New York closed out the war, fourteen months after the Armistice, with a parade for the last six hundred American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) troops to come home . . . The Cook County Jail in Chicago made two hundred prisoners view the hanging of a desperado so that they would learn to behave themselves . . . A "Rum Rebellion" in Michigan was put down without bloodshed . . . For the first time in five months, President Wilson was well enough to go for an automobile ride . . . The House decided that Prohibition was enforceable and voted $1,500,000 to enforce it . . . The Senate again voted down Mr. Wilson's Treaty of Versailles . . . A movement to wear overalls to bring down high clothing prices spread over the nation from the South . . . Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and Rachel Littleton were married and the bride counted a million dollars' worth of gifts . . . A Dartmouth College boy killed another student in an argument over whiskey . . . The Prohibition Party nominated William Jennings Bryan for President . . . Ray Chapman, Cleveland shortstop, was killed by a pitched ball . . . A man in the Polo Grounds dropped dead from excitement as Babe Ruth hit his forty-third homer of the season.

John D. Rockefeller gave $63,763,357 to charity and brought his total benefactions to $475,000,000 . . . President-elect Harding went fishing to relax himself for the ardors ahead . . . Georges Carpentier knocked out Battling Levinsky . . . Jack Dempsey stood trial as a draft evader and beat it . . . John and Lionel Barrymore appeared on Broadway together in The Jest and then John did his first Shakespearean role in Richard III . . . Chaplin made The Kid with Jackie Coogan . . . Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon won the Pulitzer Prize for drama . . . The Hatfield-McCoy feud in Kentucky produced several deaths. . . Man O'War ran a mile and a quarter in 2:03 for a purse of $75,000 and a gold cup . . . Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Wilson had tea at the White House . . . Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for vice-president against Calvin Coolidge and went down in the Harding landslide . . . Harry S. Truman was a civilian again . . . Henry Ford established the Dearborn Independent, America's leading anti-Semitic journal . . . The best-sellers in fiction were Zane Grey's The Man of the Forest and Peter B. Kyne's Kindred of the Dust, but there were some other books moving too: Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, Sherwood Anderson's Poor White and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. In non-fiction, John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace was near the top of the list, but H.G. Wells' The Outline of History would sell very strongly right through 1924 . . .

H.L. Mencken didn't like all the back-slapping in the business community. "The first Rotarian," said the Sage of Baltimore, "was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack" . . . George White paid George Gershwin fifty dollars a week to write tunes for the Scandals of 1920 . . . Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Georges Carpentier went before the Hollywood cameras. The pay is high, the product low . . . The Ku Klux Klan came back—with a large distaste for Negroes, Catholics, Jews, and the foreigners in the big cities . . . A jury in Hammond, Indiana, acquitted a man who had killed an alien for saying "To hell with the United States."

In Massachusetts, there was an incident that would reverberate around the world for seven years and write a sorry chapter into our history. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with shooting down two guards during a payroll holdup in Braintree. The nation paid no attention. Sacco and Vanzetti were just two more Anarchists hauled into the net—for an alleged murder rather than a political misdeed.