On this day

1924 — The comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” by Harold Gray debuted.1926 — Harry Houdini stayed in a coffin under water for 1 1/2 hours before escaping.1955 — An atom bomb was dropped on Hiro-shima, Japan (Aug 6 in Japan).1966 — Dr. Martin Lu-ther King Jr. was stoned by protesters during a Chicago march.

Have you ever heard someone long for the “good ol’ days?” In that faraway time, life was simple, innocent, slow-er-paced and all around, things were better, right? And it didn’t matter where you lived; you nev-er had to lock your door.

When were those better days, exactly? It depends on your per-spective. People in 1924 might have been longing for simpler times, too, after reading the news headlines in the Aug. 5 edition of the Illinois State Journal.

Among the 13 news stories on Page one, 10 of them report tragedy, criminal activity or gen-eral mayhem. A mother watched as her toddler was struck and killed by a streetcar. Another mom tried unsuccessfully to rescue her son from a burning barn filled with

hay. A fight between baseball players caused a near riot. Thousands were killed by flooding in China. A boy was killed when he was struck by a baseball during a game at a Lincoln orphanage. A couple of “bad-check artists” from Kansas City, Mo., were nabbed by the sheriff.

Reading headlines like these day after day would be enough to cause a stampede to the thera-pist.

Regardless of which stories editors placed on page 1 that day, there is plenty of evidence to prove past times, and the 1920s in particular, really weren’t any better; or at least, they weren’t any different than today.

“With all of its mod-ernism, the 1920s lacked some of the basic privi-leges we take for granted today,” says Mark Roehrs,

professor of history at Lincoln Land Communi-ty College.

“Deadly race riots in Springfield in 1908 and Chicago in 1919 showed that Illinois clearly had serious racial issues. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge’s son died of a blister that turned septic and became blood poi-soning, in part, because even simple antibiotics were still more than a decade away.

“In 1927, during the internationally famous Sacco and Vanzetti trial, the state of Massachu-setts sentenced two men to death for a bank robbery they may or may not have been involved with, largely because of their recent immigrant status and their affilia-tion with an anarchist organization. Red Scare fears of communism and blatant anti-Asian preju-dice had led to legislation in 1924 that virtually ended immigration from non-northern and west-ern Europe.”

In fact, some of Amer-ica’s great leaders held beliefs that are viewed today as offensive.

Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in Anglo-Saxon superiority. Woodrow Wilson, the son of Confederate sym-pathizers, was an unapol-ogetic segregationist and

racist.There were backers of

a eugenics movement that promoted involun-tary sterilization of the “unfit,” which included the “feeble-minded,” carriers of chronic dis-eases, prostitutes and the destitute.

“There was no mini-mum wage. There was no Social Security. Industri-al oversight was virtually non-existent outside of the food and drug indus-tries,” Roehrs said.

Life is better now in many regards thanks to advances in science and medicine. But has hu-man nature changed any in the past 100 years? Do people today have a greater capacity for ill will toward others? Are destructive acts of nature

worse now, is there more greed now, is there more just plain, bad luck to-day? Or, are these things more widely reported and with greater speed, with each generation?

In the late 1800s, ac-cording to historian and author Michael Schud-son, the Women’s Chris-tian Temperance Union of Iowa complained that in the increasingly hurried days of telephone and typewriter and distribution of news-papers by fast-moving trains, “the barbarisms of the cities easily reached the secluded villages of Iowa.” They worried that the “speed of locomotion and communication and the vastly greater use of the press” would harm their youngest genera-

The goodold days?

FLASHBACK SPRINGFIELD — August 5, 1924

Monday, August 5, 2013 THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER PXX

tion.Was it the message or

the messenger that upset the temperance women more? Imagine what they would have thought of Twitter.

“The tragedies seem remarkably familiar, as do the human foibles,” said Roehrs. “The 1920s, while fascinating, were not that dissimilar from today, and certainly not a golden age. In fact, in many ways it all seems rather too familiar and tends to show little in the way of progress, or decline, given the nearly 90 years of separation from the events of that day and our own.”

— Rich SaalDownload this page at

www.sj-r.com/flashback.

The Ku Klux Klan rallied in Washington, D.C. in 1925. The 1920s saw a resurgence of the Klan. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS