100 Years Ago – What Was Happening in 1909?

What kind of a place was the world 100 years ago, in 1909? 
It was surely very different from our familiar world of today.

• Capital punishment was regular practice in almost 99% of human societies.
• Cannibalism was practised in Melanesia and the Pacific Islands.
• 90% of doctors in the USA had no college education
• Syphilis, which drove people crazy and killed them, was still incurable.
• The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.

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A selection of “snapshots” from around the world shows that many things have remained surprisingly unchanged from 100 years ago.

Belgium

Massive genocide in Africa ends as King Leopold II dies. 

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• The Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that between 8 and 30 million people die in Belgian Congo through his private colonialism. 
• Auguste Marie François Beernaert gets the Nobel peace prize for contributing to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague.

Canada

Canada was creating the Immigration Act, 1910, which made everyone except British subjects domiciled in Canada needing permission to land in Canada.

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China

• Famine in Anhui province kills about 4 million.
• Confucius is raised to the same rank as Heaven and Earth, which are worshipped by the Emperor alone.

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Cuba

US troops finally leave Cuba, 11 years after the Spanish American war finished.

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England

• The first World Vegetarian Congress founded in Manchester.
• The Secret Service Bureau, the first incarnation of MI5, was established in 1909 to combat Imperial Germany's espionage operations in the United Kingdom.
• Britain starts arms race in response to Germany’s plans to build four Dreadnought battleships.
• Construction of the world’s then largest passenger ship RMS Titanic begins in Belfast.

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France

• Joan of Arc is beatified, 4 years after the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and State.
• Louis Blériot is the first man to fly across the English Channel.

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Germany

Paul Ehrlich discovers Salvarsan as a treatment for Syphilis, which was called: 

• the French disease in Italy and Germany, 
• Italian disease in France 
• Spanish disease by the Dutch 
• Christian disease by the Turks 
• British disease by the Tahitians

“War is one of the elements of order in the world established by God. The noblest virtues of men are developed therein. Without war the world would degenerate and disappear in a morass of materialism” says General Count Kuno von Moltke, a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He is soon implicated in the Eulenberg homosexual scandal and beaten up by his wife Lilly.

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India

Indians could be elected to legislative councils for the first time by virtue of the Indian Councils Act of 1909, commonly known as the Morley-Minto Reforms.

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Italy

Gugliemo Marconi gets the Nobel Prize for discovering wireless telegraphy (radio).

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Japan

• Vaccination is compulsory in Japan.
• Census reveals that 5,6 persons live in each Japanese household and 11% live in cities.
• Prince Hirobumi Ito, former Prime Minister, the first resident-general of Korea, who opposed annexation, is assasinated by independence activist Ahn Jung-Geun and Korea is annexed by the Japanese Empire.

Ottoman Empire

30 000 Armenian Christians slaughtered in the Adana Massacre.

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Russia

• Okhrana General Gerasimov reports to Czar Nikolai II that not a single revolutionary organization is still functioning in the Russian Empire. 
• A bloody Bolshevik train robbery at Miass in the Urals nets 60,000 rubles and 24 kilograms of gold.
• Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia begins a campaign of repression of national minorities.

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Sweden

Selma Lagerlöf wins Nobel Prize for literature. During WWII, she sends her gold medal and the gold medal from the Swedish Academy to the Government of Finland to help in the war with Soviet Union. The government of Finland is touched, raises money by other means and returns the medals to her with gratitude.

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USA

• The USA has its heaviest (136 kgs) white Republican president (William Howard Taft). His pursuit of world peace through his self-founded League to Enforce Peace and “Dollar diplomacy” was a disaster for him.
• Plastic, then called Bakelite, is invented from phenol and formaldehyde by Leo Hendrik Baekeland.
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded to end segregation and oppose lynching
• 95% of American babies were born at home.
• 90% of doctors in the USA had no college education as doctors went to medical school (many were attacked in the press as sub-standard). In Texas, a doctor coming to town only had to say he was a doctor, register with the health officer and start practising.
• Most American women only washed their hair about once a month using borax or egg yolks.
• Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health." - They advertised then.
• First woman drives motorcar across the USA. Alice Huyler Ramsey from Hackensack, New Jersey, with 3 non-driving companions drives 3800 miles from Manhattan to San Francisco in 59 days.

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Can Liberal Women Talk About Their Own Abortions!

Can US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin become the Bête noire of the liberal press or will she vanish into the wannabe garbage-bin of history? 

Considering the manner of generating controversy without any substance behind the talk, the latter outcome is most likely.

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How do people from other cultures see her?

Governor Palin’s statements like “The Iraq war is a task from God” and that she wouldn’t hesitate to start a war even with Russia are very belligerent words. 

For people in cultures outside the USA, this type of talk is standard George Bush rhetoric. Hot-headed political leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Hugo Chávez delight us regularly with phrases which provoke animated discussions. However, Sarah Palin’s statements about the Iraq war being a task from God, which she made to Charles Gibson of ABC News should be understood within the vote-catching context of election politics.

Sarah Palin's Anti Abortion Stand

But, what has annoyed many liberal feminist women in Western countries is Sarah Palin’s vehement anti-abortion stand. Religious fundamentalists and extreme right-wing republican women in the USA and tens of millions of people in other cultures may not feel that this is a negotiable issue.

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Abortion is a Taboo Topic in Most Cultures

In all cultures, abortion is a strange topic, almost ghost-like. Even in the most liberal countries like Finland in Scandinavia, abortion is a slippery subject. Jan-Erik Andelin of the Finnish-Swedish daily Hufvudstadbladet in Finland writes that women can discuss their sex-lives or lack of it, personal accounts of severe depressions and financial mishaps, but “Abortion is a taboo in 2008”.

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You can talk about abortion as a phenomenon, a statistic, a right, a political issue, but you can never talk about your own abortion even among women. No one will speak out aloud why she herself had to resort to abortion by explaining that she was 15, alone, and destitute. Most likely, even among militant feminists, only an embarrassed silence will follow if anyone present brings her personal case of abortion to the discussion.

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What are the reasons for this embarrassment? Is abortion then after all, a feminist issue? Women in many parts of the world consider the right to decide what they should do with their own bodies, as sacred, worth fighting for. 

Not having the right to choose to do an abortion means letting someone else’s interest, in this case her own child’s, override the woman’s rights of bodily self-determination.

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Is it that in a liberal society you are supposed to take care of your own contraception and if it fails, it is your own fault? 

Does abortion become a performance issue in the end? In earlier days, when a woman was supposed to give birth to many children and rear them into decent members of society, abortions were seen as eroding the base of functionality in a society. 

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Is the shame of the unemployed the same as that of the mother who had chosen abortion?