Welcome to the winter of 1924.
Calvin Coolidge has just secured his own presidential term after serving out Warren G. Harding’s scandal-plagued administration. George Gershwin’s groundbreaking Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York’s Aeolian Hall just months ago, fusing classical music with jazz in a way that captured the restless energy of the era. And in Chicago—that sprawling hub of commerce, crime, and cultural innovation—a husband-and-wife team is publishing a magazine that promises to unlock the secrets of your soul, your boss, and your bank account.
I recently acquired a rare, increasingly fragile copy of the December-January 1924-25 issue of “Character Reading” magazine. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be digitizing and sharing articles from this fascinating time capsule here on Vintage Reveries, offering a window into how Americans navigated an age of unprecedented change.
We tend to think of the “self-help” movement as a modern invention—something that emerged with Dale Carnegie in the 1930s or exploded with the New Age movement of the 1970s. But this 100-year-old magazine proves that the hunger for self-knowledge and self-improvement has deep roots in American culture. These pages are packed with phrenology (the analysis of skull shape to determine character), graphology (handwriting analysis), and vocational guidance tailored to a world transforming at breakneck speed.
The Power Couple Behind the Masthead
Before diving into the content, we need to understand who was steering this publication. The masthead lists W. Thomas Walsh as Editor and Edna Purdy Walsh as Managing Editor—a partnership that reflected both the progressive possibilities and lingering constraints of the 1920s.
It was still relatively rare to see a woman listed so prominently in publishing leadership during this era. The 19th Amendment had granted women the right to vote just four years earlier in 1920, and women were increasingly entering professional spaces previously closed to them. Yet barriers remained formidable: most newspapers and magazines were helmed entirely by men, and women journalists often found themselves relegated to “women’s pages” covering fashion, society, and homemaking.
But make no mistake—Edna Purdy Walsh was a powerhouse. As you’ll see throughout this series, her name appears everywhere in the magazine. She wrote lead articles, compiled instructional lessons, and clearly shaped the editorial voice. Her prominent position suggests that Character Reading operated in a more progressive sphere, one where expertise in psychology and personality assessment was seen as particularly suited to women’s supposed intuitive understanding of human nature.
The magazine also prominently featured Jessie Allen Fowler and Honore Wright as key contributors. Fowler, in particular, came from phrenology royalty—she was connected to the famous Fowler family that had popularized phrenology in America throughout the 19th century. In an era we often remember for its male-dominated industries and “old boys’ clubs,” Character Reading created a platform where women were recognized authorities on human psychology, character assessment, and the nascent field of personality analysis.
The “New Tech” Boom: Electricity and Automobiles
To understand the 1920s, you need to grasp how new everything felt. The decade following World War I witnessed technological changes as dramatic as the internet revolution of the 1990s. Rural electrification was transforming American life. The automobile was shifting from luxury novelty to mass-market necessity, thanks to Henry Ford’s assembly line innovations. Radio broadcasting had only begun in 1920, and by 1924, it was exploding across the nation.
In this context, if you wanted to get rich, you didn’t learn to code—you learned to wire a radio or fix a combustion engine.
The front pages of this Character Reading issue are dominated by aggressive, high-promise advertisements that mirror today’s “Tech Bootcamp” or “Learn to Code” ads on Instagram and YouTube. They paint a vivid picture of a nation rapidly electrifying and motorizing, with fortunes to be made by those who could master these emerging technologies.
The Electrical Expert (Page 3)
“Dunlap Guarantees you a Job And a Raise!” screams the headline from the American School advertisement.
This ad captures the excitement—and the economic promise—of the electrical age. Chief Engineer Dunlap wasn’t merely offering correspondence courses and textbooks; he was shipping students “4 Electrical Outfits” including hands-on equipment for house-wiring, bell-wiring, electric lighting, and Radio installation.
The mention of Radio deserves emphasis. In 1924, radio was genuinely cutting-edge technology—the internet of its day. KDKA in Pittsburgh had broadcast the 1920 presidential election results, marking the beginning of commercial radio. By 1924, hundreds of stations had launched, and families gathered around radio sets the way we now scroll through smartphones. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was minting millionaires, and every household wanted someone who could install and repair these magical boxes.
The ad boldly proclaimed:
“The world’s greatest, fastest growing, most fascinating business needs you… Prepare to BOSS untrained electrical workers… Experts earn $70 to $200 a week.”
Context matters here: In 1924, the average American worker earned approximately $1,236 per year, or roughly $24 per week. The promised $70-$200 weekly wage represented earnings of three to eight times the national average—genuinely life-changing money. The ad’s promise that “New projects total a thousand million dollars” reflected the massive infrastructure investment in electrical grids, urban electrification, and radio networks transforming the American landscape.
The Auto Expert (Page 5)
If electricity wasn’t your calling, the booming automotive industry offered another path to prosperity. B.W. Cooke, the “Directing Engineer” of Chicago Auto Shops, lured readers with breathless statistics about “18 Million Autos, Trucks, Tractors” requiring maintenance and repair across America.
This number tells its own story. In 1920, there were approximately 8 million cars registered in the United States. By 1924, that number had more than doubled. Henry Ford’s Model T, with its revolutionary $260 price tag (after successive price cuts), had democratized automobile ownership. The automobile was no longer a plaything of the wealthy—it was becoming essential to American life, reshaping everything from courtship patterns to suburban development.
