This blog, as we occasionally note has the intent . . . to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?
Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.
But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.
Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:
Seventeen year old Tommy Brown became the youngest player in Major League Baseball to hit a home run. Brown had joined the Dodgers at age 16.
Brown provides a good glimpse into mid 20th Century America. Nobody would think it a good thing for a 16 year old to become a professional baseball player now. Moreover, the next year, when Brown was 18, he was conscripted into the Army, something that likely wouldn't happen now even if conscription existed. He returned to professional baseball after his service, and played until 1953 and thereafter worked in a Ford plant until he retired, dying this year at age 97. Clearly baseball, which was America's biggest sport at the time, didn't pay the sort of huge sums it does now.
Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s. He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker. Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time. There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be. But life was like that then. My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.
People did that.
If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.
He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16. If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.
It was scraping as the military was. The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry. We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times. Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating. The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context. It's relatively hard to get into the Army now. After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape. By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.
Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century. Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports. He went to work in a factory.
Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.
The US War Production Board removed most of its controls over manufacturing activity, setting the stage for a post war economic boom.
The US standard of living had actually increased during the war, which is not entirely surprising given that the US economy had effectively stagnated in 1929, and the US was the only major industrial power other than Canada whose industrial base hadn't been severely damaged during the war. Ever since the war, Americans have been proud of the economics of the post war era, failing to appreciate that if every major city on two continents is bombed or otherwise destroyed, and yours aren't, your going to succeed.
Having said that, the Truman Administration's rapid normalization of the economy was very smart. The British failed to do that to their detriment.
Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.
Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s. Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat. It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape. We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s. The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s. West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice. Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s. Italy really started to in the 60s.
Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new. Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.
Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.
The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955. It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.
Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.
Finally, we had posted on women and careers. Well, sort of. Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:
I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is. I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.
This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.
She's right.
This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".
The world? Well, that's a little too broad. But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West? You bet.
Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer. It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles. Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong. Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.
The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich. Not hardly.
FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive. They no doubt probably save time. Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.
Women only entered the workplace at this level in the first place after domestic machinery freed, or seperated, their labor from the house, where it had previously been necessary. You don't see women being criticized because their house contains a vacuum cleaner, or a dishwasher, even though this is not intrinsically different.
Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares. The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.
At any rate, she's right. The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others. We can fix it.
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