1902

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“Literature is my utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.” 

Helen Keller

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February 14: The New England Confectionery Company, or Necco, begins selling candy hearts with messages stamped on them. There was room for only nine letters, and the choices changed over the years. “Be Mine,” “True Love” and “QT Pie” have had staying power. But “23 Skidoo” and “O! You kid” have been retired. “Call Me” wasn’t placed on any of the hearts in 1902, since telephones were still rare. Finally, it made its mark, only to be replaced in future years by “Fax Me,” and “Text Me.”

 

*

 “The reckless speed with which automobiles are driven.”

June 7: A check of the Literary Digest from this date in 1902, reveals several stories of interest today, including one titled, “Dangerous Speed of Automobiles.”

 

I adapted this piece for my seventh grade students, but here it is, as written:

 

A number of fatal accidents recently, in which automobiles have played prominent parts, are calling out editorial protests against the dangerous rate of speed at which these machines are sometimes run. The following editorial in the Philadelphia Record is typical of many similar ones in other journals. 

 

“The communities in New Jersey within twenty or thirty miles of New York and those which are so unfortunate as to be on the highway between the metropolis and Atlantic City, are justly exasperated because of the reckless speed with which automobiles are driven within their limits. It is common for these machines to dash along at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour to the great danger of all persons in the streets. In case of a casualty the automobile is pushed to greater speeds in order that the lawless drivers may escape the penalty of their offense. All sorts of expedients have been proposed, such as a gate which may be lowered on the approach of an automobile, and at one place there are threats of a battering ram to be used on any machine which may injure citizens by unlawful speeding.

 

How to deal with the rich owners of the horseless carriage is not clear. Fines, of course, mean nothing. Indeed, on the payment of a fine the amount of which he considers insignificant the millionaire chauffeur seems to think he has bought the right to break records along the public thoroughfares regardless of all regulations. An indignant legislator has proposed that every man who drives his engine at a higher speed than is authorized shall be sent to prison for a long term. To this a magistrate replies that the penalty would be visited on the hired and innocent chauffer, who is made the scapegoat for his rich employer. The only method which the French could devise was to make it necessary, as a condition of license, that the automobile should bear its number in figures so large as to be easily read, no matter how fast the pace, in order that the owner might be prosecuted in event of a casualty.

 

This and all other suggestions virtually mean that by paying money enough the millionaire may go tearing down the streets at a dangerous rate, overturning anybody who may be unable to escape. Thus the privilege of doing things prohibited by the law is allowed the man who is rich enough to pay for it. This is drawing a distinction between an aristocracy of wealth and the common people and less than a century and a half after the establishment of the republic which was designed to prevent the erection of legal barriers between the rich and the poor. In New York an attempt will be made to deal directly with the offending owners who drive their automobiles at lawless speed by equipping a part of the police force with light and fast machines which may overtake almost anything of the kind on the road. It is absurd to say, as they do in France, that there is no way to prevent this abuse. That would be to admit the failure of republican institutions. The automobile has come to stay – it is a logical result of modern development of motive powers; but should any number of its drivers continue to show their contempt for the law, they must be treated with whatever degree of severity may be necessary to make them respect the law.

 

* 

Angus Sinclair, a New York auto owner, wrote to the New York Sun in response to another complaint about speeding drivers. He began by commenting on a recent story, “Death by Automobile.” 

“The spirit of your article...is that the owner of an automobile which frightens horses ought to be punished,” including a man whose car had recently caused an auto-horse wreck which led to a man being killed. Sinclair argued that the horse is easily scared and a dumb animal besides.] 

I have been a rider of bicycles and my memory goes back to the time when some horses acted crazy at the sight of a bicycle. People are going through the same experience today with the automobile...I operate a gentle steam-runabout [steam-powered car], and I am as careful as possible not to frighten nervous horses. But I find some horses so senseless that it is useless trying...Not long ago I saw a very restive [impatient] horse and a carriage approaching me. I moved my machine into the ditch behind some brush...but the brute [animal] had seen me go into hiding. When he came near the place he reared [rose up on his back legs] and plunged at a frightful rate, and it took three men to hold him while I moved the automobile past.  

 

From such experiences it has become a question in my mind whether it is best to stop for a nervous horse or to keep moving along at legal speed. [It seems possible, Sinclair added, that the recent death might have been the fault of the horse not the driver who may well have been]...running at legal speed, and within his rights.

