-Dr.DRL
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January 6, 2010
Saint Cloud (MN) Times
Times Writers Group: Times do change, but do we?
By Derek Larson
Years ending in zero often prompt optimistic predictions as people turn their backs on the past and look to the coming decade with hope. In practice, short-term predictions of anything but the status quo are almost always wrong, if only because change that comes quickly is inherently unpredictable.
Time, as it happens, moves much more slowly than most of us realize. Step back from the perspective of a decade to that of a century and the slow pace of change is even more obvious.
Americans enjoying the first week of January in 1910 were really more like us than not. Their media — which basically meant newspapers — included some predictions for the looming teens but were mostly filled with the same sorts of stories we see today: crime, accidents, politics, weather, human interest and random curiosities.
The dominant paper of the day — The New York Times — offers typical examples. On Jan. 1, 1910, the Times featured the scientific insights of astronomer Percival Lowell, who announced that Martians were hard at work digging canals on their planet.
On Jan. 2, sporting news was fixated on the defeat of the Tulane football team in Havana, the first time a Cuban team had beaten an American one.
January 3 was crime day, with the largest headline decrying the shooting of a young woman at the Fashion Ball on Sixth Avenue, an apparently innocent victim of a “gang feud.” The requisite maudlin human interest story was about a man who had disappeared on Christmas Day while “going for a pail of beer.” He was found frozen to death in a snow drift eight days later, dead of exposure, his pail in one hand and money in the other.
The front page on Jan. 4 told the sad tale of a wealthy woman whose car was stolen when her chauffeur stopped for a cup of coffee, forcing her to miss a theater party. Of slightly greater interest was a story about the acquisition of two more trust companies by financier J.P. Morgan in a stock deal bringing the value of his corporation to more than $170 million (close to $4 billion today) making it “by far the largest in the United States.”
The next edition reflected a slow news day, marked by a piece about four people who died from eating tainted home-canned pears in Massachusetts and a longer article about a Harvard geologist who had determined the Earth was exactly 60,000,000 years old.
An emerald lost but later found at the Waldorf Hotel led the news on Jan. 6, paired with headlines about an ice storm and a 10-year-old boy genius who the paper claimed would “revolutionize geometry.”
On Jan. 7 it was revealed that Mrs. Charles W. Morse, whose husband had been convicted of breaking federal banking laws and sentenced to 15 years in prison, was starting a petition to President Taft to have her husband released from prison. Taft may have been preoccupied though, as the Times also reported that he had just received a new horse from Montana, “one of the strongest animals that could be found in the West ... and able to carry the weight of the president.”
As we look forward from 2010, things haven’t changed that much. Newspapers — and all other media — will cover the same sorts of stories The New York Times did in 1910 because our lives are basically the same.
The few pieces that may accurately predict the future will be almost impossible to identify now; only with decades of hindsight will we know which were important and which were more like the feature about President Taft’s horse.
Meanwhile, we’ll go through life just as people always have, one day at a time, blithely ignorant of what the future may bring but always hoping for bigger and better things.
-Dr.DRL
