100 Years Ago vs Today

Message 58 of 2745

Another blog waxed lyrical about how much better off Americans were 100 years ago vs today. Apparently, the blogger hasn't studied America of 1909.

A hundred years ago, we had a few plutocrats like John Pierpont Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and lots and lots of people like my grandfathers who worked 16 hours a day seven days a week for 8 cents an hour. Also, there was no job protection of any kind. If you got hurt or sick and couldn't work, you lost your job.

As for women working, they labored in sweat shops for 10 hours a day seven days a week making in conditions so dangerous it wasn't unheardof for them to die in fires. As for the children, at ten year of age, they joined their mothers the sweat shops.

One hundred years ago, a swine flu would kill millions of the youngest and healthiest people because few had the money to find cures for diseases. In fact, more American soldiers would die from 1918 influenza pandemic than would die from fighting in France.

Not everything about 100 years ago was bad, however. For all their problems, they had optimism. The automobile, the airplane and radio were coming of age. They loved to hear about how wonderful the 20th Century would be. To a person, they would be disgusted with the weak willed whiners, complainers and fear mongers making so much noise today. And, they would ask one question: not what's wrong with America, but what's wrong with you?

posted by LenRobertson

You missed the domestic terrorism visited upon black citizens.
Perhaps, an understandable omission.

posted by okhela
about 1 month ago

Good Old Days (DAMN YANKEES) view link

posted by Bernie18
about 1 month ago

Good point, Okhela.

posted by MartiInMexico
about 1 month ago

100 years ago the trout fishing would have been awesome.
100 years ago getting laid would have been a feat.
100 years ago corn bread and grits.
Being young, in the sun, that would do

posted by tjbr52
about 1 month ago

It was a hard time for most people in the first decades of the 20th Century. If I had tried to list all the of the violence done by Americans upon their neighbors at that time, the list would have been long. The South bordered on feudal with the lower class whites pitted against the blacks to the detriment of both, the East became an enormous engine with immigrants its cheapest cogs, and the West saw first the Indians and then the homesteaders driven from their land. On my Danish side, my grandfather saw his homestead swindled from him by corrupt Seattle city politicians and he later died died from appendicitis because he couldn't afford a doctor. On my Swedish side, I'm named for a great uncle murdered in a logging camp for union organizing in 1907.

If you want to read about how awful it could be at the turn of the last century, read Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle.

Yet for all that, America was far more optimistic then than it is now.

posted by LenRobertson
about 1 month ago

Another blog waxed lyrical about how much better off Americans were 100 years ago vs today. Apparently, the blogger hasn't studied America of 1909.

"A hundred years ago, we had a few plutocrats like John Pierpont Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and lots and lots of people like my grandfathers who worked 16 hours a day seven days a week for 8 cents an hour. Also, there was no job protection of any kind. If you got hurt or sick and couldn't work, you lost your job.

As for women working, they labored in sweat shops for 10 hours a day seven days a week making in conditions so dangerous it wasn't unheardof for them to die in fires. As for the children, at ten year of age, they joined their mothers the sweat shops. "

add jim crow laws, a few lynchings, the war to end all wars sounds like a great time.

posted by yichel
about 1 month ago

A lot of the people in America 100 years ago were recent immigrants who had come to America from someplace where life was MUCH harder than it was here . It is all relative . They had every reason to be optimistic because they had been , and were still allowed to be, pro-active in improving their own lives .

posted by Dirck
29 days ago

My uncle pointed this out to me when I was very young.
It sticks with me to this day:

To paraphrase him:
"America was settled by losers, dummies and has-beens.
All those people at Ellis Island were losers!
People don't immigrate when they're doing good.
They had to come here because they were doing bad where they were.
If they were doing good in the home land, they never would have immigrated.

The Africans who were brought here as slaves were losers too because they got caught. The smart ones got away.

The native Americans were losers because they didn't kill the white people immediately when they met them.

The Chinese railroad workers were losers because they were doing bad in China and had to immigrate.

So, neicy-peicy (what my uncle called me) EVERYBODY in America descends from a loser no matter what the myths say.

100 years ago, everybody (except the slaves) could be optimistic because anyplace was better than where they'd come from...and they wouldn't have come here if they'd been doing well where they were.

America has done well in the last 100 years ....
But like Australia .... it pays to remember that we all came from L O S E R S .... and made the best of it regardless of what it may have cost others.

I wouldn't laud 1909 for anything other than what it was ...