Generational Progress
Sometimes I sit and wonder about how the world has changed, especially through the lives of the last few generations of my family, although this is in no way a history of my family, only quick glances at the world when my grandparents were born, my mother and father, and I were born. Wondering is par for writers and idiots, but as Mark Twain said of idiots and politicians, I repeat myself.
My thoughts on the changing face of America begins with my maternal grandmother, born in 1882. Let’s take a snapshot of her world. No electric lights (Edison and Tesla were still fighting it out), no telephones, no radio, or TV, or airplanes. Indoor plumbing for running water and indoor toilets were only for the rich. Even in the city, cold water in homes and apartments was the norm, and central heat was only for the wealthy.
Only the elite went to college and the vast majority were men. There were few female doctors and lawyers. The first female doctor in America was an English woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, who earned her medical degree in 1849 at Geneva Medical College (NY) Later it became a part of Syracuse University.
In my grandmother’s time, the south was totally segregated and not much better in the north. When we think of segregation, we immediately think of black Americans, but segregation was a lot broader than that and included a large variety of Caucasians, such as Italians, Jews, and Irish. Race riots were all over the land, and one of the biggest was in New York City, as well as New Orleans, and more sprinkled across the south. Prominent blacks, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, berated another prominent black, Booker T. Washington, in a way we could now refer to as “being too white.” Help wanted signs frequently included “Irish Need Not Apply.” Jews were banned from joining many private clubs, and anti-Semitism was rampant. One of the biggest anti-Semites was Henry Ford.
Chester A. Arthur was President, after the 1881 assassination of President Garfield, shot by a disappointed office seeker.
What did America’s map look like? Montana, New Mexico, The Dakotas, Arizona, Wyoming, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii were all territories. The last two states, Alaska and Hawaii didn’t achieve statehood until 1959. Hawaii was the last.
The Wild West was still wild. Sioux and Apache wars did not end until around 1890. The Battle of Little Big Horn was fought in 1876. The famous outlaw, Jesse James, was shot and killed on April 3, 1882.
About this time, one of my friend’s grandmothers was sitting on a fence at her home in north Georgia, when Indians rode up on horses and chatted with her.
Speaking of horses, during this time, New York City had a big public heath problem with the thousands of horses used for every mode of transportation. The streets often clogged with horse manure. Dead horses often lay for days where they fell, because it was easier to dismember them and haul them away after they were stiff. Imagine the smell and the problem of keeping shoes and clothes clean!
Other personalities who shared my grandmother’s birth year: Franklin D Roosevelt, Virginia Wolf (writer), Robert H. Goddard (Rocket Designer)
And if you think Covid was a sweeping, global terror, just glance at the Spanish Flu of 1917-1918, which swept the globe, causing 25 to 50 MILLION deaths.
It’s worth mentioning that World War I changed the face of the globe. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire disappeared. The Russian Empire collapsed and was replaced by the Soviet Union. Europe was rearranged with different boundaries, as was the Middle East and Africa. The world still suffers from European politicians redrawing the world’s maps.
Speaking of the Spanish flu, yes, I get my flu shot every year, and have been vaccinated against Covid, and will gladly take any vaccination that prevents death and disease. Maybe you don’t. If not, I congratulation you for one who faces death head on! Fight on, brave warrior!
My mother’s father was a doctor and died treating a huge number of flu patients. She was not yet three years old when he passed away. But, before you trace my mother’s steps, let’s look very briefly at my fraternal grandparents’ world. They lived in various places, including Georgia and Florida, where my father was born in 1918. His parents, my grandparents, rode a mule from Georgia to a small town in South Carolina, where my grandfather started a laundry business. A decade later the Great Depression fell out of the sky, sweeping up my mother’s and my father’s families in a starving, pinch penny world.
But the Great Depression was not all bad news. It sometimes brought out the best in people. A man walked into my grandfather’s laundry and asked if he would wash his shirt and dry clean his suit. He said he was going for a job interview and would come back to pay the bill. A few months later, the same man pulled up in a car, came in, thanked my grandfather and paid the bill.
My mother was born in 1916 and my father 16 months later. The First World War had just concluded when a second disaster stuck, this one economic. They grew up in the heart of the Great Depression.
Yes, the Great Depression was deep and wide and became the first of many life lessons for my parents’ generation. My folks were some of the lucky ones who always had food on the table. My paternal grandfather had a spacious backyard garden, which he plowed with a plow pulled by a mule. My paternal grandmother, like many other wives of the period, seldom shopped for canned foods at a grocer’s, but instead she canned everything that came from my grandfather’s garden. As a child, I remember her pantry still stocked with row after row of glass jars of red tomatoes and green beans.
Of course, from my parents’ time and into mine, glass jars of milk were delivered door to door, at first by horse drawn wagon, and in my time by a milk truck.
Known as Black Tuesday, the world’s stock markets crashed on October 29, 1929. For those who think the stock market is only for the rich, know this: with the stock market crash, international trade soon dropped by more than 50% and unemployment in the United States rose to 23%! Just picture your neighborhood of a hundred homes, with 25 of them suddenly driven to poverty. By 1933, the nadir of the worst economic dip in the history of the industrialized world, 25 million Americans were out of work and about half the country’s banks had failed. Hard earned savings? Gone and forever forgotten. A good lesson here: When industry fails, people starve.
Yet several companies were born and thrived in the same period. Just to name an array: Hewlett Packard, KFC, Publix, Disney.
In my parents’ years, they faced not only the Great Depression, but another World War, and this time it truly did span the globe. World War I, the war to end all wars, was mostly fought in Europe, with some in the Middle East and African colonies. In World War II, the Japanese controlled much of Asia and Germany controlled Europe.
So, what was the source of my parents’ generational success? Home. Family. Love. All of which taught responsibility and determination. In my opinion, if you take away those three, failure is almost assured. There was one other factor: faith. I’m speaking of faith in the broad sense. It could be founded in religion, but perhaps not; perhaps it was faith in each other, with parents teaching their children and children having faith that their parents would always be there. And parents had faith their children would do the right thing and remain a vibrant part of the family.
In my mother’s case, although her father died before she knew anything of the wide world, she had older siblings and an extended family to lead her and nurture her.
But, let’s go back to the broad brush strokes.
There were plenty of tech advances, and many are those things my grandparents never would have even conceived of. In 1903, the Wright Brothers would begin the trek from an Ohio bicycle shop, to the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a first tentative step into the jet age.
With the onset of the age of the automobile, there were few rules. As a third grader, my father drove his father’s laundry truck, after my grandfather strapped blocks of wood on the clutch and brake and gas pedal so my Dad’s feet could reach them.
As a teenager, my father got his first airplane ride in a biplane, flown by a barnstormer, a former World War I pilot. Later on, Dad, along with thousands of others, would fly heavy bombers and drops millions of bombs around the world against our World War II adversaries. After the war, he would fly jets.
Air transportation blossomed and little by little took over for passenger travel. Still, it was a familiar world. As a youngster, my parents had no worries sending me alone by commercial air to visit a friend.
All of you are familiar with modern tech conveniences, so I won’t belabor those, but will add a few lines about other common items that crossed the line between my parents’ generation and mine. For brevity, I’ll use a list, most of which involve transportation:
The rise and decline of long bus trips.
The rise of jets, especially for international travel and the rise of international travel itself.
The rise of general (private and corporate) aviation.
The near abandonment of lengthy train travel.
The decline of the family, with fewer and fewer solid marriages and more and more children being raised in single parent homes.
More and more large American cities with serious crime rates.
Rise of the anti-gun culture, not always without reason, I quickly add. When I was a child, in rural areas, teenagers might walk to high school with a rifle, shoot a few rabbits on the way, and park it in the principal’s office until school was out. No one can imagine it now. Does that mean good people are suddenly bad, or are there more bad people on the streets in cities and towns? I have no definitive answers, but I do have some theories I prefer to keep to myself.
Fewer and fewer meals are eaten at home. That also means there are fewer and fewer discussions at the supper table.
The rise of the TV dinner and the resultant lack of familial conversation.
Obesity has risen to such astounding levels, that in America, it’s almost the norm.
More people seem to hate the rich, especially the people who want to be rich and with it, the rise of the consumer class to staggering levels.
But, let’s mention some good things:
A university education is available to almost everyone, including men and women of every race and creed.
Jobs are plentiful and opportunities are wide open. Just look at the huge companies that have risen in the past 25 years. And in this age of Covid, check out the multitudinous Help Wanted signs.
Competition has allowed unknown companies to beat the big guys. The Kresge Company morphed into KMart and was then eclipsed by Walmart and Target, which have been battered by Amazon. The American automobile industry has been given a bloody nose by the Japanese and German and Korean car companies.
Polaroid and Eastman Kodak have fallen and in fact, the photographic film industry has nearly disappeared with the rise of the digital camera and its spring-off, the smartphone camera.
TV came on the scene….pardon the pun, in the early 1950s. Radio drama disappeared. I still remember the Lone Ranger and the call of Hi Ho Silver! Away! And the question: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? THE SHADOW KNOWS!
For the most part, American middle class income has kept up with inflation. Lower incomes have decreased slightly. But, as I always say, income is not the main thing. The main thing is how much you can buy with it. With that in mind, our income has pretty much kept pace with the rise of food prices. Cost of cars also tracks well.
In my opinion, if we look to rugged lives my grandparents had, including the ever-present foils of nature, life has gotten less and less harsh over the last three generations. But, are our lives better? My answer is: Yes and No and the No part worries me.
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