{"id":207,"date":"2018-07-19T14:58:15","date_gmt":"2018-07-19T21:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=207"},"modified":"2020-05-08T23:36:54","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T06:36:54","slug":"back-to-the-1890s-2016","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/back-to-the-1890s-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to the 1890s (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The seven-story building is the quarters of the Merchants National Bank of Seattle, which went under in 1895.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The draft for my book, \u201cThe Panic of 1893,\u201d was based on several thousand notes from historical sources, most of them newspaper stories. When I was done, I had a number of notes I liked and didn\u2019t want to leave out \u2014 puzzle pieces that hadn\u2019t fit in. I put them in the book\u2019s introduction by making it an impressionistic essay about the 1890s.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My esteemed editor told me the book\u2019s introduction ought to be about the book \u2014 to prepare the reader for what I was going to do in the book, and what conclusions I was going to draw. I reluctantly agreed that she was right, and replaced most of my impressionistic introduction with copy more prosaic, but more useful to the reader.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Here is the original. I still like it.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In 1893 there were 44 states in the Union. Washington, which had become a state in 1889, had a population one-twentieth of today\u2019s. Civilization was thinner and the land wilder. In Seattle, men could go duck hunting on Lake Union. It was a time of horse-drawn wagons and dirt roads. To go from Seattle to Tacoma, people took the train or one of the Puget Sound steamers.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Children grew up sooner. In the King County schools, half the pupils in the sixth grade dropped out by the end of the seventh, and only one in four made it to graduation. Youth went to work earlier, married earlier, and started families \u2014\u00a0big\u00a0<\/i>families \u2014\u00a0earlier. A modern reader, reading of a bank president, might imagine him 50 or 60 years old; in the 1890s, he was as likely to be 30.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Religion was big in civic life. Newspapers paid attention to what mainstream Protestant pastors said, and sometimes printed their sermons in the Monday paper.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Males made up 62 percent of the state population and conducted virtually all business and public affairs. Women worked as stenographers, bookkeepers, cooks, waitresses, seamstresses, laundresses, nurses and schoolteachers. Married women worked at home, stoking coal stoves, baking bread, canning fruit, hand-washing laundry, stitching dresses, darning socks, mopping the floor and caring for children. If a housewife was well-off, she might have a Swedish girl as a servant. But times were changing: in 1894 a mill at Cosmopolis made the news by employing women to pack shingles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Women would not win the vote in Washington general elections until 1910, but in 1890 a law gave them the vote in school elections. In 1894 the voters of Clallam County elected a woman, Ella Guptill, superintendent of schools. The man who lost sued, arguing that the job was not open to women, and the judge in the Clallam County Superior Court \u2014\u00a0a man, of course \u2014 gave the job to him. In 1896 the Washington Supreme Court \u2014 all men, again \u2014 gave the job back to her.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Women had a few advantages. In the 1890s an unmarried woman could receive county welfare when a man could not. But in 1894, the\u00a0Seattle P-I\u00a0<\/i>reported that Bertha Siegel, whose beau had married her in a shotgun wedding and deserted her, was turned down for welfare in Pierce County because she was married to an able-bodied man.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the 1890s, Prostitution was tolerated but rarely named; the newspapers called it \u201cthe social evil.