A recent news article about a man with four wives at one time was accompanied by a photo of a man few would consider handsome.Yet he was able to sweet talk four women he met on social media and weasel his way into their hearts and bank accounts, gaining $20,000 from one victim. Yet he will face no jail time! He’s not the first unassuming man to take advantage of women, nor will he be the last. The year 1919 saw the arrest of such a man–the year’s most notorious serial killer.

During WWI, the nation of France suffered the loss of over 1 million men. Most casualties were junior officers and a large proportion came from the countryside. Although women had stepped into men’s roles during the war, the country hadn’t granted them full rights. Women were unprotected without a man–and not well protected from men either.

Although married to his cousin, Henri Landru saw opportunity in this situation of inequality. Between 1912 and 1919, he took out newspaper matrimonial advertisements. He had several locales and aliases and I will tell about his last.

Using the name Georges Dupont, he rented a villa in Gambais, south of Paris and bordering the Rambouillet Forest. The villa was surrounded by walls and boasted a large garden. It was close to the cemetery, the Seine, and far from neighbors. Despite its remoteness, neighbors recalled dark smoke from the chimney on occasion. At his villa, he entertained women, ten or more, all widows in their 40s. They and their bank accounts were never seen again. (Click here for a map of the region and vacation rentals.) All in all, he may have killed twenty women.

Landru was described as “nice but shabby” and his attempts at chivalry were noted as grossly exaggerated. He enjoyed dressing as an eighteenth-century nobleman, eschewing love at first sight, and bestowing flowers and compliments on lonely women. Young Annette Faucher met him through her infatuated aunt. She recalled, “He made me sit in a chair and uncoiled my hair. He went down on his knees, took my hands, fixed me with his eyes, and said, ‘Annette, I am your master, you belong to me.'” She added,”he must be the devil.”

Investigations into Landru began when a policeman noticed sparks and thick smoke coming from his chimney. It was a warm day. A woman was missing. His home and yard were searched. Coincidentally, Monsieur Henri had documents referring to single woman–all of them missing. Landru claimed he had purchased furniture from them. The only corpses on site were three strangled dogs and one cat. To be fair to Landru, French citizens did on occasion burn their possessions during the war, rather than have them seized by the Huns. Police were convinced he was a murderer, wooing lonely women and robbing them. They combed through his villa and dragged a nearby pond. They found a bone fragment from an eye socket and a stocking. Part of a shinbone was found under wall next to the cemetery.

This was enough to arrest him in April 1919. As the police drove away with him, angry women pounded on the car. He met his end via guillotine.

You can read more about him here. He’s been the subject of fiction and non-fiction. Perhaps his head is in a museum.

I’ve posted about how much things have changed since 1919. We know about vitamins. We know about antibiotics. We brush our teeth. Women can vote. We can’t cure lonely hearts. And misogyny still has a grip on us, with nearly 90% of women reporting harassment. Sexist attitudes prevail, particularly in the South. Sexism and authoritarianism go hand in hand. What do authoritarian societies do? They take away women’s rights.

Landru was referred to as a Bluebeard. Bluebeard was a man in a French folk tale who killed a series of wives. He had an unsavory blue beard but kindly women convinced themselves that it wasn’t so bad. One has to wonder if things like war and lack of women’s rights are orchestrated to give bad men access to good women. And ladies, we need to ask ourselves why we have such low standards. Be familiar with signs of a bad man. Things must change.

Much of the information for this post came from this source.

In the 1600s, a plague occurred in England. It was called rickets or “The English disease.”

Children were born healthy but between 6 months and two years, the disease “began to rage.”

The disease was most obvious in the legs and spine. The babies grew up bow legged or knock kneed with curved spines. For a century it was seen in the wealthy, who didn’t go out much and used plenty of white make-up containing lead to make themselves pale and cover their wrinkles. Gradually, people began to see a link between poor diet, lack of outdoor exercise and rickets.Travelers noted that people in Japan, who valued time outdoors, did not have rickets, nor did people in the tropics–even if they were malnourished. Prominent health experts such as Florence Nightingale and Welsh surgeon Hugh Owen Thomas began advocating “sunshine” therapy. Cod liver oil–foul tasting but packed with yet undiscovered Vitamin D– was used as a preventative.By 1919 rickets was associated with poverty and poor living conditions. In 1909, among infants 18 months or less who had died, one doctor found rickets in 96% (214 of 221) at autopsy.

