1907

 

Hats were in style for ladies. 
Ridpath might consider this proof of civilization.

__________ 

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.” 

Theodore Roosevelt

__________

“Little short of a national crime.”

 

We tend to ascribe greater wisdom to our ancestors than merited. Dr. Pasteur opened a door in 1865. Many Americans entered reluctantly. As late as 1907, Nathan Straus, a New York City department store owner (see also: 1892), was quoting an English doctor, “The reckless use of raw, unpasteurized milk is little short of a national crime.” 

 

President Teddy Roosevelt noticed. A commission was organized, which quickly reported that pasteurization “prevents much sickness and saves many lives.”

 

Chicago became the first city to require pasteurization in 1909. By the early 1920s, almost every American city had followed suit.

 

* 

America wasn’t greater in the past – not when there were no safety regulations to enforce – not when business leaders could scoff at worker safety. From 1900 to 1945, to cite an example, a year never passed that more than a thousand American miners didn’t die in cave-ins, explosions, and fires. 

The Department of Labor keeps track. 

From 1903 to 1930, death tolls averaged 2,000 plus per year. The worst was 1907, with 3,242 fatalities. 

The government began to crack down. The rise of unions helped, giving workers the leverage to complain about safety. In 1950 only 643 workers died on the job. By 2000 the toll had fallen to 38. 

In 2014 only sixteen coal miners were killed.

 

* 

“We really mean the attractiveness of woman to man.” 

March: In an essay in Cosmopolitan magazine (Volume XLII, No. 5), “Women’s Most Attractive Age,” Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer tried to answer the question. When was it?  She hedges from the start, noting that “there is no fixed hour in which the sex, as a whole, reaches its zenith of perfection.” She says, of course, “When we speak of attractiveness of woman, we really mean the attractiveness of woman to man.”

Romance: 1907 style.

Gilmer continues:

 

Not many years ago, if this question had been asked, the answer would have been unhesitatingly made that a woman is most attractive between the ages of sixteen and twenty. Most of the heroines of classical fiction are mere children. Juliet was fourteen, Di Vernon, barely eighteen, Dora Copperfield, sixteen, Amelia Sedley, seventeen, and the peerless Pamela even more youthful; and according to their respective historians the charms of these feminine kidlets were such that men went down before them like ripe wheat before the sickle.

 

Gilmer’s thoughts on the topic include this: “it is undeniable that the unintelligent woman is at her best when she is in her teens…” (569) 

Why so? 

“Nobody expects a girl at that age to have convictions about anything,” Gilmer suggests, “and her hysterical shrieks over the grandeur of a matinée idol, or the sublimity of a box of bonbons, are quite as brilliant as those of the other members of her sex and age.”

 

____________________ 

“For a woman to be thoroughly charming, she should have had a good education, and forgotten it.”

____________________ 

 

Other highlights of Mrs. Gilmer’s article: 

Twenty-three is an ideal time o’ the clock for the woman of average intelligence and pulchritude, unless she happens to be college-bred. If she has had the misfortune of acquiring the higher education, she is still top-heavy with learning and self-esteem over having discovered the ancient Greeks and Romans, and it requires ten years more for her to find out that, for a woman to be thoroughly charming, she should have had a good education, and forgotten it.

 

For the woman, however, who is meant to be human nature’s daily food, no age is more attractive than twenty-three. She is in the first flush of having just arrived. The slim promises of girlhood have been realized in the full beauty of womanhood. She still has illusions, but they are not delusions. She is still innocent, but no longer ignorant. She has seen enough of the world and society to rub off the crudeness of the schoolroom, but not enough to make her blasé.

 

Such a woman, Gilmer says, by way of advice to her readers, 

takes the trouble to be nice to the man who spends his money on her for automobiles, and theaters, and dinners. She looks at every man who crosses her horizon for the possible husband, but she has not yet grown anxious for his coming, and so her intercourse with the opposite sex has a certain frankness and comradeship that is not the least of her charms.

 

Of course, not every woman can find a husband so readily. Gilmer explains: 

The bachelor woman is at her best at thirty, because she is consciously charming. She has all the advantages with which nature originally equipped her, and she has added to them the frills and furbelows of art. She’s learned to enhance her good looks by better dressing, and to put a red shade on the lamp, and sit with her back to the light. She has also learned how to talk, and better still how to be a fascinating listener.

