What life was like in the United States in 1913

A Century Ago: 1913 Worst Year Ever

by John Willson

A few days ago I decided to put together an anecdotal word-picture of what life was like in the United States in 1913, mostly to amuse my grandchildren. My grandfather Willson’s cousin Gertrude was keeping an occasional diary during that period, primarily to record the astonishing changes that seemed to be taking place in every part of her life. Mindful of the schoolboy who wrote, “Beginning in the 1760s a wave of gadgets descended upon England,” she tried to notice not only the gadgets but the conditions of her employment, the state of the arts, family events–everything that seemed to speak of progress. It was a great god in 1913, but cousin Gertrude wasn’t quite sure about it.

“When New York had only a million people nearly all of them went to bed at night;” she wrote, “not so now. There are too many automobiles too much jazz and turkey trot. Speed and noise seem to be an inevitable part of progress. The earth has become too crowded so we have taken to the sky where greater speed can be attained…Even the absurd idea of air planes fighting in the sky has become a reality.” She wondered if the vote for women might constitute progress, and attended a “suffrage parade.” After sweating up Fifth Avenue up to 59th Street, she and a few friends slipped down an alley and took a trolley back to Brooklyn. “We were wind-blown, tired and hungry,” she said. “All the women looked their worst, hats askew, shoes dusty and back hair in much need of attention.” She concluded that until women could dress as comfortably as men, they had best not parade, and perhaps not vote.

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First, let us note that 1913 was a year in which much that makes up post-modern America began to be visible. Ford perfected assembly line production, and the Hudson automobile emerged as the first mass-produced sedan. The Swede Gideon Sundback patented the first modern zipper and Mary Phelps Jacob the first workable mass-produced brassiere; two inventions that still hold us together. The first drive-up gas station opened, in Pittsburgh. On December 21 a “word-cross” appeared in the New York World, the first crossword puzzle. R.J. Reynolds introduced Camels, the first packaged cigarette (my father-in-law smoked them for 56 years, until they passed $1 a pack, and he quit). The Lincoln Highway “opened” October 31 (actually a collection of interconnected roads) to become the first more-or-less coast-to-coast automobile friendly driving surface. On November 1, football became football as we know it when Notre Dame, led by Knute Rockne and the forward pass, beat Army, 35-13. Some surprises here, but none that bothered cousin Gertrude (or any other American) very much.

On the other hand, the Progressive Era hit a new political and constitutional high with the passage of the 16th and 17th Amendments and the Federal Reserve Act. It doesn’t take much imagination (conservative or otherwise) to argue that the “progressive” income tax gave the national government its primary tool for instituting a command and control economy, and for funding all the grand redistributionist and social justice schemes of the past century. It changed the nature of the republic perhaps more than any other single constitutional amendment. The 17th amendment, by universalizing popular elections, marked the beginning of the end of the federalist principle. As long as state legislatures controlled the makeup of the U.S. Senate, states had real constitutional authority. What had been a gradual flow of authority into Washington now became a flood. The Creation of the Federal Reserve not only transferred control of much of the country’s money power to Washington, but (along with other major progressive legislation) opened the economy to regulation by a combination of “experts” and bankers and encouraged the growth of “lobbying.” Not since Alexander Hamilton had government been so open to what in 18th century Britain had been referred to as “corruption.”

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And so for the world of art. The “Armory Show” (“International Exhibition of Modern Art”) opened on February 17, at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, and later moved to Chicago and Boston. It drew huge crowds (87,000 in New York alone, in less than a month)–particularly Gallery I, which contained the work of “Cubists” and “Futurists,” and others outrageous to traditional sensibilities. One reviewer called Gallery I the “chamber of horrors.” The work of Jacques Villon, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Archipenko, and Henri Matisse shocked most of the patrons, and delighted others. Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” was renamed by one wag, “Food Descending a Staircase,” no doubt because of the indeterminate form it represented.

This was the point. Whatever the merits of Modernism, or the “avant-garde” as it came almost immediately to be known, the deconstruction of the human form and of nature (and the family in Archipenko’s stature of that name) was both obvious and upsetting. Former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a review of the show for Outlook magazine that appeared just two weeks after it left New York. That he was perhaps the only President ever to write a review of an art show–and certainly the last–is probably a measure of its cultural importance. He compared the Armory Show to P.T. Barnum’s display of his “mermaid”: “There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every perspective.” Roosevelt, as a good progressive, liked most of the show very much, and applauded its spirit of change: “There was not a touch of simpering, self-satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhibition.” Yet, he insisted, “why a deformed pelvis should be called ‘sincere,’ or a tibia of giraffe-like lengths ‘precious,’ is a question of pathological rather than artistic significance.” It is true, Roosevelt admitted, that to be afraid of change is to be afraid of life, but: “It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.”

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