The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible! by Otto L. Bettmann | Penguin Random House Canada

This book has the aesthetic of a title destined to live sandwiched between old copies of Reader’s Digest, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and Chicken Soup for the Soul in a jumbled rack near the toilet. I found it at a book sale and bought it for $.50, mostly because I was amused by the chapter subheadings:

The Kitchen: A vale of toil

Farm Women: Draft horses of endurance

Farm Children: They lead a life of numbing blandness

Loneliness: The West was haunted by loneliness, and its twin sister, despair

Those are all sections from the chapter on rural life; Bettmann also covers air, traffic, housing, work, crime, food and drink, health, education, travel, and leisure. When I sat down to read it, though, my amusement gave way to fascination. In 1935, Bettman fled to the U.S. from Germany, where he had been director of the state art library in Berlin. In New York, he assembled what would become the Bettman Picture Archive, a three-million-image resource for “publishers, educators, ad-men and the audio-visual media.” He pulled together this book in 1974, at the rump of the Nixon era, drawing from images and news clippings in his archive to offer a corrective to what he saw as the “benevolent haze” obscuring the United States’ collective historical memory of the late 19th and early 20th century:

"I have always felt that our times have overrated and unduly overplayed the fun aspects of the past. What we have forgotten are the hunger of the unemployed, crime, corruption, the despair of the aged, the insane and the crippled. The world now gone was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own, such as pollution, addiction, urban plight or educational turmoil. In most of our nostalgia books, such crises are ignored, and the period’s dirty business is swept under the carpet of oblivion. What emerges is a glowing picture of the past, of blue-skied meadows where children play and millionaires sip tea.

If we compare this purported Arcadia with our own days we cannot but feel a jarring sense of discontent, a sense of despair that fate has dropped us into the worst of all possible worlds. And the future, once the resort of hopeful dreams, is envisioned as an abyss filled with apocalyptic nightmares."

The book is simple and brisk, with a spread dedicated to each subchapter summing up just how wretched things were in any one specific dimension of ordinary American life, illustrated with photographs, etchings, and newspaper quotes from the time. These horrors build and build, illuminating a country with city streets full of shit, air full of smoke, shoddy housing, public beaches with bloated animal corpses, milk adulterated with chalk, children beaten by schoolteachers and maimed at factories, workers driven to despair, corrupt officials at every level of government, and the cruelties of so-called justice, enacted through inhumane punishments and lynching. While many problems Bettmann discusses are still with us in altered forms, his main point holds: Overall, things are so much better—startlingly, shockingly better. I found myself thinking that if I could jump back to 1900 and talk to someone then, they might well have no hope that anything would ever change. And yet, so many seemingly impossible things came to pass because people did try, and kept trying.