Author Archive
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”*…
As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr put it, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”). Case in point: Derek Thompson reminds us that about 100 years ago, America was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work, and money. Sound familiar?
[Just over] one hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.
The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary…
And what a look it is…
… Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926. You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.
At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.
The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over…
Thompson goes on to unpack the details of the economy and employment, the migration from farm to city, the extraordinary centrality of the automobile, changing mores and gender roles, the primacy of literature and the rise of radio, and so much more. He concludes…
The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology. In one paragraph, they somehow anticipated the rise of audiobooks, YouTube, Netflix, smartphone cameras, musical software, ubiquitous air conditioning, and the electric battery revolution:
It may be that the world will find much use for talking books; school and college students may listen to lectures by long-running phonographs or talking pictures; moving pictures may be transmitted by wireless into houses; seeing with that new electric eye, the photo-electric cell, and recording what is seen, appear to have almost unlimited applications; new musical instruments different from any now in use may be given to us by electricity; the production of artificial climate may become widespread; an efficient storage battery of light weight and low cost might produce changes rivaling those of the internal combustion engine. And these are only a few of the myriad possibilities from new inventions in the future!
In an equally oracular section, the authors predicted the emergence of remote work and declining geographic mobility, anticipating that “the transmission of goods, of the voice and possibly of vision may act as a retarding influence on human mobility in the future and may cause a development of more remote and impersonal direction and controls.”
But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”
Social scientists of the 1920s saw machines pushing workers off of farms and competing with workers in manufacturing plants. How long, they wondered, until they would replace human workers in all tasks? “A larger proportion of work by machines, and a smaller proportion of human labor, is to be expected in the future,” they wrote. “There are indeed a few cases of wholly automatic factories and automatic stores and many automatic salesmen.” It is extraordinary to read these fears and not reflect on the AI jobs panic of the present, while also marveling at the thousands of occupations that are possible today precisely because machines made old jobs obsolete.
The dawn of the age of the machine drove us mad. Physicians of the day warned that the frail human mind was no match for the car, predicting at the time that “diseases of the wheel” would afflict the youth who rode bicycles and cars without restraint. It was not entirely obvious that they were wrong. In Germany, the number of patients registered in mental hospitals grew from 40,375 in 1870 to 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the share of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent.
Most perceptively, social critics of the age recognized that the urban-technological revolution of the early 20th century—what we might even call “modernity”—transformed not only our minds but also our values. Machines and systems that pulled Americans off the farm, away from the family home, and into churning markets of people and products threatened to replace the Judeo-Christian values that had bound the country for centuries with a new system of values dictated by markets. In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”
One hundred and twenty years after the publication of that essay, the Wall Street Journal asked thousands of Americans what values were still important to them. While a declining share of Americans endorsed the worthiness of patriotism, religion, community, and children, the share who said “money” was “very important to them” went up. It sometimes seems as if markets and money are the last value standing, the final common denominator beneath all human endeavor.
On its 250th birthday, the U.S. similarly defines itself through markets. Those famous words of Calvin Coolidge, America’s president in 1926, could just as well serve this American president and this American moment: “The chief business of the American people is business.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social.
You can find the full text of Recent Social Trends in the United States- Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, from the collection of the remarkable Prelinger Library, at the invaluable Internet Archive: Volume 1 and Volume 2.
* Will and Ariel Durent, The Lessons of History (in which, also: “Progress is an improvement in the means that we use for achieving the same old ends. I sometimes wonder if the progress is only of means without any progress in ends.”)
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As we hear the echo, we might recall that today marks the anniversary of a signature advance during the period covered by Recent Social Trends in the United States: on this date in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
For more on this seminal development, see “What was the best thing before sliced bread?“
“You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet”*…
The first two installments of what will be an on-going series from ProPublica and Drilled, covering fossil fuel companies in the 1990s who, even as they denied the reality of climate change, were quietly funding research that favored climate fixes that would protect their businesses…
An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that fossil fuel companies have been funding climate research at prestigious U.S. universities for more than 30 years. Their support has helped amplify the work of scientists who promote the idea that we can stop the climate crisis without breaking our dependence on oil, gas, and coal.
The research produced by those schools in turn shaped global climate models, as well as the policy and technology solutions adopted by governments around the world.
Ultimately, it fostered a misperception that climate change could be solved without dramatically curtailing fossil fuels — a notion that has delayed emissions cuts by decades.
Corporate funders sponsored entire centers, paid the salaries of researchers, kept offices on campus and in some cases had veto power over projects.
Companies maintain they are supporting innovation and needed science. Universities say that with safeguards, sponsorship enhances research programs while preserving academic independence.
Still, the impact of funding constitutes a pattern that Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford, called the “colonization of academia.”…
“Why Carbon Capture Can’t Conceivably Solve Climate Change“- For decades, oil companies have funded universities’ research into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Carbon capture is one of their favored ideas. One snag: It won’t fix the climate crisis. From Katie Worth and Lucas Waldron.
“How Oil Execs Shaped A Landmark Climate Study“- BP created an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” shaped climate discourse for a generation. From Maddie Stone.
