A Look Back in Time

It was hot.  The temperatures rose into the 90’s each day and were accompanied by 90% humidity.  For 10 days a heat that did not dissipate at night blanketed New York City, Boston, and Newark.   The heat wave stretched as far west as Chicago.  Over 1500 people died of no other cause than the heat.  In August of 1896 there was no air conditioning.  The majority of those who died were men in their mid-twenties, working as manual laborers in temperatures that did not forgive vigorous activity.  In New York, police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt implemented the distribution of ice from police stations.  The public parks were ordered to let people sleep on the grass because the closed buildings were ovens and those who sought refuge on the roofs were falling off them in their sleep.

Nor was this the only deadly weather.  On May 27 the third deadliest tornado in our history hit St. Louis, Missouri.  The damage stretched a mile wide along the tornado’s path and did $2.9 billion in damage (real dollars, adjusted for inflation).  The tornado killed 255 people and injured 1000 more.  Internationally, the Sanriku earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed 27,000 people.

Of course, there were man-made disasters as well.  The Newton Coal Company’s Twin Shaft Mine explosion killed 58 coal miners.  In Atlanta, two trains ran head-on into each other resulting in the deaths of 50 people and injuring another 60.  That is what happens when you crush 5 loaded passenger cars together. 

In the same year that the first modern Olympic Games were held, there were wars in South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Zanzibar the Philippines. 

The usual political debates were playing out at home.  On July 9, William Jennings Bryan, an orator of bombastic ability, gave his famous, “Cross of Gold Speech” at the Democratic national convention.  Jennings was long on speaking skill, the press loved him, and he was an expert at mining the rich ore of class warfare.  In its essence, the Cross of Gold Speech was an attempt to take America off the gold standard and, instead, use both silver and gold to back our currency.  This, “free silver” campaign was your basic something-for-nothing scheme.  It was inflationary, unsupportable, and has been a disaster every time it was or is tried. That whole, “We shall not crucify men upon a cross of gold…” bit plays so much better when we just go for theatrical effect and do not demand complex economic facts to be presented for proof.   Fiction reads easier than nonfiction.  Later that same year, Bryan lost to William McKinley.

Does all of this have a familiar ring?  Pick any year at random, and you will find that the world keeps doing what it always seems to do.  There is grief in abundance.  There is individual joy and national sorrow.  Nature never seems to cooperate and what can go wrong will go wrong.  In 1896, as now, some problems were caused by our own baser natures (Plessy v. Ferguson encoded the oxymoron of, “separate but equal” in the laws of the land).  Some remedies were found through the individual effort of intelligent and driven individuals (Roentgen took the first X-rays).   

In all of this, we see that there is no such thing as fixing all the problems, solving the world’s woes once and for all, or finally getting it “right.”   Part of this is because we are humans, part of it is because “right” is a transient concept.  Perhaps, instead, we should just try to not get things, “wrong.” 

Take the long view and keep the faith.