Once again, World War I looms large on the front page. The United States had declared war on Germany in the spring of 1917 although it was only at about this time that large numbers of American troops were being deployed on European soil.
Because of our declaration of war, many German-speaking individuals in Wisconsin started to speak out in favor of English as a primary language so as to distance themselves from their belligerent cousins across the ocean.
These articles reminded me of a lecture I attended last fall about the German language in Wisconsin. Professor Joe Salmons noted the move from German to English amongst many Wisconsonians and remarked that World War I was certainly a factor but that the rush to English was already well underway at this time.
Also of note in this WWI vein is the following article:
Firstly, I like how the ships are referred to as "Norse" instead of "Norwegian" as you'd likely read today. Secondly, I had no idea that so much shipping was sunk right off our coast. In the above case, the barks were 90 miles offshore. Was that considered territorial waters back in those days? Even if not, 90 miles is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the U.S. mainland.
Moving away from war we encounter some alcohol-fueled domestic conflict.
So, she tried to murder her husband back in 1916 yet he stayed with her despite this?! That guy took the whole "for better or for worse" thing quite seriously indeed.
Here's an ad for a company the likes of which you won't find today.
I love this one. Imagine not having electricity. And I don't mean that a storm has caused a blackout or that you've missed a couple payments that you have to catch up on before the electric company will restore your service. I mean you don't have the wires attached to your house. Well, in 1918 there were still homes in Milwaukee that did not have electric service.
By this time, you might head over to the rather new Downer Theatre to catch a flick.
The Downer is still open today.
And just like today, the newspaper gave Milwaukeeans culinary ideas.
You can't read it in the above photo, but those menu ideas came courtesy of Mrs. M.A. Wilson, "Former Chief Cuisiniere(? – it's difficult to make out) in the Royal Household of the Late Queen Victoria". Wowzers! Interestingly, there is no meat on her menu. Corn dodgers, if you were wondering, are a bit like hush puppies but were often baked instead of fried.
The sports section in the edition yielded this mysterious headline:
When I first read it, I had no idea what skat was but I found a webpage which explains that it is a card game.
Skat was taken to America by German immigrants and a series of Skat congresses along similar lines to those of its home country began at Brooklyn in 1887. An American Skat League was founded in 1898 at the fourth of the series, which continued in 1926. American Skat could be described as a streamlined version of the German game prior to the substantial revisions it underwent in 1927-8.
Skat here refers either to what I know as sheepshead or a close variant of the game with which I am familiar. It might be the only card game to have a statue erected in its honor, as explained at the page referenced above.
Lastly, we have an advertisement for a bogus health remedy, a form of BS which plagues newspapers today, unfortunately.
"…thousands of men and women who keenly feel their excessive thinness." Oh, that's rich. Instead of targeting the overweight, the overly thin are encouraged to consume phosphate to replace those "ugly hollows and angles" with "soft curved lines of health and beauty". Nothing like plain bitro-phosphate indeed.
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