1921 Society (1)

Society

1921. Billy Mitchell sinks a former German battleship July 21 to prove his contention that a strategic air force makes large navies obsolete.

1921. Southern Ireland gains Dominion status December 6 in a treaty signed with Britain. The Catholic Irish Free State (Eire) embraces 26 of Ireland's 32 counties but the six counties in Protestant Northern Ireland remain part of the United Kingdom and conflict between the two will continue.

1921. The United States has nearly 20,000 business failures and by September nearly 3.5 million Americans are out of work.

1921. The Teapot Dome scandal that will help tarnish the Harding administration has its beginnings as Navy Secretary Edwin Denby transfers control of naval oil reserves to the Department of the Interior whose secretary Albert Fall secretly leases Teapot Dome to private oil operators Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny.

1921. A Federal Highway Act passed by Congress November 9 begins to coordinate state highways and to standardize U.S. road-building practice.

1921. Heart disease becomes the leading cause of death in America after 10 years of jockeying for the lead with tuberculosis.

1921. The Council of the American Medical Association refuses to endorse an A.M.A. resolution proposed in 1917 that would oppose use of alcohol as a beverage and would discourage its use as therapeutic agent. More than 15,000 physicians and 57,000 druggists and drug manufacturers applied for licenses to prescribe and sell liquor in the first 6 months after passage of the Volstead Act in 1919 and by 1928 physicians will be making an estimated $40 million per year by writing prescriptions for whiskey.

1921. Poliomyelitis strikes former U.S. Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 39, while he vacations at Campobello Island off Nova Scotia. Popularly called Infantile paralysis, it will leave Roosevelt crippled for life.