Understanding Information History: The Case of America in 1920 (SpringerBriefs in History of Computing) 3031441338, 9783031441332

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
1 America in 1920: An Information Microhistory
1.1 America in 1920: The Traditional Account
1.2 Altering the Traditional Account to Give Greater Attention to Information History
1.2.1 Farming
1.2.2 Spanish Flu
1.2.3 Information as a Tool of the Federal Government
1.2.4 Prohibition
1.3 Consumer Technologies, Modernity, and Information Issues
1.4 Information Institutions and Industries
1.4.1 The Print Media: Newspapers, Magazines, and Books
1.4.2 Libraries
1.4.3 Public and Higher Education
1.4.4 Advertising
1.4.5 Scientific Research Infrastructure
1.4.6 Consulting
1.4.7 Financial Services Industries
1.4.8 Office Appliances
1.4.9 Communication Technologies
1.5 “Disciplining Information”: Research in What was Later Called Computer Science and Information Science
1.5.1 Punched-Card Tabulating Systems
1.5.2 Analog Computing
1.5.3 Numerical Analysis
1.5.4 The Documentation Movement and Information Retrieval
1.5.5 Information Theory
1.6 How the Story Changes When American History is Told from an Information History Perspective
2 An Illustrated Information History of 1920 America
2.1 Conclusions
3 What is Information History and How Do We Study It?
3.1 How This Microhistory Compares to What Other Information History Scholars Say Belongs in Information History
3.2 The Scope of Information History
3.3 Further Reading

Citation preview

SpringerBriefs in History of Computing William Aspray

Understanding Information History The Case of America in 1920

SpringerBriefs in History of Computing Series Editor Gerard Alberts, Institute for Mathematics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

Springer Briefs in History of Computing presents concise summaries which address the history of computing, with an emphasis on the ‘externalist’ view of this history, more accessible to a wider audience. The series examines content and history from four main quadrants: the history of relevant technologies, the history of the core science, the history of relevant business and economic developments, and the history of computing as it pertains to social history and societal developments. The series provides a forum for shorter works which may not suit the traditional book model. SpringerBriefs are compact volumes of 50 to 125 pages; between the limit of a journal review article and a conventional book. Typical topics might include: • • • •

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William Aspray

Understanding Information History The Case of America in 1920

William Aspray Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN, USA

ISSN 2662-3005 ISSN 2662-3013 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in History of Computing ISBN 978-3-031-44133-2 ISBN 978-3-031-44134-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44134-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

Microhistory is a technique that has been used effectively by writers of both fiction and non-fiction. It enables an author to cut through the complexities of large swaths of history by focusing on a particular time and place. The successful microhistory must be able to set aside the idiosyncrasies of a particular case and identify patterns that obtain more generally across a large body of time and place. Microhistories are particularly useful in historical study when a subfield has recently arisen, and there are not yet enough monographic studies from which to draw general patterns. The degree to which an author narrows his focus in a microhistory varies considerably. For example, in his famous novel, Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec focuses on a single point time (8 PM, June 23, 1975) in a particular apartment block in Paris, to understand the puzzles and ironies of modern life.1 In Rockdale, Anthropologist Anthony Wallace studies a town of 2000 people in the Delaware Valley during the years 1825–1865 to understand the changes that industrialization brought to American society.2 This study is, in ways, less narrowly constructed than either those of Perec and Wallace—yet shorter and much more modest in its scope of analysis. It focuses on a single year (1920) across the entire United States, with the goal of understanding the various roles of information in American society. It is written as a modest contribution to the discussions underway over the nature of information history.3

1

Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual (original published in French, Paris: Editions Hachette Litterature, 1978; English translation, Boston: Verba Mundi, 2009). 2 Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Norton, 1972). 3 Another, well-written and interesting microhistory from the same era, which I discovered after I completed a first draft of this manuscript, is Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (New York: Doubleday, 2013). v

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Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing interest in information history.4 This development is marked, for example, by the reorientation of the journal Libraries and the Cultural Record as Information and Culture: A Journal of History; the renaming of Library History as Library and Information History; the publication of James Cortada’s two books, All the Facts and Birth of Modern Facts, as well as James Gleik’s Information; the appearance of two historical information history handbooks by Princeton and Routledge; and the academic writings of other information scholars such as Toni Weller, Alistair Black, Boyd Rayward, Laura Skouvig, and Jenna Hartel.5 As Cortada describes information history: “The objective is to move from a fuzzy idea—information—toward a more concrete appreciation of the centrality of its use in human affairs.”6 Across all of history, as new historiographical perspectives arrive, traditional historical accounts are modified. For example, as the new social history became popular in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, greater attention was paid to everyday life (and to related topics such as education, work, leisure, and inequality) and less attention given to the traditional study of political history, economic history, and the history of “great men.” It is too early to know how, if at all, information history will change the standard accounts of American history. This study suggests what might happen by taking a single year in American history—1920—and examining how the historical perspective might change when events are seen through an information history lens. Why did I choose America in 1920 as the year to study? The America part is easy to answer. As a historian, I am an Americanist and am better equipped to study the United States than any other place, even though a different author might equally well select a location separate from America. One could make a plausible claim that each year has something that makes it interesting,7 but there are some characteristics of 4

On the history of information history, see Alistair Black, Information History, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 40, 1 (2006), 441–473; Toni Weller, Information History—an Introduction: Exploring an Emerging Field (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2008); and Toni Weller, An Information History Decade: A Review of the Literature and Concepts. Library and Information History, 26, 1 (2010), 83–97. There are much longer histories of scholarship in other related areas such as library history, archival history, book and publishing history, communication history, and computer history—all of which contribute to the field of information history but each of which is pursued by its own set of somewhat insular scholars. See William Aspray, The Many Histories of Information, Information and Culture 50, 1 (2015), 1–23. 5 James Cortada, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States Since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); James Cortada, Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments, and Businesses (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023); James Gleik’s Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York: Vintage, 2012); Ann Blair et al., ed. Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); and Toni Weller et al., Routledge Handbook on Information History (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 6 James W. Cortada, Building Blocks of Modern Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 7 The Indian mathematical savant, Srinivasa Ramanujan, famously argued that every number (i.e., every positive integer) is interesting. He gave a whimsical proof by contradiction: If there were some numbers that are not interesting, then there would then be a smallest one that is not interesting, but

Preface

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1920 that made me partial to it. It was long enough ago that many of the events that happened are not completely familiar to today’s reader, so we can get some historical distance; but not so far in the past that the reader cannot relate to the world of that time. It was an important transitional year. Farm life and Victorian morality were losing their grip, and America was becoming more urban and entering the Roaring Twenties. A swing back from the Progressivism of the first two decades of the century to a more conservative political stance was underway, as evidenced by the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices during the new Harding Administration in the early 1920s. There were also significant changes in Black migration and women’s rights and new concerns about immigrants and Communism. It was a year in which two Constitutional Amendments went into effect. Much was happening in 1920!8 Another factor in my choice of 1920 is to be able to use photographic images more readily in my account. The year is long enough ago that copyright law provides freer rein on publication of photos from that year. However, it is recent enough that photographs of daily life from that era are readily available. The choice of 1920 might make the computer historian scratch their head. It is long before the modern electronic computer was created and even longer before the rise of personal computing, the Internet, and social media. It is well before these technologies became fully ensconced in the work of business or government or spread in use to the public. But I regard that as a benefit rather than a limitation of this study—as I attempt to demonstrate how information history differs from and is broader than computer history. Why study just one year? I did consider choosing a year from the 1950s and another from the 1980s, and comparing them to 1920, to learn about how information needs and uses changed over time. I think this would be a worthwhile study, but I wanted to produce a document that an interested reader could consume in a single evening and was short enough that it could be assigned in a college course for a single class meeting. I also wanted to avoid some of the copyright issues over illustrative material for the later years. The assignment of dates is, of course, an artificial human projection that makes life possible. But years often do not match up well with historical events. Thus, in this study, I have sometimes begun an account prior to 1920 or end a story in a later that very characteristic of being smallest makes it interesting; hence, there must not be any numbers that are not interesting. 8 The reader might say that 1920 is so long ago, more than a century in the past, and why not pick a year that was more a part of people’s experiences. But it was not so long ago generationally. This author’s parents were both born in 1922, and so all four of this author’s grandparents were adults in 1920. Another indicator of a connection between 1920 and today is how many famous people born in 1920 are familiar to us today. They include, for example, actors Yul Brenner, Montgomery Clift, Richard Farnsworth, DeForest Kelly, Jack Lord, Walter Matthau, Tony Randell, Mickie Rooney, Gene Tierney, Jack Webb, and Shelley Winters; the doctor Henry Heimlich; scientists Richard Bellman, Owen Chamberlain, Edmond Fischer, Adele Goldstine, Lawrence Klein, Timothy Leary, George Armitage Miller, and Douglass North; musicians Dave Brubeck, Peggy Lee, and Charlie Parker; sports figures Red Holzman, Stan Musial, and Tex Schramm; business people Frank Cary and Leona Helmsley; authors Ray Bradbury, Henry Charles Bukowski, Frank Herbert, Mario Puzo; and the politician Bella Abzug. 1920 really was not so long ago in our memories!

