アメリカ、1926年：忘れられた100年前のレポートが私たちについて語ること

America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We AreAmerica in 1926 was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work, and money. Sound familiar?Derek ThompsonJul 03, 2026169424Share1920s Los AngelesSubscribeOne hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.Yes, this is the actual cover of the not-so-electrically entitled volume “Recent Social Trends,” from which most of this article—and all of its pretty yellow charts—are made.In some ways, the Americas of 2026 and 1926 are eerily similar. In both cases, the country is celebrating a major birthday in the midst of a rising stock market and widespread fears of “technological unemployment” (mechanical power then vs. AI now); giddy wealth is coiled with economic anxiety; technology has transformed the way that people get information, mind-wiring us to a global cacophony of far-flung emotions (radio then vs. social media now); and after years of record-high immigrant entry to the U.S., the government has choked the migrant stream to a trickle.In other ways, the America of 1926 was another world—practically another planet. Roughly half of the U.S. still counted as rural, and tens of millions of Americans had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Thick smoke from oil lamps filled their homes, and they emptied their bladders and bowels in old-fashioned chamber pots. Women had only voted in two presidential elections. Millions of children still worked for pay. Of the nation’s 27 million households, only 11 million had a phonograph, to listen to music, or a car. The first movie with sound would not come out for another year.Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination. But if I do my job well in the next few sections, you’ll see both the progress we’ve made in the last 100 years and the progress we haven’t made. Many anxieties that feel electrically charged in the present moment about work, family, and individuality are echoes of our ancestors’ fears. They felt all of our feelings. They just happened to poop in chamber pots.Life is long, and it’s getting longer. Someone born in 1850 and dying in the 1920s saw average life expectancy at birth increase by 50 percent in her lifetime.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe1. The Average American in 1926Before we dive into the world of 1926, let’s get into character.Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926.1 You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.The population distribution of America in 1926 was radically different than in 2026. Today, there are more women over 70 than there are girls under 10; but one century ago, girls under 10 outnumbered women over 70 by fivefold, at least.At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over.II. The Economy of 1926The major population trends of the 1920s, at a glance—falling child labor, rising women’s labor, and explosive population growth. (Note: Many of the graphs in Recent Social Trends have logarithmic Y-axes where the major tick marks increase by a factor of 10.)In 1926, the Roaring Twenties were at their full-throated peak. But America was anxious. If today’s commentators can’t stop talking about “maxxing” and “vibes,” the writers and politicians of the Twenties were vexed by the opposite of single-minded optimization. The watchword of the day was balance. Appearing 30 times in the Recent Social Trends report, balance was the cardinal worry of economic commentators: balance between rural and urban America; between manufacturing and farming; and between rapid progress and traditional values.America in 1926 was smaller, and its values and identity were more twined with the countryside. The US population was about 120 million—about one-third of its current size—and nearly half of Americans lived in rural areas, compared to about 10 percent today. “In many respects, those country ways of life remained untouched by modernity,” the historian Kennedy wrote. From the Potomac River to the Gulf of Mexico, America looked “little different than it had at the end of Reconstruction”—cotton fields unfurled under a hot sun, hardly touched by electricity or modern plumbing.The agrarian world was in a double crisis in 1926. The first problem was economic. In the 1910s, the American farmer fed the world. After World War I, global agricultural production came back online, and farmers were stuck with a ruinous surplus. The price of cotton and corn plummeted more than 50 percent from their wartime high. The second crisis was technological. The tractor and mechanical power transformed the farm, automating jobs for horses, as well as for people.2Estimated total horsepower available on farms in the U.S., 1850 to 1930. Trucks and gas tractors took over the farm in the 1920s, and the population of working horses declined swiftly from then on. If rural America was frozen in the ice block of history, urban America was a gushing torrent of change. By 1928, per-capita incomes of urban workers reached four times the average income of farmers. Between 1910 and 1930, the farm population declined while the urban population nearly doubled (see first graph below), thanks to both domestic migration and a wave of European immigrants (see second graph below). Much like today, the fear of historic levels of foreign-born people sparked an anti-immigrant movement. The 1920s saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which dominated the politics of several states, including Indiana and Oregon. “The nativist sentiment tha