 

Moreover, at thirty a woman has added to her arsenal of charms a powerful weapon – the desire to please. She knows that it is now or never with her if she means to get married, and so she throws herself heart and soul into the effort to attract men. The boy that the young girl snubs, the dotard that twenty-three flees, the bore, the widower with many children, find Miss Thirty’s door open to them, and her smile welcoming them into the parlor where she spins her web; and thus it happens that many a woman who was a wallflower in her early youth achieves a belated bellehood – to speak politely – in her maturity. (570)

 

At “thirty-five the extremely clever woman reaches the summit of her fascination,” Gilmer suggests. 

She has found out that the two things in woman that attract men as the magnet does the needle are selfishness and flattery, and she uses them for all they are worth. She demands nothing of man except that he let her admire him. She burns for him the incense of a devotion which is as insidious as the fumes of an opium-pipe, steals away his reason, and makes him powerless to resist her. She makes him feel that she alone of all the world is capable of appreciating him and knowing how wonderfully great, and talented, and handsome, and strong, and noble he is; and when a woman can make a man feel that way about himself it doesn’t make a bit of difference whether she is fat or thin, wrinkled or smooth of skin. She is a Venus in his eyes, and a bundle of irresistible attractions. No young girl can possess these fascinations. It takes age, and experience, and knowledge of the world, but it is the compensation for being thirty-five years old. (570-571)

 

Whether a woman is at her best at forty depends upon whether she is married and has children. It is the age of despair for the unmarried woman, when she realizes that her chances are practically gone and she has not reconciled herself to spinsterhood; but for the woman who has the man she loves by her side and her babe at her breast it is a time of beauty ineffable. Artists have painted it, poets have sung of it, and the dullest clod among us all thrills to some fine sense of the exquisite loveliness of the Madonna-look upon a woman’s face. She who never knows that never really knows the best of life. The woman who does know it, no matter what hardships fate may send upon her, can say that she has lived. She has had the best of hours when a woman is at her best. (571)

 

* 

June 20: This item appeared in The New York Times:

 

LONDON, June 20. — Mark Twain exhibited himself as an eccentric to-day, and every staid Londoner who witnessed the exhibition fairly gasped. A little after 8 o'clock this morning he appeared in the foyer of Brown’s Hotel garbed in a blue bathrobe and slippers, with about three inches of bare legs showing.

 

When the bushy-haired gentleman appeared “in this unconventional costume,” he “startled the patrons of the hotel and worried employees tremendously.” Twain shrugged off the stares, and with his assistant, headed out the front door and crossed over Dover Street. Destination: The Bath Club, where Twain planned to freshen up a bit. The hotel manager was reportedly “aghast,” when Twain “returned to his hotel in his three-piece costume of one bathrobe and two slippers” but “didn’t want to make a fuss. His feeling was that a great man like Mark Twain must be allowed to do as he pleases.”

 

“I simply wanted to take a bath,” Twain explained to reporters later, “and did the same thing I’d often done at the seaside. London is a sort of seaside town, isn’t it?” he mused.

 

*

 

Racism as history.

 

In books like Great Races of Mankind and History of the World, John Clark Ridpath, a prominent historian of this era, reveals the unthinking racism of the era. In a chapter titled “Barbarism Illustrated,” in Great Races, he begins:

 

It is painful page to reflect how great a portion of the earth is still under the dominion of savage races. Europe, the smallest of the continents, has long emerged from her primitive condition. Large tracts of Asia have been occupied by civilized nations from a remote antiquity. A new world has within the last three centuries been reclaimed. A powerful race has planted itself in place of the scattered aborigines. South America has, within the current century at least, presented the redeeming aspect of Latin civilization. But the rest of the world is still dominated by races of men whose manners and customs lie close to original barbarity. The islands of the sea presents some of the most striking aspects of this current savagery of mankind. Africa throughout nearly its whole extent is untouched with the sunshine of the higher life. The boreal regions, whether in the old world or the new, are still occupied by races on a very low plane of development. It is among such peoples that we must now seek and find our examples of existing forms of barbarity in illustration of the prehistoric life of man.

 

Racism as history.