WWI was hard on Germany and its allies and orphans were particularly ill-fed, kept indoors, and thus were rickety. A German doctor,Kurt Huldschinsky, noted how pale they were and estimated that half had rickets. He attempted to treat them, first with x-rays and then with ultraviolet light on one arm. The later treatment improved rickets in the exposed arm and the doctor theorize that sunlight must help the body make a chemical that prevented rickets. Vitamins were newly discovered (as of 1912). That very same year–1919-Sir Edward Mellanby, did experiments on dogs with rickets and discovered Vitamin D and its role in preventing rickets. Thus it was established that exposure to sunlight and Vitamin D, such as in cod liver oil, could prevent and reverse rickets.Following this, having a healthy tan became important to white people and being outside was important to all. Accordingly, women’s fashions became more revealing.

By the 1920s, Vitamin D was added to milk in the United States. We now know Vitamin D is important in calcium absorption and behaves like a hormone, affecting all cells in your body. Although it has been touted as a cure all for everything from cancer to depression and it does help the immune system, some of the claims need more study.

Rickets can still be found today. Children have even died from rickets! Those most susceptible are young, breastfed, elderly, thin, smoke, drink, have dark skin, and live in northern or cloudy climates. There are also cases of genetic deficiencies causing rickets.

Children with growing pains can be helped by a dose of Vitamin D.

Be careful. You can get too much Vitamin D. Confusion, stomach pain, fatigue, and thirst are among the symptoms.

Going outside with non-covering clothes for 20 minutes several times a week can provide enough Vitamin D. Prolonged exposure doesn’t translate into more Vitamin D so no need to overdo. Vitamin D is fat soluble and stored in the body. A dose can last up to two months.

High Vitamin D foods include salmon, trout, mushrooms, and eggs.

Rickets is once again on the rise in the United States, the UK, and Canada. Fortunately, since 1919, the cause is known and it can be cured.

In 1919, there were 104 million people in the United States and 6.8 million cars.When cars were first developed, they were toys for the rich. It wasn’t until 1908 when an affordable car, the Model T, was built. In 1913, the first assembly line helped speed the production of the Model T. A Model T could go 40-45 mph and got fuel economy of 13-21 mpg. The Ford Company offered an astonishingly high wage of $5 a day. Although electric cars were also available in the 1900s, cheap gasoline–and the Model T– edged them out of the market.

 

This video of 1919 New York shows a city filled with cars and trolleys. It would be another 20 years before cars replaced horse drawn carriages.

Airplane technology leapt forward during WW1 which was just ending in 1919. WWI saw the first air conflicts during war. Pilots were the new sexy heroes. After the war, ten thousand men had trained to fly.

What does a country do with extra airplanes? Beginning in 1919, the government sold them for a fraction of the cost. Most of these planes were the Curtiss Jennys. Many ex-military bought their own planes and performed stunts and gave rides. Thus began the Barnstormer phenomenon where people paid to watch daring areal performances and get airplane rides. This became a popular entertainment in the Roaring Twenties. There were few restrictions on this entertainment. Anyone who could scrape together the $50 or so to buy a plane and some lessons and who had the nerve to fly and do stunts could get together an act. This was an equal opportunity venture and many wing walkers and dare devils were women and African Americans.

I took this photo at the Henry Ford Museum

Barnstorming was popular from about 1920-1927. It was a brave way to make a living and escape poverty. As airplanes became more common, they became regulated and the dangers and economic mobility of Barnstorming came to an end. The great American road trip, however, was just beginning.

Albert Einstein wasn’t a famous scientist in early 1919. His theory that massive objects such as the sun can affect space  was unproven. Most people believed, as Isaac Newton had stated, that 

space was unchangeable. You know, heavenly. And with one way to observe it.

In 1905, Albert Einterin had proposed his Theory of Special Relativity, with acknowledged assistance from Dutch physicist Hendrick Lorentz.

This Theory dealt with light. Einstein proposed that light has the same speed no matter how it is observed. This is different than for example, a bullet shot from a moving train. To someone watching the train pass, the bullet would travel at its speed plus that of the train. Light however, doesn’t change speed. It won’t move faster if you shine a flashlight from a train (He came up with this theory while riding a train.) Thus, Einstein said, nothing can be accelerated to go faster than the speed of light. This theory also describes the famous E=mc2 equation showing that energy and mass are interchangeable. This equation is the basis of nuclear chemistry and nuclear bombs. Bombs either involve loss of mass due to fusion (creating a heavier element from lighter ones as powers the sun) or fission (busting an atomic nucleus into smaller pieces). In either case, mass is converted to energy in the process.

