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America, 1926: A forgotten 100-year-old report
- pfdietz 4mo agoSo, we're about to have Great Depression 2 and WW3? Fun.
- Avicebron 4mo agoSometimes I wish Strauss–Howe theory hadn't been hijacked. It seems noteworthy how similar (cyclical?) things are even if it's a coincidence..
- edoceo 4mo agoA key feature of the human condition is thinking "this time will be different"
- gopher_space 4mo agoFrom my perspective more like "it didn't work the last 20 times we tried it, but it damn well ought to!"
- copper-float 4mo agoWhat do you mean hijacked? I'm not familiar with that theory.
- Spooky23 4mo agoCrazy/extemist people use it as a way to justify their nonsense.
- GolfPopper 4mo agoYeah, that's my guess as to what Avicebron meant as well. Various flavors of extremists use it (like others have used "social darwinism") as a justification or excuse for their accumulation and abuses of power. "We are the 'hard men' this time needs! Shut up and do what we tell you!"
- Izkata 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... The relevant sections for these comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory#Turnings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory#Timing_of_generations_and_turnings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... Basically we've been in a "4th Turning" for about two decades, and the 4th turning typically ends in some sort of crisis (hence the name for it, "Crisis"): Great Depression/WWII in the previous one, the US Civil War before that, the "Age of Revolution" before that, etc. The idea behind it is lessons learned last until the people who lived through the previous one die. So the 4 "turnings" repeat every 80-100 years, and some sort of major crisis is expected around now - hence talk of another Great Depression or WWIII. I don't see what GP means by "hijacked", GGP is pretty much a direct reference to exactly what it talks about. Aside, this meme is based on this theory: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hard-times-create-strong-men https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hard-times-create-strong-men - "hard times" represents the 4th Turning, though it's oversimplified, which makes it not really a great match.
- UncleOxidant 4mo agoWe're kind of already having the WW3 part.
- stackghost 4mo agoIt has felt inevitable to me for a few years now. The market != the economy but a major crash can still trigger a credit crunch that will materially affect regular people. Look at the insane valuations on some of these companies. They can't continue forever. As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
- miroljub 4mo ago> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces. How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man. It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
- pfdietz 4mo agoIt sometimes is a single person. Consider the failed beer hall demagogue who wrecked a nation, a continent, and nearly a world.
- UncleOxidant 4mo agoTo both of your points: the beer hall demagogue wouldn't have gotten to Chancellor if the German elites hadn't decided that he really couldn't do that much damage and we may as well let him be chancellor to quiet down his followers. Even after the putsch, he got a very light sentence because the judge was sympathetic with his right-wing cause. You're both right to some extent. A huge amount of damage was done by one man, but he got to where he did because the German elites thought that he might be useful to their cause.
- pfdietz 4mo agoAll events have multiple causes. But history turned on what he did, and would have been very different otherwise.
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- fierycatnet 4mo agoStill reading the article but it reminds me that I need to watch Metropolis now, I think it came out in 1928 or so.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoYou're a 26 year old in 1926. You're part of what history would later call the Greatest Generation. You will suffer through both the Great Depression and World War II. Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
- dctoedt 4mo agoIf you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoLost Generation describes those who experienced WW1. Given that he turned 18 in 1918 it's certainly possible he enlisted or was drafted. The article implies he didn't join WW1. It's that experience rather than his exact birthday that would categorize him into Lost vs Greatest IMO.
- mylifeandtimes 4mo agoIn the US, something like 98% of eligible men enlisted in WWI. There was no draft. So yes, VERY high probability of service.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_Act_of_1917 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_Act_of_1917
- fc417fc802 4mo agoWild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII. Complaining about AI buildouts causing electronics prices to regress by a decade or so begins to seem rather trite in comparison.
- ck2 4mo agoyeah but America 1926 didn't have a billion dollars a day being extracted from the economy by a totally useless war (that is going to start again in 60 days) or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
- Schiendelman 4mo agoYou might be surprised to hear that wealth concentration was worse a hundred years ago than it is now. It's very easy to assume otherwise when the numbers are so much larger now across the board. https://americanbusinesshistory.org/superwealth-a-historical-perspective/ https://americanbusinesshistory.org/superwealth-a-historical...
- ck2 4mo agoyes almost all americans now have running water and indoor toilets except we have more homeless than ever so they don't even have that with taxes slashed for billionaires and safety-nets for food and healthcare being destroyed, we are actually headed back to 1926 on purpose
- copper-float 4mo agoFeels like a bit of a dramatization.
- WillAdams 4mo agoThe definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process. Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a_Wandering_Man https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a...
- davoneus 4mo agoGreat article. Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
- piva00 4mo agoI discovered the pendulum of social movements after reading Bertrand Russell's "The Ancestry of Fascism" at a relative young age (~16 years old), it only really made sense after my 30s though. It required me watching, experiencing how things I had considered settled and humanity was over them started to turn back: the rise of fascistic tendencies in different societies, anti-intellectualism, etc. things that as a teenager/young adult I never considered could become societal issues again.
