March 2000

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Archives 1999

1920

• The world population reaches 1.86 billion.
• Eight members of last year's Chicago White Sox baseball team are indicted in September for fraud in connection with last year's 5-to-3 World Series loss to Cincinnati.
• The U.S. population reaches 105.7 million. Urban residents (54 million) for the first time exceed rural residents (51.5 million) but one in every three Americans still lives on a farm, a proportion that will drop in the next 50 years to one in 22.
• Popular Movies: The Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton's The Saphead, The Round Up with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, The Kid with Charlie Chaplin
• Woman suffrage is proclaimed in effect August 26 following Tennessee's ratification of the nineteenth amendment; women voters help elect Harding.
• Joan of Arc is canonized.
• The National Football League (NFL) is organized as the American Professional Football Association.
• Popular songs: "Whispering", "When My Baby Smiles at Me", "I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time", "Margie"
• Babe Ruth signs with the New York Yankees January 3 to begin a 14-year career as "Sultan of Swat" for New York.
• National Prohibition of sales of alcoholic beverages in the United States goes into effect January 16.
• Calvin Coolidge says, "Civilization and profits go hand in hand."
• The first Miss America beauty queen is crowned at Atlantic City, N.J., to begin a lasting tradition.
• Barely 20 percent of America's virgin forest lands remain uncut.
• Baby Ruth is introduced by Chicago's Curtiss Candy Co.
• Notable Books: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
• Prohibition booms sales of coffee, soft drinks, and ice cream sodas, but consumption of alcoholic beverages will continue through illegal sales and homemade "bathtub gin."
• The first Universal Negro Improvement Association international convention opens at Liberty Hall in New York's Harlem under the leadership of Marcus Garvey.
• The American Civil Liberties Union is founded by Methodist minister Harry F. Ward, 47, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Helen Keller, Roger Williams, 36, former War Labor Policies Board chairman Felix Frankfurter, 37, and socialist Norman Thomas, 35. FBI agents soon infiltrate the ACLU.
• The League of Nations meets for the first time November 15 in its new headquarters at Geneva but its membership includes neither the U.S.S.R. nor the United States.
• U.S. motorcar production increases with Ford Model T cars accounting for 54.57 percent of all cars sold.
• Pepsi-Cola's Caleb Bradham has bought sugar at 22¢ per pound, he loses $150,000, and Pepsi-Cola heads toward bankruptcy.
• Ezra Pound moves to Paris.
• Born: Dave Brubeck, Eileen Farrell, Montgomery Clift, Charles Bukowski, Sugar Ray Robinson, Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), Charlie Parker, Stan Musial, Ray Bradbury, Leona Helmsley, Dick Francis, Denton Cooley, Charles Schultz, Eric Rohmer, John Paul Stevens, Bella Abzug, Howard Nemerov, Ravi Shankar, Isaac Stern, James Farmer, Amos Tutuola, Federico Fellini, Mary Margaret Rossi.

Most information from The People's Chronology © 1994. All Rights Trampled.