One consequence of Special Relativity is that time and space are not constant but can change relative to the observer. If a clock is moving along, as if on a train, time is “normal” to a person on the train. But to an observer, it appears to be moving slower…it contracts. If the train can reach the speed of light, time will appear to stop. Likewise, as the train moves away, it appears shorter in length (but not height or width). Near the speed of light, it will contract to have almost no length.

As for mass, which as we know is related to energy, it will get larger and larger as the train gains speed until the mass will be almost infinite. Another way to think of this is that the train will be so massive it will become unstoppable. The contraction in length and in time and increase in mass are called the Lorentz factor and can be calculated with an equation.

In 1916, Einstein proposed the theory of General Relativity: gravity is caused by curves in space and time. That’s right, attraction is not caused by masses acting on each other as Newton thought, but because objects bend space-time.

His ideas make sense–the sun can make a dent in space like a bowling ball or a heavy partner on a mattress. The dent can be thought of as pulling planets towards the sun as if they are circling a drain.

Gravity isn’t the force Newton thought it was. The bodies aren’t acting on each other. They are reacting to the dents made in space. Each plant makes its own little dent.

Here’s the Earth making a little dent in space circling around the Sun’s bigger dent. From https://theconversation.com/how-einsteins-general-theory-of-relativity-killed-off-common-sense-physics-50042

Instead of saying that the Earth and the Sun attract each other in a fixed stage-like realm, Einstein said that each warps the space and time surrounding the other. This is what Einstein called General Relativity. He took his inspiration from the orbit of Mercury.

One prediction of General Relativity was that light from the stars would be bent towards the sun as they passed it. (This was also predicted by Classical Gravity but not to the same extent.) He calculated that the shift of light from the Hyades cluster would be bent one two thousandths of a degree. Of course, the sun was too bright to be able to observe this, until the eclipse of 1919. Several British and Dutch astronomers saw this as a great time to observe the light as it passed by the sun. They devised an experiment where they would measure the light bending as it passed the sun during the eclipse.

“To pinpoint the position of the Hyades in the sky, (British astronomer) Eddington first took a picture at night from Oxford. Then, on 29 May 1919, he photographed the Hyades as they lay almost directly behind the sun during the total eclipse… experienced that day. Comparing the two measurements, Eddington was able to show that the shift was as Einstein had predicted and too large to be explained by Newton’s theory.”

Another phenomenon predicted by Einstein that held true is that light will lose energy and change color (become more red) as it is affected by gravity.

Another key idea of General Relativity is the equivalence principle. Gravity pulling in one direction is the same to as acceleration in the opposite direction. A train accelerating forwards feels just like sideways gravity pushing you back against your seat. An elevator accelerating upwards feels just like gravity pushing you into the floor. (Elevators became popular in the 1880s.) Two difference forces might feel the same: this is sometimes called Einstein’s Elevator.

Today’s GPS devices rely on the precise measurements made by the theory of relativity.

The 1919 eclipse made Einstein famous. Most people didn’t really understand any of the science but they seized on it as a blow to the absolute world, including moral taboos and “absolute” roles for women they’d been raised with. It was particularly popular with the young who saw the universe as giving them permission to seek their own truths.

At the time, Albert was divorcing his first wife, a physicist, in order to marry his cousin, who he felt would take better care of him. Wisely, his ex had put in the divorce settlement that if he won the Nobel prize, she’d get half the money. He won the prize and never did publish anything as grand as those two theories developed while collaborating with his first wife, Meleva Maric. People, including their son, to speculated that the work was as much hers as his. She did get half of the prize money, but struggled financially for the rest of her life. And Albert was an absolute jerk to her. Read here for more.

Would you have enjoyed living 100 years ago, given the few rights for women, before the passage of the 19th Amendment? Why were women denied their rights? How was it acceptable? Standing in the way of rights for women was The Cult of Domesticity, a middle class social schema for white people in the US and England. Women were to act like pure, religious flowers with no rights and no responsibilities outside of the home. Their only weapon was their purity and shaming their husbands into civilized behavior. lot of this “look” was maintained by healthy middle-class wages along with poorly compensated servants or in the South, slaves. The Cult of Domesticity had its heyday between 1820-1860. It was fairly easy to get people to accept this idea for a while. However, both the Civil War and WWI relied on women to do men’s jobs, leaving women wanting their share of society. See photos here. 

Add to this mix the efficiency movement, encouraging productive lives for everyone.

The new wish for freedom as well as health made 1919 a time when corsets were falling out of favor, being replaced with bras and girdles. Women wanted undergarment freedom along with the right to vote!