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year. Nevertheless, I have centered this study on events of 1920 and have tried not to extend my accounts too far in time in either direction. This short book contains three chapters. Chapter 1 provides a microhistory of America in 1920 from an information history perspective and compares that story to the way that this history is more traditionally told. Chapter 2 retells the same microhistory but does so through images, mostly photographs but sometimes artwork that appeared in posters, cartoons, or magazine covers. The goal here is to both provide a resource that a scholar could use in teaching a class or giving a research talk, but also to reflect on the differences in telling a story in words or in pictures. Chapter 3 engages the literature on the historiography of information and asks what we can learn from this microhistory that informs us about the nature of information history. This chapter is more academic than the other two but is not so full of arcane concepts or terminology that a general reader could not follow it. The first two chapters are written in a way to engage a general reader. Thanks to Gerard Alberts, Lecia Barker, Thomas Misa, and especially to James Cortada for their ideas and comments on various drafts of these chapters; and to Wayne Wheeler, Sriram Srinivas, and their colleagues at Springer for the opportunity to publish with them and their help with the preparation and distribution of the manuscript. Minneapolis, USA

William Aspray

Contents

1 America in 1920: An Information Microhistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 America in 1920: The Traditional Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Altering the Traditional Account to Give Greater Attention to Information History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Farming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Spanish Flu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.3 Information as a Tool of the Federal Government . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.4 Prohibition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Consumer Technologies, Modernity, and Information Issues . . . . . . . 1.4 Information Institutions and Industries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 The Print Media: Newspapers, Magazines, and Books . . . . . . 1.4.2 Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.3 Public and Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.4 Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.5 Scientific Research Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.6 Consulting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.7 Financial Services Industries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.8 Office Appliances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.9 Communication Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 “Disciplining Information”: Research in What was Later Called Computer Science and Information Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.1 Punched-Card Tabulating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.2 Analog Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.3 Numerical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.4 The Documentation Movement and Information Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.5 Information Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 How the Story Changes When American History is Told from an Information History Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 2 8 9 10 12 14 15 19 19 21 22 24 26 28 29 33 34 36 37 38 38 39 40 41

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Contents

2 An Illustrated Information History of 1920 America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 2.1 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 3 What is Information History and How Do We Study It? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 How This Microhistory Compares to What Other Information History Scholars Say Belongs in Information History . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Scope of Information History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85 86 90 97

Chapter 1

America in 1920: An Information Microhistory

Abstract This chapter presents a microhistory of America in the year 1920 from an information perspective. Topics include an overview of America in 1920 from a traditional historical perspective, four examples of how traditional accounts of events from 1920 might be retold in a different way when giving information issues greater consideration, ways in which an information history perspective might offer greater historical attention to new technologies and to information institutions, how various academic disciplines have treated the concept of information, and how an information-oriented account of this history differs from a traditional historical account. Return to Normalcy. [Campaign slogan of victorious candidate Warren G. Harding in the 1920 U.S. presidential election] Worry kills more people than the disease itself. [Misinformation from a Chicago health official about the Spanish flu]1 Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush! (Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links)2

This chapter presents a microhistory of America in the year 1920 from an information perspective. The chapter is organized into six sections. The first section gives an overview of America in 1920 from a traditional historical perspective.3 The next 1

Spanish flu, Wikiquote. Accessed 25 May 2023. Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1923). 3 There is a large body of literature about America in the decade of the 1920s, or about the period between the two world wars. See, for example, Kathleen Drowne, The 1920s (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004); David Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, rev. 2004); Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Nathan Miller, The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003); Susan Currell, American Culture in the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Robert Goldberg, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); John Braeman, Robert Bremner, and David Brody, Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920’s (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968); and Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (London: Atlantic Books, 2009). 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Aspray, Understanding Information History, SpringerBriefs in History of Computing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44134-9_1

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1 America in 1920: An Information Microhistory

section provides four examples of how traditional accounts of events from 1920 might be retold in a different way when giving information issues greater consideration. The next two sections discuss ways in which an information history perspective might offer greater historical attention to new technologies and to information institutions. A fifth section discusses how various academic disciplines have treated the concept of information. A final section discusses how an information-oriented account of this history differs from a traditional historical account.

1.1 America in 1920: The Traditional Account 1920 was a transitional year in American history.4 The nation’s recovery from both the First World War and the Spanish flu was underway but not yet completed. There were two main efforts to recover from the war—neither of which was to become successful during 1920. The first was the League of Nations. The League was an international organization that came into effect in early 1920—with an idealistic platform to ensure peace among nations once and for all, addressing issues of world health, prisoners of war, human and drug trafficking, labor issues, women’s and children’s rights, and protections of minorities and indigenous populations. While US President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Prize in 1919 for his efforts to promote the League, the United States never signed the international treaty because of Wilson’s unbending insistence on his own version in opposition to an alternative version favored by Senate Republicans. The League of Nations lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War, but it never had the effectiveness that Wilson had hoped it would achieve. The other effort to recover from “the War to End All Wars,” as this event was described by H. G. Wells,5 was an effort by the United States to move quickly from a wartime to a flourishing peacetime economy. For all of 1920 and the first half of 1921, however, there was serious deflation in the US economy, with large drops in wholesale prices and gross national product, and severe increases in unemployment—driven in part by the inability to find enough jobs for the soldiers returning from the war. By the second half of 1921 until the stock market crash in 1929, the United States had unprecedented growth, but 1920 itself was a difficult year economically.6 4

While we are summarizing the traditional account of 1920 America in this section, it does not mean that this account has been unchanging. The first historical accounts of this period focused on political themes, then later added economic and literary themes, and then even later a new focus on private life, technology, and social norms. What we are calling “traditional” here is what one would find in today’s historical research on this period. 5 H. G. Wells, The War that will End Wars (1914; reprint Bristol: H. G. Wells Library, Read & Co., 2016). 6 See Michael D. Bordo and John Landon-Lane, Exits from Recessions: The US Experience 1920– 2007, National Bureau of Economic Research (2010); James Grant, The Forgotten Depression, 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself (2014); Daniel Leab, ed., Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions (Stuttgart: Holtzbrinck, 2014); Christopher Shaw, ‘We Must Deflate’: The Crime of 1920 Revisited, Enterprise and Society 17, 3 (2016), pp. 618–650.

1.1 America in 1920: The Traditional Account

3

The United States, like much of the rest of the world, had to recover from the Spanish flu (H1N1 virus). An estimated 500 million people worldwide contracted the virus, beginning in 1918. The first Americans sickened were soldiers. But soon the flu moved rapidly through the American population. There were no vaccines, and an estimated 675,000 Americans died from the flu, including many young people. The flu was not well understood by the public or even by the medical profession (e.g., who advised the use of high doses of aspirin, which were toxic), and there were information challenges getting the word out to the public to encourage them to wear masks, not spit in public, and avoid public places such as libraries, schools, and churches. High levels of illness among government and local health workers made it difficult to statistically track the disease and inform the public. High crop losses occurred because of the shortage of farm workers, many of whom had succumbed to the flu. There were two waves of the Spanish flu in 1918, a third wave in early 1919, and hopes were dashed that it was over with when a fourth wave hit the United States in early 1920. New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and a few other cities were hit with high flu death tolls in 1920. By late 1920, the flu had evolved, making it less deadly, and by 1921, the pandemic had finally ended.7 1920 was also a transitional time in other ways. Modern technologies had been developed for the home but were not yet available in all households. For example, in 1920 only one-third of American homes had electricity and only one-fifth had a flush toilet.8 Similarly, American culture was taking a radical turn, not only with the emergence of flappers and jazz but also in high literature, where T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Edith Wharton were creating a new, more modern style of literature.9

7

On the history of the Spanish flu, see G. Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (New York: Atria, 1999); A. W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); H. Phillips and D. Killingray, eds., The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003); J. M. Barry, The Great Influenza (New York: Penguin, 2004); Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world (New York: Public Affairs, 2018); K. C. Davis, More Deadly than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2018); Guy Beiner, ed., Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). On the Spanish flu in 1920, see Jess McHugh, The 1918 Flu Did Not End in 1918. Here’s What its Third Year Can Teach Us, The Washington Post, 6 February 2022, https://www.washingtonpost. com/history/2022/02/06/1918-flu-fourth-wave/. Accessed 20 May 2022. 8 Duff McDonald, The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America, https://longreads.com/2013/10/23/the-making-of-mckinsey-a-brief-history-of-manage ment/. Accessed 25 May 2022. Excerpted from D. McDonald, The Firm (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 9 See, for example, T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (North Yorkshire, England: Methuen, 1920); F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920); Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920); Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwym Mauberley (London: Ovid Press, 1920); and Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: Appleton, 1920). This point is discussed further later in this paper. An interesting artifact of the time is an etiquette book for flappers, which has been republished almost a century later: Alice

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1 America in 1920: An Information Microhistory

