Media

Retro-Reading: The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine from 1884

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Leafing through a copy of the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine (published 1876-1907) at a used bookstore, I was struck by the high quality of the writing. I didn’t buy the magazine, but there are copies online and I recently downloaded the collection from 1884 and have been reading through some of the contents.

A locomotive fireman is quite different from a regular fireman–he doesn’t put out fires, rather,  he starts them and keeps them going. These are the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnaces, working on a swaying platform in a cab that was definitely not climate-controlled. The job required more brainwork than one might think but still, this was not one of the more intellectual jobs on the railroad. I doubt if there were many if any college graduates among the readership of this magazine, I’d guess that no more than half had gone all the way through high school.

So what kind of reading material was designed for them?

There are a lot of short stories, some of them centered around railroading but many on other topics entirely. Ichabod Turner’s Mission is about a mentally-disturbed man who believes it is his mission to save the world..his life will intersect with that of a young railwayman who has been assigned to run a train–although he knows that he has had inadequate rest.

All in a Fashion is about a girl who marries “an enterprising young man” and later visits her hometown wearing a a very fashionable hat…which everyone wants to borrow and some try to imitate…eventually, she is accused of being the one doing the copying.

His Mistake is a gripping story about a train dispatcher, Bob Norcross, and his telegrapher, Miss Louise Dale. Attempting to keep traffic moving following various mishaps, Norcross writes an order to change the usual meeting place of two trains running in opposite directions. He has finished writing the order but not yet signed it when he hears a whistle and, picking up what he thinks is the order he has just written…but is actually another loose message slip lying nearby… and walks out onto the platform.

Miss Dale turns from her instrument and picks up the message, noticing that it has not been not signed but remembering that the dispatcher had twice spoken about changing the meeting point of the trains.  “Bob is hurried and driven tonight,” she thought, “he forgot to sign it.” And then she remembered that the mail must be close up to Scotville..the intended new meeting point..already and that no time ought to be lost.  She looks for Bob, but doesn’t see him–he is speaking with the superintendent, in the baggage room.  What should she do?  What does she do?

There are philosophical thoughts and historical notes on various subjects. Consistency is a meditation on the concept of equality…which the author sees as being violated by two privileged classes of people: lawyers and liquor sellers. Stands Alone, reprinted from the London Times, says about this country:  “The history of the world has furnished no precedent for the condition of the United States…With the conscious power to carve its own destinies belonging to perfect national independence, it combines the Roman peace enjoyed privately and commercially by subject provinces of the ancient Roman empire.  No country in the world has any interest in molesting it…Their happy fortune has left it for the time with no more difficult problem to settle than how to avoid accumulating so enormous reserve of public wealth as not to know what to do with its taxes.”  (Well, we’ve solved that problem)  There’s a transcript of a fiery speech given by Patrick Henry in response to British threats toward signers of the Declaration of Independence.

There are many stories about then-current events and projects, including the prospects for what became the Suez Canal…the potential for solar power, involving what we would now call the solar-thermal method…the potential for what became Trans-Siberian Railway…and progress on automatic couplers for railcars, the lack of which was responsible for a large number of deaths and serious injuries every year.  There are a lot of pieces on scientific subjects, including the chemistry of life, such as photosynthesis. There’s a suggestion that ship collisions with icebergs could be prevented with a very sensitive thermometer that would sound an alarm if the temperature suddenly dropped (would this work?) and an article on ballooning which argues that it is pretty pointless.

There are a couple of articles about Kate Shelley, who, aged 15, had three years earlier saved a train from destruction by an incredible act of heroism. Her Iowa home overlooked the railroad tracks and a bridge over Honey Creek, and during a terrible storm, she observed that the bridge had gone down.  She knew that the Omaha express was due from the west in a short time.  The only way to save the train was to get a message to the station at which the express would stop briefly and to do this, she had to make her way across the high trestle bridge over the Des Moines river. The walkways on the bridge had been removed to discourage pedestrians, and the only way she could get across was by crawling from tie to tie, making her way by feel and by lightning flashes. (True story–more here)

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They Accuse!

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The ridiculousness about Elon Musk’s hand gesture reminded me of something: In his memoir of Spain before and during their civil war, Arturo Barea said that on one occasion, he was showing a friend how tall a child was–“like this,” he said, holding up his hand to indicate the height. He was accused of giving the Fascist salute, and was saved from the firing squad only by the intervention of credible friends.

Imagine No Internet

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There has been a lot of commentary about the downsides of the Internet generally and of social media in particular…lowered attention spans, on-line bullying, growing narcissism, rapid spread of untrue information, etc–even, perhaps, inhibiting the assimilation of immigrants…and many of these concerns are indeed valid.  However:

Imagine that there is no Internet.

In this alternate history, the traditional media still rule  They may choose to provide online access to some of their content, but user-generated content will be enabled only in the form of ‘letters to the editor’, which, like their print prototypes, are published online very selectively and at the total discretion of the major media organizations. In the sphere of commerce, large corporations may offer some form of online ordering, but there is no such thing as just putting up a website and seeing what you can sell.