Carrie Chapman Catt, who grew up in Charles City, Iowa, and graduated from Iowa State, was a leader in the Suffrage Movement, which, by 1917, was beginning to rely on militant protests such as hunger strikes and arrests as suggested by Alice Paul, shown below being force fed.

By 1918, president Woodrow Wilson, who had been a target of protests, agreed to support the cause. The 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was passed on June 4, 1919. It came after a push of nearly 100 years.

It then needed to be ratified. Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were the first states to do this on June 10.  At the end of 1919, 22 states had ratified it. 36 states were needed. This was achieved in August 1920. Women had won the right to vote.

It took until 1984 for all states to agree to ratify. Those in purple lagged behind.

1919 saw gains for women’s equality. Women have only recently had equal rights and these rights did not come easily, nor will they be easily regained if lost.

A teacher friend of mine asked her class if they had heard of the Suffragettes. All stared at her blankly. Not even 100 years has passed! 1919 and the 19th Amendment are too important to forget.

Modern playing card honors the Suffragettes.

In any case, 1919 stands out as a shot across the bow of the Cult of Domesticity. Let’s not go back in time.

 My house was built in 1919. I’d like to look at some events from that era. What was shaping the world when my house was built? What progress has been made, and not made?

Much has changed since 1919. Science has marched on, clothes have gotten more comfortable, lifestyles have evolved. In politics, not much has changed, unfortunately. Let’s begin with the grim and take a look at world events from 1919.

1919 marked the end of The Great War, known now as WW1, a war that saw tanks, trench warfare, submarine warfare, and poison gas. The war was viewed by most as “senseless slaughter” that set up many problems we still have today. There was no clear winner on Armistice Day (Nov. 11, 1918)

Some lessons were learned, at least for a while: don’t go to war when diplomacy might work and don’t start a war thinking it will be over quickly.  No, we didn’t retain the lessons but in 1919, there was all hope we would.

The adversaries in WW1 were Allies (Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the United States) and  Central Powers which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. With the end of the war, 1919 saw the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire (sometimes called the Turkish Empire, based around the Mediterranean).  These folks had helped defeat the Roman Empire. They had a large slaved-based army lead by sultans and a monarch ruling ruthlessly for hundreds of years. The Empire fell into a state of relative peace for a time and became anti-science, favoring religion instead. This area had been the cradle of chemistry, but science gradually slipped out of vogue as being worldly and not focused on god. Thus, the Ottoman Empire lost its edge. Napoleon took a good swipe at the Empire and when the Ottomans attacked Russia in 1914, other countries piled on to defeat them. Lesson learned here: don’t let religion rule over your scientists. 

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. It was hard on Germany, put all of the blame on them,  and ignored the suffering and starving its citizens had endured.  In the United States, German-Americans were the most hated ethnic group. They were accused of being ruthless and cruel and called Huns, although they were primarily beer brewers. President Woodrow Wilson, in perhaps one of the only punctuation prejudices known to history, attacked their German-American self-identification, calling the hyphen a dagger and a weapon. The result was a loss of German-speaking communities, German presses, and even a loss of German last names as people changed the spelling to hide their their nationality: Huber became Hoover, Joder became Yoder, Muller changed to Miller, and even Haustein turned into Hausten. This pressure was pronounced in cities like Milwaukee. Less so in San Diego, where my family lived, thus no change in spelling, although a Navy captain changed his name to Hausten. Did you ever wonder why the element tungsten has the symbol W? It’s because the German term for the element was Wolfram, and Germans who discovered/isolated the element named it thus. In a fit of pettiness, the name was changed but the symbol was used far too much to meet the same fate.

Ethnic prejudices serve political advantage. They can unite people against an Other. Long term, they do nothing positive. This is one lesson we as a nation have not completely learned. At least we still send kids to Kindergarten, but the confusion on the periodic table of elements remains.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. It was hard on Germany, put all of the blame on them,  and ignored the suffering and starving its citizens had endured.  In the United States, German-Americans were the most hated ethnic group. They were accused of being ruthless and cruel and called Huns, although they were primarily beer brewers. President Woodrow Wilson, in perhaps one of the only punctuation prejudices known to history, attacked their german-American status, calling the hyphen a dagger and a weapon. The result was a loss of German-speaking communities, German presses, and even a loss of German last names as people changed the spelling to hide their their nationality, Huber becoming Hoover and Joder becoming Yoder, Muller changing to Miller, and even Haustein becoming Hausten. 

 

 

 

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The Haustein’s of my last name didn’t feel the pressure to change. They were living in San Diego and didn’t feel the pressure that those in Milwaukee and St. Louis did. One family member who changed was in the Navy and lived in Hawaii.