There were two major stories of 1920 concerning national presidential politics— one concerning the sitting president (Woodrow Wilson) and the other concerning the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James Cox. Wilson, a Progressivist Democrat, having previously served as a professor and the president of Princeton University and the governor of New Jersey, was elected the US president in 1912. He was reelected in 1916 on an isolationist platform, arguing that he had been able as the president to keep the United States out of the First World War. However, in 1917, three years after fighting began, the United States did declare war on Germany. Wilson was a strong believer in the power of diplomacy, and his Fourteen Points Program for World Peace at the end of the war in 1918 led to the creation of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations.10 Late in 1919, Wilson suffered a stroke that made it almost impossible for him to govern. His second wife, Edith, took control over access to the president and increasingly made political decisions that she believed would be what he wanted. The president’s ill health became publicly known in early 1920, and there were criticisms from Wilson’s Republican opponents and others about his fitness to serve and the inappropriateness of his wife serving as an unelected but the de facto president. This situation nevertheless continued until the newly elected president, Harding, assumed office in 1921. Wilson had seen considerable progress during his first term as the president, when there was tax and tariff reform, the Federal Reserve banking system was created, and major antitrust legislation was passed. By contrast, his second term was disrupted by the war and his stroke, and throughout 1920, the president was unable to deal not only with the League of Nations ratification but also with major issues concerning anarchists and labor unrest, demobilization of the military forces, and prohibition. Successes of his later years in office included passage of universal suffrage for women and appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.11 It had been expected after the war ended in 1918 that the 1920 presidential election would be a race between the former president Theodore Roosevelt as the Republican candidate and Wilson as the Democratic candidate. However, Roosevelt’s death and

Leone-Moats, No Nice Girl Swears: Notes on High Society, Social Graces, and Keeping Your Wits from a Jazz-Age Debutante (New York: Apollo Publishers, 2020). 10 Because of political battles with the Republicans, who had taken control of Congress in 1918, the United States never ratified the treaty that created the League of Nations. 11 On Woodrow Wilson, see, among many other books and articles: Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940); Arthur Walworth, Woodrow Wilson: American Prophet (original 1958; 3rd ed. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1978) and Woodrow Wilson: World Prophet (original 1958; 3rd ed. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1978); Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (New York: Harper Torch, 1963); John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983) and Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2009); Kendrick Clements, Woodrow Wilson, World Statesman (original 1987; Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003); August Hecksher, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Scribner, 1991); A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013); Patricia O’Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); and Thomas Knock, To End All Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

1.1 America in 1920: The Traditional Account

5

Wilson’s stroke—both in 1919—threw open the candidate fields for both major political parties. The Democratic ticket of Cox and vice-presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt was soundly defeated by the Republican slate of Harding and vicepresidential candidate Calvin Coolidge. The sentiment of the country was shown by its strong support for Harding’s campaign slogan of “return to normalcy.” Harding died 3 ½ years into his term in office. He is generally regarded as one of America’s least effective presidents, and several of his senior political appointments to his cronies from Ohio ended in scandals.12 He is also seen as a transitional political figure, appointing four conservative Supreme Court justices who helped to undermine some of the liberal laws and rulings that had occurred during America’s Progressive Era from 1895 to 1915. Another set of themes of 1920 involved concerns over immigration, gender, and race. The American public and politicians were acutely aware of the Communist Revolution that had occurred in Russia in 1917, and there was heightened concern about immigrant anarchists disrupting the good life in America, especially after the bombing in September 1920 of the J. P. Morgan Building on New York City’s Wall Street, which killed 30 people and injured 300. The bomber was suspected to be an Italian anarchist, but he escaped to Italy before he could be interrogated and his guilt was never proved.13 People were also nervous about the disruptive effects of the 3600 strikes that occurred in the United States during 1920, especially the several large labor strikes and the possible role of Communist agitators in them, including steelworkers in six states,14 sugar plantation field workers in Oahu,15 and streetcar conductors in Denver.16 But the most famous case involving immigrant anarchists at the time was a robbery and murder in suburban Boston in 1920 for which Nicola Sacco 12

Regarding Harding’s presidency, see Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939); Randolph C. Downes, The Rise of Warren Gamaliel Harding (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1970); Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 2000); John W. Dean, Warren Harding (New York: Times Books, 2004); and Ryan S. Walters, The Jazz Age President (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2022). 13 See Wall Street Bombing 1920, FBI, https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/wall-street-bom bing-1920. Accessed 17 May 2022; Charles H. McCormick, Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005). 14 See Erin Blakemore, Why the Great Steel Strike of 1919 was One of Labor’s Biggest Failures, History, https://www.history.com/news/steel-strike-of-1919-defeat. Accessed 17 May 2022; David Brody, Labor in Crisis: the Steel Strike of 1919 (1965). 15 See Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Manoa, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1985). 16 Edward T. Devine, The Denver Tramway Strike of 1920 (original 1921; London: Forgotten Books, 2018); John Paul Enyeart, The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). The US government increased its surveillance capabilities in 1898 when faced with Filipino resistance to its occupation of the Philippines. Ralph Van Deman, who took command of these intelligence operations in the Philippines in 1901, applied this experience during the First World War, when President Wilson directed him to create the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) in 1917. After the war ended, the MID worked together with the FBI to gather intelligence about labor activists and others involved in the strikes of 1920. See A. W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire:

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and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were eventually convicted and executed in 1927.17 During the Red Scare, perhaps as many as 10,000 people were arrested as Communists or sympathizers in multiple raids across the country. Race relations continued to be an issue in 1920. A year earlier, there were dozens of assaults on African Americans around the nation in what is called the Red Summer of 1919. There was national attention to the lynching of Irving and Herman Arthur, who were forcibly removed from a jail in Paris, Texas, taken to the local fairgrounds, and burned alive before a crowd of 3000. A grand jury was convened to investigate the lynching, five were indicted, but all were acquitted.18 Three weeks before the Texas lynching, national attention was given to a lynching in Duluth, Minnesota, where a crowd numbering more than 1000 stormed a police station that was holding six young African Americans who worked as laborers in a traveling circus and were accused (with some questions about the evidence) of raping a white girl who had visited the circus. Three of these young men were lynched a block from the police station, while thousands watched. It shocked the American public that a lynching could occur in the north, but there was clearly some racist sentiment in the local community.19 The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had originally been formed in the late 1860s, after the American Civil War, but it was quelled by federal action in the 1870s. It started up again in 1915, and it was quite active in 1920, before falling off again in the late 1920s. The Klan espoused White supremacy and targeted intimidation for African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants from non-Protestant regions—through cross burnings and the hooded White garments (both new features of the KKK at this time) and through public demonstrations. The KKK was active in 1920 in both the South and North, in both rural and urban settings.20

The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 17 There is an enormous literature on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, as well as plays, films, paintings, and even music. Some examples of the more thoughtful writings include Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, The Atlantic, March 1927, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/1927/03/the-case-of-sacco-and-vanzetti/306625/. Accessed 17 May 2022; Brian Jackson, The Black Flag (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul 1981); Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Moshik Temkin, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 18 There is limited scholarship on this event, but lots of press coverage. The Wikipedia article entitled Lynching of Irving and Herman Arthus provides pointers to this news coverage. Also see David Lynn Chapman, Lynching in Texas, MA thesis, Texas Tech University, 1973, https://ttu-ir. tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/15566/31295000657113.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2022. 19 See Duluth Lynchings, Minnesota Historical Society, n.d., https://www.mnhs.org/duluthlynchi ngs/lynchings. Accessed 17 May 2022; Michael Fedo, The Lynchings in Duluth (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society, 2000). 20 See, for example, David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Richard Baudouin, The Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism & Violence (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 1997); Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

1.1 America in 1920: The Traditional Account

7

In 1920, the United States completed ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, ensuring universal suffrage for women voters in the United States at both the state and national levels. Prior to this, there was partial suffrage, with women able to vote in some (but typically not all) elections, in some states. While efforts had been made on this cause prior to the American Civil War, the movement picked up political strength through the efforts of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which effectively informed the public of the important roles that women played—as nurses and ambulance drivers, for example—during the First World War. Passage occurred in time for women to vote in the 1920 presidential election, and they turned out in large numbers, to vote overwhelmingly for Harding. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1919 and went into effect in January 1920. The amendment prohibited the production, transport, and sale of alcohol throughout the United States.21 In 1920, Congress passed the Volstead Act, which identified common drinks that were banned and provided specific enforcement capabilities to the government. The temperance movement, looking to prohibit alcohol, had begun its work prior to the American Civil War. These efforts gained momentum in the early twentieth century through the work of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which argued that alcohol was the source of many social problems. Prohibition was certainly a boon to organized crime, but there is disagreement among scholars about whether prohibition simply provided new opportunities for organized crime or created it.22 1920 was the beginning of a decade of cultural liberation, the so-called Roaring Twenties, that included “lost generation” writings, jazz, flappers, art deco, and the Harlem Renaissance. More Americans were able to experience these new art forms because of higher family income, urbanization, and enhanced media coverage. The most important modernist literature published in 1920 included Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.23 Important live performance of that year included Eugene O’Neill’s experimental play The Emperor Jones in New York City; Martha Graham’s modern dance Xochitl in Long Beach, CA; Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and 21

At the point of ratification of the 18th Amendment, some states had passed various types of laws prohibiting certain kinds of alcohol in certain places, but it was a checkerboard of regulations. 22 See, for example, David Roos, How Prohibition Put the ‘Organized’ into Organized Crime, History, updated 9 March 2021, https://www.history.com/news/prohibition-organized-crime-alcapone. Accessed 23 May 2022; Prohibition Profits Transformed the Mob, Prohibition: an Interactive History, https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-rise-of-organized-crime/themob-during-prohibition/. Accessed 23 May 2022; Stephen R. Fox, Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1989); and Mike Dash, The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia (New York: Random House, 2009). 23 Some of the other important literature published in 1920 included: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwym Mauberley (long poem, original 1920; available from Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg. org/ebooks/23538. Accessed 20 July 2023; Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok (original 1920; Mattituck, NY: Amereon, 2020); Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel (original, 1920; reprint, Edinburgh: Legare Street Press, 2020; and writer for the masses Zane Grey, The Man of the Forest (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920).

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1 America in 1920: An Information Microhistory

Joe “King” Oliver playing jazz in New Orleans; and Vaudeville playing in Peoria and around the country. Other popular music of that year included Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues and Paul Whiteman’s Japanese Sandman. Major artworks of that year included Edward Steichen’s abstract photograph, Time/Space Continuum, and paintings by Joseph Stella (The Voice of the City of New York) and Charles Sheeler (Church Street El). More serious writing of that year included George Santayana’s social criticism, Character and Opinion in the United States; Lothrop Stoddard’s political discussion of racism, The Rising Tide of Color; John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy; and T. S. Eliot’s book of essays, The Sacred Wood.24 There are of course many other events that occurred in the United States in 1920. Sports and sports journalism were becoming big. That year, the National Negro Baseball League and the National Football League were both formed, and one of the biggest stories of the year was the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees so that Red Sox owner Harry Frazee could support his struggling theatrical performances in Manhattan. The League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union were both founded. Margaret Sanger was actively speaking and writing on contraception, and the following year she founded the American Birth Control League (later renamed Planned Parenthood). The Great Northern Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north was well underway. Confidence man Charles Ponzi was at the height of his swindling of the American public. Dorothy Parker and the Round Table were going strong with their witty criticism of urban life every week at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. Postwar deregulation came about with the passage of the Esch-Cummins Act, which returned railroads to private control. However, there is not space here to look at these events, or others, in any detail.

1.2 Altering the Traditional Account to Give Greater Attention to Information History If one takes into consideration information issues when reinterpreting traditional accounts of America in 1920, many of the same events would be given prominence, but the way in which they are presented might be changed, and certain aspects of the story might be lessened or heightened in importance. One might expect in these new accounts that the importance of information to everyday activities would be made clearer and more prominent, and that there would be more attention to the types of information sought as well as to the places where it is sought and found. It is beyond our scope to retell the complete history of America in 1920 from an information perspective; instead, we give four examples that illustrate how the history might be written differently.

24

This list given in this paragraph draws heavily upon, but is not identical to, the list given on pp. x-xi in Susan Currell, American Culture in the 1920s (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

1.2 Altering the Traditional Account to Give Greater Attention …

9

1.2.1 Farming The first example concerns farming.25 A national population census in 1920 showed that farming was still the occupation of approximately half the US population. Many accounts of the industrial revolution discuss the innovation coming into manufacturing and the extensive movement of the population from rural to urban areas, to drive this manufacturing economy. In this narrative, farming is portrayed as a backward occupation. While tractors may have partly supplanted horses, this narrative argued, the job of the farmer was not unlike what it had been in 1800. However, this narrative is misleading. Farming, it turns out, had become a heavily information-intensive occupation. Farmers wanted access to the latest information about such topics as land management, including rotation of crops to protect the soil’s fertility and how to do contour plowing to avoid runoff. They benefited from scientific innovation concerning seeds and crops, which were themselves undergoing major changes through the innovations of the many seed companies that came into business starting in the 1880s and remained active in 1920.26 They desired information about how to plow, plant, and harvest. They wanted to know about appropriate tools and motorized farm equipment, how to use them, and what they cost. There was active innovation in the agricultural machinery industry from 1880 until 1920, with dozens of new products introduced.27 Farmers also wanted to know about the new synthetic means of creating ammonia and nitric acid, which had been created by German scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how they compared to the use of natural fertilizers. Indeed, farmers were avid consumers of various sources of farm information. They consulted many sources, including the land-grant agricultural schools created in the 1860s through the Morell Act; weather information presented in rural newsletters; agricultural agents working for state and federal agencies who served farming areas, enhanced by the Cooperative Extension System created by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914; circulars reaching farmers from the US Department of Agriculture; meetings of 4-H (created in 1902); corn clubs, active from 1900 to 1920, where boys cultivated an acre of corn on their own with advice from a local club leader; preparation gained from achieving an agriculturally oriented merit badge through the Boy Scouts of America, beginning around 1910; enhanced high school education in agriculture and mechanical subjects through the National Vocational Education Act of 1917;

25

This discussion of farming draws heavily on the account of James Cortada in his book, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States Since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Cortada has given permission to draw heavily on his account here. 26 See Chelsea Green Publishing, A Short History of Agricultural Seed, n.d., https://www.chelse agreen.com/2021/a-short-history-of-agricultural-seed/. Accessed 18 May 2022. 27 See, for example, the list in Timeline of Ag Equipment Firsts, Farm Equipment, 23 September 2009, https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/4269-timeline-of-ag-equipment-firsts. Accessed 18 May 2022.

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the Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck catalogs, which included numerous farm technologies; the Farmer’s Almanac; and traveling libraries and bookmobiles.28

1.2.2 Spanish Flu The second example concerns the Spanish flu pandemic, which was rampant in the United States from 1918 into 1921. The flu first spread through the troops on the battle lines during the First World War, training camps and bases, and in the close confines of the ships in which troops were transported. The American government tended to hide the data on the spread of the pandemic both because they wanted to keep up the morale of the troops and because they did not want to make public any information that might be of value to their adversaries. The pandemic was called the Spanish flu not because it originated there but instead because Spain was a neutral country in the war and the Spanish press was not constrained in reporting about the flu, so it did so more often and earlier than the press in other countries.29 The Wilson administration did not hesitate to mislead the press about the flu or suppress stories in public news sources.30 One commentator at the time wrote, “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms” and “The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.”31 There were numerous spurious stories circulating about how the flu was spread, often blaming it on the enemy or on foreigners.32 Others argued that the flu was caused by new agricultural practices, Jews, cigarettes, tainted food, foreigners with hypodermic needles, and suspicious new cultural phenomena such as wild dancing and

28

The focus in this subsection is on understanding the role of information in events of 1920 America. There are important issues about the positive and negative consequences of information and information technology, but these are beyond the scope here. To learn more about these important issues, consider the literatures on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), ethics and values in science and technology, and science and technology studies. 29 Becky Little, As the 1918 Flu Emerged, Cover-Up and Denial Helped It Spread, History, 26 May 2020, https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-censorship. Accessed 20 May 2022. Also see Samantha N. Edwards, Understanding the Present Through the Past: A Comparison of Spanish News Coverage of the 1918 Flu and COVID-19 Pandemics, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 99 (1) (2022) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/107769902 11061762. Accessed 20 May 2022. 30 See Spanish Flu and the First Amendment, First Amendment Museum, n.d., https://firstamendme ntmuseum.org/learn/spanish-flu-and-the-first-amendment/. Accessed 20 May 2022. 31 Arthur Bullard, as quoted in Robert Kessler, Outbreak: Lies and Misinformation, EcoHealth Alliance, n.d., https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2018/05/outbreak-lies-and-misinform ation. Accessed 20 May 2022. 32 Some additional myths about the Spanish flu are given in Richard Gunderman, Ten Myths About the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Smithsonian, updated 17 March 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ history/ten-myths-about-1918-flu-pandemic-180967810/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

1.2 Altering the Traditional Account to Give Greater Attention …

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jazz.33 One widespread report stated that a German boat entered Boston Harbor and the cloud that accompanied the boat’s arrival released the disease. Another common myth was that the flu was caused by the consumption of aspirin, the largest supplier of which was the German pharmaceutical firm Bayer; in response, the American branch of Bayer initiated a campaign to inform the public that the manufacturing of aspirin tablets sold in America was entirely under the control of the American firm.34 Another false claim was that the flu was caused by the vaccinations that the American military gave in large numbers to its soldiers.35 There were also claims in the press that this malady was simply an ordinary flu—the “grippe” that had been around for centuries.36 Commonly recommended treatments included gargling, rinsing out the nasal cavities, or giving injections of various materials.37 The newspapers placed advertisements encouraging the public to wash their hands frequently, avoid crowds, wear masks, and have “disdain for people flouting the rules.”38 33

Cameron Givens, Going Viral: COVID Conspiracies in Historical Perspective, Origins, n.d., https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/covid-influenza-conspiracies-fake-news?language_con tent_entity=en. Accessed 20 May 2022. 34 Maria Cohut, The Flu Pandemic of 1918 and Early Conspiracy Theories, Medical News Today, 29 September 2020, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-flu-pandemic-of-1918-andearly-conspiracy-theories. Accessed 20 May 2022. Some of the best full-length treatments of the Spanish flu pandemic also discuss these issues: Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (New York: Atria, 2001); John Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin, 2005); Nancy Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also see the special section of the American Journal of Public Health on the 1918 pandemic, which is most readily accessed by the introductory article: Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein, The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Lessons Learned and Not—Introduction to the Special Section, American Journal of Public Health, 108 (11) (November 2018), pp. 1435–1436, available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC6187781/. Accessed 20 May 2022. 35 Reuters staff, False Claim: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic was Caused by Vaccines, 1 April 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccines-caused-1918-influe/false-claim-the1918-influenza-pandemic-was-caused-by-vaccines-idUSKBN21J6X2. Accessed 20 May 2022. 36 Chauncey Devega, Fake News, Conspiracy Theories, and a Deadly Gobal Pandemic—and that was in 1918, Salon, 8 May 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/05/08/fake-news-conspiracy-the ories-and-a-deadly-global-pandemic--and-that-was-in-1918/. Accessed 20 May 2022. 37 The following article describes nostrums provided around the world to cure the 1918 flu, but it is hard to know which ones were commonly tried in the United States: Philippa Martyr, People Dropped Whiskey Into their Noses to Treat Spanish Flu, The Conversation, 19 September 2021, https://theconversation.com/people-dropped-whisky-into-their-noses-to-treat-spa nish-flu-heres-what-else-they-took-that-would-raise-eyebrows-today-167525. Accessed 20 May 2022. 38 Suyin Haynes, ‘You Must Wash Properly.’ Newspaper Ads From the 1918 Flu Pandemic Show Some Things Never Change, Time, 27 March 2020, https://time.com/5810695/spanish-flu-pan demic-coronavirus-ads/. Accessed 20 May 2022. Becky Little, ‘Mask Slackers’ and ‘Deadly’ Spit: The 1918 Flu Campaigns to Shame People Into Following New Rules, https://www.history. com/news/1918-pandemic-public-health-campaigns. Accessed 21 June 2022. Advertisements from Britain at the time added: do not take public transportation, get a walk in the fresh air every day, avoid other people, and don’t get overly tired. (Coronavirus: How They Tried to Curb Spanish Flu

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Public health officials were not particularly helpful in their answers and suggestions, and they were slow to respond.39 The Sedition Act, promoted by the Wilson Administration and passed into law in 1918, made it a severely punished crime to criticize government actions, and it helped the government to suppress criticism of public health efforts to counter the flu epidemic.40

1.2.3 Information as a Tool of the Federal Government The third example concerns information as a tool of the federal government. Information was used extensively by state and federal governments to understand its lands, its people, and its commercial organizations.41 Much of the information collected by government agencies between 1870 and 1945 was statistical. During the nineteenth century, the federal government had created seven information and statistical gathering agencies (Statistics of Income Division, Bureau of Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, Weather Bureau, Geological Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Interstate Commerce Commission). Between 1900 and 1920, the federal government had created nine additional data-oriented agencies (Bureau of the Census, Crop Reporting Board, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Reserve Board, War Industry Board, Statistical Branch, Division of Research and Statistics, Bureau of Standards, Federal Bureau of Information). For example, consider the Census Bureau, which was created in 1903. The United States had been taking a decennial population census since 1790, but beginning in the late nineteenth century, just as the population exploded through immigration, the number of questions asked in these surveys began to grow and grow. The Census Bureau also created additional surveys, such as one about manufacturing begun in 1905 and another on manufacturing industries begun in 1915. Other government agencies also added new surveys around this time, e.g., labor surveys conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These various surveys were helpful to the government in peacetime. When the First World War came to the United States in 1917 and 1918, the federal government decided that it should also control information (and misinformation) targeted at both its citizens and foreign combatants regarding war efforts, so it created the Committee on Public Information (CPI, operating 1917–1919). As one source describes this organization:

Pandemic in 1918, BBC News, 10 May 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52564371. Accessed 20 May 2022. 39 Hannah Mawdsley, Fake News and the Flu, Wellcome Collection, 18 September 2019, https:// wellcomecollection.org/articles/XXIeHhEAACYAIdKz. Accessed 20 May 2022. 40 Fake News and the 1918 Flu, https://www.newsy.com/stories/fake-news-and-the-1918-flu/. Accessed 20 May 2022. 41 This account is again taken mostly from Cortada’s All the Facts—with Cortada’s permission.

1.2 Altering the Traditional Account to Give Greater Attention …

13

Driven by its fiery chief, George Creel, the CPI reached every crevice of the nation, every day, and extended widely abroad. It established the first national newspaper, made prepackaged news a quotidian aspect of governing, and pioneered the concept of public diplomacy. It spread the Wilson administration’s messages through articles, cartoons, books, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines; through feature films and volunteer Four Minute Men who spoke during intermission; through posters plastered on buildings and along highways; and through pamphlets distributed by the millions. It enlisted the nation’s leading progressive journalists, advertising executives, and artists. It harnessed American universities and their professors to create propaganda and add legitimacy to its mission. Even as Creel insisted that the CPI was a conduit for reliable, fact-based information, the office regularly sanitized news, distorted facts, and played on emotions. Creel extolled transparency but established front organizations. Overseas, the CPI secretly subsidized news organs and bribed journalists. At home, it challenged the loyalty of those who occasionally questioned its tactics. Working closely with federal intelligence agencies eager to sniff out subversives and stifle dissent, the CPI was an accomplice to the Wilson administration’s trampling of civil liberties.42

It is not surprising that politicians learned from these wartime efforts and showed a new-found interest in controlling the information related to the presidential election in 1920. During the nineteenth century, the major mass communication vehicles were newspapers and magazines, and many of the newspapers had owners affiliated with a particular political party, so there were limited media opportunities for politicians to use the media to shape presidential campaigns. However, during the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, political control over the newspapers lessened. Also, radio was invented and became commercially available just in time for the 1920 presidential campaign. Democratic Presidential Candidate James Cox used a traditional approach, holding campaign rallies in various cities and speaking from the back of trains at various railroad stops. Republican Candidate Warren Harding reached many more people without nearly as much travel. He held “Front Porch” speeches from his home in Ohio, but he also used the advertising guru Albert Lasker to place positive stories about him in national magazines such as Colliers and in newsreels produced by the growing film industry, as well as getting celebrities (including Al Jolson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford) to visit his hometown in Ohio and give endorsements. The election night results were carried on KDKA radio from Pittsburgh, the second commercial station to appear on air in the United States (although there was only a limited number of people with radio receivers in their homes yet).43 42

This is the review on the Amazon Books web site, as of 18 May 2022, for John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). Hamilton’s book provides a detailed examination of this government organization. Also see George Creel, How We Advertised America, reprinted with Charlotte M. Yonge listed as author (London: Forgotten Books, 2012). Another good source is Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (1940 original, facsimile reproduction, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). The federal government had created a Bureau of Investigation in 1908 (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 and under the direction of the famous J. Edgar Hoover from 1924 to 1972). In 1920, the government created a separate Bureau of Prohibition, which in the 1930s was merged into the FBI. 43 On the 1920 presidential campaign, see John A. Morello, Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding (Stuttgart: Holtzbrinck, 2001); Wesley

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1.2.4 Prohibition The fourth example is prohibition, which presented information-seeking problems for the various participants. Individuals who wanted to consume alcohol had three choices: visit an illegal establishment, such as a speakeasy; find an illegal supplier of alcohol; or find a way to make alcoholic beverages for themselves. All three options involved information issues. Where were the speakeasies located, how did one gain admittance, how expensive were they, and how safe were they from police raids or crime? Where would one find smugglers to buy from or locate moonshiners who were making the alcohol locally, and how safe was it to consume these products? What ingredients and equipment did one need if they wanted to make alcohol themselves and how likely were they to be prosecuted if they did so? What sources of information were trustworthy? What did prohibition mean to legitimate businesses? Most saloons were put out of business or went underground after passage in 1919 of the Volstead Act, which banned the production, sale, and transport of intoxicating liquors. But what happened to restaurants whose profit margins were dependent on alcohol sales? To what degree could one skirt the law in the provision of alcohol-related beverages, for example selling Bacchus Bricks, which were concentrated blocks of grape juice with explicit instructions—wink, wink!—about what not to do if the consumer wished to prevent fermentation.44 What did prohibition mean to illegal businesses such as speakeasies? How did they find suppliers that could provide them with a consistent supply of safe, drinkable, not-too-expensive alcohol to serve? How did they avoid being raided by the police and how much would this cost them? How did they interact with organized crime in a way that enabled them to operate yet not lose control over their operations?

