In every generation, a lot of young people believe that they were born at a bad time in history or at least not as good a time as when their grandparents were their age. A lot of people become depressed thinking about it. I think this happens for 2 reasons. First, their grandparents and other old people always talk that way. When people get old, they tend to remember the time when they were young as ‘the good old days’, whether those days were actually good or not. But what old people are really nostalgic for is not the time of their youth, but their youth itself. That happens in every generation. Second, books, movies, and TV shows set bygone times, more often than not, idealize those times. Yes, young people today do have things to worry about that people didn’t worry about 100 years ago, like nuclear bombs. That is something to worry about, but every generation has things to worry about. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed 2/3 of the population of Europe. No one knew what caused it. It would go away for a while and then it would return with a vengeance. That was something for people to worry about, wasn’t it?

The truth is that, more often than not, the ‘good old days’ were never really as good as people imagine. When I started giving my ‘Good Old Days’ lecture to junior high school students in 2006, ​so I picked 1906, 100 years earlier, for comparison. Now, think about big-budget movies that you have seen that were set in that period, 1900 to 1910. Don’t most of these movies have happy endings and depict a wonderful time to live, movies like ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’, ‘Hello Dolly’, ‘Peter Pan’, ‘The Ghost and Mrs. Muir’, ‘Gigi’, to name a few. However, life was not really that beautiful and carefree in1906. 

If you know teenagers who think that your grandparents or their great grandparents grew up in happier times, show them this article. This article is my cure for teenage nostalgia for ‘the good old days.’

Life expectancy: In 1906, the average American lived to age 45. Today, it’s 80. Incredibly, we have added 35 years to life expectancy.

Disease: The 3 leading causes of death in 1906 were pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis. Epidemics of contagious diseases killed millions of people every year. During the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, 10,000 Americans a week died from the flu. Morticians ran out of coffins. Thousands of corpses were just wrapped in bed sheets and buried in hastily dug mass graves and then covered with dirt with bulldozers.

Medical Care: 90% of all physicians in the U.S. had no college education. Most doctors attended for-profit medical schools that were unregulated and unlicensed. People feared going to hospitals, which were breeding grounds for disease. A person’s odds of recovering from nearly any disease were much greater at home than in a hospital.

Medicine: Prescription drugs were much cheaper than they are today, but most drugs were medically worthless ‘snake oil’.  Far more people were killed by toxic medicines than were cured of their diseases. 75% of all cough syrup sold in the U.S. contained opium or cocaine. No prescription was needed. It was legal to sell narcotics to children. Coca Cola, which was advertised as a headache cure and ‘brain tonic’, contained cocaine, which is how the product got its name.

Gangs: Street gangs are nothing new. All major U.S. cities had gangs in 1906. New York City had the largest and most violent gangs.​ Criminal gangs like the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, and the Bowery Boys had hundreds of members. These gangs made money by burglary, armed robbery, extortion, kidnapping, protection rackets, and many other crimes. They frequently had gun battles in the streets over territorial disputes.

Cleaning: Washing and ironing clothes was extremely time consuming. Most housewives spent 1 or 2 full days every week doing laundry. Working men normally changed their shirts a week. Pants were washed even less frequently. Most coats were never washed. Only 14% of all U.S. homes had a bathtub. Heating the water for a bath could take an hour or more. Once the tub was filled, every member of a family would bathe in the same bath water, one after another. Most hotel rooms had no bathrooms or bathtubs.

Children: Poor working women commonly gave infants and young children laudanum before going to work. Laudanum is a mixture of alcohol, opium, and morphine. It was an alternative to daycare, which poor women could not afford. Laudanum kept their kids doped up until mother got home. Boys as young as 6 years of age worked in coal mines for 8¢ an hour. Girls worked in textile mills, which were just as dangerous. ‘Mill girls’ often died by the age of 18 from brown lung disease, caused by breathing cotton lint. The boys died of black lung disease from breathing in coal dust. Employed children typically worked 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. There were no child labor laws, workman compensation, compulsory education laws, or occupational safety laws. Children who were injured or crippled on the job were simply fired.

Education: 10% of all Americans were completely illiterate. 20% of Americans could read a little, but not well enough to read a newspaper. Only 6% of all Americans graduated high school. Public school teachers were allowed to beat children with their hands, sticks, and paddles. It was quite common for school teachers to beat at least one child every day. In most places, children had to buy their textbooks. If they couldn’t afford to buy textbooks, then they didn’t have textbooks.

Food: There were no federal food inspectors, and food processors were not required to list ingredients on package labels. New York City had its own food inspectors, and this is what found in a 1901 study: 90% of the milk sold in New York City was watered down, 50% of all bread contained sawdust, and 90% of all sausages contained animal parts unfit for human consumption. Most meat markets did not have ice or refrigerators. In hot weather, raw meat went bad quickly. 1/4 of the raw beef and pork sold in New York City was rancid or contained maggots. Virtually all canned food contained lead from soldered joints. Food coloring contained lead, arsenic, and mercury. Not surprisingly, food poisoning was one of the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.

Cars: There were 8,000 cars in the entire U.S. Only very rich people owned cars. The average car sold for $5,000. That was 2-years salary for a skilled worker. The maximum speed limit in big cities was 10 miles an hour. Safety glass had not yet been invented, and cars did not have seat belts. Even minor accidents at 10 miles an hour could be fatal.

Horse Manure: Outside of cities, most houses had at least 1 horse. An average horse weighs 1,000 pounds and produces ​30 pounds of manure a day, or ​over 5 tons a year. If there was a boy in the house, it was his job to take care of the horse. That included feeding, watering, and grooming the horse; and disposing of the horse manure. This was usually done by composting the manure or shoveling it onto a manure wagon and carting it away.​

The Horse Manure Crisis. As the population of American cities grew in the 19th Century, many of them developed a ‘horse manure crisis’, as it was known. In 1900, horses deposited 3 million pounds of horse manure on the streets of New York City every day. You can imagine what this smelled like on a hot, humid day. Here is a short PBS video about this crisis: New York City Horse Manure Crisis.

Electricity​ & Telephones: Only 2% of all homes in the U.S. had electricity. Nobody had refrigerators or air conditioners. If your parents were wealthy, they might have a telephone, but children were not allowed to use it. Only 1 house in 12 had a telephone. Telephone calls were very expensive. A 3-minute phone call from San Francisco to New York cost $10.00, more than a week’s salary for an average worker.

Would you still like to have lived in ‘The Good Old Days’?