“When I was a youngster, in the closing decades of the last century … There was no such thing as walking off in comfort in a new pair of shoes. The shoemakers shaped their lasts to rub and hurt, and rub and hurt they did. All through the ‘80s they grew narrower and narrower, until in the ‘90s the so-called toothpick toe came in, and the whole nation began to limp. Does it seem comic, looking back? Then believe me, friends, it was not comic to the sufferers. Every drug-store window was full of corn-cures, but none of them really worked. Corn-doctors practiced in every American community, gouging, gashing and spreading streptococci. Desperate men cut off their own toes. Children at play stopped to hop around on one foot, holding the other and yelling.”
Anyone heard of all that? He explains that in 1912 a brigadier-general in the Army Medical Corps “designed a last that really followed the shape of the human foot, and during the World War it was used in making shoes for the Army. After the war the secular shoemakers began imitating it, and corns began to disappear. A little while longer, and they will be as rare as smallpox.”
Assuming there’s truth to that, what did the general change? Were American shoes ever different from the rest of the world’s?
Googling, from context I believe he was referring to the Victorian & Edwardian style of shoes and boots, which were very pointed and hard on the feet. So it would be less American than US and England. Not sure about the rest of Europe.
Yes - as a general principle, before the rise of Big Shoe in the inter-war period, you could buy ready-made factory shoes and hoped that they fit. There were various tricks to help, not least multiple pairs of socks, soaking them in urine and getting cobblers to stretch them, but it was essentially tough luck if your feet were more than slightly larger-smaller / thinner-wider / arched-flatter than the norm. Given natural variations probably the best general fit shoe only worked on 25% of people and everyone else had to make them work. And Mencken’s memory is right - feet problems were chronic. Podiatry became a distinct booming medical profession before the Great War.
The technology of shoe construction, both in types of materials and understanding of ergonomic design grows exponentially in the past century. By the time you get to the Great War, it was perhaps the last big event when large numbers of men were shod in essentially peasant footwear. As a result of the experiences of the Great War all the big armies looked at improving soldier boots, rather than relying on them being spat out to a small number of sizes by factories on overdrive.
One of my friends who participates in Civil War reenactments told me that the hard core “soldiers” wear exact replicas of the uniforms including the shoes which have no arches and no left and right. The civilian population of the time probably suffered the same situation.
I recall a discussion with a professor about a course he offered, “The History of Technology”. He mentioned that before the Civil War, shoes were typically hand–made by cobblers who custom-fit them. Then suddenly the Union had outfit a million soldiers with uniforms and boots in a short time. The result was shoes made to a pattern and a set of sizes (and clothing too). For simplicity and speed, boots were made to a simple pattern, no left or right or any special fitting; just something that covered the foot as simply as possible.
When the war was over, the monufacturers saw an opportunity to supply the civilian market using this tech and an assortment of shoe sizes, but quickly discovered that real paying consumers demanded more comfort - so arches, shaped to fit the foot more snugly, etc.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve shown you every pair of shoes in the store… except… the cruel shoes.”
Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. “People thought the longer the toe, the more masculine the wearer,” Shawcross says. “But some people weren’t keen on that connotation.” Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency, and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions:
I can’t help thinking of them as “penis compensation shoes” now.
Not quite. The Union Soldiers had mass produced shoes- or bought their own. However, most civilian shows were made left/right. Still they had to be broken in unless custom made, and even then there was a brief period of that needed. Some rich people had a servant break their shoes in!
Even in the 2000’s, Queen Elizabeth II had someone with the same size feet who wore all her new shoes for a while to break them in. The Queen had many public events & private meetings every day, where she was often walking or standing, so her shoes had to be comfortable for that.