- dgellow 4mo agoI’m really not sure, if you look at things before the 20th century it’s difficult to see a pendulum swing pattern. That works relatively well between the 20th and 21st centuries, but I don’t think we can see it as a general rule. It’s also pretty dependent on the region you look at, and movements you decide to take in consideration or filter out. There is just so much room for biases, it’s easy finding a pattern because that’s what our brains are good at doing, but it doesn’t mean it is predictive of anything That being said, this video from Three Arrows (aka Dan Arrows) “America coming Weimar moment” has interesting things to say on that specific comparison: https://youtu.be/CFDDf48nj9g https://youtu.be/CFDDf48nj9g
- chneu 4mo agoA lot of folks forget that ancient Egypt existed for thousands of years without major changes. Pre-industrialization, civs tended to come and then go(dispersing with other groups), as power structures came and went.
- blooalien 4mo ago> Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely. Or keep pushing it to further and further extremes with each swing until it inevitably breaks under the strain. :(
- axpy906 4mo agoNo offense but outside of money does the US have anything going for it?
- fluidcruft 4mo agoThe Mississippi river. Few understand what an advantage that river is.
- derektank 4mo agoAnd that’s in spite of the fact that we’ve in some ways crippled it with the Jones Act
- artisinal 4mo agoNatural parks. Tasty drinkable water from the tap in nearly the entire country. Being able to flush toilet paper. Free toilets almost everywhere. Being a country for 250 years is also quite an achievement. I’m European and have witnessed many wars on my continent in my lifetime. A childhood friend was shot down with a Russian surface to air missile.
- 2muchtime 4mo agoThe water is drinkable but in many places not what I would call tasty.
- artisinal 4mo agoWater tastes pretty gross in coastal Spain. In countries like Albania I wouldn’t even drink it at all. On Greek islands it is safe but everyone buys water from the stores. Due to the age of many places in Europe there is also still a lot of copper pipe used for tap water. Not deadly but also not very healthy. In Amsterdam over 20 percent of homes have copper pipes.
- jandrewrogers 4mo ago
- jmyeet 4mo agoI an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore. In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from. Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown. So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen. Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton. It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar? [1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/01/stanford-historian-uncovers-grim-correlation-violence-inequality-millennia https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/01/stanford-historian... [2]: https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mckinsey-consultant-arch-patton-didnt-invent-wealth-inequality/ https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mc... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
- UncleOxidant 4mo agoI read Sinclair Lewis' Babbit last year and it was kind of depressing how little has changed since 1922. The political climate (at least as portrayed in the novel) seemed eerily similar to now. Maybe we continually go through oscillations.
- abirch 4mo agoI'm shocked how much the average American knows about how things work. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I'm not surprised how quickly Americans are giving up their liberty.
- dgellow 4mo agoDid you mean to say “how little”?
- bryanrasmussen 4mo agoHow much and how little are logically equivalent, although in vernacular usage it is of course common to use how little when implying the amount is less than one might expect, and how much to imply the amount is more than one might expect.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoPractical communication is not an exercise in logical deduction. The meaning of those terms is not equivalent for exactly the reason you noted.
- achenet 4mo agohuman beings are not always perfect communicators, regrettably. Luckily, other humans can 'clear things up' :)
- bryanrasmussen 4mo agoobviously you can use much to mean little with a how in front but generally with a little snarky aside like ", which is not much at all," after the "how much", but yes, in typical usage they are not interpreted the same, although I'd say the difference really only becomes important in comparative usage as in "how little for how much" and similar examples. on edit: took out hows to avoid confusion.
- g42gregory 4mo agoIs this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...? "Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination." - I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example. People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs. And so on. I don't see a lot of happy faces on the streets of America.
- vitorfblima 4mo agoSince he is explicitly comparing 2026 to 1926 I think his statement holds up.
- ra0x3 4mo agoMeh, seems he's using arbitrary metrics to make arbitrary claims (which is fine). But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement. It's like saying "Beaches in 2026 are so much better than beaches in 1926". Sure you could cherry-pick some metrics to make the case, and someone else could cherry-pick metrics to make the opposite case. Sort've a "talking just to hear yourself talk" kind've thing.
- throw0101d 4mo ago> But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement. Given that there was no antibiotics in 1926, no chemotherapy or radiation therapy for cancer, no public pensions (so good luck getting old), hardly any indoor plumbing (even by 1940 it was about half), I think life is much better now that one hundred years ago. What were infant mortality rates in 1926? Maternal mortality? Average life span? How many years did people live after retirement? Can you list the ways in which you think life was better in 1926? And to say life is better now is not to say it's perfect or to deny that improvements can still be made.
- miranaproarrow 4mo agono one is talking about the alcohol part?
- achenet 4mo agoyeah, that is honestly a good win, going from awful side effects of prohibition to intelligent legalization. Even cannabis has been largely legalized, although there is the opiate epidemic to worry about now. Still, overall, I feel like drug policy now beats 100 years ago :)
- ksymph 4mo agoNit: movies with sound were around as early as the 1800s; 1927 is just considered the turning point when they became commercially viable and widely available (with the release of The Jazz Singer).
- triceratops 4mo ago> According to the historian Bill Bryson, 1920s Kansas alone had more vehicles than France Humorous and informative writer. Not a historian. Thompson refers to him as a historian several times in the article.
- tomlow 4mo ago[dead]
- Ariarule 4mo agoThe WSJ charts at the end should be taken with a huge grain of salt: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/544508/measuring-trends-americans-personal-values.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/544508/measu...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- padjo 3mo agoSomething that really helped me understand how similar and yet bizarrely alien the 1920s are to modern eyes was watching the films of Buster Keaton. They're still pretty entertaining and relatable and all available for free on YouTube. They really drive hone the notion of "the more things change the more they stay the same".