S. C. Johnson dies at Racine, Wis. His son Herbert F. takes over the company that Johnson founded in 1886.