Notice I said that you’ll be “bigger and healthier”, not “stronger”. You’ll meet plenty of laborers with muscles like iron. But on average they’ll be six inches shorter than you with worse skin and teeth. You’ll meet plenty of people stronger or tougher than you, but you’ll have this weird healthy glow that’s the result of good childhood nutrition and modern dentristry and medicine.
Just thought of something: You’d stare at people with smallpox scars. You might even wonder what they were, or marvel at how much worse acne was back then.
(Oh, and be sure to get a full round of vaccines. Polio, TB, and smallpox especially, and I don’t even know if we can vaccinate against diphtheria, typhoid, and cholera, though we’d better learn if the flooding gets much worse. Taking back multiple rounds of antibiotics would be wise.)
Your written correspondence, even if you were a Pulitzer-winning journalist, would seem quite informal and overly concise to those 100 years ago. That’s not to mention the small stuff, like spelling “today” and “tomorrow” without hyphens, botching addressing nomenclature (street name suffixes were often not capitalized, “O” was used for “Ohio”, and so on), and not shortening certain names (how often do you see “Geo.”, “Rob’t” or “Chas.” today?).
Spoken English: you could probably understand them easily, but they might have a hard time understanding you. New vocabulary, new idioms, foreign loanwords from immigrant groups that became part of today’s English, business jargon, concepts affected by the euphemism treadmill, slang … well, English is forward-compatible, but not backwards-compatible. Example: someone from 1900 would have no idea what “backwards-compatible” means. You might have some problems with their slang, but that’s about it.
You wouldn’t jump five feet in the air every time you heard something shocking.
(I love Barnacle Press.)
1900 is a particularly tricky date. Automobiles but no airplanes, telephones but no radios. Some vaccines already exist, but no antibiotics.
I think I’d just pretend I was from an H.G. Welles novel.
The face of the United States is far more diverse than it was 100 years ago. Also, most of those “dirty immigrants” of the former era are now collectively in America’s middle-class. If you’re visibly Italian, and you’re speaking flawless English with no “old country” accent, you might be a curiosity. If you’re from India, Asia or the Middle East, and more-or-less assimilated … well, you’d probably be one of the few of your kind.
Jewish? Being a “Hebrew” will keep you out of elite men’s clubs, and you would likely face a glass ceiling at the workplace, but otherwise you’d fare okay. Most American Jews before the great wave of immigration at the turn of the century were ethnically German, moderate in their practice, and culturally assimilated. In turn-of-the-last-century city directories, synagogues were usually in the list of “churches”. I’ve seen society calling guides from early 1900s Buffalo that include many obviously Jewish names. The face of American Judaism changed when Ashkenazi Jews, mostly Orthodox, began to arrive from Eastern Europe.
Cynicism about government is nothing new, nor is hand-wringing over how cynical Americans are about their government. Indeed, the turn of the century was something of a high-water mark for cynicism about government. You don’t need the internet to spread scandals – this was the golden age of yellow journalism, when newspapers were cheap and widely available. They were also explicitly partisan and went out of their way to inflame any hint of scandal by the other party. Thomas Nast and his successors skewered political bosses and government corruption in their political cartoons. In fact, it was this cynicism that was starting to get Populists and Progressives elected and forcing the major parties to co-op elements of their agenda.
I don’t think the speech patters would be all that hard to adopt. I think I could probably manage to not sound like a complete loon after just listening to people talk for a while. But then some people are better at picking up accents. I tend to do it subconsciously. In fact when I would have English-speaking friends abroad, I would pick up their accents and speech patterns even though it wasn’t a native one.
I guess I’d start with they typical vaudeville accent and see where that gets me.
I think we’d probably be very surprised at just how unhealthy every single thing is. It’d probably be worse than living in a third-world country today. Imagine living in Manhattan. Things were far more crowded in those days. On top of that you’d have all of the animals and their waste in the streets.