 

The question comes up. Has the owner of an idiotically skittish [excitable] horse the right to keep it working where it may be frightened into destructive violence at the sight of a strange wheelbarrow?

 

*

 

“Return of the ‘Star Car’ to Louisiana” is also of interest.

 

Louisiana proposes to return to the use of the old “star car,” or separate cars for negroes, which were in use in the early sixties and were called in, according to the Washington Post, in 1868, when the Republican Government was installed, with little if any manifestation of public disapproval. The Post says:

 

“For some years past, however, there has been a steadily increasing demand for separate cars. The advocates of the measure claim that the negroes, as a race, are reverting to hoodlumism, if not to actual barbarity; that their street manners have been rapidly deteriorating under the dispensation of freedom; that it is no longer safe to permit all colored men to enter cars in which there are ladies and children, and that since it would be unsafe to intrust conductors with the right or the duty of discriminating, the taboo must be drawn against them all. They show that the blacks have been actually free more than thirty-five years; that they have had every opportunity of education and advancement; that for nearly a decade they held control in  politics and government. And now, as the argument runs, they find the negro lower in the social scale than he was during the era of slavery. His morals are lower, his criminal record infinitely more discouraging, his condition from every point of view deplorable. They cannot legislate him into frugality, respect, good behavior, or civilization, but they declared that they will endeavor to contract the field of his objectionable activity.

 

The proposed law as outlined in the New Orleans papers is very carefully drawn and promises a most effective operation. It provides for the arrest and punishment of any and everyone who attempts to violate it, and it imposes heavy penalties on street-car companies who officials neglect the least of its injunctions. The spectacle of New Orleans resurrecting after a generation of disuse the old, half-forgotten star cars of 1866 contains much food for disturbing thought. It proves, at least, that the community is convinced of the necessity of the expedient. (p. 763)

 

*

“What arrests the flacid attention of vacuous and brainless indolence.”

 

A second item of note relates to novels, then thought to be a bad influence on the morals of readers. This piece is titled “A Plea for the Silence of the Novelist.” She continues (in  The National Review, May):

 

Many are the voices that have been raised in protest against the prevailing over-production of the novel, and various are the remedies proposed to cope with this latter day problem. “Maxwell Gray,” of London, the well-known English novelist, seriously states it as her opinion that it would be a matter of small moment if no more novels were written for the next fifty years. If that seems an excessive term of silence, she adds, it would be a boon if there were no more novels, “say for twenty years, during which a generation might be reared with a taste for something nobler than novels, or at all events for the fine works of fiction that already exist and are so seldom read; or even for ten or five years.”

 

“It is not that all the tales have been told; they had all been told many times over long before letters were invented. They always will be told in some form or other in prose or in verse, in speech or in writing, till the end of time, and they will always, these same old tales, be pleasant to tell and pleasant to hear till the end of time, because they tell of things that can never grow old, of the relation of man to man, and of the relation of man to the seen and to the unseen that surrounds and molds him. Also of the relation of man to his time, for though you will see times change, yet man’s relation to his time is constant….No; the tales maybe told and retold from every point of view and to every variety of detail and amplification, with every embroidery of thought and fancy and manifold beauty of setting, and never fail to charm, nor, if rightly told, to edify and instruct; tho amusement and not edification is the novelist’s proper aim.”

 

The root trouble is rather that the majority of those who essay fiction are either unable or unwilling to write novels that are entitled to rank as true literary productions. And so we have “novelettes, newspaper-corner serials made by the yard, and magazine stories with nothing to recommend them beyond a knack of putting together what arrests the flacid attention of vacuous and brainless indolence, unable to endure a second without external diversion from inward monotony. It is weariness to think of these productions; the sight of the empty stuff piled on railway bookstalls produces moral and mental nausea.” The writer declares:

 

“It was a sad moment for literature when the notion that novel writing was a lucrative craft first got about…”

 

Gray goes on to insist that staunching the flood of bad novels might allow people to again focus on fine poetry, rather than the “preciosity, brutality, slang, and doggerel [that] charms the public.”

 

In short, “there might be a literary renascene”; and reading would become a real means of popular education because it would give men the power to enjoy literature.

 

Novels! A bad influence!

*

 

Animal crackers and Crayola crayons first appear, improving the lives of children for decades to come.

 

*

 

Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life is published. It tells how a blind, deaf and dumb child (“dumb” as they used to say) learned to write and speak.