Marvin Bagby, The Road to Normalcy: The Presidential Campaign and Election of 1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); and David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents (New York: Basic Books, 2008). The analysis of information has become a principal topic of study by political communication scholars, who have traditionally come from the academic discipline of communication or mass media studies. There are indistinct lines between information studies, communication studies, and media studies, and it is useful for information historians to draw upon methods and results of these closely related fields as they engage in their research. 44 See lupatchi 1927, Let’s All Raise a… Brick? Wine-making During Prohibition, A Smile and a Gun (A Blog About Chicago in the Roaring Twenties), 30 January 2015, https://smileandgun.wor dpress.com/2015/01/30/lets-all-raise-a-brick-wine-making-during-prohibition/. Accessed 23 May 2022; Eric Burns, Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

1.3 Consumer Technologies, Modernity, and Information Issues

15

What did prohibition mean to organized crime? How were they to create the national and international supply chains that allowed them to distribute alcohol? How did they build themselves up into large organizations from the small organizations that had typically been focused on a single ethnic neighborhood? By what means could they interact with the local police, the court system, and federal enforcement agencies to maintain and grow their businesses without interference? How did they avoid the violence of turf wars, such as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre that occurred in Chicago in 1929? These are only a few of the more salient questions that made prohibition such an information-intense activity.45 Thus, we have seen in the case of each of these four examples that taking an information perspective provided a different way of telling a common story of America in 1920. Farming was not a backwater but instead was an activity rife with interest in learning about new techniques and technologies, with many sources available to do so. The story of the Spanish flu was eerily like the COVID pandemic of 2020 in the United States—both in terms of the large amount of misinformation circulating about causes and treatments and also about the shortcomings in government action. At this time, the federal government was a leading creator of information, including statistical information, for the purposes of efficient government; but it also learned to suppress information and mislead the public when it was in the government’s interest to do so. Prohibition created pressing new information issues for the members of the public, the managers of legitimate restaurants and illegal speakeasies, and moonshiners and organized crime. We next turn to information issues that arose in 1920 with the rise of new technologies and the shift from an agrarian to a modern society.

1.3 Consumer Technologies, Modernity, and Information Issues In 1920, America was experiencing a period of modernization. A Victorian world view was being rapidly replaced by a more modern view “associated with individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalization, a decline in emphasis on religious worldviews, rapid urbanization, the rise of nation-states, and accelerated financial exchange and communication.”46 We have already seen strong evidence of 45

There is an immense literature about prohibition and its effects on various participants. The following sample suggests the range of scholarship: Kathleen Morgan Drowne, Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920–1933 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000); Frank Alduino, The Damnedest Town This Side of Hell: Tampa 1920–29 (Part I), Scholar Commons, University of South Florida, 1990, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154480419. pdf. Accessed 23 May 2022; Hans Andersson, Illegal Entrepreneurs: A Comparative Study of the Liquor Trade in Stockholm and New Orleans, 1920–1940, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 3, 2 (2003), 114–134; J. C. Burnham, New Perspectives on the Prohibition “Experiment” of the 1920’s, Journal of Social History 2, 1 (1968), 51–68; S. J. Mennell, Prohibition: A Sociological Vew, Journal of American Studies 3,2 (1969), 159–175; T. M. Coffey, The Long Thirst: Prohibition in America, 1920–1933 (New York: Norton, 1975); and W. J. Rorabaugh, Prohibition: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 46 Encyclopedia Britannica, “Modernity,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity. Accessed

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this above, for example, in our discussions of the general pattern of migration from the country to the city and in the various new forms of music, dance, and fiction that appeared at about this time. In this section, we discuss the connection of modernism to the adoption of new technologies. Some of these technologies found their way into the workplace of 1920 America, e.g., appliances such as calculators and filing systems in offices; or the use of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and new machinery on farms. Others found their way into people’s homes, e.g., telephone,47 radio,48 and home “labor-saving” devices such as washing machines and refrigerators.49 Technological development and use often involve information-rich activities. To save space, we illustrate the connection between information and technology by considering only a single technology, the automobile. Our focus here is on highlighting the information issues—not giving a complete snapshot of the automobile as it appeared in 1920. We do not cover other transportation technologies such as trucks, railroads, buses, trollies, subways, or ocean liners—all of which were present at the time and all of which had information issues associated with them such as keeping track of where the railroad rolling stock was located and charging customers the appropriate ton-mile charges, scheduling railroads and buses and subways, providing timetables for users, providing literature for the American public who might wish to see the country on a railroad tour, or keeping tabs on room capacity and ticketing on an ocean liner. First, we give a snapshot of the automobile in 1920 America.50 Almost 2 million cars were sold in the United States in 1920. By then, gasoline had mostly won 26 April 2023. 47 See, for example, Claude Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 48 Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Eric Barnouw, A Tower in Babel (A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933, Vol. 1) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); Alfred Balk, The Rise of Radio, from Marconi through the Golden Age (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005); Anthony Rudel, Hello, Everybody!: The Dawn of American Radio (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). 49 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013; Carroll Gantz, The Vacuum Cleaner: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012); and Peter Scott, ‘Forced Selling’, Domesticity, and the Diffusion of Washing Machines in Interwar America, Journal of Social History 54, 2 (Winter 2020), 546–568. 50 Some of the most useful historical literature on the automobile in America for the purpose of this article includes James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (2nd ed., Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2018); Michael Berger, The Automobile in American History and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001); Joel Eastman, Styling vs. Safety: The American Automobile Industry and the Development of Automotive Safety (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, Users as Agents of Technological Change, Technology and Culture 37, 4 (1996), 763–795; Richard Coopey, The Automobile Industry, 1896–1920, Business History 34, 2 (1982); Kevin L. Borg, Auto Mechanics: Technology and Expertise in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2007); Michael L. Berger, The Social Impact of the Automobile on Rural America, 1893–1929, D. Ed. thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1972; Akerman, James R. “Private journeys

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out over electric and steam for powering vehicles. The leading car manufacturer in America was Ford, and it was continuing to build its mainstay, the Model T, first introduced in 1908. However, the company had growing competition from other companies, including Dodge Brothers (the second-leading brand behind Ford in 1920), Auburn, the luxury brand Duesenberg (created in 1920), another luxury brand Lincoln (which a little later, in 1922, was acquired by Ford), the brands associated with General Motors (Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, McLaughlin, Oakland, Oldsmobile, Scripts-Booth, and Sheriden), and a few dozen other small independent firms. Learning to drive was an information issue. There were 8 million registered drivers in the United States, including women who had first learned to drive in large numbers during the First World War. The first driving schools had been created in the United States in 1917, and a form of driver’s education was first offered in the public schools in 1920.51 Learning navigable routes was an information problem. There was a growing network of roads, but many of them were unimproved and mud continued to be a serious problem for drivers.52 The following year, in 1921, the first National Highway Act was passed, which included road improvement, new roads, and rationalization of the road numbering system. Fixing and maintaining cars was an information issue. Cars broke down frequently, and flat tires were a common problem. Repairs were offered at new car dealerships, gasoline stations, and garages—some of which had previously been involved with the bicycle business. Many people fixed their own flat tires, and some people were able to repair cars themselves because of the simplicity of the Model T, the experience they had with fixing farm equipment, and the availability of repair manuals. Most new cars had electric self-starters (invented by Cadillac in 1912, but only adopted by Ford in 1919), but many older cars on the road had hand cranks, making physical strength important if one were driving oneself. Cars were a social asset, e.g., providing access to more employment opportunities, relieving isolation to those who lived in on public maps: A look at inscribed road maps.“ Cartographic Perspectives 35 (2000): 27–47; Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance, Technology and Culture 59, 1 (2018): 1–25; Larry Printz, here the First Automotive Road Maps Came From, Hagerty, 16 January 2019, https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/first-automotive-roadmaps/. Accessed 24 May 2022; and C. A. Welsh, Patents and Competition in the Automobile Industry, Law and Contemporary Problems, https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2349& context=lcp. Accessed 24 May 2022; Richard Tedlow, The Struggle for Dominance in the Automobile Market: The Early Years of Ford and General Motors, Business and Economic History 17 (1988), 49–62; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); and National Museum of American History, Automobile Safety, https:// americanhistory.si.edu/america-on-the-move/essays/automobile-safety. Accessed 21 June 2022. 51 Robert Tate, Remembering the Early Days of Driver’s Education, Motorcities, 17 April 2017, https://www.motorcities.org/story-of-the-week/2017/remembering-the-early-days-of-drivers-education. Accessed 24 May 2022. 52 George Rugg, Road Trip! Long-distance Driving in 1920, Rare Books and Special Collecions, University of Notre Dame. https://sites.nd.edu/rbsc/road-trip-long-distance-driving-in-1920/. Accessed 21 June 2022.

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rural areas, enhancing shopping opportunities, making the car ride a new form of entertainment, and providing a greater range of destinations for vacations; but they also raised new social issues such as unsupervised courting time for young adults. There were many information issues associated with the purchase, use, and maintenance of a car.53 Some of the issues that faced the potential purchaser of a new car in 1920 America involved whether to buy a car or use public transportation, general understanding of cars, and the purchase and licensing procedures, which brand and model to buy, characteristics of a particular car (e.g., price, sportiness, engine power and acceleration, handling, luxury, quietness, open or closed body, ability to drive on unpaved roads), and whether to pay cash or lease.54 As the operator of a car, the driver had to determine where there were places to buy fuel and get the car serviced—and which types of service (changing the oil, fixing a flat tire, or more) that they could do themselves; and whether they needed to learn how to drive and, if so, where to get that instruction. If they wanted to take the car out of their local area, they had to acquire the appropriate maps and determine the route, the condition of roads (often muddy or washboarded), and where to stay and eat. They had to decide when it was time to trade in their car on a new model. (There are similarly a set of issues faced in the production, distribution, and sale of cars, not discussed here.) It is clear that this one new technology raised many new questions that had not been addressed before and led to the creation of a variety of new sources of information: street maps (often provided promotionally by gas stations), repair manuals, car advertisements appearing in a number of general-purpose and women’s magazine as well as in newspapers, thousands of Model T accessories advertised in the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and brochures advertising particular brands and models.55 Other technologies at the time presented similar issues, e.g., germs, cleanliness of the house, and protecting the family’s health; or how to properly cook frozen foods in connection with home “labor-saving” devices such as the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, and the washing machine.56 So, in 1920 Americans were confronted with a host of new information problems and new sources of information that were either not evident or not prominent before the First World War. 53

Motor Magazine, How to Drive a Car: A Fascinating Insight into Driving in the 1920s and 30s (Amberly Publishing, 2014); Here’s What You Needed to Know to Drive a Car Back in the 1920s, reprinted and adapted from H. Clifford Brokaw, West Side YMCA Automobile School, New York, The Ogden Standard-Examiner 22 October 1922, https://clickamericana.com/topics/culture-andlifestyle/cars-trucks/how-to-drive-a-car-back-in-the-1920s. Accessed 21 June 2022. 54 Leasing became commonplace after 1919, when the General Motors Acceptance Corporation was created to help purchasers finance their automobiles. By the end of the 1920s, the majority of radios, sewing machines, washing machines, purchases, about refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, as well as automobiles were purchased on credit. (Blackford and Kerr, op. cit.). 55 Other information sources connected to the automobile came later. For example, the road atlas came in 1926 (Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth) and the independent review of automobiles with Consumer Reports, started in 1936 (Aspray, 100 Years of Car Buying). 56 See, for example, Cortada, All the Facts; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021).

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1.4 Information Institutions and Industries Traditional accounts of American history occasionally mention industries that create, distribute, analyze, or use information in intensive ways. But these accounts do not pay as much attention to these industries as do information historians. There are specific histories of print media or computing, for example, but only now are histories beginning to appear that look at the development of the entire collection of the information industries over time. In this section, we will identify some of the major information institutions and industries that existed in 1920 America and point the reader to the specialized historical literature about each of them. It is beyond the scope of this study to offer any synthesis that ties the various information industries together or examines their historical development generally.

1.4.1 The Print Media: Newspapers, Magazines, and Books 1920 was near the end of an ascendent era for the print media in America. Newspaper circulation had reached its apex in 1910 and by 1920 was on a downward and mostly steady decline. By 2000, the circulation rate had dropped to one-third what it had been in 1910.57 Periodicals circulation per household had also dropped in 1920, compared to 1910, although it grew steadily again between 1930 and 1960. Book publications per household also peaked in 1910, dropping steadily until 1940, when it started to rise again. During the 1920s and 1930s, radio became established and cut into both readership and the importance of the print media; and after the Second World War, television cut into the importance of both the print media and radio. Newspapers had existed since colonial times and, despite the modest productions, were a major information source then.58 There were approximately 2000 newspapers published in English in America in 1920, serving approximately 1300 American towns and cities.59 During most of the nineteenth century, newspapers were commonly owned by political parties and served as their mouthpieces. The 1880s

57

For the statistics cited here, see Gordon (2016), p. 175. On the history of American newspapers, see David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Emery, Michael, Edwin Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts, Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 9th ed., 1999); and, Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On the history of American media more generally, see Sloan, W. David, James G. Stovall, and James D. Startt. The Media in America: A History, 4th ed. (Hammond, IN: Publishing Horizons, 1999); and Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 59 Carl F. Kaestle, A History of the Book in America: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 58

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and 1890s were the time of yellow journalism, with publishers competing for readership, especially among the lower classes, by emphasizing sensationalism in what they published. Beginning in the late 1890s and continuing until the early 1920s, newspapers reflected the Progressive Movement, with serious investigative journalism, targeted at a middle-class audience, reporting on the corruption in government and big business, and on other social ills such as poverty. Starting late in the first decade of the twentieth century, newspapers were becoming much more professional, e.g., with the founding of the first schools of journalism at American universities. The first American magazines were published before the revolution, including a well-known one (The Pennsylvania Gazette) published by Benjamin Franklin.60 Magazines became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, providing a combination of entertainment and news. Beginning in the late 1890s, Progressivist sentiments worked their way into magazines, and one began to see magazines (Collier’s, Munsey’s, McClure’s) publishing serious stories targeted at the middle- and upper-class reader, about America’s ills as well as high-level stories on culture. Some of these magazines had national readerships in the hundreds of thousands. This was the situation in 1920. Books had been produced and sold in America since Colonial times.61 During most of the nineteenth century, American book publishers made most of their money by infringing copyright and producing inexpensive editions of British books. However, American copyright laws were strengthened in the early twentieth century, and American book publishers began to respect copyright and publish original books. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, both public schools and public libraries were improved and increased in number, and this led to a larger reading public in America to serve as a potential market for these books. Over the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was a great maturation in the American book publishing industry. What had originally been small, often familyoperated businesses became larger, more professional, and more corporate operations. Technological advances reduced the cost of paper and printing. Market segmentation occurred in the book publishing industry, resulting in segregated niches for mainstream, government, academic, and religious volumes. Literary books adopted a more modernist cast, but there was also a strong market for non-fiction of all sorts. The number of new books published in 1920 numbered over 10,000, and that year the 60

On the history of magazines in America, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 5, 1905–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968); Theodore Peterson, Magazines in 20th Century (2nd ed., Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1964); and John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 61 There is a substantial literature on the history of American book publishing and readership. See, for example, Carl F. Kaestle, A History of the Book in America: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Megan Benton, ‘Too Many Books’: Book Ownership and Cultural Identity in the 1920s, American Quarterly 49, 2 (June 1997), 268– 297; and Asadoorian, Maro N., “Where did all these books come from? The Publishing Industry and American Intellectual Life” (2007). Honors Theses. Paper 282. https://digitalcommons.colby. edu/honorstheses/282. On literacy history in America, see Carl Kaestle et al., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

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National Association of Book Publishers was founded. Several of the large publishers that we recognize today were already in business in 1920: Harper (founded in 1817), Scribner (1846), and Knopf (1915), while several others were formed during the 1920s as the book publishing field continued to develop, e.g., Simon and Schuster (1924), Viking (1925), and Random House (1927). Most books were sold at the time through independent booksellers, but there were alternative means to selling books. The first subscription model for inexpensively selling quality titles, the Little Leather Library, appeared in 1916 and was modestly successful. However, it was overwhelmed by the Book of the Month Club, which began six years later. There was also an effort to include access to borrowed books, serving people who lived in remote areas, away from a library. While there had been traveling libraries as early as the nineteenth century, the first use of automobiles as bookmobiles apparently occurred in New Jersey in 1920, using a modified Model T Ford.

1.4.2 Libraries One of the most important information institutions in the United States is the library. This has been true since colonial times. The first university libraries (Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary) were created in the United States in the seventeenth century, and many others were created in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries. Various subscription libraries were founded in the eighteenth century, the most famous one created by Benjamin Franklin. In the first half of the nineteenth century, mercantile libraries were created in various cities for vocational training purposes. At about that same time, many states created state libraries, often near the state capitol, to serve as reference resources for government employees. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first free public libraries began to appear—as a parallel to free public education, which had widespread public support by this time.62 Also during the nineteenth century, specialized libraries—for theology, law, medicine, education, and science and technology—were created, often in connection with university faculties. What were libraries like in 1920? Fortunately, an article in The Encyclopedia Americana published that year gives us a clear snapshot.63 All of these types of 62

For an overview of public libraries, see University of Michigan Libraries, Public Libraries in the United States of America; Their History, Condition, and Management (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Libraries, 2005); Wayne Wiegand, Part of our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Christine Pawley and Louise Robbins, eds., Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth Century America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); and M. Connor and L. Plocharczky, “The History of Libraries and Literacy in the United States,” Libraries and Reading (Bingley, England: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020), pp. 7–28. 63 Libraries, Modern. The Encyclopedia Americana, 1920, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Enc yclopedia_Americana_(1920)/Libraries,_Modern. Accessed 27 May 2022.

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libraries continued to exist in 1920, although there were only a few subscription or mercantile libraries remaining. Some of the public libraries had become quite large. For example, the Philadelphia public library system had 26 branches and held more than half a million volumes.64 Many of the college and university libraries had also grown. For example, in 1920 the Yale University library held just over one million volumes. By 1920, the New York state library had grown to hold 450,000 volumes. Among the largest special libraries in 1920 were the Princeton Theological Seminary Library with just over 100,000 volumes; the Harvard Law School Library with 170,000 volumes; the US Army Surgeon General’s Library with 190,000 books and more than 300,000 pamphlets; and the US Bureau of Education Library with 150,000 volumes. Two important shapers of libraries in 1920 America were the American Library Association and the Andrew Carnegie endowment. The ALA was founded in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (expositions being another important information institution). Over the years, the ALA has been an important force in the professionalization of libraries and in advocating for the importance of libraries in American society and for values they hold dear, such as intellectual freedom. Two interests of the ALA in 1920 were to promote library access for military service personnel (started during the First World War) and promoting adult education (which continued as a major interest throughout the 1920s). Between 1886, when he built his first public library, and 1919, Carnegie had donated tens of millions of dollars to create over 1600 free public libraries in small towns and cities across 39 states. He continued this library building program throughout the 1920s.65

1.4.3 Public and Higher Education Public school education was an important information institution.66 By the late nineteenth century, public elementary school education was available to most children

64

For a contemporary view of public libraries in the 1920s, see Public Libraries in the United States of America: Their History, Condition, and Management: Special Report, Volume 1 (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010 reprint of 1923 report). 65 See Carnegie Libraries: The Future Made Bright, National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places Program, https://www.nps.gov/articles/carnegie-libraries-the-future-made-bright-teachingwith-historic-places.htm. Accessed 27 May 2022; Theodore Jones, Carnegie Libraries Across America (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1997). 66 For the history of American public education, see Wayne Urban, Jennings Waggoner Jr., and Milton Gaither, American Education: A History (6th ed., London: Routledge, 2019); L. Dean Webb, The History of American Education (Pearson, 2005); John Pullam and James Van Patten, History and Social Foundations of American Education (10th ed, New York: Pearson, 2012); David Boers, History of American Education Primer (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007); and Gerald L. Gutek, An Historical Introduction to American Education (3rd ed., Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2012).

