Words + Images

foreword to the interludes

interlude: genesis

interlude: exodus, part 1

In early 1920s America, “a return to normalcy” was the popular catchphrase. People were weary from war and desiring to pull back from engagement in world affairs. With the support of business and promotion of isolationism, the Republicans would hold the White House throughout the decade.

Throughout most of the decade, the economy improved in the U.S. and in many parts of the world.  At the same time, countries like Germany were still dealing with the debts and damages of war, and in many countries, there were rising tides of nationalism — and resulting conflicts — as people sought independence from colonial powers.  In the U.S. wages were increased by some industry leaders.  Tax rates were lowered for the wealthy.  It was a bullish stock market.  In general, people had more money.  Some invested in stocks for the first time.  A consumer culture evolved.

In some agricultural areas, like Nebraska where Joseph lived, the situation was a bit different.  The postwar economics were not as kind.  The technological advances (e.g. electricity, telephone infrastructure, etc.) were taking place at a much slower rate in rural areas. The rural exodus to cities increased dramatically as people searched for new opportunities.

The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was still in place.  Prohibition would not be repealed until the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1931. Al Capone would become notorious during the 1920s, and he wouldn’t be the only one trying to find creative ways around the law. The era would be remembered by many names, from the Roaring Twenties to the Jazz Age.

In his book The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald would capture the beauty and excesses of the period.  In his book The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway would popularize the term the lost generation, describing the young men who’d returned from World War I.  In 1925, folklorist  Zora Neal Hurston would arrive in New York during the height of the Harlem Renaissance where African American intellectuals like Langston Hughes and artists like Romare Bearden were redefining and celebrating what it meant to be black in America.

It was a period of innovation and of expansion of mass production.  People indulged in wonderful new technologies like radio and greater access to automobiles.  By 1928, Velveeta cheese was crafted, so to speak, for the first time and sliced bread made its debut.  Charles Lindbergh had flown his Spirit of St. Louis non-stop from New York to Paris.  Sports figures were celebrities.  Lou Gherig, Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth were hitting baseballs out of stadiums across the country.  Cinema expanded.   Mickey Mouse made his debut in a Disney animated short. Charlie Chaplin became an independent producer at this time.  In 1928, he films The Circus, a movie that brought Chaplin a special trophy at the very first Academy Awards (1929).

Such prosperity would not last, of course.  By the time seventeen-year old Joseph arrives in Washington, D.C., in 1928, financial collapse was imminent.  He didn’t share many stories of that time in his life so there’s no way to know what he was thinking or what he did on a daily basis.  We know the following based on notes written by Joseph later in his life, and the few stories he did tell his children.

He arrived in Washington in 1928 to attend either Immaculate Conception College or St. Paul’s College.  St. Paul’s College is the house of studies for Paulist Seminarians who then complete their graduate studies in theology at Catholic University.

In a different document then the above, Joseph mentions attending Immaculate Conception College, also located in Washington, D. C.   Immaculate Conception (also known as the Dominican House of Studies) is the theological school for candidates for the priesthood in the Dominican Province of St. Joseph, which in the 1920s and ‘30s included all of the U.S. except for the West Coast. He may have studied there before transferring to Catholic University.

So far none of the schools can find record of his attendance.  I suspect some of the difficulty has to do with Joseph’s last name.  At some point in the 1920s, as he traveled from Nebraska to Washington, D. C., Joseph changes his last name.  He may have changed it more than once, but by the time he is in attendance at Caius College in Cambridge, England his last name is definitively Horne.  He will later recall an incident at the school when a professor would say, ” Mr. Horne, will you tell us, please, in your rude, crude, inimitable manner, all that you know of the Peloponnesian War.”

Joseph also describes hearing, during this period, the writer, Christian apologist and famed orator G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936).  Chesterton was known for great intellectual debates with friends and colleagues George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Hillaire Belloc.  Their debating spans the time Joseph was studying in Cambridge (1930-1932).  Mr. Chesterton was also debating on both sides of the Atlantic during this time.  In January 1931 in New York City, he debated with Clarence Darrow about whether or not the world would return to religion (read more here).  If indeed Mr. Horne was in England during this time he missed the beginning of the Great Depression in the U.S. though eventually the whole world would be affected.  In 1932, Joseph would have returned to see Hooverville’s springing up, the shantytowns named for President Hoover who had so misjudged the financial crisis.  He may have returned just in time to vote in the 1932 election in which New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt would win in a landslide with his promise of A New Deal for the country.  He would have returned with the knowledge and skills of what he later characterized as “dead languages,” literature, and music.  He would not return with clerical robes.

By June 1933 he was teaching  music for the Pennsylvania-based Smith Williams Institute of Music. He would teach music and music appreciation to classes in Clarksburg, WVa and environs.  When I mentioned to Horne’s son that the institute apparently gave away free violins to students and instructors, he remarked, “Maybe that’s where my father got that beat-up violin he carried around.”  Horne would make $40/week until December 1935.

He ceased to teach in the Clarksburg vicinity after economic conditions became very bad.  He made his way back to the Washington, D. C. area and there, in his own words:

In other documents, he describes in greater details the different jobs held in the D.C. area. What becomes increasingly clear is his growing interest and skill in photography as a tool.  He also becomes interested in a young woman. Elsie was beautiful with a keen mind.  The two soon married and, in 1937, Joseph Jr. was born.

Though he clearly stayed in touch with is parents back in Nebraska, Joseph’s home was now in the Washington area.  He would continue to take on any job to provide for his new family, and to buy his cameras.

Elsie would later recall that he  always had to have the best camera, and that one year the family ate an awful lot of oatmeal so that they could pay for their son’s orthopedic shoes and still buy such an instrument. By 1941, Joseph would provide clinical photography for the Vets Administration, Mt. Alto Hospital in D.C.  In that same year, the U.S. would enter its second World War.

Priorities across the nation would shift.  Joseph Horne with his rural American roots, his knowledge of multiple languages, world literature, and music, and his facility with a camera would find himself in the U.S. and especially abroad at the crossroads of arts, culture and, perhaps most unexpectedly to him, of politics.

Stay tuned for the next Interlude in April.

Additional Reading/Sources …

1920s Farm Life in Nebraska

Radio in 1920s America

Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns

Wall Street Crash of 1929

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog