1889

__________ 

“No one, up to that time, had ever thought of outfitting windows with fly-screens.” 

H. L. Mencken

__________

ELBRIDGE BROOKS, writing in The Story of the American Soldier (1889), sums up the problem with the Native Americans: 

    The Indian policy of the Government has been fickle, illiberal, faithless and bad, the moral influence of the soldiers upon the red-men has been of the worst character, the military rule to which they have been subjected has been autocratic, tyrannical and full of harm, and the Indian wars of the United States have been, largely, of the nation's own making.

*

April 23: A land rush is unleashed in Oklahoma, as lands taken from the various tribes’ reservations are sold. Claims went to the first person who could reach a spot and mark it.

 

    “A dispatch from Oklahoma City to-night says that at 12 o’clock men seemed to rise from the ground there, and in an incredibly short time a town was staked off and lots placed on the market.” (The New York Times.)

    The term “Boomer Sooners,” popular with University of Oklahoma sports fans, relates to the land rush of 1889.

(Image from blogger's collection; feel free to use.)

 

*

 

THE BOSTON BEANEATERS pitcher Vic Willis is the highest paid player in the league, earning a salary of $1,800. (Sports Illustrated; 12-14-15)

 

*

 

June 24: Butch Cassidy begins his criminal career, taking part in the robbery of a bank in Telluride, Colorado. In following years he and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh) perfect the “pony express” method of escaping the scene of the crime – a crime that they have just committed. They have relays of horses and supplies ready, at twenty-mile intervals. Using this system, they could rob a bank in Rawlins, Wyoming on a Monday, and be 120 miles away in Browns Park, Utah, the following day. (“Riding the Outlaw Trail” by Robert Redford, National Geographic, November 1976).

 

    Their famous “Hole-in-the-Wall gang” got its name from a gap barely wide enough for a horse, in a fifty-mile-long sandstone ridge “rearing out of the Wyoming grassland.” (625) Two men with Winchesters, Redford says, could hold off an army at that narrow opening.

 

    In 1900, and by that time famous, Butch had an idea for a “good joke,” when he and the rest of the gang posed for a picture in Fort Worth, Texas. They were wearing clothes they had just purchased with money they “withdrew” from a bank in Winnemucca, Nevada. (628)

Left to right: Longabaugh, Bill Carver, Ben Kilpatrick (alias: Tall Texan),
Harvey Logan (Kid Curry), and Robert Leroy Parker (Butch Cassidy).
(Image from internet.)

 

 

    Logan is “credited” with eight killings, including his first, in 1894, during a Christmas party in Landusky, Montana, named after Powell Landusky, his victim. Logan eventually fled to Argentina, where he was murdered in turn by another outlaw. As for the town, by 2017, the population had fallen to only 40.

 

    The Sundance Kid soon acquired a girlfriend named Etta Place. According to the Pinkerton detective agency, which had been tasked with tracking down the gang, Etta “appears to be refined;” but she could also ride and shoot. She, Butch and Sundance traveled to New York City in 1901, where they spent a great deal of money. (632) In his earlier career, Butch liked to pass himself off as a horse trader; but it was soon noted that he was always selling and rarely buying. As for his nickname, he got it after working at a butcher shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming. (637) The gang also hung out at South Pass City. A gold rush in the area caused population to boom, reaching 2,000. Today, South Pass City is a ghost town.

The Sundance Kid with Etta Price.

The movie version of the gang's story, starring Katherine Ross (as Etta),
Robert Redford (as the Sundance Kid) and Paul Newman (as Butch).

Abandoned mine near South Pass City.

The lure of gold.

Old placer mining site near South Pass City.

South Pass City in boom times.

Lynchings were common during this era.
(George Witherell, accused of murder in Colorado).
(All images above from the internet.)

 

    One tough character who lived there was Jesse Ewing. He had been clawed badly by a grizzly, winning the nickname, the “Ugliest Man in South Pass.” He once shared a jail cell with Isom Dart, an African American criminal – which did not please Ewing. He made Dart kneel one day, and used his back for a table. Dart’s friend later killed Ewing, and then Dart was killed by Tom Horn, the bounty hunter. Horn, in turn, was hanged in 1903, after he allegedly shot and killed a 14-year-old boy.

 

    The gang liked to hold up Union Pacific trains, and near Wilcox, Wyoming, used dynamite to blast open a safe on a mail car. The explosives were too powerful. The car and the safe were obliterated, and $30,000 in cash was scattered in all directions.

    Redford notes that there is no record that Butch ever killed anyone, calling him “the most amiable of all western outlaws.” (655)

* 

September 12: Henry Mencken turns nine. Around this time he discovers Huckleberry Finn, an event he will later describe as “the most stupendous of my whole life.” With that, his desire to write is born. H. L. Mencken, as he will become known, described growing up in Baltimore in the 80s. (49/5-18) 

    Mencken remembers: “There was a great epidemic of typhoid fever every Summer, and a wave of malaria every Autumn, and more than a scattering of smallpox, especially among the colored folk in the alleys, every Winter.” 

    It was, he says, the “Aframerican way,” to burn buckets of rosin and tar to prevent disease. “The whole neighborhood choked on the black, greasy, pungent smoke for hours afterward,” he recalled many years later. “It was thought to be an effective preventative of cholera, smallpox and tuberculosis.” 

    Another problem was that raw sewage, from both private and public buildings, emptied into the Back Basin, and the water flowed slowly down to Chesapeake Bay. “As a result it began to acquire a powerful aroma every Spring, and by August smelled like a billion polecats. This stench radiated all over downtown Baltimore, though in Hollins street we hardly ever detected it.” 

    On a happier note, Mencken had a kind of fun that seems almost impossible today. “In every way,” he wrote, “city life was much nosier than it is now.” 

    Children at play were not incarcerated in playgrounds and policed by hired ma’ms, but roved the open streets, and most of the games involved singing or yelling. At Christmas-time they began to blow horns at least a week before the great day, and kept it up until all the horns were disabled, and in Summer they began celebrating the Fourth far back in June and were still exploding fire-crackers at the end of July. Nearly every house had a dog in it, and nearly all the dogs barked more or less continuously from 4 a.m. until after midnight. It was still lawful to keep chickens in backyards, and many householders did so. All within ear range of Hollins street appeared to divide them as to sex in the proportion of a hundred crowing roosters to one clucking hen.

 

    He and his brother were regularly ordered to bathe – no easy task, in an era before showers, and bathtubs with running water. 

    Whenever it was decided that we had reached an intolerable degree of grime, and measures were taken to hound us to the bathroom, we went into the vast old zinc-lined tub together, and beguiled the pains of getting clean by taking toy boats along. Once we also took a couple of goldfish, but the soap killed them almost instantly.

 

    Mencken also reports: 

    Nothing, in those days, seemed to work. All the house machinery was constantly out of order. The roof sprang a leak at least three times a year, and I recall the day when the cellar was flooded by a broken water main in Hollins street,  and my brother and I had a grand time navigating it in wooden wash-tubs. No one, up to that time, had ever thought of outfitting windows with fly-screens. Flies overran and devoured us in the Summer, immense swarms of mosquito were often blown in from the swamps to the southwest, and a miscellany of fantastic moths, gnats, June-bugs, beetles, and other insects. Some of them of formidable size and pugnacious, buzzed around the gas-lights at night.

 

    On a happier note,  

    Baltimore lay very near the immense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay, and out of the bay it ate divinely. I well recall the time when prime hard crabs of the channel species, blue in color, at least eight inches in length along the shell, and with snow-white meat almost as firm as soap, were hawked in Hollins street of Summer mornings at ten cents a dozen. The supply seemed to be almost unlimited, even in the polluted waters of the Patapsco river…

 

    Mencken says of his father, “In the evening he seldom had much appetite, and would usually complain that cooking was fast going downhill in Baltimore, in accord with the general decay of human society.” He also recalled that his dad paid $1.20 for a case of 24 bottles of beer. 

    The people of Baltimore believed that all vegetation was healthful, and kept down chills and fever. So, even dandelions grew in the streets.     

    I myself once had proof that the excess of litter in the streets was not without its value to mankind. I was riding the pony Frank when a wild thought suddenly seized him, and he bucked me out of the saddle in the best manner of a Buffalo Bill bronco. Unfortunately, my left foot was stuck in the stirrup, and so I was dragged behind him as he galloped off. He had gone at least a block before a couple of colored boys stopped him. If the cobblestones of Stricker street had been bare I’d not be with you today. As it was, I got no worse damage than a series of harsh scouring running from my neck to my heels. The colored boys took me to Reveille’s livery-stable, and stopped the bloodshed with large gobs of spider web. It was the hemostatic of choice in Baltimore when I was young. If, per chance, it spread a little tetanus, then the Baltimoreans blamed the mercies of God. 

 

*

 

THE MERCK MANUAL of Medical Information recommends one hundred different treatments for bronchitis. (The modern editor of the manual admits that “none of them worked.”)

 

1920

 

____________________

 

“The older generation pretty much ruined this world before passing it on to us.”

 

John F. Carter

____________________

 

 

    In an August 1965 issue of American Heritage, Bruce Catton explains, “All the old rules seemed to be vanishing in the Twenties.” “…the characteristic figure of the era was the Flapper, the girl who bobbed her hair and wore short skirts with nothing in particular beneath them and put in her time piling in and out of open cars populated by collegians in coonskin coats.”

 

    Catton writes: “There was an immense, all-pervading disillusionment. The nation’s highest ideals had been appealed to during the war, so that to win the war seemed the holiest of causes; the war had been won, but it was hard to see that anything worth winning had been gained; the idealism had been used up, and people had an uneasy feeling that they had been had.” 

 

    Westbrook Pegler called it “the Era of Wonderful Nonsense.” Says Catton: “Publicity was the thing, and it had no standards of value except pure sensation.” Farmers and wage earners did not share in the growing prosperity. One “conservative senator announced that congressmen who protested about this situation were simply ‘sons of the wild jackass’ whose cries need not be noticed.”

 

    E. B. White summed up the impact of radio: that man’s “words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.”

 

    Jack Shuttleworth described the Jazz Age: “Fitzgerald wrote it, Held drew it…” John Held, Jr. was born in Salt Lake City in 1889. At age nine he sold his first woodcut for nine dollars. He was later trained by one of Brigham Young’s “160-odd grandsons,” Mahonri Young.

 

    Shuttleworth describes Held’s art:

 

    The scenes were football games, fraternity houses, speakeasies, cocktail parties, tea dances. The step was the Charleston or Black Bottom and the picturesque means of transportation the Stutz Bearcat, the Marmon roadster, and the Model T. And at all these places, in any car, stairway, and alcove, one main, almost relentless recreation was necking.

Held makes fun of college men and their affectations.

 

    Malcolm Crowley describes how the decade began:

 

    When we first heard of the Armistice we felt a sense of relief too deep to express, and we all got drunk. We had come through, we were still alive, and nobody at all would be killed tomorrow. The composite fatherland for which we had fought and in which some of us believed—France, Italy, the Allies, our English homeland, democracy, the self-determination of nations—had triumphed. We danced in the streets, embraced old women and pretty girls, swore blood brotherhood with soldiers in little bars, drank with our elbows locked in theirs, reeled through the streets with bottles of champagne, fell asleep somewhere. On the next day, after we got over our hangovers, we didn’t know what to do, so we got drunk.

 

…We returned to New York, appropriately—to the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you met came from another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have parents, or a past more distant than last night’s swell party, or a future beyond the swell party this evening, and the disillusioned book he would write tomorrow.

 

    Hemingway talks about the embarrassing use of words like “sacred, glorious, and sacrifice.” Having served in the ambulance corps, he admitted, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”

 

   John F. Carter Jr. wrote in a letter to a friend: “the older generation pretty much ruined this world before passing it on to us.” It was like a child had been handed this Thing back in the 90s in good shape. “But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages.”

 

*

 

THE 1920 CENSUS will show the State of New York standing first of 48 states in population, at 10,384,829. Pennsylvania will be second, Illinois third. Cleveland, Ohio will have 796,841 people – making it larger than Los Angeles, San Francisco or San Diego.

 

    Kansas will rank 24th in population, at 1,769,257. Hard to believe a century later, but Florida will trail, standing 32nd, with 968,470. Miami, Florida will count only 29,571 residents.

Abandoned high school near Ness City, Ness County, Kansas.
In 2020, the population of Ness County was 2,687,
or about 2.5 people per square mile.
In 1920, the county had 7,490 people.

The blogger bicycled across the country in 2007. 
In two small Kansas towns, the locals reported that even McDonalds had closed.

These two young riders were heading east, also riding across the country.
I was heading west.
(I lost their names, unfortunately.)
Kansas Highway 96 was flat for many miles.

 

    The ten least-populous states will be:

 

39. Montana

40. Utah

41. New Hampshire

42. Idaho

43. New Mexico

44. Vermont

45. Arizona

46. Delaware

47. Wyoming

48. Nevada

 

   Only three cities have topped a million people: New York leads (5.6 million, including 1,989,216 persons foreign born); Chicago is second (2.7 million); and Philadelphia is third (1.8 million).

 

   Detroit is close (993,678). (Source: The North American Almanac, 1924).

 

  A century later, with two states since added, New Hampshire is still #41. Montana is #43, Delaware is #45, Vermont is #49, and Wyoming finds itself at the bottom, #50.

 

  Rounding out the bottom ten are states new to the list of least populated: Maine #42; Rhode Island #44; South Dakota #46; North Dakota #47; and Alaska #48. 

Parts of Wyoming remain barren a century later.
Author's photo from a cross-country bicycle ride - 2007.

Much of Montana is sparsely populated, as well.
Picture heading north toward Browning, 
from blogger's bicycle ride 2024.
Even finding shade was a challenge in places.

*

MARION DAVIES stars in the movie, “The Restless Sex,” as an adventurous young woman, torn between her love for two different men.

* 

THAT SPRING, Arthur Walworth writes, Wilson faced a number of post-war problems:

 

long-simmering problems of labor and industry were brought before the recuperating President for settlement. During his illness the men of his Cabinet had been debating delicate, incendiary issues of law. Now, when Palmer suggested the use of an injunction to suppress a strike in New York Harbor, the President turned to him quietly and said: “Every lawyer knows that is an abuse of the writ.” Labor could never be forced back into the conditions under which had worked before the war, Wilson thought.

 

Wilson refused, however, to consider a pardon for Eugene Debs, the Socialist, whom he considered a “traitor.” (10/397 II)

 

* 

February 25: Congress passes the Mineral Lands Leasing Act. Royalties to be paid to the federal government, by companies extracting oil and gas are set – but are not changed for at least a hundred years. Most lands can still be rented for an annual fee of $2 per acre for petroleum, and $3 per acre for coal.

 

*

 

March 26: This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, is published. At a time when polite society believed a woman who allowed a man to kiss her must then be engaged, this line shocked readers.

 

Amory Blaine’s girlfriend Rosalind Connage tells him, “I’ve kissed dozens of men, I suppose I’ll kiss dozens more.”

 

In the wake of World War I, young people challenged the old rules.

The pre-war style of 1914 is going out.

* 

REACTION against immigration continues to fester. H.L. Mencken offers his acerbic take on the Anglo-Saxon type:

 

As I say, the American of the old stock is not unaware of his steady, and, of late, somewhat rapid deterioration – this gradual loss of his old mastery in the land his ancestors helped to wring from the Indian and the wildcat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and, as if in despair of arresting it in fact, makes desperate efforts to dispose of it by denial and concealment. These efforts often take grotesque and extravagant forms. Laws are passed to hobble and cage the citizen of newer stocks in a hundred fantastic ways. It is made difficult and socially dangerous for him to teach his children the speech of his fathers, or to maintain the cultural attitudes that he has inherited from them. Every divergence from the norm of the low-caste Anglo-Saxon is treated as an attentat against the Commonwealth, and punished with eager ferocity.

 

It so happens that I am myself an Anglo-Saxon – one of far purer blood, indeed, than most of the half-bleached Celts who pass under the name in the United States and England. I’m in part Angle and in part Saxon, and what else I am is safely white, Nordic, Protestant and blonde. Thus I feel free, without risk of venturing into bad taste, to regard frankly the soi disant Anglo-Saxon of this incomparable Republic and his rather less dubious cousin of the Motherland. How do the two appear to me, after years spent largely in accumulating their disfavor? What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stick out above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence – his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms – in short, his hereditary cowardice.

 

He adds that the two great empires, English and American, “were built up primarily by swindling and butchering unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations.”

 

In fact, Mencken quotes a report focusing on the condition of the people of southeast Ohio, at the time, described as “more purely American than in any of the rest of the State.”

 

Here gross superstition exercises strong control over the thought and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feeble minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics is corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes abound, the schools have been badly managed and poorly attended. Cases of rape, assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence within five minutes’ walk of the corporation limits of the one of the county seats, while in another county political control is held by a self-professed criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and its evils results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but are extreme also in the towns. (49-131-132)

* 

May: In a book review, The New York Times takes note of the anti-Semitism of the era. 

    The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that was owned by Ford and circulated via Ford dealers around the country, launched a series titled “The International Jew.” It cited “The Protocols,” and advanced the plot: Schiff and the Warburgs, in this telling, had not just brought down the Russian Empire; they had also conspired to bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. (Unsurprisingly, these rich bankers did not in fact support the Bolsheviks.) International Jews, Ford’s paper said, were the “conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.” 

    The newspaper series was a crisis for American Jews. But Schiff, uncharacteristically, advised restraint. “If we get into a controversy we shall light a fire, which no one can foretell how it will become extinguished,” he wrote to a group of Jewish leaders in June. “I would strongly advise therefore that no notice be taken of these articles and the attack will soon be forgotten.”

 

Schiff died later that same year, and did not live to see how terribly wrong he had been.

Ford turned the series, “The International Jew,” into a book (subtitle: “The World’s Foremost Problem”) and millions of copies were printed. 

Two years later, The Times reported that Adolf Hitler, had a portrait of Ford on his office wall in Munich. On a table in his anteroom you could pick from a stack of copies of The International Jew, translated into German.

* 

August 10: Mamie Smith and Perry Bradford record a song, written by Bradford, “Crazy Blues.” Smith is from Cincinnati, a singer with only one other recorded title to her credit. In the first month, “Crazy Blues” sells 75,000 copies, two million over time. As The New York Times noted on the hundredth anniversary of its release, “It established the blues as a popular art and prepared the way for a century of Black expression in the fiery core of American music.”

 

“Crazy Blues”

By Mamie Smith

 

I can’t sleep at night

I can’t eat a bite

‘Cause the man I love

He don’t treat me right

 

He makes me feel so blue

I don’t know what to do

Sometime I sit and sigh

And then begin to cry

‘Cause my best friend

Said his last goodbye

 

There’s a change in the ocean

Change in the deep blue sea, my baby

I’ll tell you folks, there ain’t no change in me

My love for that man will always be

 

Now I can read his letters

I sure can’t read his mind

I thought he’s lovin’ me

He’s leavin’ all the time

Now I see my poor love was blind

 

I went to the railroad

Hang my head on the track

Thought about my daddy

I gladly snatched it back

Now my baby’s gone

And gave me the sack

 

Now I got the crazy blues

Since my baby went away

I ain’t got no time to lose

I must find him today

 

Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can

But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man

I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news

Now I got the crazy blues

 

I’m gonna do like a Chinaman

Go and get some hop

Get myself a gu, and shoot myself a cop

 I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news

Now I’ve got the crazy blues.

 

The Times explains the power of the song: 

A boisterous cry of outrage by a woman driven mad by mistreatment, the song spoke with urgency and fire to Black listeners across the country who had been ravaged by the abuses of race-hate groups, the police and military forces in the preceding year — the notorious “Red Summer” of 1919.

 

The blues worked on multiple levels simultaneously and partly in code, with “my man” or “the man” translatable as “the white man” or “white people.”

 

Out of her mind with despair, the singer turns to violence against her oppressor for relief in the chorus that gives the song its title: “Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can/ But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man/ I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news/ Now I’ve got the crazy blues.”

 

Indeed, the blues became a full-blown craze, with listeners of every color able to buy and listen at home to music marketed as “race records.” The form was initially associated almost exclusively with women such as Ms. Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. They and many more women made hundreds of records that sold millions of copies over more than a decade — well before the great bluesman Robert Johnson stepped into a recording studio for the first time, in November 1936.

 

But so was the song’s disturbing but powerful ending, in which Ms. Smith sings allegorically of the darkening circumstances: “There’s a change in the ocean/ change in the deep blue sea.” In the concluding verse, she speaks of changing the way she responds. She has decided to “go and get some hop,” she announces, and “get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop.”

 

Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was also a dance tune: People were not only moved by it; they moved to it. 

A young woman of the era: showing too much ankle!

No good girl would ever smoke or show so much skin!!!

1920 Model T Coupe by Ford.

* 

September: In the Atlantic Monthly, “These Wild Young People” appears, written by One of Them.

 

The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They gave us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof. “So simple that a child can run it!” But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages. Now, with loving pride, they turn over their wreck to us. (155/frontispiece)

 

* 

November 2: President Wilson is convinced Democrats will prevail in the voting. “You need not worry,” he tells his cabinet on Election Day. “The American people will not turn Cox down and elect Harding.” (10/403 II) 

It’s not even close. 

Warren G. Harding polls 16,151,916 votes, a winning margin of 60.3 percent. James M. Cox earns 9,134,074. Democrats manage to win the votes of every former Confederate state, save Tennessee. 

They also pick up Kentucky. The rest of America votes – as we might say a century later – red.