No matter what era in Lexington, Thanksgiving always a time for gratitude and penitence

Thanksgiving 1922: a season for gratitude and penitence.

In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring the last Thursday of November as a Thanksgiving holiday. It stated that Americans should be grateful that other nations had not provoked aggression, that the economy had not collapsed from resources being taken for national defense, and for the successes of the Union army. Lincoln urged people to be thankful for the blessings they had received and to ask God with “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience” to restore peace, harmony, and tranquility to a fractured nation. This duality — thankfulness and a humble recognition of failures and perils — undoubtedly was a sentiment widely shared at Thanksgiving 1922.

Two catastrophic, global events so intertwined as to seem as one had formally ended. World War I ground to a conclusion in November 1918, leaving in its wake some 15 million military and civilian deaths, with 116,000 American soldiers numbered among them. The 1918 influenza pandemic, coming in four distinct waves and resolving in 1920, carried a worldwide death toll estimated at 50 million; in America, 675,000 persons perished, pushing down the average life expectancy by more than 10 years. In the wake of the devastation from war and the pandemic, simply being alive at their conclusion was reason enough to celebrate.

By 1922, periodic shortages of basic food stuffs were lessening, gasoline and rubber supplies were increasingly available to power a growing automobile industry, and with the United States industrial base untouched by wartime damage, production soared as both domestic consumer demand and exports rapidly increased. It was the start of the “Roaring Twenties.”

In Lexington, bread was 6 cents a loaf, eggs were 40 cents a dozen, and Talk of the Town flour was $1.15 for 24 pounds. A wool suit could be had for $35 at Graves Cox, a men’s clothing store on 124 W. Main Street, and just a few blocks away, the S.P. Penny automotive dealership, 420 West Main Street, was offering a new Ford sedan for $645. With $1 in 1922 worth approximately $16.70 today, prices for many items were still much greater than today’s.

Radio came to the White House in 1922, with President William Harding giving the first broadcast presidential speech on June 14. The popularity of and demand for radios spread as quickly as they could be made, and in Lexington, Barney Miller’s opened their first store on Main Street.

October 1922 also saw the Kentucky Theater opening, the largest of Lexington’s “palace theaters,” having a 4,000 bulb marquis, a $25,000 Wurlitzer organ, and seating for 1,276 white patrons. During Thanksgiving weekend, for 25 cents, you could see a matinee showing of “Strongheart, Brawn of the North,” starring Strongheart himself, a German Shepherd dog so popular as to earn a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Just a few doors down, the Strand Theater was showing “Woman’s Hate,” billed as “a vivid, pulsating drama of the exciting underworld.”

On Nov. 29, the Lafayette Hotel, which is now home to Lexington’s Government Center, was offering a stirring concert by Bruce Reynolds (violin), Moyner Moberly (piano), and Vera Eubanks (soprano) performing such suggestive classics as “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “Pack Up Your Sins,” “Under the Leaves,” and “Sixty Seconds Every Minute.” Thanksgiving dinner could be had the next day for $1.50, with a menu featuring entrees of turkey, goose, roast pig, tenderloin beef, and oysters; ten different vegetables; four kinds of pies; and five flavors of ice cream from which to choose. Prohibition, which began in January 1920 and would not end until December 1933, meant that unless a guest had their own illegal connection or a doctor’s prescription, alcohol could not be purchased.

Lexington was the home “to 170 factories of all types,” providing employment for 1,656 workers. The two largest were refineries located off of Leestown Pike. Also located on Leestown Pike was the J. F. Price Company, another of the city’s biggest employers, “each week slaughtering and processing some 100 hogs and 50 cows” to make “high-class sausages, lard, and pickled meats.”

The University of Kentucky football team, captained by Birkett Pribble, would finish the season with a 6-3 record under Coach William Juneau. In the win column was a beat-down of the Louisville Cardinals, headlined in the Louisville Courier Journal as “Kentucky Slaughters Louisville 73-0 in Gridiron Melee,” the reporter going on to write, “Many of the visitors were slightly injured [but] only one seriously”; and, “Their lack of knowledge of the game aroused the sympathy of the spectators.” In the loss column, UK fell 27-3 to the Praying Colonels of in-state rival Centre College.

For the 1922-23 season, the UK basketball team struggled, going 3-10 overall and 0-5 in the Southern Conference, notwithstanding the efforts of 6’2 center Fred Fest and 6’0 power forward Will Wilkinson. Accounts of the games paint a different picture from today’s comparatively tame version, with the Kentuckian newspaper reporting, “Our captain is right there at center, in that he is alert and always ready if the other fellow tries to get rough. When that occurs, Freddy gives said fellow all he is looking for, with interest.”

Many of the problems and concerns faced in 1922 haven’t been resolved. The Lexington Herald reported that legislators in the coming session would be facing tough issues such as the demand for better roads and greater educational opportunities. Dr. J. J. Tigert lamented the lack of tax revenue generated from coal mining and called for better education as the first step towards economic diversity, saying, “Are we content to talk about our extensive coal mines yielding more than Pennsylvania’s? For all the good we are deriving from them, they might as well be on the Planet Mars. We must have something more than raw materials.” And on Nov. 2, 1922, the United States Revolver Association urged state legislators to pass uniform laws governing the sale and purchase of handguns by requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon, sales recorded and the buyer required to have a valid I.D., a 24-hour waiting period between the sale and delivery of a pistol, and an additional five years penalty added to a sentence if a gun was used in the commission of a crime.

The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922, and prominent Black Americans who were invited to the ceremony were seated in a segregated area guarded by Marines. Lexington’s population stood at roughly 42,000, of which approximately one-third were Black citizens. In line with other Southern towns, Lexington was strictly segregated. The joys of attending the newly opened Kentucky Theater and indeed other theaters along Main Street were denied to Black citizens unless a theater had a balcony so that segregation could be maintained. Segregation permeated nearly all aspects of life — from restaurants and hotels, to schools, parks, and housing — such that the decade of the 1920s was arguably the height of “the Great Migration,” the movement of some six million Black citizens fleeing the brutality of Jim Crow in Southern states to safer cities in the North. In 1922, 51 Black people were lynched. The Ku Klux Klan reached its peak membership in the 1920s, with over two million members finding no contradictions or moral and ethical problems with racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and segregation while simultaneously championing the United States as a bastion of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Now, more than 100 years past World War I and a global pandemic, during this Thanksgiving season, we might read Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation and, with “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience,” reflect upon the problems faced as we emerge from another deadly global pandemic, a crisis in Ukraine and the existential threat of nuclear conflict it poses, and the internal socio-economic, racial, and political divisions that tear at what minimal democratic structures that we have.

John Buckner is a Lexington resident interested in the intersections of people and place.