America in 1915: Long Hours, Crowded Houses, Death by Trolley
Bad news: No antibiotics. Good news: Streetcars, everywhere!
by DEREK THOMPSON, FEB 11, 2016, The Atlantic

The presidential campaign is replete with allusions to better times
and eclipsed golden ages of American greatness. But in a new review
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economist Carol Boyd Leon
paints a sociological portrait of America as it was 100 years ago,
when technology was meager, financial ruin was one downturn away, war
was ongoing in Europe, and the choices that Americans have come to
expect—in their cars, clothes, food, and homes—were preceded by a
monotonous consumer economy. In 1915, Americans walked everywhere (or
took a streetcar, if they lived in cities), lived in three-generation
homes that they rarely owned, ate almost as much lard as chicken, and
spent Friday nights dancing to player pianos. In short: Everything was
worse, except for the commute.

Here is a closer look at America, one century ago.

[America suffered worse working conditions, in just about every way.]

For men: Work for men was more widespread, more dangerous, worse paid,
and, well, just more annoying. According to the 1920 census, 85
percent of men over 14 were in the labor force, compared with just 69
percent for men over 16 today. It was the dawn of scientific
management, with factory workers introduced to a brand new office
colleague, the time clock. Manufacturing workers averaged 55 hours at
work per week, 10 percent more than self-reported averages today. And
the jobs were more dangerous: With a fatality rate of 61 deaths per
100,000 workers, the workplace was about 30 times more dangerous than
it is today.

For women: Women were much less likely to work, and in 1915, many were
finding employment at elementary and high schools. The reason for
women’s early entry into education in the U.S., however, is a little
depressing. School boards preferred female teachers not only because
they were seen as more loving, but also because they would do what
male principals told them while accepting less than a man’s wage.

For the elderly: For those who did make it to old age (something of a
feat back then), Social Security didn’t exist, and in bad times,
poverty among the old was so bad that contemporaries wrote of growing
old as if it were a dystopia—the “haunting fear in the winter of
life.” In 1938 a writer with the American Association for Old-Age
Security said "our modern system of industrial production has rendered
our lives insecure to the point of despair.” The industrializing
economy was no country for old men or women. As families moved off
farms into cities and suburbs, it became harder for some old people to
find work in factories, which ran on limber sinews and sweat. In the
40 years before 1920, the share of men over 65 working on farms
dropped 39 percent.

[America ate lard and cold cereal and paid a lot of money for it.]

It’s hard to imagine many Americans begging to switch places with a
1915 gourmand. Food was not only less varied in 1915, but also
considerably more expensive. The typical American spent one-third of
his income on food 100 years ago, which is twice today’s share.

The early 20th century was a golden age of cold-cereal products—Corn
Flakes, Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat, and Shredded Wheat all
came on the market between 1906 and 1912—but on the farm, people
enjoyed a heartier meal of eggs and pancakes. Lunch at the office
provided a logistical challenge, as in 1915, there existed no such
thing as a plastic bag to keep a sandwich fresh. Instead, contemporary
cookbooks called for keeping sandwiches moist by "wrapping [them] in a
dry towel, covered with a towel wrung out of hot water.”

The average American ate roughly equivalent amounts of lard and
chicken—11.5 pounds and 14 pounds, respectively, per year. One century
later, the ratio has, blessedly, widened. Americans eat 57 pounds of
chicken, compared to just 1.5 pounds of lard. But Americans, gluttons
to their core, have replaced fat’s flavor with something even worse:
Their sugar intake has jumped from 88 to 130 pounds in the last 100
years.

[American home life was extremely crowded.]

"The business of America is farming business," one might have said in
1915, but industrialization was slowly removing the “farming” part.
America had one-third of its current population in 1915, and it was
considerably more spread out. Half of all families lived in rural
areas, or in towns with populations below 2,500.

But you wouldn't notice the relative sparseness if you just just
stayed home. The average household was crowded, with more than four
people, a figure which has fallen with each passing decade, and now
resides just above 2.5 people. Loneliness was a financial
impossibility, back then, as few could afford to live alone. Children
remained under their parents’ roofs until they were married (at an
average age of 21, for women). Practically no couples got divorced,
and widows moved in with their adult children.

Owning was a rarity. In 1920, there were about four times as many
renters as homeowners, whereas today, the homeownership rate is above
60 percent. Houses were cheaper, but buying was a relative hassle:
Although the average value of a home was no more than $75,000 in
today’s dollars, mortgages typically required a downpayment of about
50 percent.

Infants were both more abundant and more precarious. Women had more
children—three, on average—to help on the farm in the old agrarian
economy. But the more disquieting reason women had so many children
was that children were likely to die: Ten percent of infants died in
their first year, compared with one in every 168 births in the U.S.
today. For this happy and dramatic improvement, mothers and fathers
can thank the professionalization of baby-delivery. Giving birth at
home in 1915 wasn’t merely normal; it was ubiquitous. In a major city
like Pittsburgh, 87 percent of births happened outside of hospitals.