Would this no-Internet world really be an improvement?

I’ve previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.  It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true about running large organizations,  it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country.  The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others.  And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power. This is especially dangerous when those controllers of the information all have similar backgrounds and worldviews.

Some may argue that we managed without the Internet, not so many years ago, and that that absence didn’t lead to disasters. And some have argued that without a feeling of threat from increasingly-dominant Internet competition, the legacy media would be more balanced and responsible, would not have become so one-sided and tendentious.  As a guide what an Internet-less world would be like today, though, I think these arguments don’t apply. Thirty or forty years ago, local and regional networks and broadcasters were more common and more significant than they are today, and journalists were more diverse (in a professional and background sense) than they are today. (And even back then, there was plenty of group-think and lack of coverage of important issues and topics.)  My own view is that a non-Internet world would be conformist, intellectually stifling, and very dangerous in terms of the evolution of national policies.)

Not to mention the malign effect on economic dynamism.

Yet I get the impression that a lot of people would prefer, or think they would prefer, such a world.

And European countries do seem determined to use censorship and threats to try to simulate a pre-Internet world as nearly as they can. We will see how that works out for them.

Your thoughts?

Related posts:  Betrayal, also Starvation and Centralization.

Enslaved by Devices, 1920s Version

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One frequently observes people who appear to be the captives of their phones and other screen-based devices, and many concerns have been raised about the effects of this behavior. Reading Merritt Ierley’s book “Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold”, I was amused to see the following passage in a chapter about a letter written in the mid-1920s concerning the then-new technology of radio. The letter was sent to NYC radio station WEAF by a man whose family had just acquired a receiver:

It is 5:25 PM–you have just finished broadcasting; you have practically finished breaking up a happy home.  Our set was installed last evening.  Today, my wife has not left her chair, listening all day.  Our apartment has not been cleaned, the beds are not made, the baby not bathed–and no dinner ready for me.

A little quick on the trigger, I’d say…good grief, they’d just gotten the radio the previous evening.  I wonder what happened over the next few days, and how common this experience/reaction was.

Some reactions, though, were much more positive about the influence of radio.  Writer Stanley Frost thought radio had the ability to reach out to “illiterate or broken people,” making them “for the first time in touch for the world around them,” and reprinted a letter received by WJZ in Newark:

My husban and I thanks yous all fore the gratiss programas we received every night and day from WJZ…The Broklin teachers was grand the lecturs was so intresing…the annonnser must be One grand man the way he tell the stories to the children.

And in an article titled ‘Radio Dreams That Can Come True’, Collier’s Magazine asserted hopefully that radio could lead to a “spreading of mutual understanding to all sections of the country, unifying our thoughts, ideals, and purposes, and making us a strong and well-knit people.”

Thoughts?

Kamala and the Constitution

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Democrats and never-Trump Republicans assert that Trump must not be reelected because he threatens the Constitution.  Peggy Noonan goes so far as to say, in her most recent WSJ column, that Kamala Harris should move to a more centrist position on a range of issues in order to improve her chances of winning and thereby negating Trump’s perceived threat to Constitutional government.

The problem with this formulation is that the Democrats don’t much like Constitutional government, and indeed don’t much like the Constitution itself.  (And by ‘Democrats’, I mean not only the Democrat officeholders and politicians, but also the larger Party, including the academics, bureaucrats, and media people who are the party’s ideologues and the beneficiaries of its polices and who think themselves entitled to be the kingmakers or prince-electors of America.)

For example, here is Hillary Clinton, calling for Americans to be civilly or even criminally charged for ‘misinformation.’  Here is Kamala herself, asserting that Trump has lost his free speech privileges and that his Twitter account (this is from 2019) should be taken down…and expressing dismay that social media sites can speak directly to millions of people without any level of oversight.  Tim Walz says “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech”…the definitions of which, of course, he surely expects to be edicted by people ideologically aligned with himself.  Democrat Representative Jamie Raskin has been a leading figure in Congress opposing efforts to investigate and curtail massive censorship programs coordinated by the Biden administration.

Many academics and journalists–representing professions that are highly Democrat-aligned–have attacked the very foundations of free speech and constitutional government.  For example:  New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.”  In another New York Times piece, titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” two law professors (one from Harvard and one from Yale) call for America to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”  Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. There are more examples at the link.

Democrats have also called for expanding the membership of the Supreme Court, for purposes of what used to be called court-packing, and been extremely tolerant of the ‘heckler’s veto’…indeed, often now the ‘thug’s veto’…to shut down speech which is considered Badthink.

This is not a matter of a few rhetorical excesses; there is clearly a very broad-based and multi-layered movement against free speech–and toward further centralization of power–among prominent and influential Democrats.

When Democrats cast themselves as defenders of democracy, I am reminded of the phrase ‘guided democracy’ as employed by the Indonesian ruler Sukarno to describe his system.