As I cracked open the Time Magazine collection, I could tell I was into something I had never been exposed to. That is, a magazine with hardly any pictures and articles covering things I had never even heard of. As I read deeper into it though, my interest began to spark; I was recognizing companies in the advertisements and even connecting some of the articles with information I have learned in history classes over the past eight or so years.
The first aspect of the magazine that caught my eye was the advertisements (I suppose they are still doing their job even nearly a century out of relevance). Let me also say I specifically picked an issue of Time before the Great Depression, simply because that wasn’t something I was exactly in the mood to cover the excitement I am experiencing with Spring Break looming five day away. However because of this, I noticed certain things about the advertisements: they nearly all seemed to be about luxuries. This century was always known as the “Roaring Twenties;” businesses succeeding, happy people, and the introduction of buying on credit gave the American people every reason to have fun with their lives. Ads for luxuries such as fine stationaries (funny to see that advertised since the written word has nearly been phased out by our culture) littered the pages. Also present were pages advertising video cameras, cabins in the beautiful woods of Tacoma, and cigarettes. But not just regular cigarettes, Murad brand, “for the man who feels entitled to life’s better things.” Even though our country recently went through an economic slump, we live in a culture where luxury seems to be very important to everyone, and due to this these advertising schemes don’t seem too different to the ones we seem today. Though it is funny to think about how much this magazine had changed in entirety just a mere two or three years later.
While on my literary scavenger hunt, came across two articles that I found very interesting, and it was funny how pertinent each might be to the college lifestyle: prohibition and pornography. Obviously I’m not saying our campus needs prohibition nor is a pornography collection a staple to every student, but alcohol and sexuality are definitely rampant over college campuses.
The prohibition article isn’t even anything special, but it just sparked my though about the uproar that would occur if TCU were to be made a dry campus. Obviously the article was written before the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933 repealing it, which made me think more. Does it look bad when a college switches from a dry to wet campus. To be honest, I feel like it might, almost like the school is giving in, saying “well, if they’re gonna do it anyway, might as well let ‘em.”
Even more striking than this is the article about a B. MacFadden who was frowned upon by the public eye for his production of pornographic material, and by that I mean a skit involving women in “scanty costume” being measured “for hip, breast, ankle, [and] calf dimensions” in order to get a job as a stenographer. It’s funny to see how this was called blasphemous back then, and today could practically be in a PG rated movie. If this is pornography, then you could practically call any party that goes on around here a pornographic presentation. With these two things being presented to the public’s eye in 1927, it really is a sight to see how much of a spectrum we can create of it in comparison to the lives we are all living today.
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