New Year’s Day often prompts newspaper editors to switch from recording the past to predicting the future. The Chicago Tribune’s issue of Jan. 1, 1922, was a mix of both, reflecting a post-World War I America that was also grappling with Prohibition and a younger generation’s rejection of Victorian mores.

       Splashed across the front page 100 years ago was a headline suggesting that Americans were being weaned off of booze: “New Years Minus Hic Hooray: Celebrations Orderly Under Raiders’ Eyes.”

       “State Street, ordinarily a caldron of howling hospitalers of New Year’s Eve, was a dignified stolid thoroughfare,” the Tribune reported. “Out in Evanston, Chief Charles W. Leggutt issued orders to his force to arrest any person seen drinking in any place. He said the town was drier than the Sahara.”

       On Page 2 was news of another kind of hangover. A dispatch from Washington announced: “Uncle Sam Over Rough Part of Normalcy Road.”

       “Normalcy” was the awkward but winning buzzword of the 1920 presidential election — the first since World War I left Americans fearful their country had gone astray.

       “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy,” proclaimed Warren G. Harding, the Republican who won the White House.

       But what came next was more change, at the speed of a drummer beating on high-hat cymbals. The 1920s were aptly dubbed the Jazz Age.

       Paradoxically, Prohibition gave drinking an urbane cachet. Hemlines rose temptingly, and women bobbed their hair. Men’s formalwear went from stuffy to sporty.

       The Tribune reported that in Florida’s high society, knickers once restricted to golf courses were “now more accurately described as a knickerbockers suit.”

       Some more serious issues foreshadowed the Great Depression that would be triggered by the stock market crash of 1929.

       “The Fort Dearborn Bank Incident is not a pleasant event with which to begin the new year,” the Tribune noted on Jan. 2. The La Salle Street bank had gone under, having made loans its officers should have known were too risky.

       But the Depression was a decade away, and the Tribune urged: “The (Fort Dearborn Bank) affair should not be allowed to cloud the steadily brightening skies.”

       It was similarly reassuring about a looming farmers’ crisis. The price of farm products was falling, which threatened dramatic repercussions in Chicago, the financial center of the agricultural Midwest.

       But the Tribune reported the secretary of agriculture as saying: “There does seem to be the promise of better times both for the farmer and those whose business is largely dependent upon him.”

       Looking back on the ‘20s, Frederick Lewis Allen was struck by how financial wizards and flappers alike missed obvious signs that the boom times couldn’t last forever.

       “One of the most distinguished bankers in the United States, in closing a deal in the early autumn of 1929, said privately that he saw not a cloud in the sky,” Allen noted two years later in “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.”

       Until the stock market crashed it seemed that fortunes were still to be made in Chicago. There would always be a sufficient supply of millionaires and showgirls for them to fall for.

       On Jan. 1, 1922, the Tribune reported on one such case:

       “Did Miss Mary Largo, beautiful former ‘Follies’ girl, poison herself because she thought Gordon C. Thorne, stock broker and man about town, had fled from her love?”

       Better times seemed on the horizon thanks to the potential payoff of technological innovations. The Tribune reported that, with the post office instituting airmail service, “aviation now has a foothold on the world of commerce.”

       In January 1922, the Tribune began publishing the schedule of KYW, Chicago’s first radio station. Commercial radio was destined to be an entertainment medium, although popular entertainment meant something different then from what it does now.

       On Jan. 30 its broadcast selections from operas included Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”

       Yet classical music wasn’t for everyone, as evidenced by the cultural fissures that were opening.

       “The world split in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” said Willa Cather, who published “One of Ours,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, that year. A writer of straightforward prose, she evidently sensed being eclipsed by more adventurous writers like Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound.

       In the New Year’s Day Tribune, those cultural gaps were there for all to see. It reported that the pastor of the Kenwood Evangelical Church preached a fire-and-brimstone sermon decrying an opera by Richard Strauss that was drawing music lovers to the Auditorium Theatre.

       “If the opera ‘Salome’ were given at a sink hole theater in South Water Street, the audience and the performers would be pinched,” said the Rev. Albert J. McCartney. “The exhibition is a reflection on the intelligence of Chicago people and a discredit to the police.”

       The Tribune noted that the author, Oscar Wilde, was gay (using a pejorative term) and that his opera was a riff on the biblical story of Salome, who danced lasciviously with the head of John the Baptist.

       Pleased that “Salome” was banned after two Chicago performances, the Tribune noted that it would be performed in New York, in February. “There may be a protest or two over ‘Salome’s’ revival, even in New York,” the Tribune reported, hinting at Middle America’s moral superiority.

       Better suited to the holiday season, the Tribune editors decided, was “His Little Life,” essentially a morality play about an usher who greeted Chicago theater patrons for 40 years. Newspapers then ran short stories. The author of this tale was Henry B. Fuller, an early master of realistic fiction.

       Spread over a page and a half, it told the story of how the usher welcomed every regular patron by name, though they knew nothing of his life beyond the theater’s foyer. But when he died, his funeral was standing room only. In the story a mourner — who had gone from rags to riches, had a failed marriage and various mistresses — compared his life to the usher’s and concluded that the usher lived the better life.

       rgrossman@chicagotribune.com

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