[America was a younger country, but had no concept of “teen-agers.”]

In 1915, 100 million people lived in the United States, and more than
half were under 25. One century later, the population is more than 300
million, but the share of people under age 25 has fallen to one-third.
Meanwhile the share of people over 65 tripled, from 5 percent to 14
percent.

But in the early 20th century, the word “teen-ager” either didn’t
exist or was scarcely used outside of development psychology. Since
the term applies to a group of youngish people who hang out together,
their invention required an insulated environment where teens could
behave, well, teenagery. Teens didn’t create "high school." High
schools created “teenagers."

As the U.S. economy shifted from a disparate agrarian society to a
mass production machine, families relocated closer to cities and, at
least initially, many sent their children to work. The movement to
prevent kids from being forced to toil in mills encouraged compulsory
education for teenagers. In 1920, just 28 percent of American youths
between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were in high school. By
1930, 47 percent of this age group was attending high school. As young
people spent more time in school, they developed their own customs in
an environment away from work and family, and the possibility of a
distinct teenage subculture became possible. It’s hard to imagine a
teenage culture in an economy where every 16-year-old is expected to
work with his father on the lathe, or in the fields.

The second key development in the creation of the teenager was the
invention of cars. It might be a horrifying consideration for today’s
singles, but a first date once meant an introductory chat in the
living room with a girl’s parents. This might have been followed by a
deliciously awkward family dinner.

But cars emancipated romance from the stilted small talk of the family
parlor. Just about everything a modern single person considers to be a
“date” was made possible, or permissible, but the invention and
normalization of car-driven romance. (If you think Tinder and dating
apps are destroying romance today, you would have hated cars in the
1930s.) The fear that young men and fast cars were upending romantic
norms was widespread. The chorus of the 1909 Cole Porter song “Keep
Away From the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile” is instructive:

Keep away from the fellow who owns an automobile

He'll take you far in his motor car

Too darn far from your Pa and Ma

If his forty horsepower goes sixty miles an hour say

Goodbye forever, goodbye forever

[Americans didn’t drive: They walked, rode horses, and acrobatically
dodged trolleys.]

In the last 100 years, perhaps nothing about daily life has changed
more than the commute.

Half of all families lived on farms in 1915, which means work was
typically a walk away. Many city-dwellers also lived close enough to
factories to arrive at the office on foot. Others went by horseback.
In lieu of parallel parking spots along Main Street, there were
hitching rails up and down central boulevards, where one might park a
mule.

Horse use was peaking. The number of horses and mules on U.S. farms
reached its all-century high around 1915, as tractors gradually
replaced them. Streetcars were peaking, too, although their legacy
would live on in surprising vestiges. My favorite anecdote in Carol
Boyd Leon’s remarkable essay concerns the origin of the Los Angeles
Dodgers’ name:

The Brooklyn Grays baseball team, nicknamed the Brooklyn Trolley
Dodgers in 1895 and later the Brooklyn Dodgers, was so named “in
tribute to their fans, who had to avoid speeding [trolley] cars in the
maze of trolley lines crisscrossing the city.”)

One thing that wasn’t peaking was cars. There were just 2 million cars
on the sparse roads of 1915, or about one for every 50 people. The
Model T was a hot commodity, but outside of a handful of cities, there
weren’t many places you could easily drive it. Today, after several
decades of car-friendly policies and public construction, there are
more than 255 million registered vehicles in the United States. The
number of vehicles has grown by 100 times in 100 years, conveniently
for memory’s sake.

[America danced to phonographs in blue serge suits and long skirts.]

Globalization has dramatically brought down the cost of clothing in
the last few decades. But before the United States exported its
textiles to Asia and Mexico, Americans paid handsomely for handsome
American apparel. Now just 3 percent of a typical consumer’s budget,
clothing demanded 13 percent of one’s income in 1915.

Even those sick with nostalgia for debonair hats and gloves must
acknowledge that the era’s style was monotonous. Men uniformly wore
blue serge suits at work. Women wore skirts whose length varied,
according to the fashion and the amount of material available for
apparel manufacturers (since some was conserved for the war).

There were all sorts of tech amenities that might seem quotidian today
that were rarities in 1915. Thirty percent of the country had a
telephone. Less than 20 percent had a stove. Very few people owned a
refrigerator, and almost nobody owned a radio. Within 60 years,
clothes washers, dryers, air-conditioning, and television sets would
all be household staples, but in 1915 they were nowhere to be seen.
Instead, the most popular media product of the time might have been
the player pianos or the phonograph.

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DEREK THOMPSON is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes
about economics, labor markets, and the media. He is the author of Hit
Makers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business...n-1915/462360/