Thirty-three trillion dollars is a staggering amount of money today.  Imagine that number owed by a nation one hundred years ago.

The Paris Conference of 1921 stipulated that sum for reparations by Germany for causing the recent Great War.  And Germany, eventually, paid it.  Because of their ire in being blamed entirely for the costly recent war, Adolf Hitler rose to prominence that same year, as the leader of the newly formed People’s Socialist Party – or in other words, the Nazi Party.

1921 was a most eventful year.  On January 20 in the United States a new president was inaugurated, largely due to the influx of new female voters who had recently been given the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  The handsome and personable Warren Gamaliel Harding won the election with the promise “ Return to Normalcy ”.  A former Ohio newspaper editor and owner, and a recent member of the U.S. Senate, Harding was one of the few Presidents elected directly from the Senate. He was the second to date (James A. Garfield was the first in the election of 1880 against Civil War general and Gettysburg hero Winfield S. Hancock.  Garfield only lived nine months into his Presidency, being shot by a disgruntled office seeker).

While President Harding would not survive his first term, he at least was not assassinated (or at least it is not thought that he was).  However, in 1921, many heads of state in other nations were assassinated.  The Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Date was killed.  The Japanese Premier Takashi Hara was murdered.  Portugal’s leading statesman Santos was assassinated during an uprising in Lisbon.  There was also great unrest in Ireland – which led to the formation of Northern Ireland as a separate nation loyal to Great Britain.

Never one to shrink from violence to accomplish his ends, Hitler sent his henchmen of the SS to terrorize and threaten their political opponents in war-weary Germany.

In Arlington National Cemetery, U.S. citizens honored their war dead by dedicating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, an unidentified slain soldier from World War I.

During the summer of 1921 a future President endured a life-altering crisis.  Vacationing with his wife and children at the family resort in Campobello, Franklin Roosevelt woke up with a high fever and in terrible agony.  He had contracted polio, and life would never be the same for him.  In spite of the grueling, life-threatening illness, he survived, but never could walk without help again.  Within twelve years, however, he would become President of the United States.

In 1921 former President William Howard Taft was named as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position he held until his death in 1930.

That same year, the son of a Gettysburg veteran was named to President Harding’s Cabinet.  William Dawes, the son of Rufus Dawes, was appointed as Director of the National Budget.  After the Great War, Warren Harding discovered that there was no national budget.  He wisely selected the imminent Dawes, who soon put the nation to rights.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum resumed his work on Stone Mountain in Georgia.  Having been commissioned before the Great War, Borglum had to cease the work due to the terrible conflict.  He spent much of the year raising funds to complete the project begun by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  Their ninety-four-year-old president of the Atlanta Chapter, Helen Plane, was unable to continue her work on the project due to her advanced age.  Always in awe of Civil War veterans, Borglum threw himself into the work.

In 1921, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, or the effect that light, as energy, could produce electricity in metal substances; the greater the intensity of light, the greater the effect.  Dr. Einstein was already famous for his Theory of Relativity from experiments in 1916.  Author Edith Wharton was the first American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature for her novel The Age of Innocence , about New York high society in the late 19th century.

On May 31, 1921, a terrible race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma destroyed a successful black neighborhood.  A thousand homes were burned, along with businesses.  Many black citizens were gunned down as they attempted to escape the burning buildings.  The reason for the destructive mob was a rumor that a man of color attacked a woman in an elevator.  She never pressed charges, and the man eventually was freed. 

That same year, Sweden abolished the death penalty.

Some who were born that year included future first lady Nancy (Lewis) Reagan, astronaut and statesman John Glenn, author Alex Hailey, actors Lana Turner and Esther Williams, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Russian physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, and famed mathematician and engineer Mary Jackson.  Joseph and Rose Kennedy welcomed a daughter, Eunice.  Her brother, Jack, was just four years old.

A century ago, there were one hundred and seven million people in the United States – less than one third what we have in population today.  The war and influenza had taken their deadly toll, and while immigration was steady, more would come as a future war reared its head.  For the time being, the Roaring Twenties had arrived, and the people were ready for a period of normal life once again.