Ridpath goes on to claim,

 

One of the most striking facts in connection with the savagery of the human race is filth. There is perhaps no single example among aboriginal tribes of anything like cleanliness. Those dispositions which we observe in many birds and animals to plume and cleanse themselves and to protect their nests and lairs from the grosser forms of filth are strangely absent among the ruder savages. The historian Kolben has remarked of the Hottentots that they may be regarded as the filthiest animals in the world! Not content with the offensive accumulations of nature and constant contact with dirt, they actually cultivate gross forms of defilement, rendering them in their personal habits repulsive and disgusting to the last degree. In his description of these heathen the author says: “Their bodies were covered with grease, their clothes were never washed, and their hair was loaded from day to day with such a quantity of soot and fat, and it gathers so much dust and other filth, which they leave to clot and harden in it, for they never cleanse it, that it looks like a crust or cap of black mortar. They wore a skin over the back, fastened in front. They carried this as long as they lived, and were buried in it when they died. Their only other garment was a square piece of skin, tied around the waist by a string, and left to hang down in front. In winter, however, they sometimes used a cap. For ornaments they wore rings of iron, copper, ivory, or leather. The latter the advantage of serving for food in bad times.”

 

… instead of desiring to purify themselves from all animal taint, from defilement, from those offensive odors which are peculiar to tribes in low conditions, such peoples seem to take pleasure in intensifying the disgusting peculiarities of the beast-life which they live. It requires many ages of development, as a rule, to change this horrid instinct and the instinct of personal purity.

 

The Hottentots are also a good example of other debasing usages. The gathering, and taking of food may be cited as a second strongly discriminating feature of human life. One must needs reflect upon the vast difference in the method of refined eating and that of barbarism. The savage man eats very much after the manner of brutes. As to materials, he selects first of all native roots and wild fruits, such as yield themselves readily to his appetite, without cultivation or much of search. The proportion of animal food in tropical countries is always considerably less than in higher latitudes, but the Hottentots are nonetheless great eaters of meat. … No pains whatever are taken for cleanliness, either of the meat itself or of the utensils.

 

Ridpath also focuses on the aborigines of Australia, insisting that they offer one of the best chances of “scientific observation” of humankind it an aboriginal state. “They are today virtually as they were when they were first made known to the Western nations. These original inhabitants of the continent, Ridpath writes, live in houses that “are perhaps the smallest and most insignificant which have ever been used as human abodes. They are scarcely large enough to contain a single person.” As for their personal habits, “No evidences of art artistic taste or adornment have been discovered in connection with these primitive habitations.”

 

“In matters of taste and cleanliness, the Australians are but little superior to the Hottentots,” Ridpath writes. He insists the aborigines have “no sense of cleanliness or decency.”

 

Sometimes Nature is kind:

 

The whale is, of course, beyond the reach of capture to these barbarians, but he is sometimes stranded from the deep or washed up dead on the shore. When this happens bonfires are kindled as a signal, and there is a holiday for the natives. It is their great providence, which they accept with as much gratitude as they are capable of knowing. The inhabitants gather from the region about, and pounce upon the carcass with the avidity of beasts. It makes no difference in what stage of putridity the flesh maybe. They gorge themselves to utter repletion. They clamber about the dead body, and quarrel for the choicer parts. Notwithstanding the heat of the climate, they stuff themselves with blubber until they are distended with the fatty mass. They eat holes into the interior, and go inside to find what they can not devour. They smear themselves with the offensive oil, and remain for days together half suffocated around the scene of their feast. Perhaps the annals of barbarism furnish no example of bestiality more gross and revolting.

 

 

“The social system of these people is miserable in the last degree.”

 

Ridpath also comments on the Veddahs, the “aboriginal inhabitants” of Ceylon. “These people are among the rudest and most primitive of any with whom modern observers have come in contact.”

 

In his telling, the Veddahs

 

do not indulge in polygamy, each man having one wife, and the tribal code being very severe in demanding fidelity of the one to the other. The rule, however, does not exclude intermarriage in the family. Brothers and sisters marry with impunity, subject only to restrictions that the sister must be the younger of the two. Otherwise the tribe is scandalized.

 

Ridpath says that the inhabitants of the Andaman islands “have been cited as the lowest existing species of men.” They do “hunt a species of wild pigs that lives in the jungles, which are sometimes taken and eaten by the natives.”