\u201d The word \u201cabortion\u201d was rarely used. In July 1893 a physician in Spokane was charged with having performed \u201ca criminal operation\u201d on 14-year-old Georgie Bishop. There were other taboos. In April 1895, the\u00a0Spokane Chronicle\u00a0<\/i>had four page-one stories, datelined London, of the accusations against Oscar Wilde of \u201cvarious relations with boys and men\u201d that amounted to \u201cgross indecency,\u201d without saying what the acts were.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There was no taboo against calmly expressed racism. Noting that 24 percent of people in Washington were foreign-born, the\u00a0Spokane Chronicle\u00a0<\/i>reassured its readers that most of them were from Northern Europe. \u201cEven including the 4,000 Chinamen,\u201d it said, less than 3 percent of the people came from countries \u201cexperts have branded \u2018undesirable\u2019.\u201d The\u00a0Seattle Press-Times,\u00a0<\/i>the ancestor of today\u2019s\u00a0Seattle Times<\/i>, called the Chinese \u201can alien and non-assimilative portion of our population, against whom a justifiable prejudice is entertained by our workmen.\u201d At least Seattle\u00a0had\u00a0<\/i>Chinese; since expelling them in 1885, Tacoma had fewer than could be counted on one hand.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Nationally, lynching peaked in the early 1890s. During the 1880s and 1890s, Washington averaged about one lynching a year. No blacks were lynched in Washington in those years, though in 1895, 50 masked men at Walla Walla came in the night for a young white man who had been living openly with a colored woman, a brothel keeper, and had just married her. The mob tarred and feathered them.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Life was less sanitary then. Downtown Seattle\u2019s streets were planked.\u00a0\u00a0The planks broke under the wagon wheels and sank into the mud and horse excrement. The\u00a0Tacoma Ledger<\/i>, describing the pedestrian \u201csloshing over rickety sidewalks and floating planks in the streets\u201d asked its readers to imagine themselves \u201csmirched with Seattle\u2019s slime.\u201d Most toilets were outhouses. Seattle\u2019s Board of Health reported many cases of \u201cunconnected sewers,\u201d \u201coverflowing cesspools\u201d and \u201cfilthy privies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In 1895 Seattle had 264 cases of scarlet fever, and the Board of Health closed the schools. In 1894 \u201cconsumption\u201d \u2014 tuberculosis \u2014 killed 62 residents, and typhoid fever \u2014 a disease spread by sewage \u2014 killed another 19. Eighteen children under 5 died of diarrheal diseases. For that year the city reported 18 suicides, most commonly by gunshot or by drinking tincture of opium, which was available at the drugstore.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the 1890s people were maimed or killed regularly in accidents involving horses and wagons, railroads, streetcars, electric wires, boats, swimming, logs, farm equipment, guns and wood-burning kitchen stoves. On June 14, 1893, the\u00a0Seattle Telegraph\u00a0<\/i>reported four industrial injuries: a shingle worker with his thumb torn off, a lumber worker with the tip of a finger cut off, another with his thumb and finger cut off and a miner with his leg crushed between two ore cars. On Aug. 19, 1893, the\u00a0Spokane Chronicle\u00a0<\/i>carried the story of the death of George Maxwell, 29, a worker at the Chattaroy lumber mill who was called to splice a loose belt. \u201cHis cotton blouse was unbuttoned and blew open as he ran across the basement and stooped down to pass under an iron shaft that whirls about 225 times a minute,\u201d the paper reported. \u201cThe loose corner of the blouse caught on a coupling.\u201d Co-workers heard a cry of terror and \u201ca terrible noise of pounding on the floor.\u201d The man\u2019s neck was broken, his right arm was torn off and both his feet hung from his legs by half-severed tendons. In September 1895 a similar accident at an Everett shingle mill took off the left arm of a 13-year-old boy.