"History and Time"

 If my Apple watch is correct, this should be the last of the blistering hot days here in Connecticut. Tomorrow, Sunday, the high is expected to be 80 degrees. A quick look at Connecticut’s historical weather records is instructional. The hottest temperature recorded in Connecticut (106 degrees) was set thirty-one years ago, on July 15, 1995, in Danbury. It matched the temperature set on August 23, 1916 in Torrington. Despite our discomfort, we are lucky to be living today when 90% of Connecticut’s homes have some form of air conditioning. Only about 50% did thirty years ago and virtually none in 1916. I wonder if our ancestors complained as much as do we?

 

The photo of our flag was taken here at Essex Meadows. Long may it fly!

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“History and Time”

July 4, 2026

 

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

                                                                                                                L.P Hartley (1895-1972), English novelist

                                                                                                                The Go-Between, 1953

 

We have lived near the shore in eastern Connecticut for thirty-five years, in Old Lyme and Essex, and we have driven to Madison – a village less than twenty miles to the west – hundreds of times. During the final months of World War II, with my father in the army, my mother went to stay with her parents in Madison. Thus the town became the place of my earliest memories.

 

Driving into Madison on a late June day, I thought of her as she would have been in 1926, the year of the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. She was then fourteen and would turn fifteen in July, the second child, and the only girl, in a family of four children. The boys loved sailing; she loved horses. She would ride or take a cart into town, or out into the back country, to visit friends. How different was her life from ours today!

 

And I thought of the passage of time, and how changed everything is today from that summer of 1926. After 20 million deaths during the “Great War” and an estimated 50 million during the Spanish Influenza, relative peace and prosperity reigned. 

 

By the mid 1920s the world seemed a happy and peaceful place. The United States was experiencing what became known as the “roaring Twenties.” The economy had rebounded sharply from a steep downturn that lasted from January1920 until July 1921. Even as prohibition was unsuccessfully trying to ban alcohol, flappers were dancing to Jazz-Age music, and the Harlem renaissance was in full swing. By July 1926, the Dow Jones Averages had more than doubled since it had troughed near the end of the recession. With the introduction of the Rentenmark and the negotiation of the Dawes Plan, Germany had resolved its hyperinflation problem and was in the midst of what was called the “Golden Twenties.” Japan was pushing toward democratic, parliamentary reform. While still recovering from war, the world was at peace.

 

Yet change was in the air. A world-wide Depression and a Second World War were on the horizon. In the U.S. consumer debt “sky-rocketed” to $7.6 billion in 1929 from almost nothing in 1920, driven by “buy now, pay later” installment plans. Stocks could be bought on 10% margin, sparking a speculative bubble by the decade’s end. 

 

Subsequently, between September 1929 and June 1932 the Dow Jones Industrial Averages lost 90% of its value. A world-wide depression ensued, which only ended in the late 1930s with preparation for war. In Germany, Hitler was making a name for himself. While in prison in 1924, he wrote Mein Kampf. By July 1932, the Nazi Party was the largest in the Reichstag. On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. In Asia, a growing militaristic Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931. While the predictability of these events, with the benefit of hindsight, seem obvious to us today, none were foreseeable during that happy, somnolent summer of 1926. 

 

Driving around Madison I thought of all this – the inability to know the future and to marvel at the changes wrought over the past century – the ubiquity of the automobile and the interstate highway system, jet planes, computers, cell phones, digital photography, air conditioning, robots, and the dramatic changes in medicine: antibiotics like penicillin, the mass production of vaccines, the discovery of insulin, organ transplants, medical imaging and gene editing; and an American actually walking on the moon – and wondered: were these changes greater than those in the one hundred years from 1826 to 1926? 

 

Perhaps, but maybe not. By 1826 industrialization had begun. The number of Americans living on farms had declined modestly, from roughly 90% in 1800 to about 80% in 1826. Harnessing water power from natural falls and dams, mills and factories were beginning to proliferate, moving people off of farms and into cities and towns. By 1926, the percent of Americans living on farms was approaching 25 percent. (Today that number is less than two percent.)

 

Those hundred years between 1826 and 1926 saw dramatic advances – railroads; cars and highways; planes; power generation, including electricity; the telegraph, telephone and typewriters; photography, movies and flush toilets. (Franklin Pierce was President when the first modern bathroom was installed in the White House. By 1926 the White House had thirteen bathrooms.) In 1826, it would take one to two weeks to travel from Washington, D.C. to Boston, and almost as long to send a message. By 1926, travel time had been cut to 10 or 12 hours, and a message could be sent in minutes. (It would be another twenty years before scheduled commercial flights between the two cities were instituted.)

 

Most important, those hundred years saw the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the abolition of slavery in 1863. Two years later on December 6, 1865, the 13^th Amendment was ratified. The first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848. It witnessed the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. Seventy-two years later, on August 18^th, 1920, the 19^th Amendment was ratified.

 

In both hundred-year periods progress was made. Both amendments in the earlier period helped fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence. The United States is not and never will be a finished product. It is a work-in-progress and always has been. While we can speculate, none of us know the future. The Country has gone through rough times and internal squabbles have grown heated – at no time as violent as they were in 1861 – but we have always emerged an improved society. It is not important to determine which period was most productive, but to remember that both eras brought improvements.

 

There is much that concerns me regarding our current state of affairs – the anti-Semitism that pervades extremists on both sides of the aisle; a refusal to respect those who disagree; a President who uses his office as a piggy bank; the recent rise of those favoring of socialism over free-market capitalism; the sorry state of many of our public schools, into which we pour money but with diminishing results; federal and state debt levels; the speculation that has propelled risky investments – like prediction markets, leveraged ETFs, cryptocurrencies and sports betting; a decline in the number of people who read books, and the increase in those isolated on social media. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote that men were not angels, which is why government is necessary, but also explains why the Founders created a government constrained by three separate but equal branches.

 

Despite concerns but because of the genius of Madison and others, I remain an optimist. Warren Buffett is right in his foundational investment philosophy: “Never bet against America.” Common sense will, I believe, return and with it the realization that we are in this together – that we are lucky to live here; that we all want a better future for those who come after us; and that we are adaptable to change. However, we must ensure that the ladder to success is available to all, even if not all avail themselves of it. After all, we are all different in looks, abilities and aspirations, but we are all equal in our rights as American citizens.

 

Happy birthday, U.S.A.!