And so was the news, really. Political Chaos France’s Peril, said one front-page heading, which I had no trouble skipping. Hold Up Aged Merchant, said another, and I read that “four men sprang out of a doorway in Water Street yesterday,” and “grabbed George Abeel, an iron merchant.” “The four men throttled him, while one of them went through his pockets and took his gold watch worth $150 and $50 in cash. Then they beat the aged merchant, who is 72 years old, about the head and face . . .” Ho hum.
I read that Andrew Carnegie had stonewalled a congressional committee. Saw nothing wrong with inducing the President of the United States to appoint one of Carnegie’s steel company lawyers secretary of state. Said that “his personal contributions to various Republican campaign funds” had nothing at all to do with the alleged violations of the Sherman antitrust laws by the U.S. Steel Corporation. Didn’t seem to understand, in fact, just what this antitrust law was. Denied that he was head of the company: he was only a stockholder who happened to own fifty-eight percent. Didn’t even know what his lawyers did or what their duties were. The editorial page ran a verse:
If asked your age,
Or name,
Or views,
On anything in life,
Or “Where’s your home?”
Or “How’s your health?”
Or “Have you got a wife?”
Or, “Tell me do,
What’s two plus two?”
Don’t answer.
Simply chant:
“I’m fully,
Quite fully,
Blissfully ignorant.” Ho hum.
Jack Dorman had knocked out Young Cashman last night, a society couple was divorcing, and Wall Street was “shocked” at a stock exchange scandal. So ho hum again. Was 1912 just like today? Couldn’t be. The news people make, the things they do, Dr. Danziger had once taught me, remain essentially the same in every time. But in the ways people think, feel, and believe . . . every time is different. So I began to hunt for the people of 1912 between the lines of the routine news they made.
And began to find them. A first hint, I thought, of the way people once felt and believed showed up in a Saks ad headed, Resolutions for You and for Us. Below that, a long column of sentiments like these: “To bear failure with courage, and success with humility . . . To whine a little less and work a little more . . . To speak in small type and think in capitals . . . To remember that the echo of a knock reacts on the knocker.” And so on and so on, a column of stuff like that, almost unbearably trite to our eyes, followed only by the Saks signature.
And yet, I sat thinking, a copywriter in an early ad agency, and a business firm that okayed and paid for that ad must have thought they knew their fellow New Yorkers. So—a first hint?—wasn’t this ad published for a people who were ambitious? Hopeful? Cheerful? Optimistic? Certainly not cynical.
And so I began, in this and many another paper, to look for what the people of 1912 had to tell me about themselves. Skipping crime, divorce, and liars under oath, I read the classified ads, and learned that three 1912 people had lost their dogs, whose names were Tammany, Sport, and Bubbles, and whose breeds were “a French bull dog,” a “Schipperke,” and a “Pug.” And when, later that afternoon on my way out from the library, I stopped in Reference to look up Dog in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for 1911, I found that photographs of those breeds didn’t really look the same as even those same breeds today. And I walked down the library steps onto present-day Fifth Avenue, wondering where to have dinner, with the first beginnings in my mind—knowing what you might see at the end of the leash—of what the sidewalks of New York might be like in 1912.
Every day that week, all day except for lunch and one or two coffee breaks, I sat reading—trying not to think too much of home—the Times, the Herald, the World, the Telegram, the Express. Of 1909 . . . 1910 . . . 1911, ’12, and ’13. And found stories I should have passed by, but didn’t have the willpower. And so I learned that Thomas Edison had just invented a way to make furniture out of concrete. Including phonographs. With a photo of one that looked fine to me. But I was also becoming aware of how often I came across references to sheet music. And how often pianos were advertised. Looked like these people made their own music.
A brief account of an accident in which “A Second Avenue trolley car crashed into an Avenue C horsecar at Houston Street and Second Avenue” told me that the nineteenth century in which Julia and I lived was colliding with the beginnings of the twentieth.
The Pennsylvania Railroad train to Cleveland carried a library car. Office supply ads illustrating new rolltop desks helped me peek into a 1912 office. An ad headed, “A Demi Unit filing cabinet is a genuine multum in parvo for the private office . . .” said to me that an advertiser felt he could count on 1912 businessmen knowing some Latin. And suggested a vanished kind of schooling which graduated people who knew geography, arithmetic, spelling, American history, some Latin, and maybe even some Greek.
I discovered how the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, Surface and Elevated, thought their 1912 patrons ought to be treated, because they regularly ran ads to tell them what they had left behind. Giving me a glimpse of empty El and streetcar seats on which lay “eyeglasses, small music roll, suitcase, stationery, baby’s bottle, derby hats, velvet handbag.” Told me they walked out of the cars in their 1912 clothes leaving “a letter file, muff, man’s coat, pocket-book, handbags, rubbers, purse, book, knife . . .” And I wondered why champagne was advertised so incessantly. Was it the Coca-Cola of 1912? All of February 1912, I learned from the weather reports, was “unseasonably mild; spring- and almost summerlike, unusual for New York.”
Newspapers, magazines, even trade journals. And after a while I got tired of them and of the library, and began bringing books back home. Up to my room in the Plaza elevator with A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter . . . or Cap’n Warren’s Wards, by Joseph C. Lincoln . . . Truxton King: A Story of Graustark, by George Barr McCutcheon . . . The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton . . . All with color illustrations on their covers.
And then for a while—mornings after breakfast in the armchair in my room, or on a Central Park bench in the warm part of an afternoon, or sitting up in bed leaning toward the lamp cleverly shaded to keep light from reaching my book—I read things like:
“He was a tall, rawboned, rangy young fellow with a face so tanned by wind and sun you had the impression that his skin would feel like leather if you could affect the impertinence to test it by the sense of touch.” Further down the page: “This tall young man in the panama hat and grey flannels was Truxton King, embryo globe-trotter and searcher after the treasures of Romance. Somewhere up near Central Park, in one of the fashionable cross streets, was the home of his father and his father’s father before him: a home which Truxton had not seen in two years or more.”