 

In their personal habits the Andamanders are exceedingly filthy and coarse. They smear themselves with mud, and wear no clothing. … It is the custom of the people to dig up and distribute the bones of the dead, the skull being reserved for the widow. This she suspends by a cord around her neck and uses as a casket for her ornaments and valuables! It is believed that these savages have not succeeded in domesticating any of the animals, though it has been noted that tame fowls are seen about their huts. For the rest, their state is one of absolute savagery.

 

It is not intended in this connection to discuss what may be called the moral ideas of barbarians. Indeed, it might be difficult to speak intelligently of what has little or no existence. It is still in doubt whether the barbarous peoples in the preceding pages have any true concept of religion or of its duties and ceremonial. … It is not clear that the natives of Australia, of Tasmania, and Ceylon have any notion of a Supreme Being or of a life after death.

 

At times, a modern reader can only marvel at the blindness of Ridpath to the values and beliefs of the “races” he describes. If there is a social practice anywhere among the darker peoples that he admires, he does not mention it. Of the Pacific islanders, he feels compelled to feature cannibalism prominently. “The cannibalism of these islanders is proverbial the world over,” he claims. “The eating of human flesh was until recent times the universal practice,” and accepted without the slightest repugnance. “It was the custom, first of all, to eat the bodies of the enemy slain or taken in battle.”

 

Young girls were also chosen for sacrifice. “The preliminary murder was no more regarded than the slaughter of a fowl among civilized peoples,” Ridpath continued, even offering up a bit of a joke. “It is in evidence that the Fijian looked upon his companions with constant regard to their edibility.”

 

Those prepared to partake of human flesh would “speak of the lusciousness of their intended victims,” he added. “It has been declared, with probable truth, that the Fijians have no word in their language to denote a human body except as convey the notion of food.” “Long pig,” they sometimes call humans, Ridpath says. (Great Races of Mankind, pp. 383-394)

 

His disdain for other peoples extends to the colder climes. Of the “Esquimaux,” he admits that they are good map makers.

 

They decorate their ornaments and utensils skillfully with “the outlines of men and birds and beasts.” He further notes,

 

The Esquimaux’s fancy takes up the scenes and incidents of daily life, the little dramas of the hut and seashore, the hazards of the chase or of fishing, and even the farcical happenings of their barbarous society, and depicts the same, with no little humor, on the surface of their drawing materials. …

 

Otherwise the Esquimaux have little intellectual force and no attainments. … They have no mathematical ability whatever. Their minds in respect to number and permutation are as weak as those of children. They are rarely able to count as much as ten, and beyond this they are unable to go. They have large families, which in the northern regions are a blessing rather than a discomfort. It has been observed that the man of the hut can rarely tell the number of his children. He will attempt to enumerate them on his fingers, will fail, and the matter will result in an animated dispute between himself and his wife! The perceptions properly so called are in a better state of development than the judgment. Those faculties which have been brought into exercise by the conditions of the Esquimaux environment have been quickened into tolerable activity. But the rest of the mind lies dormant, as in a state of absolute savagery.

 

The social system of these people is miserable in the last degree. They practice polygamy. The chief men particularly encumber themselves with multiple wives, and the usage attracts no comment. Polyandry is also in vogue, but it is not so common as polygamy. A woman of unusual attractiveness will frequently have two or three husbands, but the common lot are content with one. This sanctity Of the relation of the man and the woman is not regarded. The custom which has been noted among many savage nations of loaning to a visiting stranger the wife of the man who is visited prevails among the Esquimaux. The act is regarded as a social compliment, and any refusal to accept the same on the part of the visitor would be a gross violation of etiquette.

 

As to moral qualities, the Esquimaux have very little appreciation of duty, obligation, or dependence on a higher power. Their promise or pledge, however solemnly made, is generally worthless.

 

Other peoples, Ridpath classifies as among the “semi-barbarous.” The Berbers and Moors of North Africa have achieved a civilized kind of commercial society. Yet, in their “race customs,” the remain “distinctly barbaric…Their personal manners among themselves have the sense and flavor of a remote and barbaric past period their wild dances and crude religious ceremonies ally the race with the Barbarians, leaving only a small reason for classifying them with the civilized peoples of the world.”

 

 

Progressive and nonprogressive parts of the of human species.

