Some years back, my wife and I made the acquaintance of a couple who were into something called the "Society for Creative Anachronism." They tried to explain the whole thing to us, and, curious (we are both innately curious people), we went to one of their get-togethers. It was mildly amusing, a bunch of Americans dressing up in fancy medieval clothes and pretending to be lords, ladies, knights, and all that rot. The key turnoff for me was when this couple, who we were told were the "king and queen," entered the room and everyone was supposed to kneel, heads bowed. I refused. "I'm an American," I told them. "I don't kneel for anything or anybody."
That incident got me thinking. As I often did in those days, I told the Old Man about the experience, and we shared some observations on how those "good old days" weren't always so good - not only way back in the knights-in-shining-armor days, but even as recently as 1928, when my Dad's younger brother Lee died of pneumonia - and how at the time we were talking about it (around 2000 or so) he never would have been in any danger.
Somehow, though, even our usual notions for how much those "good old days" really suck just aren't getting it. A recent piece in City Journal, but the Cato Institute's Chelsea Follett shows us, very vividly, just how bad things in a pre-industrial city really were.
When Americans were polled in 2023, almost 20 percent said that it was easier to “have a thriving and fulfilling life” hundreds of years ago. Across the country, as one writer put it, people are engaged in an “endless debate around whether the pre-industrial past was clearly better than what we have now.” In fact, Mamdani’s politics are grounded in an ideology that first arose from the frustrations of the early industrial era.
If Americans could go back in time to preindustrial New York City, however, they’d likely be horrified and possibly traumatized. Despite today’s real challenges, most New Yorkers would not trade places with their predecessors.
Boy howdy, if that isn't a natural-born fact. There's so much we take for granted in our modern world. A few examples:
Long before the rise of factories and industry, New York City was a bustling port, founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in order to trade furs in the early seventeenth century. As early as 1650, local authorities enacted an ordinance against animals roaming the streets to protect local infrastructure—but to no avail. Then, in 1657, according to the Dutch scholar Jaap Harskamp:
New Amsterdam’s council attempted to ban the common practice of throwing rubbish, ashes, oyster-shells or dead animals in the street and leave the filth there to be consumed by droves of pigs on the loose. When the English took over the colony from the Dutch, pigs and goats stayed put. . . . Pollution persisted. The streets of Manhattan were a stinking mass. Inhabitants hurled carcasses and the contents of loaded chamber pots into the street and rivers. Runoff from tanneries where skins were turned into leather flowed into the waters that supplied the shallow wells. The (salty) natural springs and ponds in the region became contaminated with animal and human waste. For some considerable time, access to clean water remained an urgent problem for the city. . . . The penetrating smell of decomposing flesh was everywhere.
One dealt with sewage and the other waste by chucking it out the window - and hoping nobody else did so while you were walking down the sidewalk. Did your terrier die? Chuck it into the street. A drove of pigs will happen along and eat it - and if you've never heard the noise a drove of hogs can make fighting over food, then you can't imagine the headache that can cause. There would have been roving packs of stray dogs, as well.
The disease, too. There would have been no such thing as clean water. You would have to haul water to your loving quarters from a community pump, and it would be a matter of wild luck to have that water free of typhus, cholera, or any number of other pathogens.
And can you imagine the smells? Rotting animal carcasses, sewage, rotting vegetables, and thousands upon thousands of humans who had been wearing the same clothes for months, and for whom bathing wasn't even really a concept they were familiar with.
No, those good old days weren't that good - and they won't be again, if the leftist municipal jurisdictions don't get going on cleaning up the massive homeless enclaves that seem to be springing up all over. Want to see a return of all these things we just looked at? That's how you go about it. Many of those pre-industrial problems with waste, with sanitation, with disease, are returning.
Read More: Obama Calls LA Homelessness an 'Atrocity' — Forgets Who Wrote the Playbook
I remember my paternal grandfather, a Ford mechanic for much of his life, sharing memories of his youth, before the automobile became common - he was born in 1894. His primary observation? "Even in small towns like Troy (Troy Mills, Iowa), the streets were full of horse manure."
That's a cogent observation. The very people who rhapsodize over those wonderful, clean, green, pre-industrial days? Like the streets of Troy Mills in 1900, they, too, are full of horse manure.