The advertising copy conveys genuine excitement about the industry’s scale, calling it “The World’s biggest, most fascinating business.”
Cooke’s pitch emphasized:
“I train you with JOBS—not books… I bring the original ‘JOB-WAY’ training TO YOUR HOME! … Earn $75 to $200 a Week!”
Again, that $200 weekly figure appears—equivalent to roughly $3,500 per week in today’s dollars. Whether these correspondence schools actually delivered on such extravagant promises is, of course, another question entirely. The Federal Trade Commission would later crack down on many vocational schools making fraudulent claims. But the optimism and sense of possibility are undeniably palpable. This was an era when ordinary Americans genuinely believed they could transform their economic destiny through the right technical knowledge.
The Social Skill of the Jazz Age: Graphology
While men were being steered toward motors and wires, Character Reading magazine offered a different kind of power: Social Intelligence and Psychological Expertise.
Page 2 features a charming advertisement for Hall Cameron’s graphology course—handwriting analysis positioned as both a marketable skill and a tool for social navigation. This wasn’t just about business applications; it was marketed as essential for navigating the complex, rapidly changing social landscape of the 1920s.
The Jazz Age brought unprecedented social fluidity. Young people were challenging Victorian conventions. Women were bobbing their hair, raising their hemlines, and entering the workforce in growing numbers. Prohibition had created a culture of speakeasies where social classes mixed in unprecedented ways. In this swirling social environment, the ability to “read” people—to quickly assess character, intentions, and trustworthiness—held genuine appeal.
The copy includes a fascinating appeal specifically to women:
“The girl who can read handwriting is always the most popular girl at the party.”
This single line encapsulates so much about 1920s gender dynamics. Women were gaining freedoms and entering public life more than ever, yet they were still expected to navigate social situations with particular skill. Graphology offered a way to be both modern and socially powerful—to possess specialized knowledge that made you interesting, valuable, and influential in social settings.
The ad also positions graphology as “A Scientific Key to Character,” suggesting that handwriting reveals subconscious impressions and hidden personality traits. This reflected the era’s growing fascination with psychology and the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s ideas were filtering into American popular culture, and personality assessment tools were proliferating.
The ad features a testimonial from Olive Donn, who claimed she placed a small advertisement offering graphology readings and received 41 responses, earning “six times the cost of the adv.” The “Side Hustle” economy, it seems, was thriving even in 1924.
Why these ads belong here (and why I’m starting the series with them)
These advertisements aren’t mere commercial clutter—they’re essential to understanding what Character Reading magazine represented. This is a publication about personality assessment and self-knowledge, but it’s equally about mobility: social mobility, financial mobility, and the intoxicating fantasy of transforming your fate through the right knowledge or skill.
The magazine’s structure makes perfect sense when viewed through this lens:
- Graphology: A skill offering both social capital and potential income, particularly appealing to women seeking influence and financial independence
- Electricity: The invisible force powering the modern world, transformed into a lucrative career path
- Automobiles: The visible symbol of modern American life, transformed into a skilled trade with remarkable earning potential
And behind it all: the Walshes steering the publication, with Edna Purdy Walsh’s prominent editorial role and the noticeable presence of women contributors throughout the issue. That combination—self-knowledge + vocational opportunity + social navigation—represents exactly the terrain women were mapping in print culture to gain influence in a male-dominated publishing world.
It makes complete sense that a woman like Edna Purdy Walsh would be right there in the masthead, actively shaping what “character” meant in this era and how Americans should understand themselves and their potential.
The Bigger Picture: Self-Help Culture in 1920s America
Character Reading magazine sits at a fascinating intersection of several cultural currents flowing through 1920s America:
The Scientific Management Movement: Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efficiency studies had convinced Americans that everything—including human personality and potential—could be scientifically measured, analyzed, and optimized.
The New Psychology: Freud, Jung, and other psychologists were introducing Americans to ideas about the unconscious mind, personality types, and psychological assessment. While academic psychology was skeptical of phrenology and graphology by this point, popular culture embraced these accessible, seemingly scientific approaches to understanding human nature.
The Vocational Guidance Movement: As America industrialized and specialized, young people faced bewildering career choices. Vocational guidance counselors and personality assessments promised to match individuals with careers suited to their inherent traits.
Women’s New Roles: With suffrage secured and more women in the workforce, there was intense interest in understanding female personality, potential, and proper roles in modern society.
This magazine offered readers tools to navigate all these currents—to understand themselves, choose appropriate careers, read others accurately, and succeed in a rapidly modernizing world.
This is my prologue post: the magazine before the magazine. The part where it shows you the dream first—the promise of transformation, prosperity, and self-knowledge—before it tells you who you are.
Coming Up Next in the Series
Now that we’ve explored the advertisements and met the editors behind Character Reading, we’re ready to dive into the actual content. In the next post, we’ll examine the magazine’s fascinating “Chemical Personality Types.”
Are you an Oxygen Type or a Nitrogen Type? According to the psychology of 1924, the answer could determine whether you were destined for wealth and leadership or headed for a life of struggle. We’ll explore how this quirky personality system reflected both the era’s faith in science and its anxieties about success in modern America.
Get the full 1925 Character Reading Digital Archive (PDF + High Res Images) – Download the complete magazine to read the full text of these ads and explore the vintage typography for yourself.
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