Yes, 44.
I'd have guessed older.
And I don't know how old his wife is, in this photo, but my guess is that she's no older than him, and if typical demographics then and now are assumed, she's likely in her late 30s.
This photograph was taken on or about March 2, 1919. This just seems flat out the norm in photos of this era. Everyone is older than they appear.
Some maintain, well, look at the number of kids. That'd age ya. . . Maybe, but even the kids usually, at least by the time they're in their mid teens, look older than at least my generation did when they were kids. That boy in the back row, for example. I'll bet he's 15 or 16. He looks like he could be 25.
Hard living conditions?
Ole Hanson was the mayor of Seattle in 1919, and that was no treat. That was the year of the big mid winter labor strike that many people worried was the beginning of Bolshevik agitation in the U.S. And frankly, while those concerns were misplaced, they weren't completely without some justification. Europe was aflame in many places in Communist revolution, which had started in in ports in both the USSR and Germany. No wonder people worried.
Hanson certainly worried. After he resigned he wrote a book based on his concerns from 1919.
In it, he declared:
I am tired of reading rhetorical, finely spun, hypocritical, far-fetched excuses for bolshevism, communism, syndicalism, IWWism! Nauseated by the sickly sentimentality of those who would conciliate, pander, and encourage all who would destroy our Government, I have tried to learn the truth and tell it in United States English of one or two syllables....
With syndicalism — and its youngest child, bolshevism — thrive murder, rape, pillage, arson, free love, poverty, want, starvation, filth, slavery, autocracy, suppression, sorrow and Hell on earth. It is a class government of the unable, the unfit, the untrained; of the scum, of the dregs, of the cruel, and of the failures. Freedom disappears, liberty emigrates, universal suffrage is abolished, progress ceases,...and a militant minority, great only in their self-conceit, reincarnate under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a greater tyranny than ever existed under czar, emperor, or potentate.
Indeed, he was convinced that the Seattle strikes were the attempted revolution, and said so:
The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact... The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practised in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt — no matter how achieved.
He toured the country with that message.
And he founded the town of San Clemente, seeing it as a Spanish style resort town on the Pacific for Californians tired of urban life.
He died in 1940, at age 66.