As the first piece concludes…
Climate experts know about the costs, technical troubles, and failures of CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequestration] test projects.
Yet many of them have continued to boost the technology, even as they have downplayed solutions showing greater progress.
For example, the same modelers who overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground.
A distressing– but critically important– read. How the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself: “Carbon Captured,” from @propublica.org and @drilledmedia.bsky.social.
And as a reminder that, while climate change is certainly reason enough, it’s by no means the only reason to care: “Five Americans die every hour from toxic vehicle emissions, study finds.”
* Bill McKibben
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As we face facts, we might give ourselves a short break on this, the anniversary of “Raspberry Beret,” by Prince & The Revolution, hitting #1 on the charts in 1985.
Here is the official video (now in 4K). Directed by his Purple Majesty himself, it features graphics and animation from Drew Takahashi, George Evelyn, and the crew at Colossal Pictures.
“I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.”*…
As Frank Landymore explains, we’ve been underestimating fungi…
Scientists have mapped the Earth’s entire underground fungal network, showing that it’s so extensive that if it were stretched into a straight line, it would reach other star systems — and span a sizable chunk of the Milky Way galaxy, for that matter.
The groundbreaking work, published in a study in the journal Science, focused on microorganisms known as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Forming the hidden backbone of our planet’s soil, they circulate water and nutrients and regulate the climate by locking away vast stores of carbon.
Altogether, the global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons, the study found, which is four to six times more than the biomass of all human beings. Around 40 percent of that fungal mass resides in high-altitude or flooded grasslands, like the Everglades in Florida.
The authors hope that their work will highlight the indispensable but overlooked role that these fungal networks play in the Earth’s ecosystems, with around 70 percent of all ground-based plant life depending on the fungi.
“People just aren’t paying attention to these ecosystems,” coauthor Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam and director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), told The New York Times. “What we want to do with these data is really shine a light on some of these hidden patterns underground.”
“I hope this builds into the conversation for their protection because wild grasslands are going away quite quickly,” lead author Justin Stewart, a fellow SPUN biologist, told Live Science. “These are areas that people are really ripping up because it’s much easier to rip up a grass than it is to rip up a tree.”
To unearth this subterranean network, the researchers used data from over 16,000 soil samples across 300 previous papers that calculated the local density of fungal filaments, or hyphae, across the globe. They then fed this data into a machine learning model to predict the density of these hyphal networks per square kilometer of topsoil.
The results were staggering. In all, the model found that the planet is lined with more than 110 quadrillion kilometers of hyphae, or 68 quadrillion miles, which is almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On a cosmic ruler, that equals nearly 12,000 light years, or about a tenth the diameter of our galaxy, which is enough to take you to the Westlund 1 super star cluster.
It’s the clearest picture yet of just how much fungal networks underpin our terrestrial ecosystems. What’s fuzzier from the model, though, is what it says about their health. The density of the fungal networks were lower in soil used for growing crops, but “we don’t know where networks are very healthy and where they’re threatened,” Kiers told the NYT…
“Earth’s Underground Fungus Network Is So Gigantic That If You Stretched It Out, It Would Reach to Other Star Systems,” from @futurism.com.
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As we muse on the mycorrhizal, we might ponder a different kind of massive spread, as we recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev said that without Spam, the Soviet Army would have starved. And Spam was not only eaten but was also incorporated into many other aspects of the war (e.g., grease for guns, cans for scrap metal).
During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Japan, Korea, Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a singular part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific region.
Today Spam is regualrly eaten in 50 countries around the world. According to the Spam website, there are 12.8 cans of Spam products consumed every second; over nine billion cans of Spam have been sold (so far). Big Ben is 1,163 Spam cans tall, and it would take 415,469,599 cans of the stuff to circle the circumference of the Earth. Need to know more? There is a museum devoted to anything and everything related to the Spam brand in Austin, MN.
Contrary to rumor, Spam is only made from six ingredients: pork with ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite.
“Its folds protect no tyrant crew, / The red and white and starry blue”*…
(Roughly) Daily is off today… but it would be wrong to fail (to get to the almanac entry upfront) to mark the date on which we (accurately or inaccurately) celebrate the birth of our nation. So here is Paul Sorene with a selection from the photographic collection of Robert E. Jackson…
“I have decided to do a post which recognizes that next month our beleaguered country celebrates its 250th birthday. But in a subtle manner,” writes photograph collector Robert E. Jackson. “It focuses on stars in photography which makes a reference to the stars and stripes of our flag in some of the images.”
So, half a century since the bicentennial madness of 1976 we’re back to see the wonder of America all over again…
Many more at: “The USA’s Stars and Stripes In Found Photos“
Holiday bonus from Robert S. Levine: “Here’s the Frederick Douglass Speech to Revisit This July 4th.” And looking forward, from Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen, “America At 250 & Beyond.”
* John Philip Sousa, “Stars and Stripes Forever”
“It is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended”*…
Scheduling note: as tomorrow is July 4, (Roughly) Daily will be off. Regular service will resume on July 5… and should continue uninterrupted for awhile. Meantime…
The “Great American State Fair,” ostensibly celebrating the 250th birthday of the U.S., is having a rocky run. After the talent for what was presented to them as a bi-partisan event largely withdrew, the Fair’s champion, President Trump, converted the opening into an unabashed “Trump Rally.” Thereafter, sparse attendance, equipment issues, high prices, and other embarassments.