Your teeth and even features would certainly be an anomaly. Even the rich probably had poor teeth. I’d think that your physical appearance would maybe be enough to get you in with some important people. They could simply tell by looking at you that you’re not one of the underclass. That is assuming you’re a white male. Let’s not kid ourselves here.
Man I really wish I could go back to the past to experience these kinds of things and maybe even interact with such people.
If you’re much past 25 or 30 you would also probably look considerably younger than other people of similar age. Again, nutrition, sanitation, and medicine is a factor here, but most people also spend less time outside and are more likely to use things like sunscreen that limit damage to the skin. If transported back to 1900 I’d likely be mistaken for a woman in her late 20’s rather than one in her mid-40’s because I have no grey hair, no wrinkles other than crow’s feet when I smile, and oh yes, that smile - full set of white teeth. Very anomalous.
If you go back, whatever you do … don’t forget your hat!
Pretty much any heterosexual oral sex will require financial arrangmements.
Just compare how a typical American looks compared to a typical Mexican, discounting ethnic differences.
What you’ll look like–with your soft hands, white teeth, pale unblemished skin, and straight back–is a member of the middle classes. But “middle class” means something different in 1900 than 2008, or in America compared to Mexico. It means you’re not an agricultural worker, or a servant, or an industrial worker, or an artisan.
And the notion that you’d be lynched because you’re not racist is simply laughable. You might find yourself in trouble if you loudly and at every opportunity stood on a soapbox and started ranting about the evils of racism and racists. But for simply treating blacks as human beings?
A vegetarian restaurant in early-1900s Los Angeles
(You have to scroll down a way.)
I agree, some people in this thread seem to keep losing track of the point that this was just over 100 years ago. It was not that long ago. A lot of the stuff we believe today was in early stages, but it was certainly present in the Zeitgeist. 1900 also had a fair amount of ongoing technical and medical accomplishment. People seem to think 1900 was akin to colonial times or something. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, with alcohol, you would find a great deal less social acceptance back then depending on where you were or who you were with. For example, Kansas had statewide prohibition since the early 1880s, and many other areas of the country were dry. The little independent city of Hollywood, Calif, was dry in the early years, but voted to be annexed by L.A. in 1910. At this time, they became wet, but of course the whole country went dry 10 years later.
If you don’t mind, could you pick me up a few shares of NCR? kthx
Bwah? That’s not true. Smoking cigarettes is one of the major contributions to premature deaths in third world countries. Actually it’s more often smoking-induced respiratory and heart diseases than cancer itself, but smoking DOES kill them by the dozens, nonetheless. I think that smoking was also significant cause of deaths back in the days - it was just assumed that those diseases were “natural causes”.
As to the OP, another aspect, not yet mentioned: environmentalism. The what? Hunting animals on industrial scale cause loss of biodiversity? Massive cutting of forest cause soil depletion and contribute to floods? Heating houses cause climate change??? What language are you speaking, actually?
I guess you don’t know anybody over 35 who’s worked a manual job or trade (miner, carpenter, whatever) all their adult life? The question isn’t whether they have any joint problems, it’s where and how much.
Sure, some laborers are going to have developed a few specific muscles, but in general their joints are going to be way worse off. And muscles shrink back when they’re not used. Joint pain is forever (or perhaps until arthroscopic surgery, which wasn’t really an option in 1900).
And the labor a tradesperson does is rarely the ideal for good health. Standard presciption for health is low-impact moderately intensive aerobic exercise for only part of the day with plenty of rest. A coal miner, on the other hand, is doing high-impact all day without sufficient rest, yet mostly low-intensive enough to not get cardiovascular benefits.
That’s without considering the benefits of good childhood nutrition and adequate food as an adult.
People who have done hard labor every day all their lives are usually pretty strong, but they’re not so much strong as tough. They usually deal with chronic pain and the constant risk of random injury, and the only thing to do is become stoic about it.
Chronic pain? jus take belt of that lydia pinkham’s Nerve Tonic (10% opium in alcohol)! One thing: you would have to get used to the stench-all those horses dropped a lot of manure everyday-what did cities DO with the stuff?