 

Ridpath’s only sign of understanding comes when he admits that the cave men of Western Europe, the ancestral white people, were just as barbarous as many of the groups he has just described.  Barbarism and savagery once spanned the corners of the globe, as well, and the historian notes, and he does seem to realize that geography – not race – may play a central role in the advance of civilization.

 

At first the savage state gave away in the river valleys of the East and in those choice peninsulas which drop down from the northern continents into the southern waters. In a later stage barbarism receded from the regions north of the great mountain chains. The central portions of the continents were reclaimed, and there was a recession, a retreat, of savagery toward the borders of the world.

 

The general result has been the extirpation of the barbarous condition in all the central and better parts of the habitable globe. It is in these best regions of the world that the great powers are planted. Here they flourish, and in proportion as they are vigorous and possess the elements of perpetuity, they extend themselves, by varying conquests, toward the horizon. Savagery has fallen back before this movement and is now compelled to occupy the further coasts of the planet. …

 

The principal lesson deducible from the present aspect of savagery is the emphasis which it places on the difference between the progressive and on the nonprogressive parts of the of human species. … The manners and customs of the Adamanders and the Veddahs, and the method of life of the Digger Indians in Western America are in every wise as gross and degrading as any which are suggested by the memorials and relics of the primitive world.

 

It appears conclusive that a considerable part of the human race is at the present time in a condition as degraded and unprogressive as any which is suggested by our knowledge of the prehistoric races of the Old World. On the other hand, we have The fact of evolutionary progress splendidly illustrated in the history, tendencies and prospects of the civilized races. It is apart from the present purpose to speak of the industry, the enterprise, the letters, the art, the triumph over the obdurate forces of the natural world, which have been practiced and achieved by the great peoples now holding dominion in the earth. It is sufficient to note and to emphasize the contrast which is afforded by the degraded and elevated aspects of human life, and this contrast is brought most vividly to the mind of the inquirer as he considers the aspect of barbarism set darkly against the blazing disc of civilization. (Great Races of Mankind, pp. 401-410)

 

*

 

By contrast, in his History of the World, Ridpath sees an American model of civilization helping lead mankind toward a brighter future. He cites, for example, the work of Thomas Edison and the Roebling family, John A. Roebling, Washington A. Roebling, and Emily Warren Roebling.

 

His prediction, regarding the beneficent powers of electric lighting now seems particularly quaint. (See: Year 1883, for the Roebling family.)

 

Edison began his investigations in this line of invention in September of 1878, and in December of the following year gave to the public his first formal statement of results. After many experiments with platinum, he abandoned that material in favor of the carbon-arc in vacuo. The latter is, indeed, the essential feature of the Edison light. A small semicircle, or horseshoe, of some substance, such as a filament of bamboo reduced to the form of pure carbon, the two ends being attached to the poles of the generating machine, or dynamo, as the engine is popularly called, is enclosed in a glass bulb, from which the air has been carefully withdrawn, and is rendered incandescent by the passage of an electric current. The other important features of Edison’s discovery relate to the divisibility of the current, and its control and regulation in volume by the operator. These matters were fully mastered in the Edison invention, and the apparatus rendered as completely subject to management as are the other varieties of illuminating agencies.

 

It were vain to speculate upon the future of electric lighting. The question of artificial illumination has had much to do with the progress of the human race, particularly when aggregated into cities. Doubtless the old systems of lighting are destined in time to give place altogether to the splendors of the electric glow. The general effect of the change upon society must be as marked as darkness, the enemy of good government and morality in great cities, will, in a great measure, be dispelled by the beneficent agent, over which the genius of Davy, Gramme, Brush, Edison, and a host of other explorers in the new continents of science has so completely triumphed. The ease, happiness, comfort, and welfare of mankind must be vastly multiplied, and the future must be reminded, in the glow that dispels the night, of that splendid fact that the progress of civilization depends, in a large measure, upon a knowledge of Nature’s laws, and the diffusion of that knowledge among the people. (Ridpath’s History of the World, Vol. IX, 383)

You knew this was coming. Illustration from Ridpath

* 

In 1907, Woodrow Wilson told students,

 

Liberty fixed in unalterable law would be no liberty at all. Government is a part of life, and, with life, it must change, alike in its objects and its practices; only this principle must remain unaltered – this principle of liberty, that there must be the freest right and opportunity of adjustment. (10/288)