1911

  

This 1911 Runabout was produced by the G.A. Schact Motor Truck Company, 

of Cincinnati, Ohio.)

__________

 

“You wouldn’t even pass the Lord’s prayer without money.”

 

Anonymous state lawmaker, commenting on legislative corruption.

__________

 

 

January 18: Eugene Burton Ely makes history when he completes the first successful landing and take-off from a naval vessel. 

    Ely had graduated from Iowa State University in 1904, with a degree in engineering. His first interest was in the new automobile industry; and he sold cars, repaired cars, and then turned to racing. In 1910 he taught himself to fly. In short order, he was hired to work with Glenn Curtiss’ exhibition team, which toured the country. 

    In 1909, the U.S. Army had purchased the first Wright Brothers planes. Now the Navy wanted to catch up. Ely was approached about the idea of taking off from a U.S. warship and readily agreed. Smithsonian magazine describes the scene: 

    On November 14, 1910, the light cruiser USS Birmingham was readied at Norfolk, Va., with a wooden platform erected on the bow, approximately 80 feet long. Ely’s Curtiss Pusher aircraft (similar to the Curtiss D-III Headless Pusher on display at the National Mall Building), equipped with floats under the wings, was hoisted aboard and the ship moved off shore. Ely succeeded in making the first take-off from a ship, barely. The Curtiss rolled off the edge of the platform, settled, and briefly skipped off the water, damaging the propeller. Ely managed to stay airborne and landed 2 ½ miles away on the nearest land, called Willoughby Spit.

 

    Despite his close call, Ely was anxious to try a take-off and a landing again. The Curtiss team was scheduled to put on a performance in San Francisco in January 1911. The U.S. Navy made the necessary preparations for Ely to attempt the feat: 

    The armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania was prepared and anchored in San Francisco Bay. This time a longer platform was in place, 120 feet, along with ropes and sandbags stretched across to serve as a crude arresting system for landing. There was also a canvas awning at the end to catch the airplane if the ropes and sandbags were not sufficient. With longer wings and hooks on the landing gear, and Ely donning a padded football helmet and bicycle inner tubes around his body in case anything went awry, all was ready on the morning of January 18…Crowds lined the shore and boats collected in the harbor to witness the daring flight. At 11:00 a.m., Ely took off from nearby Tanforan Race Track and headed for the Pennsylvania. To the delight of thousands of spectators, Ely made a safe landing, the arresting equipment working perfectly. 

 

    After lunch with the ship’s captain and a few photographs, the platform was cleared and the Pennsylvania was pointed into the wind.  Ely took off, flew past the crowd, and landed safely back at Tanforan. Naval aviation was born.

 

(Ely did not live long to enjoy his fame. He was killed in a crash on October 19, in Macon, Georgia. In 1933 he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.)

Ely's first attempt put him in the water.

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Immigrant workers in dangerous jobs.

 

March 25: If you have forgotten why we need government regulations, the disaster at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is a solid reminder. As History.com explains: 

    The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Manhattan. It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English and worked 12 hours a day, every day. In 1911, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances.

 

    For “good measure,” we also know that Blanck and Harris paid their workers only $15 per week.

 

    When fire broke out in a rag bin, a host of safety violations combined to create a great disaster. Trapped by spreading flames, many of the young workers leaped from the eighth floor.

 

    One hundred and forty-six employees died needlessly that day.

 

    Also that month, Alice Hamilton, one of the few female physicians in the United States, takes an interest in worker safety, particularly when it comes to employees dealing with lead. Smithsonian explains: 

    One day in March of 1911 – the same month as the infamous Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York City that trapped and killed 146 workers – a woman named Alice Hamilton arrived at the Sangamon Street works, a lead-smelting plant on Chicago’s West Side, and asked to take a look around. 

    The owner welcomed her in. She was a small woman, unassuming. What harm could she bring to a powerful boss? She walked by the kettles and furnaces. She observed the sweating men holding shovels and prods. The air was stifling, full of humidity, and several times she covered her nose and mouth to dampen the scent of industrial chemicals wafting through the unventilated rooms. On the floor were pieces of scrap metal and a film of metallic dust, some of which also floated visibly in the air. A few men wore dirty uniforms, but most donned the same stained overalls they wore at home each night. There was a pile in one corner of large rubber respirators, but none of the men was using them. A few of them had tied dirty handkerchiefs around their mouths. 

    Hamilton walked around with a pen and pad in hand, listening. One man told her about a young immigrant from Bulgaria who’d been working here but had seemed to go crazy a few weeks earlier; the worker was removed from the plant in a straitjacket and later died. She heard of another man, also an immigrant, who was put to work making paste for batteries and had a habit of moistening his fingers on his tongue. He lasted ten days before he went home ill. One foreman told Hamilton that few of his men could work for more than a few weeks before they called in sick. Almost all had suffered the same symptoms, starting with hallucinations. The boss offered no payment for sick workers, and he didn’t appear to be making much effort to prevent them from getting sick. “Many times … I met men who employed foreign-born labor because it was cheap and submissive, and then washed their hands of all responsibility,” she wrote. “They deliberately chose such men because it meant … a surplus of eager, undemanding labor.”

 

    Hamilton, who lived to be 101, spent the rest of her long life crusading for worker safety and stricter environmental protection. She took a special interest in banning lead in gasoline and warned about the dangers of hazardous chemicals used in manufacturing, as well as mercury, radium, asbestos and carbon monoxide.

 

   Ms. Hamilton died in 1970, shortly after President Richard M. Nixon signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

 

    Nixon sent her a note thanking her for her decades of work to improve the lives of others.

 

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CHEERLEADING is, in 1911, basically a sport for men. According to The Nation, it is “one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college.” Five future presidents will cheer in college: Eisenhower, FDR, Reagan and both Bushes. Rick Perry, Tom DeLay and Mitt Romney will also cheer.

 

    It was after WWII that women began to replace men with megaphones. Cheerleading was one of the few ways open to females to participate in college athletics before Title IX was passed in 1972.

 

    The moment when N.F.L. cheerleading takes off comes in 1976, according to The New York Times.

 

    The breakout moment for the Dallas squad came in 1976, during Super Bowl X, when a TV cameraman, looking for what was known as the “honey shot,” panned to the sideline and a cheerleader named Gwenda winked into the camera. Suddenly, the world “forgot there was a football game going on,” as the Cowboys chronicler Joe Nick Patoski has put it—confirming what Tex Schramm, the Cowboy’s president and general manager had suspected: that a bolder, sexier look would create enormous buzz.

 

    Rules for Cowboys’ cheerleaders were strict: no fraternization, no chewing gum, no jeans, no curlers in public. Weigh-ins were mandatory and Suzanne Mitchell, who ran the squad for a decade, would circle body parts on photos that needed work. “Your shorts were custom fitted to you,” she told the women. “We’ll take them up but we won’t let them out.”

 

    A visitor to a Cowboys’ cheerleaders’ tryout session in 1978 noted how tense it was for the 150 females trying out, “the most envied, celebrated and sought-after” women in the world. They were paid $15 per game ($14.72 after taxes), had practice five hours per night, five nights a week. They could not appear where alcohol was served, attend any parties, or wear jewelry with their uniforms.

 

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CORRUPTION in government was as prevalent as ever in 1911. In Breach of Faith (p. 52) we read: 

 

    Hiram Johnson was a “conscience” Republican, and early in the century his conscience had been violated by the sordid control of his party and state [California] by the Southern Pacific Railroad. That railroad bought and sold legislators and officials in Sacramento as if the state government were its property. In this legislature, said one of its members, “you wouldn’t even pass the Lord’s prayer…without money.”

 

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“Appalling growth of population.”

 

    An assessment by the historian Andrew C. McLaughlin in A History of the American Nation; pp. 545-546; 551-552; (1911) included these problems: “The first and most notable fact is the growth – one might say the appalling growth – of population.” 

    The census of 1910 showed that within the United States there were 92,228,496 people.

 

    Moreover, soon after the century began, men realized that the West was gone; there was no longer a great area open to the western settler and offering opportunity to anyone who would till the wide acres…the great free land of the West had largely been taken up.

 

…With the growth of the railroads came the concentration of business…Village industries were supplanted; our clothes are no longer made by the village tailor or our shoes by the village cobbler; our medicines are not compounded by the village druggist; our flour is ground in Minneapolis; or beef is slaughtered in Chicago or Kansas City. Industry is not only immense, it is concentrated.

 

 

“Land uninhabited by civilized men.”

 

    In 1911, readers are not generally bothered when the historian refers to the West as “land uninhabited by civilized men.”

 

    For President Roosevelt and other politicians, McLaughlin wrote, these developments presented a dilemma. “Even to those who saw this remarkable growth it was not always quite plain why conditions were as they were; but all felt that they were passing or had passed into a new era, and they felt the pressure of a new social order and the weight of new burdens.”

 

    Workers had only limited protection if disaster struck. “Under the law the workingman could obtain compensation for injuries only with great difficulty, and if he were guilty of ‘contributory negligence’ he could obtain nothing at all.”

 

    There were improvements during these years, however:

 

    Public parks, playgrounds, wider streets, public bathing places, better health laws, purer milk, better water; these are the matters that occupied an increasing share of public attention. Public transportation in cities is a matter which affects everyone within their limits…the enforcement of building ordinances that would give reasonable security against fire were subjects much discussed.

 

    In general, the courts were unfriendly to attempts to organize labor. “An injunction is an order issued by a court, directing a person or persons to refrain from doing certain things,” McLaughlin wrote, “and is especially directed to the protection of property. Disobedience may be punished by the court without a jury trial, and this fact has made its issuance in labor disputes especially objectionable to labor leaders.” 

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RACISM was accepted, often without thought. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica had this to say about the differences between races. “Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.” “The mental condition of the negro [adult] is very similar to that of a [white] child.”