1922 by Nick Rennison - Introduction It was a decade with a distinctive character. Even at the time, those who were living through them recognised that the 1920s were unusual. They deserved a special status. In America, they were dubbed ''The Roaring Twenties'' or ''The Jazz Age''; in France, they wereLes Années Folles(''The Crazy Years''). The world had just emerged from a war that had killed millions of people and a global pandemic that had ended the lives of tens of millions more. The so-called ''Spanish'' flu, named because Spain had initially seemed one of the most severely hit countries, had first shown itself during the last months of the First World War. It had spread over the next few years, infections coming in several waves, until almost a third of the world''s population is now estimated to have caught it and between 20 and 50 million people had died of it. (Some estimates put the number of fatalities even higher.
) Those who had come of age during these years and survived the twin traumas of war and disease were often disoriented and directionless. They were, in the phrase coined by the expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein, the ''Lost Generation''. The only aim many of the members of this generation in Europe and America had was to enjoy themselves. In an era of dance crazes, Hollywood excess, illicit drinking and a relaxation of sexual morals, hedonism was the name of the game.This determination to party was only one aspect of the 1920s. It was also a period of upheaval and change. Of all the years in this dramatic decade, 1922 was the most turbulent. It was a year which altered the map of the world.
In the wake of the war, an empire tottered and fell. The Ottoman Empire, which had survived for 600 years, ended with its last sultan forced into exile. Even the British Empire, which reached its greatest extent in the 1920s, was showing signs of decay. In Ireland, the Anglo-Irish War had come to an end in late 1921. A peace treaty had been signed that created the Irish Free State but triggered a brutal civil war the following year. Egypt had been granted a diluted form of self-government. The independence movement in India was gaining strength. Elsewhere, new nations came into existence and older nations made radical changes in their politics.
The last few days of 1922 saw the official foundation of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Earlier in the year, Mussolini and his Blackshirts had embarked on their ''March to Rome'' which had resulted in Italy becoming the first Fascist state.In the arts, traditional forms were proving inadequate and writers, musicians and painters were seeking different means of expressing themselves. In Anglophone literature, the publication in February 1922 of arguably the most influential novel of the century (James Joyce''sUlysses) was followed in October by that of the most influential poem (TS Eliot''sThe Waste Land). In society, already changed by the trauma of war, the conventions and morals of the past seemed increasingly outmoded; new ways of thinking and behaving were making their appearance. My book aims to provide a portrait of this rollercoaster of a year.Through a series of snapshots of events, from murders to football matches, from epoch-changing events like the establishment of the Soviet Union to artistic landmarks, I have attempted to give some sense of what the world was like 100 years ago. Some of what follows will provide reminders that, in LP Hartley''s famous words, ''the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there''; some passages will seem all too familiar.
A century later the influence of events from 1922 lives on in many different ways. Modern Ireland has been shaped by what happened in the country that year. The treatment of diabetes with insulin (see January) continues to save and improve lives. The little-known animator who established Laugh-O-grams Films in Kansas City (see May) went on to create a media empire that still plays a central role in popular culture today. Sport still holds the mass appeal it was just beginning to achieve in 1922. Racial divisions still plague modern societies. As we emerge from a worldwide pandemic not so dissimilar to the one experienced by an earlier generation, it''s easy to understand the determination of so many people in 1922 just to enjoy themselves. I hope that all of these snapshots of a past that sometimes carries surprising echoes of the present prove entertaining and enlightening.