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 1893 the Pacific Northwest still had a frontier economy, with wages, prices and interest rates higher than in the East. Most merchants did not bother with pennies, and the nickel was a new thing. A few years earlier, small purchases had been conducted in \u201cbits\u201d \u2014 \u201ctwo bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar\u201d \u2014 in which the change for a quarter on a one-bit purchase was a silver dime. Still, the \u201chigh\u201d frontier prices of the 1890s seem impossibly low today. A shingle weaver earning $4 a day \u2014 a\u00a0ten-hour\u00a0<\/i>day, six days a week \u2014 was making good money. In 1893 a pair of new shoes could be had for $3 and a pound of beef for a dime. In Tacoma, the Grand Central Hotel on Pacific Avenue ran an ad for rooms: $1, $1.25, $1.50 and $2, meals included. A separate dinner was 25 cents. For a rough equivalent in purchasing power to 2018 dollars, multiply the 1890s dollars by 25.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For all these differences, the people of the 1890s thought of themselves as moderns no less than we do. Newspapers speculated about life on Mars. They ran stories about the new \u201cliving pictures\u201d \u2014 movies \u2014 and about X-rays. On May 24, 1894, the editor of the\u00a0Yakima Herald\u00a0<\/i>imagined \u201cair ships\u201d that might \u201ctravel at the rate of from one to two hundred miles an hour.\u201d<\/s><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Wright Brothers would fly their first airplane nine and a half years later.<\/a>[i]<\/span><\/sup><\/sup><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a9 2016 Bruce Ramsey<\/span><\/em><\/p>

<\/a>[i]\u201cDeath in Cold Water,\u201d\u00a0Telegraph<\/i>, Dec. 3, 1893, p. 8; \u201cSchools of King County,\u201d\u00a0Telegraph,<\/i>Aug. 26, 1894, p. 2;\u00a0Compendium of the Eleventh Census<\/i>, 1890, Part I, p. xxxviii; \u201cMill Run,\u201d\u00a0Puget Sound Lumberman<\/i>, Feb. 1894, pp. 10-11; \u201cWomen Can Vote,\u201d\u00a0Ledger<\/i>, Jan. 14, 1896, p. 4; \u201cA Woman Can\u2019t Hold Office,\u201d\u00a0Seattle P-I<\/i>, Jan. 5, 1895, p. 1; \u201cWomen Are Eligible,\u201dSeattle P-I,<\/i>Jan. 4, 1896, p. 5; \u201cDeserted by Her Husband and Father,\u201d\u00a0Seattle P-I<\/i>, Jan. 20, 1894, p. 2; \u201cA Spokane Physician Arrested,\u201d\u00a0Telegraph<\/i>, July 7, 1893, p. 1; \u201cOscar\u2019s Trial,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>, April 3, 1895, p. 1; \u201cCrowded Court,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>, April 4, 1895, p. 1; \u201cTables Turned,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>, April 5, 1895, p. 1; \u201cBack to Jail,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>, April 6, 1895, p. 1; \u201cLucky Washington,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>, Dec. 12, 1894, p. 2; \u201cThe Geary Act,\u201d\u00a0Seattle Press-Times<\/i>, May 18, 1893, p. 4; \u201cTar and Feathers,\u201d\u00a0Seattle P-I<\/i>, June 10, 1895, p. 2; Michael James Pfeifer, \u201cMidnight Justice: Lynching and Law in the Pacific Northwest,\u201dPacific Northwest Quarterly,\u00a0<\/i>Spring 2003, pp. 83-87; \u201cPaving in Seattle,\u201d\u00a0Ledger<\/i>, March 12, 1894, p. 6; Seattle Board of Health,\u00a0Annual Reports<\/i>for 1894 and 1895;\u00a0Telegraph,<\/i>\u201cThree Millmen Hurt,\u201d June 14, 1893, p. 2; \u201cTorn to Pieces,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle,<\/i>Aug. 19, 1893, p. 1; \u201cA Shocking Accident,\u201d\u00a0Everett Times,<\/i>Sept. 25, 1895, p. 1; \u201cA Cordial Welcome,\u201d\u00a0Chronicle<\/i>, April 25, 1895, p. 2; \u201cMiracles in Mars,\u201d\u00a0Seattle P-I,<\/i>April 28, 1894, p. 4; \u201cThe Men of Mars,\u201d\u00a0Ledger<\/i>, April 21, 1895, p. 11; \u201cMiracles in Mars,\u201d\u00a0Seattle P-I,<\/i>May 7, 1895, p. 4; \u201cWizard\u2019s Latest,\u201d\u00a0Ledger<\/i>, March 11, 1894, p. 5; \u201cRadiant Heat Light,\u201d\u00a0Bellingham Bay Reveille,<\/i>Jan. 31, 1896, p. 2; \u201cReveries of a Smoker,\u201d\u00a0Yakima Herald<\/i>, May 24, 1894, p. 2.<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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The seven-story building is the quarters of the Merchants National Bank of Seattle, which went under in 1895. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The draft for my book, \u201cThe Panic of 1893,\u201d was based on several thousand notes from historical sources, most of them newspaper stories. When I was done, I had a number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-207","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/207\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}