1925
Antoine de Paris opened a hair salon at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Inlaid and embossed linoleums were introduced.
Popular films included The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney,
Grass directed by Merian C. Cooper, The Gold Rush starring
Charlie Chaplin, The Freshman starring Harold Lloyd, The Merry
Widow starring Mae Murray and John Gilbert and directed by Erich Von
Stroheim, The Big Parade starring John Gilbert and directed by King
Vidor, and Ben-Hur starring Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman.
Popular fiction and poetry included F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,
Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Theodore Dreiser’s An American
Tragedy, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan
Transfer, Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” E.E. Cummings’s
& and XLI Poems, T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, Robinson
Jeffers’s Road Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Ezra Pound’s A
Draft of XVI Cantos, Amy Lowell’s What’s O'clock, and Countee
Cullen’s Color.
Popular songs include Al Jolson’s “Swanee” and “I’m Sitting on the Top of
the World,” Louise Groody & John Barker’s “Tea for Two,” Ben Bernie’s
“Sweet Georgia Brown,” Ethel Waters’s “Dinah,” June Cochrane & Sterling
Holloway’s “Manhattan,” Gene Astin’s “Yes, Sir That’s My Baby” and “Five
Foot Two, Eyes of Blue; - Has Anybody Seen My Girl?”
John Alden Carpenter composed Jazz Orchestra Pieces.
Paul Whiteman’s orchestra performed George Gershwin’s 135th Street at Carnegie
Hall in New York.
Edward Hopper painted House by the Railroad.
Man Ray painted Sugar Loaves.
John D. Rockefeller funded the Cloisters in New York.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded.
Bootleg-liquor prices began to appear regularly in the “Talk of the Town”
section of The New Yorker which began publication this year.
Cosmopolitan began publication.
The Supreme Court ruled in the U.S. versus Linder that drug addiction is
a medical condition for which it is legal to prescribe opiates.
May 8: One of the first Black labor union,
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was organized by A. Philip Randolph.
June 13: The first transmission of a moving
picture film, the image of a windmill, traveled 5 miles away within the confines
of District Columbia. Television was born.
September 22: Sunny opened starring Marilyn
Miller, Clifton Webb and Jack Donahue with songs by Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach,
and Oscar Hammerstein II.
November 12: Louis Armstrong made his
first recording with the Hot Five called “Gut Bucket Blues.”
December 3: George Gershwin’s Concerto
in F for Piano and Orchestra had its premiere at Carnegie Hall, New York.
December 8: The Coconuts opened,
with songs by Irving Berlin and starring The Marx Brothers.