Inspirational Case Study #1: The 100 Year Perspective

[Published on the Facebook Thunkity Thunk: Open Ideas forum on September 17, 2019]

Who and what will be remembered 100 years from now? Who are we to assume we know what lies ahead, even 10 years in the future?

The most popular pieces of music from 100 years ago? You don’t know them. Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, they had a few songs... published as sheet music. Stravinsky had some pieces debut, but they weren’t “The Rite of Spring.” Yet to come though: Nat King Cole was born, and Pete Seeger and Liberace and the dancer Merce Cunningham.

J.D. Salinger was born too, and so was Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Iris Murdoch and Primo Levi and Doris Lessing. But, again, what rose up in culture in 1919 is largely unknown now. I recognize Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” and then names like Jack London, M. Somerset Maugham, and Andre Gide, but it’s their lesser known works that were released that year.

It’s true that out in Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists. But the 10 Top films themselves that year contain nary a recognizable title, even to a cinephile like me.

The list of notable works of visual art are a litany of unknowns, broken only by a mention of Matisse here, Picasso there, Monet painting yet another water lily, and old guard Singer Sargent leaving his rich people portrait business late in his career to paint “Gassed” — based on his real experience visiting World War I’s front lines — a work that anticipates the photographic war journalism to come throughout the 20th Century. It seems cliched to us now, almost Normal Rockwell-esque. But back then, in 1919, this painting of a line of blindfolded soldiers holding each others’ shoulders as they stepped across the dead was so moving it was voted Picture of the Year by the Royal Academy of the Arts.

The war to end all wars had ended the year before. But it was still so fresh that it wasn’t until June of 1919 that the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Four months later, our president, Woodrow Wilson, has a debilitating stroke. He remained in office until 1921. Our whole country was stumbling along anyway, though; it can’t have seemed so odd to have a leader as cut down as everyone else felt.

Anarchists sent mail bombs to eight prominent people in America. There was a race riot in Chicago, after a white man threw stones at black teens on a raft. Up in Epson, Canada, 400 soldiers — angry at not being sent home yet after the end of World War I — attacked a police station. Over in Winnipeg, mounted police fire into a crowd of unemployed, protesting veterans, killing two. Back in the US, there are May Day riots in Cleveland, leading to two deaths, 40 injured, and 116 arrests. The same day, there are violent confrontations between left-wing protestors and police in France. The war is over, but the whole world is still in turmoil.

Countries continued to annex other countries, and break apart from within. In Mexico, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead. Pauncho Villa hung the mayor of Parral, Chihuahua, and his two sons. The British massacred 379 Sikhs in India in one day. British troops fire on a crowd in Malta, killing five people protesting colonial rule. An Armistice Day parade in Centralia, Washington, ends with four members of the American Legion dead and the lynching of the local leader of the International Workers of the World. 1919 is the year the American Communist Party is formed. And it’s the year over 10,000 suspected Communists and anarchists are arrested in 23 cities in the US in the Palmer Raids.

It’s the year women got the Constitutional right to vote. And it’s the year we also used the Constitution to prohibit alcohol.

In Italy, Mussolini founded his fascist party. In Germany, Hitler gave his first speech to the German Workers Party. And to the east, the Russian Revolution raged on, season after season.

The people back then didn’t know that the next decade would retroactively be called the Roaring Twenties. The fun would be deceptive though. They would have no clue the degree to which the upcoming corrupt Harding Administration would be asleep at the wheel, as the economy turned toward an iceberg. The Crash of 1929 was just 10 years away. The blink of an eye it will take between now and when my son will graduate from college somewhere.

What’s so fraught now that will largely be forgotten in 2119? What works of art will rise to fame long after we’re dead? What spirals of history are rhythmic and predictable, and which will defy all our algorithms to make us laugh that we once thought that we were so smart?

[All facts via Wikipedia, to which we should all give thanks and whatever donations we can afford]