The world that God, with the assistance of Dr. Peterson, delivered me into on Wednesday morning, October 17, 1928, was vastly different from the world of today.
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| Me in 1929 |
It was a large and less-crowded world with seemingly unlimited room for expansion. There were densely populated areas, but those were in far off places such as China and India and New York. Nor did we think of ourselves as a global village in those days. Foreign lands were truly foreign, and we saw their strange looking peoples in the black and white photos on the pages of our geography books. They were far off and unlikely ever to be encountered except by world statesmen, missionaries or adventurers. Even Europe, the land of our ancestors, was two full weeks away by the only feasible mode of travel, the steamship; and Asia, where the yellow races lived, was nearly a month away.
Natural resources were abundant, at least in the United States, and saving the environment was strictly a local concern like eliminating smoke from the steel mills in Pittsburgh or pigeon droppings from the county courthouse steps. The biggest concern about the environment was how to master it and make it produce for the satisfaction of our material needs. America's farm land, except for dry lands later to be irrigated, was practically all cultivated, but the nation still seemed to be wide open; and expanding industrialization was luring more and more people from the farms to the cities. The city was where civilization blossomed. The city was where aspiring farm youth were casting their eyes in the pursuit of fonder dreams.
1928 was just ten years after the end of the Great War (later to be designated World War I), the bloodiest war of all time to that date. The war had been fought--or so President Woodrow Wilson had stated--"to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy." By 1928, however, those noble ideals were already in jeopardy. The Communists, under the ruthless dictator Josef Stalin, were in firm control of Russia. Germany, while having a democratic government, smarted under the severe treatment it had received in the Treaty of Versailles at the war's end and was having disastrous economic problems. Meanwhile, the League of Nations, brain-child of President Wilson, was floundering impotently, and our own country had refused to become a member of it. America, in spite of its involvement in the war, wanted nothing more than to steer clear of any further involvement in the messy politics and wars which had plagued Europe over the centuries.
By 1928 the United States had a flag of 48 stars and a population of 120 million. There was a general spirit of optimism in the nation for the "Roaring Twenties" was proving to be a time of prosperity for urban Americans who had become, for the first time, the majority of the population. People in large numbers were experiencing a prosperity that had been unknown before. The more sophisticated of them were acquiring new wealth by investing in the stock market. Stock prices had been rising steadily and rapidly since the early twenties and it seemed that every venture would pay off. People, therefore, were investing heavily, even borrowing money just to make these investments, hoping to sell later for assured easy money from the capital gains.
This optimism, however, did not extend to rural America, the America I was born into. On the contrary, farmers were experiencing hard times in the twenties. While prices and wages generally were rising to produce prosperity for the urban population, farm products were depressed. Farmers had to pay high prices for the things they bought, but were not getting good prices for the crops they sold. Many farmers were losing their farms.
The Volstead Act which was passed in 1919 to enforce the Prohibition Amendment, forbade the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, and was still the law in 1928; but it was having difficulty. In the big, distant city of Chicago, for example, the Prohibition era had ushered in the creative activity of Al Capone and his mobsters who were intent on and quite successful in supplying the deprived and thirsty citizens of Chicago with illegal booze. Rival gangs and Federal Narcotics agents were unable to unseat Capone although a great deal of effort was expended and a considerable amount of blood was spilled in that effort, giving Chicago an enduring reputation as the underworld crime capital of the world. The famous Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 on North Clark Street in Chicago is still remembered as an example of the lawlessness and violence of that era.
Numerous clubs and "speakeasies" supplied free-flowing liquor for the growing drinking class of this time, including those who frequented the Navajo Country Club. That club was located on a golf course just west of Ridgeland Road and south of the Calumet-Sag canal in rural Worth Township southwest of the city of Chicago. Some years later this area would become part of a newly-plotted village called Harlem Heights (later, called Palos Heights) and the country club would in 1959 become the administration building for Trinity Christian College which had purchased part of the Navajo golf course.
