By Joey & Rao

Dance Marathons are the latest craze. Many new inventions helped the economic boom of 1920s. The year 1924 was very important. Many famous political and economic events took place. Barney’s opens on New York’s Seventh Avenue at 17th Street. Saks Fifth Avenue opens. People are singing "Tea for Two" and "It had to be you."

• V.I. Lenin dies of sclerosis on January 21. He was 53 years old. Petrograd is renamed Leningrad, and a Josef Stalin  and Leon Trotsky fight for power. More about Lenin
• On January 24 First Winter Olympics held in Chamonix, France.
• The Wrigley Building is completed in May with a 32-story tower on Michigan Avenue for the William Wrigley Jr. Co. It has 442,000 square feet of office space and is the first large building north of the Chicago River.
• On May 10 J. Edgar Hoover is appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
• On May 15, All God’s Chillun Got Wings by a man named Eugene O’Neill opened at New York’s Provincetown Playhouse.  Former football star Paul Robeson was one of the stars in the show. Paul played a black man married to a white woman. The Ku Klux Klan threatens violence. Click here to see a playbill. Click here to see the Playbill.
• Congress passed "The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act" on May 26. It limited the annual quota from any country to 2 percent of U.S. residents of that nationality in 1890. The act totally excludes Korean Americans despite a warning by the Japanese ambassador of deadly consequences if the United States abandoned the Japan's Agreement.
• Kleenex is the first disposable handkerchief. It is introduced on June 12 by Kimberly Clark.
• "Little Orphan Annie" appears October 5 in the NewYork Daily News. Chicago Tribune staff cartoonist Harold Lincoln Gray, 30, has helped Sidney Smith draw "The Gumps" and has developed a blank-eyed, 12-year-old character together with her dog Sandy, her guardian Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks, and his manservant Punjab. The comic strip will campaign against communism, blind liberalism, and other threats to free enterprise and rugged individualism, continuing beyond Gray’s death in 1968.
• On October 10, the Washington Senators take game seven to win the World Series by defeating the New York Giants 4 games to 3.
• President Coolidge won the reelection on a platform of "Coolidge Prosperity" and took office at the White House. Unable to decide between President Wilson’s son-in-law William Gibbs McAdoo from California and New York’s Catholic governor Alfred E. Smith. The Democrats nominated New York corporation lawyer John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot at the convention in Madison Square Garden, which is in New York. Though Davis won only 136 electoral votes and 29 percent of the popular vote against 382 electoral votes and 54 percent of the popular vote for Coolidge.
• In November, Wheaties, (created when a health clinician created crunchy flakes when he spilled gruel onto a hot stove) is introduced by Washburn Crosby Company. The cereal will later become "the breakfast of champions".
• On November 4, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam Ferguson of Texas are the first two women elected Governors in the United States.
• Maxwell Motor Corp. introduced the first Chrysler motorcar in 1924. It was called the "Chrysler Six" could go 70 mph and created quite a stir when it was introduced.
• Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn won the nobel prize in physics in 1924. He won it for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy.
• Using Mount Wilson's powerful telescope Edwin Hubble discovers another galaxy.
• International Business Machines Corporation is organized in New York by Thomas J. Watson.
• The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade moves 2 miles from Central Park West down Broadway to Herald Square, beginning an annual promotion event designed to boost Christmas sales.
• Some of the popular songs of the day were:
• The discovery of insulin gives diabetics a new lease on life. Canadian medical researchers Frederick Grant Banting, at age of 31, and Charles Herbert Best at age 23, isolated the hormone (Banting called it "isletin") from canine pancreatic juices, and use it to save the life of Leonard Thompson, age 14, who was dying in Toronto General Hospital.

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last updated 12/04/05