The Daily Agenda: Turkey talk 100 years ago
What were Tucsonans talking about at Thanksgiving 1923? ... Not too different than what we talk about today ... City officials ask state about Prop 413 recount.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
Turkey day is tomorrow, which means it’s the time of year when we gather with family and friends and talk about what’s on our minds, and what’s happening in the world.
If you’re staying in Tucson, you can always talk about the University of Arizona football team’s string of impressive wins. For those of you who are more politically minded, maybe you’ll chat about the recent city elections or who should be president.
We know what’s going on today, but we wanted to see what Tucson families were talking about 100 years ago. So we went through the archives of the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Citizen on newspapers.com.
It was enlightening. This treasure trove of history showed Tucson starting to thrive in the modern age, and the roots of a newspaper culture that is fading away before our eyes.
But more than anything, we found myriad ways Tucson in 1923 mirrors Tucson today.
In November 1923, Tucsonans also were getting amped about the UA football team — ”Wildcats by name and wildcats by nature” — as they geared up to play Santa Clara in the UA’s homecoming game.
Like today, Tucson held elections for city council members in November and relatively few people cast their ballots. The editorial board of the Tucson Citizen lamented voter apathy and the political machines that exploit it, in “off year” politics.
“Now, the Citizen is making no sensational charges of improper influence, and we do not charge that any of the Democratic candidates will enter the council, if elected, to do the bidding of any certain politician—but we do say that there was a politicians’ ‘slate’ in the recent Democratic primary and that as a result of the activity of those politicians that slate was elected.”
Education sparked heated debate back then, just like it does now. Instead of emotional social learning or which bathrooms transgender students should use, the hot topic in 1923 was the teaching of evolution.
A pair of UA professors were invited to give a series of “non-controversial” lectures about evolution from the pulpit of the First Congregational Church. A student wrote that “all the fuss” was about “the attack of evolution and its advocates upon the authenticity of the Bible; it is about professors standing before their classes and ridiculing those who have implicit faith in the Word without giving those attacked the legal privilege of reply.” Sound familiar?
The Colorado River caused a lot of tension last year among the states that depend on it. The same could be said for 1923. Californians wanted a dam on the river to protect farms in the Imperial Valley. But they wouldn’t even discuss an agreement on water rights with Arizona and Nevada unless every state that used the river was involved.
When Caitlin and Curt worked at the Star, we often heard complaints from readers about national and international news dominating the front page. Well, that’s what both the Star and the Citizen were doing back in 1923.
Prohibition was the law of the land and the nation’s eyes turned to cross-border smuggling. Just not the U.S.-Mexico border. Detroit and other cities on the U.S.-Canada border were the focus as U.S. officials tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Canada to crack down on booze smuggling.
The Ku Klux Klan still had political power back in 1923. Legislators in Oklahoma were debating a bill that would require the KKK’s membership rolls be made public, which KKK-aligned legislators very much did not want to happen. Unfortunately, the KKK-backers were winning the debate in Oklahoma.
Beyond political news, Tucsonans were dealing with growing pains as the modern economy took over.
The city still didn’t have an office building, so local officials launched a campaign to construct a 10-story building where lawyers and business people could work. If that wasn’t possible, they said a six-story building would do the job.
But agriculture still played an important role. Local cotton farmers were upset about a years-long cotton quarantine, even though the boll weevil infestation was no longer an issue. They were planning a big gathering to persuade state officials it was time to end the quarantine.
Tucsonans were talking about car traffic back then, just as we do now. Except in 1923, cars were kind of new. Reporters wrote about “autoists” or “motorists” much more than “drivers.” And instead of finding ways to avoid traffic-related deaths on Tucson’s streets, like we do in 2023, they marveled that over 200 cars passed through the city every day.
As winter set in, city officials and the Tucson Chamber of Commerce were bracing for 80,000 cars from the east and “middle west” driven by people heading to California. They were trying to divert that traffic onto Old Spanish Highway. They also complained that out-of-state motorists were using local roads, even though they didn’t pay taxes to repair those roads.
Speaking of “new” technology, the Tucson Gas, Electric Light and Power Company urged readers to “Keep a lamp on so you don’t ruin your eyes!” and “Modern household accessories make comfort for the wife and beauty for the home.”
We’re reporters, so we couldn’t help but notice the newspaper culture back then was much livelier than it is today. Editorial boards argued with each other all the time, even from across the country.
We enjoyed the hard-nosed attitude of editorial writers back in 1923. Upgrade to a paid subscription so we can keep hardening our own noses.
The editorial board of the Atlanta Constitution didn’t know what they were talking about, the Tucson Citizen’s editorial board declared. Former President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations would have worked better if he had sent a bipartisan delegation. “The whole trouble is that Wilson was obsessed by the idea that he alone possessed the wisdom to draft a treaty,” they said.
And it looks like a lot of the issues discussed by editorial boards back then haven’t gone away. Does this editorial from the Star ring any bells?
“As long as crooks are able to get firearms, there’ll be shooting. Even the law-abiding citizen is apt to have moments of rage or drunkenness when possession of a pistol is dangerous. But local restrictions cannot be other than puny until the national government prohibits, in interstate commerce, the sale and shipment of revolvers except for officers of the law."
Newspaper readers need a little flavor to go along with hard news as much now as they did in 1923.
Russian movie audiences were thrilled by U.S. adventure and detective movies, so a cottage industry sprang up in Germany making phony U.S. movies. The only problem was that “the Russian audiences were not deceived, however, and gave them the ‘horse laugh.’”
The personal lives of European royalty, even minor royals, were intriguing to readers in 1923, like when Prince Hans Heinrich asked the Pope for dispensation so he could get married again, to a woman 43 years younger than him.
Howard Carter’s excavation of Egyptian tombs captivated the world, so much so that “Old King Tut left walking cane in tomb” made headlines in Tucson.
This was long before the internet gutted print media, so Craigslist hadn’t yet beaten out newspapers for classified ads. And Tucson’s merchants took advantage of it.
If you groan about Christmas season starting earlier every year, you should know the Christmas shopping season began well before Thanksgiving in 1923. Newspaper pages were covered with ads for all kinds of Christmas gifts.
And local merchants weren’t going to let a gathering of the Arizona State Teachers Association go to waste. The Harry A. Drachman Shoe Co. welcomed them with a sale on silk hosiery and comfy slippers, while Wilson’s Studio tried to entice teachers to take their Christmas photo while they were in town.
For Tucsonans looking for some entertainment, “The Fourth Musketeer” was ending its run at the Opera House, “home of Arizona’s largest pipe organ.” They also could go see “Java Head” at the Rialto Theater on Thursday and Saturday.
The Rialto was all set to host the Sistine Chapel Choir, from Vatican City, on Friday. The reporter who wrote about it added, in a style typical of the time, that an organizer of the visit by the choir, Father Gilbert O’Malley, assistant pastor at the All Saints Catholic Church in Tucson, had recovered from the bronchial infection that brought him from Colorado two years earlier. He was back at the Benedictine monastery in Pueblo, according to Father Thomas Connelly.
All in all, Tucson in 1923 had a lot going on. It was starting to develop a local business community, it was tuned in to world events, and there appeared to be a vibrant civic life.
As we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner and try to come up with things we’re thankful for, we’ll leave you with these words by Elsket Beach from her “Thoughts of Tucson” column on Sunday, Nov. 25, 1923.
Getting a second opinion: The Tucson City Council is going to ask the state attorney general and secretary of state for advice on whether the city needs to do a recount of votes for Prop 413, which would give the mayor and council members big pay raises and was passing by a razor-thin margin, the Arizona Luminaria's Carolina Cuellar reports. The city attorney said on Friday that state law did not apply to the Prop 413 election. At a special meeting to canvass the election results on Tuesday, and after hearing concerns from Tucsonans, the council members decided to ask state officials to weigh in.
Taking the reins: The Humane Society of Southern Arizona announced Monday that, after last month’s small mamal debacle, longtime animal welfare advocate Jose Ocaño will sign on as Interim Chief Program Officer at the start of next month, KVOA’s Sarika Sood reports. Ocaño has more than two decades of experience in animal welfare and previously worked as executive director of Pima Animal Care Center and senior director of People and Culture at Best Friends Animal Society.
Protecting free speech: Dozens of University of Arizona students, faculty and community members held a sit-in Monday to protest the suspension of two College of Education faculty members after they spoke about the Israel-Hamas war during class, the Arizona Daily Star’s Ellie Wolfe writes. The sit-in was organized by students in the college who told dean Robert Berry that it would continue until the two professors were reinstated to their positions.
Unequal treatment: A new report from the advocacy group No More Deaths found that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department has a history of not responding to calls from lost migrants, Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara reports. A review of thousands of distress calls showed a segregated and discriminatory system where calls are treated differently based on the location of the call and the caller’s ability to speak English. Sheriff Chris Nanos has disputed the report, saying proximity to another agency is the only thing that factors into the decision of whether to transfer a call.
A small victory: A recent court ruling in a lawsuit over a teenager’s death in the Pima County jail could lead to new insights into why people keep dying of drug-related causes in the jail, the Arizona Luminaria’s John Washington writes. A federal judge ruled last week that the lawsuit about 18-year-old Sylvestre Inzunza’s death may proceed to the legal stage of discovery, meaning parties must share previously undisclosed documents. Since the beginning of 2022, at least 18 people have died in the jali and another 23 people have died within 30 days of being released.
Hitting the road: The UA College of Veterinary Medicine’s mobile surgical unit just completed a week-long stay at Pinal County Animal Care and Control in Casa Grande, its inaugural service trip since the veterinary program launched in 2020, UA News’ Logan Burtch-Buus writes. The unit is a 53-foot travel trailer that holds all the equipment and supplies needed to perform tests and procedures on a variety of animals. UA faculty were able to complete 20 spay or neuter surgeries for the Casa Grande shelter, allowing those animals to be adopted much faster than the four to six weeks they’d spend waiting in the shelter for their surgery appointments.
24 mph: The highest wind speed recorded at Tucson International Airport on Tuesday, a surprisingly windy day.