Neither Prohibition nor Al Capone had much direct impact on midwest, rural America, however. Rural, Protestant America, with some exceptions of course, did little drinking and had, after all, been a major force in the attempt to eliminate the evils of booze by crusading for Prohibition in the first place. Religiously, this was a time when old values were being threatened and new and looser standards were being adopted. Not only did recent immigration from eastern and southern Europe make Catholicism a force to be reckoned with, but even the dominant Anglo-Saxon, Protestant religious fabric was being torn apart by the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies. Modernists, while claiming to be Christians, did not take the Bible very seriously and were ready to buy into much of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, took the Bible very seriously, but sometimes, perhaps, too literally, and tended to be suspicious of science and learning. The Tennessee "Monkey Trial" in 1925 in which William Jennings Bryan debated Charles Darrow on evolution made the Fundamentalists look bad. My people, while having much in common with the Fundamentalists, did not feel completely comfortable with them either, for they were considered too simplistic in their interpretation of Scripture and too negative in their lifestyle. And yet my people shared much of their distress as America began to move away from the "Old-Time Religion" in favor of a more sophisticated version.
Airplanes were coming into their own. They had been used somewhat in combat already in World War I, and in 1927 Charles Lindbergh had become a national hero by flying across the Atlantic Ocean alone. Some commercial travel would begin shortly after this, but it would be after after World War II, in the 1950's, that trans-Atlantic passenger air travel would become common.
The first commercial radio station began broadcasting in Pittsburgh in 1922, and by 1928, nearly half of American homes already owned a radio receiver. The telephone was even more common by this time, but the postal letter, which could be sent all the way across the country with a 2-cent stamp, was still the accepted means of communicating beyond the local community. The telegraph was available for speedy communication over a distance, but farmers rarely found occasion to use it.
Nourished by that new marvel, the radio, this was a time when sports were receiving national interest, and even farmers would often try to find time to listen in to play-by-play descriptions of what was becoming America's national pastime--baseball. The National and American leagues had already been in existence before 1900, and all the major American cities from Boston in the northeast to St. Louis in the west had major league teams. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Washington each had a team; while Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis had two teams. New York, if you included Brooklyn, had three major league teams.
As for other sports, the Chicago Bears were already in existence, as were the Washington Redskins, the New York Giants, the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers. Football was rather foreign, however, to rural and small town America, and few people paid much attention to it beyond what was played in their state universities or colleges. Professional basketball had not been born yet, while the high schools and colleges were still observing the center jump after every basket was scored. The Olympic games had been in existence in modern times since 1896 and the games had just been held in Amsterdam, Holland in the summer of 1928. Surprisingly, professional boxing grabbed a lot of attention in those days. In a day before Blacks came to dominate that sport, White Americans like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney captured the fascination of millions who listened to the blow-by-blow accounts provided by the miracle of radio.
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| Stereoptiscope |
The camera was common and black and white photographs no novelty. Mickey Mouse was born one month after I was, in November of 1928. Later, he and Minnie would become movie stars. The 1920's were actually the hey-day of the movies. Sound pictures, first called "talkies" had just been perfected and people in the cities flocked to the ornate palaces which had been built to show them in. Even Kanawha, Iowa had a small movie theatre. Coincidentally, 1928 was also the year that the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church had designated movies, along with card-playing and dancing, as worldly amusements, which it admonished--some say, ruled--its members to abstain from.
While books and newspapers have been a part of American life from its earliest times, magazines like Readers Digest, Time, The Saturday Evening Post and National Geographic were becoming popular features of the reader's fare, serving an intellectual as well as an entertainment function.
So that, in sketchy summary, was the world God put me into--the world of the late 1920's. The decade of the twenties, so historians say, was a watershed decade, a time of great change. On the other side of that divide was an America which had been geared to agricultural interests, greatly influenced by the evangelical Christian faith, and dominated by White AngloSaxon Protestant (WASP) cultural perspectives. On this side of the slope was an America that had entered what we today call the modern world. City life and city values would begin to predominate. A more heterogeneous population, religiously and culturally, would promote more secular and diverse viewpoints on life. Better transportation and communication would create a smaller world, but one in which diversity would become increasingly more apparent.
The world left behind was another world; and while that previous world could and would still influence our lives, its vitality was being sapped, its substance, withering away. Although, thanks to my conservative forbears who were solidly planted on the other side of the divide, that old world would do much to shape me--often for the better, I believe. But, as is true of all of us, we are children of our times and products of our culture, and so the new world, the modern world, would do much to shape and mold me too. I had the distinct advantage, then, of being born at a time when I could profit from the values of the older world, while participating in the modern era, an era that would be dynamic, fascinating and challenging. I can't imagine choosing a better time in which to have been born.
