A fine and timely post, metatron.
There are many websites that give good information along the lines of your theme. One is:
The Good Old Days Weren’t So Good
http://www.liberator.net/articles/SloanGary/GoodOldDays.html
While it's true that times have been bad for many people, one has to keep a certain perspective and not think that the "good old days" were really so good. As Ecclesiastes 7:10 says:
Do not say: "Why has it happened that the former days proved to be better than these?" for it is not due to wisdom that you have asked about this.
I've been reading a half serious/half humorous book called The Good Old Days -- They Were Terrible by Otto L. Bettmann (Random House, New York, 1974). Bettmann is a German who came to the US in 1935 and eventually established the Bettmann Archive in New York, famous in the media industry for its archive of photographs and prints of daily life in American history. In the Foreword, Bettmann writes (pp. xi-xiii):
The good old days -- were they really good? On the surface they appear to be so -- especially the period to which this term is most often applied, the years from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900's. This period of history has receded into a benevolent haze, leaving us with the image of an ebullient, carefree America, the fun and charm of the Gilded Age, the Gay Nineties.
But this gaiety was only a brittle veneer that covered widespread turmoil and suffering. The good old days were good for but the privileged few. For the farmer, the laborer, the average breadwinner, life was an unremitting hardship. This segment of the populace was exploited or lived in the shadow of total neglect. And youth had no voice. These are the people, the mass of Americans, whose adversities this book attempts to chronicle.
Such an endeavor may come as a surprise to those who are familiar with my work. The files of the Bettmann Archive bulge with graphics of what we call the golden past. Many do, indeed, exude an aura of charm and well-being. But there are so many others, less in demand, which give us a totally different picture.
I have always felt that our times have overrated and unduly overplayed the fun aspects of the past. What we have forgotten are the hunger of the unemployed, crime, corruption, the despair of the aged, the insane and the crippled. The world now gone was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own, such as pollution, addiction, urban plight or educational turmoil. In most of our nostalgia books, such crises are ignored, and the period's dirty business is swept under the carpet of oblivion. What emerges is a glowing picture of the past, of blue-skied meadows where children play and millionaires sip tea.
If we compare this purported Arcadia with our own days we cannot but feel a jarring discontent, a sense of despair that fate has dropped us into the worst of all possible worlds. And the future, once the resort of hopeful dreams, is envisioned as an abyss filled with apocalyptic nightmares.
My post at "the picture window of history" has given me a more optimistic if less fashionable vista. I have concluded that we have to revise the idealized picture of the past and turn the spotlight on its grimmer aspects. This more realistic approach will show us Gay Nineties man (man in the street, not in the boardroom), as one to be pitied rather than envied. He could but dream of the Utopian miracles that have become part of our everyday life. Compared with him we are lucky -- even if dire premonitions darken our days and we find much to bemoan in our society.Proceeding from such convictions, this may be called a missionary book, a modest personal attempt to redeem our times from the apsersions cast upon them by nostalgic comparisons. It is a supplemental, revisionary view I offer, necessarily sketchy because of the boundlessness of the subject and the tyranny of book pages that refuse to stretch.Even if we cast but a cursory glance at the not so good old days and bring them into alignment with our own, we will find much to be grateful for. We are going forward, if but slowly. This fact should move us to view the future in less cataclysmic terms -- the future that will see man, in Faulkner's words, "not only endure but prevail."
Of course, such is the case world-wide and going far back into history. Historian Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror, described the 14th century as "a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant," and added:
If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.
Here are a few choice tidbits from Bettman's book to make the heart of modern man glad:
On food:
It was common knowledge to New Yorkers that their milk was diluted. And the dealers were neither subtle nor timid about it; all they required was a water pump to boost two quarts of milk to a gallon. Nor was that the end of the mischief: to improve the color of milk from diseased cattle they frequently added molasses, chalk or plaster of Paris. ...
Bacteria-infested milk held lethal possibilities of which people were unaware. The root of this problem was in the dairy farms, invariably dirty, where the milch cows were improperly fed and housed.
It was not unusual for a city administration to sell its garbage to a farmer, who promptly fed it to his cows. Or for a distillery to keep cows and feed them distillery wastes, producing what was called "swill milk." This particular liquid, which purportedly made babies tipsy, caused a scandal in the New York of 1870 when it was revealed that some of the cows cooped up for years in filthy stables were so enfeebled from tuberculosis that they had to be raised on cranes to remain "milkable" until they died. (pp. 114-116)
On urban epidemics:
To Americans before the turn of the century the origin of yellow fever was unknown, but the effects were only too visible; its victims literally turned yellow and died in agony. The Memphis epidemic of 1878 took 5150 lives. Many of the sick had crawled into holes "twisted out of shape," their bodies discovered later "only by the stench of decaying flesh." _Leslie's Weekly_ described the suffering of an entire family caught in one room, the mother dead "with her body sprawled across the bed ... black vomit like coffee grounds spattered all over ... the children rolling on the floor, groaning." Out of a population of 38,500, 20,000 deserted the city.
New Orleans was struck in the same year, a predictable circumstance to many who believed it to be the most unhealthy city on earth "... a dungheap ... Its streets ... saturated with the oozings of foul privy vaults." At the height of the epidemic in September the death rate reached a hundred a day; funeral processions were about the only traffic to be seen; and an "indescribable doom" pervaded the city. But the total dead, estimated at 3977, was only half that of the 1853 epidemic, which had taken 7848 lives.
Known also as the American Plague, since it had struck the Bay Colony in 1647, yellow fever decimated Philadelphia in 1793, thus ending its supremacy in the young Union. In the Spanish-American War, soldiers were more fearful of this disease than of bullets (p. 135).
AlanF
