100 Years Ago: Golf Mania, Pace Cars, and American Productivity

Golf Mania Hits America

Golf gained widespread popularity in the 1920s as many Americans became compulsive players. It was suspected that men and women were taking up the game to while away some of the hours that, before prohibition, they’d have spent drinking. Not everyone admired the game. One writer observed players were becoming so obsessed that only a national ban could restore sanity to the nation.

We never had any trouble like this with liquor. We could take it or leave it alone. We took all we could get for some years, and what we couldn’t get we let alone. We have no will power whatever where golf is concerned. Unless we are rescued by a Constitutional amendment [to ban golf], we are done for. The Scotch invented the game so that while the rest of the world wastes its time in playing, they can get all the prosperity there is. Since taking up golf we no longer have friends; we have only golfing associates, and we don’t like them, because they can all play better than we can.
—“Golf — A New Industry” by Floyd W. Parsons, July 3, 1926

Change of Pace

At the 1926 Indy 500, the pace car was driven by Louis Chevrolet, seen here drawing off the track as the race begins. This was 15 years after he founded the Chevrolet Motor Car Company, which he left four years later. This might be the reason his pace car is a Chrysler Imperial 80, not a Chevy.

New Era

In July of 1926, the Post reported on the steady rise in American productivity. Per capita automotive production, for example, had risen 600 percent over the previous decade.

With just 6 percent of the world’s population, America was using over half the world’s steel, copper, cotton, coal, and newsprint. The U.S. had almost half of all the world’s railroad mileage, used 75 percent of the world’s telephone and telegraph equipment, and drove nine-tenths of the world’s automobiles.

This article is featured in the July/August 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.