No one can predict the future
Most people who say they like history really mean they like nostalgia. History can be hard; nostalgia, a walk down memory lane, is easy.
Here’s an example of both along with an inference:
Around the middle of May 1930, newspaper editor O’Neil Kennedy attended a ceremony marking the construction of a new Bell Telephone building on Church Street in Uniontown. (The building is still there.)
Later, Kennedy of the Daily News Standard, a predecessor of the 蘑菇视频, let readers in on a little secret: his mind drifted back in time during the ceremony.
Apparently, Kennedy’s childhood residence had been right across the street from the construction site. So was the school he attended — Miss Alcinda Thompson’s “little private school” tucked into the second-story of a small frame house.
In addition to Miss Thompson, Kennedy’s mind’s-eye settled on a half-dozen or so former classmates, including George Marshall, then an obscure Army colonel, and Herb Bowman, Kennedy’s boyhood hero who became a star athlete at Yale.
He recalled pastors who served at the Second Presbyterian Church, right next door to the Bell building, town doctors, and his chum Neal Claggett crossing Church Street to see him, stepping”on the six big crossing blocks set down in the dirt street.”
And since the day was dedicated to Bell Telephone, Kennedy thought back to the first long-distance telephone call, in the 1890s, placed from Uniontown: Judge Umbel spoke to Pittsburgh from the Boyd & Umbel law building at the corner of Main Street and Gallatin Avenue.
All of this was nostalgia, not a bad thing certainly and rather valuable, then and now. In the same column, Kennedy recorded a slice of history, though he didn’t see it as history. It was “news” to him and hopefully to his readers.
It seems later that same day the editor was on hand to hear Leonard P. Reaume, president of the National Association of Realtors, speak to Fayette County realtors. Reaume painted a bright future.
Science and advances in technologies such as air conditioning, he said, were transforming the real estate market, making even new homes quickly obsolete. Reaume predicted that over the next 15 years America would go on a building spree, remaking itself in the process. “The false optimism of five years ago is now replaced by real optimism,” extrapolated Kennedy.
As a foreshadowing of the post-World War II years, Reaume did pretty good. For the years immediately ahead, however, he and Kennedy couldn’t have been more wrong.
The 15 years separating 1930 from 1945 were, of course, consumed by the Great Depression, when nothing much at all got built, and World War II, when America built millions of planes, ships, and tanks, but precious few homes.
The fact that O’Neil Kennedy missed the Great Depression even in the midst of it should not be held against him. Quite a few of his contemporaries did, too, including President Hoover.
How was this possible?
The short answer is that the present is almost always too chaotic for even the most astute observers to make sense of. Signs of recovery from the stock market crash of October 1929 seemed evident in May of 1930. Other, more malignant forces less so.
To have predicted that unemployment would soon skyrocket to 30 percent, that prices would plunge by a third, and that total economic output would fall by half would have invited derision.
The Great Depression was beyond the imaginative reach of most people in the spring of 1930.
It makes you wonder: what’s going on now that we cannot yet fathom or are only dimly aware of?
Maybe nothing, maybe a whole lot. The veil is drawn as tightly for us as it was for O’Neil Kennedy. We think we’re so smart. We shall see.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books: “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.