As it happens, President Trump has some historical company. 100 years ago, in Philadelphia, dicey politicians hoped to replicate the success of the 1876 Centennial Exposition with a celebration of America’s 150th birthday. Instead, the 1926 “world’s fair” lost millions of dollars, hobbling the city’s finances on the eve of the Great Depression. Meilan Solly reports…
A century ago, the first visitors to Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial International Exposition—held to mark the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding—waded through mud and wandered along unpaved sidewalks to reach the heart of the fairgrounds, only to find carpenters still at work on half-finished exhibition halls and gaping holes marking the spots where attractions had yet to be built.
Dining and shopping options were limited, and some of the few exhibits on view stretched the very definition of “entertainment.” One was a model Post Office where “you could go send yourself a letter and watch it get canceled,” says historian Thomas H. Keels, author of Sesqui! Greed, Graft and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926. “That was it.”
The 200,000-plus Shriners in town for their fraternal organization’s national convention realized that their parades and rallies were the main events planned for these early days of the fair. Many went home disappointed, telling family and friends that the exposition wasn’t worth visiting…
Held in Philadelphia between May 31 and December 31, 1926, the fair—referred to as the Sesqui—celebrated the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding. Little remembered today, the event was a financial failure that Varietydeemed “America’s greatest flop.” Exact figures are hard to come by, but Keels suggests that the fair lost the equivalent of more than $410 million in today’s dollars, effectively bankrupting the city of Philadelphia.
The exposition was America’s main celebration of the sesquicentennial. Congress authorized the fair and provided limited funding for it, in addition to issuing commemorative coins and encouraging local celebrations, but the scale of federal participation paled in comparison with that of the 1976 bicentennial and this year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Attendance at the Sesquicentennial Exposition also failed to match the numbers of Philadelphia’s 1876 centennial celebration, which attracted roughly 20 percent of the country’s population in an era when planes, cars and luxury liners had yet to make long-distance travel more accessible. Organizers predicted that 30 million people would visit the 1926 fair; ultimately, fewer than five million paid to attend. [For comparison, more than 44 million people visited the “World of Tomorrow” at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Two and a half decades later, 51 million visitors flocked to the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.]
What doomed the sesquicentennial? Poor planning and lukewarm reviews by the fair’s early visitors contributed to the disastrous outcome. So, too, did the streak of bad weather that plagued Philadelphia during the exposition’s run, with rain falling on more than half of the days the fair was open to the public.
Although some observers considered the lackluster public response a sign that the golden age of world’s fairs had come to an end, Chicago’s 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition proved this prediction wrong, drawing more visitors than any of its predecessors. Overall, Keels attributes the 1926 fair’s failure to its “association with what was being viewed as an increasingly corrupt political machine,” headed by Pennsylvania Republican William Scott Vare.
After the fair incurred “nationwide ridicule,” Keels tells Smithsonian magazine, Vare and other local politicians were eager to move on from the endeavor, selling off leftover structures piecemeal “for pennies on the hundreds of dollars.” This push to forget the sesquicentennial has reverberated into the present: Just one building constructed for the 1926 fair stands in Philadelphia today…
More of the macabre story: “America’s 150th Birthday Celebration Was Deemed the Nation’s ‘Greatest Flop.’ What Went Wrong With the Sesquicentennial?” from @smithsonianmag.bsky.social.
Apposite: “America Is Trapped in the Grossest Pool Party of All Time.”
* John Steinbeck
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As we rethink recreation, we might celebrate one of the great “public parties” of all time, recalling that it was on this date in 1970 that the Second Atlanta International Pop Festival opened in a soybean field adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia. Running officially through the 5th (but actually ending around dawn on the 6th), 500-600,000 folks attended a festival designed to foster a sense of community that transcended race, region, and social class. And while the weather was boiling (local farmers brought watermelons and cantaloupes to help attendees), and there were reports of occasional nudity and recreational drug use, the three days were essentially trouble free… and a blast.
Performers included The Allman Brothers Band, the Chambers Brothers, Richie Havens, Grand Funk Railroad, It’s a Beautiful Day, B.B. King, Lee Michaels, Mott the Hoople, Mountain, Poco, Procol Harum, Rare Earth, John Sebastian, the Bob Seger System, Spirit, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter– and the Jimi Hendrix Experience who, at midnight on this date in 1970, played his rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” for nearly 500,000 people—the largest crowd of Hendrix’s career.
Georgia’s “colorful” governor at the time, Lester Maddox, who had tried repeatedly to prevent the festival from taking place, vowed that he would do whatever it took to block any similar event in the future. The state legislature willingly complied and enacted sufficient restrictions to make it much more difficult for anyone to organize another rock festival in the state. A third Atlanta Pop Festival never took place.
Georgia’s loss. As “Abraham Lincoln” said (in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), “Be excellent to each other. And… PARTY ON, DUDES!”
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