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in most American communities.67 In 1900, education was compulsory for children aged 8–14 in 31 states; and, by 1920, all states had made elementary school education compulsory for able-bodied students. However, high school education was slower to develop. In 1910, 72% of children were attending school but only 14% of Americans ages 25 and older had completed high school. High school graduation rates were lower for African Americans and females than for White males. Between 1900 and 1920, the annual number of high school graduates more than tripled, from 95,000 to 311,000.68 By 1910, the one-room schoolhouse that taught grades 1–8 together, which had been the mainstay of public education throughout the nineteenth century, had been widely replaced by the 6-3-3 model of elementary, junior, and senior high school. In 1920, the battles between science and religion in the public schools had not yet begun to be fought; for example, the famous Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution did not occur until 1925. Professionalization of public school education was given a boost by the founding of the American Federation of Teachers in 1916, which fought for better pay and working conditions, and for academic freedom. The reasons for the increases in numbers of children enrolled in public education during these first two decades of the twentieth century included the child labor laws passed as part of the reformist Progressive legislation, the widespread belief that public education was an important means for assimilating the masses of immigrants that continued to arrive in America, and the continuing shift in demographics from rural to urban settings, where schools were more readily available. Vocational education received a big boost from the 1914 Smith-Lever Act and 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which provided federal support for (gendered) education in agricultural, trades, and “homemaking.”69 Higher education was also an important information institution.70 While there was less than 10% growth in the number of higher education institutions in the United States between 1900 and 1920, from 977 to 1041, there was an explosion in the 67

Center on Education Policy, History and Evolution of Public Education in the US, Graduate School of Education & Human Development, George Washington University, n.d., https://files. eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf. Accessed 2 June 2022. 68 US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1975, as quoted in Cortada, All the Facts. 69 For more on the advance of vocational education, see David Carleton, The Smith-Hughes Act, Landmark Congressional Laws on Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), pp. 63–76; and Dreilinger, Danielle, The Secret History of Home Economics. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021). 70 On the history of American higher education, see Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (2nd ed., New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Lexington, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2021); and John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2011). Some of the books on the history of American public education cited above also contain information about higher education. For an interesting contemporary reflection on the college curriculum, by a noted American historian, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, The History Situation in Colleges and Universities, 1919– 1920, The Historical Outlook, 11, 3, 108, https://www.proquest.com/openview/ce73ee09bf6bf88 c5da30ffe54dc5e9b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818448. Accessed 2 June 2022.

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number of students, from 238,000 to 598,000. During this same period, the numbers of doctorate degrees granted annually rose from 382 to 615 and master’s degrees from 1583 to 4279. Just over half of the Ph.D.s were conferred in the physical and biological sciences, medicine, psychology, or agriculture.71 One major growth area was the rise in teacher colleges, to train teachers for the public schools. Another growth area was in junior colleges (20 in 1909, 170 in 1919). The number and size of both public and private junior colleges continued to grow throughout the 1920s. There were many colleges emphasizing a liberal arts education, but there was also a growing number of professional programs, especially in business. The number of women attending college grew after the First World War ended in 1918; before the war, women did not often attend college. The number of African Americans attending college continued to be low. By 1900, more than 2000 African Americans had graduated from college, and most but not all of them had graduated from one of the 78 Black colleges and universities that then existed. College sports became established as a mainstay during the 1920s, and this both attracted students to attend college and stimulated the public to follow and support their local colleges.

1.4.4 Advertising Another important source of information in 1920 was advertising.72 In the nineteenth century, there was widespread deception in advertising, particularly in the advertising of patent medicines.73 The Progressive Era showed a strong desire to make a better society through information. Collier’s Magazine published a series of articles entitled “The Great American Fraud” denouncing spurious advertising. The Federal Trade Commission was created in 1914 with the ability to regulate advertising. During the first decade of the twentieth century, many advertisements focused 71

This data comes from the Census bureau, as cited in Cortada, All the Facts. The standard work on the history of advertising in America is Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); also see Thomas K. McCraw, American Business Since 1920: How It Worked (2nd ed, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); James R. Beniger, Revolution in Control of Mass Consumption, Chap. 8 in The Control Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Roland Marchand, The Golden Age of Advertising, American Heritage, https://www.americanheritage. com/golden-age-advertising#2; and James Norris, Advertising and the transformation of American society, 1865–1920. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). We might also have written about the rise of corporate public relations, which were also in place by 1920; but to save space, we resisted. Some useful sources on this topic include Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Cayce Myers, Public Relations History (London: Routledge, 2021); and Scott M. Cutlip, Public Relations History: From the 17th to the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1995). 73 See William M. O’Barr, A Brief History of Advertising in America, Advertising & Society Review 6, 3 (2005), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193868. Accessed 3 June 2022; also James W. Cortada and William Aspray, Fake News Nation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Chap. 7. 72

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on “reason-why copy [that] contained a vigorous sales argument, crammed with facts and pock-marked with dashes, italics, and exclamation points.”74 These data-heavy advertisements, it turned out, were not particularly effective at persuading potential customers. Even during the height of fact-based advertising, there was a fascination among advertising executives with psychology. This seems to have begun in 1908 with the publication of Walter Dill Scott’s Psychology of Advertising.75 Advertising executives began to think about how to tap the unconscious behavior of consumers, and play upon suggestion and persuasion, to give consumers a desire to purchase their products. This movement was consummated in 1920 when John B. Watson, the influential creator of the theory of behaviorism in psychology, left his prestigious academic appointment at Johns Hopkins University and joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he spent the rest of his career managing major advertising accounts such as Ponds cold cream and Maxwell House coffee.76 By 1920, advertising had matured and only a few reason—why ads were being printed. This change brought with it new trends, which had already begun by 1920. Color was used more often in ads to attract the consumer’s attention. The occupations of copywriter and graphic designer were rapidly becoming specialized and professionalized. Perhaps most importantly, marketing was becoming an important business practice. Before the First World War, companies were primarily thought of in terms of their manufacturing capabilities and products. “Marketing as an orientation involved conceiving of a company as an institution that sold goods as opposed to simply producing them. Marketing meant setting the firm’s strategy according to realistic observations of available customers and then organizing the firm to coordinate production, distribution, sales, and service according to those observations.”77 In 1911, the Saturday Evening Post hired Charles Coolidge Parlin, a high school teacher and principal, who employed interviewing and survey techniques to study effective advertising methods for various industries: agriculture in 1911, department store goods in 1912, and automobiles in 1914. He called his department “commercial research”—what we would today call “market research.” Based on his success, commercial market research departments were established by US Rubber Company in 1915 and by Swift and Company the following year. Market research had become an established business information practice by 1920.

74 Lears, T. J. Jackson. “The Rise of American Advertising.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976–) 7, no. 5 (1983): 156–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40257575. Accessed 3 June 2022. 75 Walter Dill Scott, Psychology of Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1908). 76 It is rumored that one of Watson’s advertisements created the practice of coffee breaks, but this may be apocryphal. See Who Invented the Coffee Break?, Coffee for Less blog, 18 December 2017, https://www.coffeeforless.com/blogs/coffee-for-less-blog/who-invented-the-cof fee-break. Accessed 3 June 2022; Need a Coffee Break?, 734 Coffee: The Face of Sudan, 7 August 2018. Accessed 3 June 2022. 77 An online extract from Mansel Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American Society (3rd ed., Boston: Cengage Learning, 1993), https://faculty.atu.edu/cbrucker/engl5383/Mar keting.htm. Accessed 3 June 2022.

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Another main character from the advertising community of this era is Albert Lasker, partner in the Chicago advertising firm Lord & Thomas, who orchestrated the advertising campaign for Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign. Lasker used newsreels, billboards, and newspaper ads; as well as a special campaign to attract women voters who could vote for the first time.78 He was already well known in the advertising industry and managed the advertising accounts for top product lines including Palmolive soap, Pepsodent toothpaste, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Legend is that he contributed significantly to women beginning to smoke by arguing that they could stay slim through smoking Lucky Strikes. He also helped Sunkist to transform a surplus of oranges into an asset by creating the first national market for orange juice.

1.4.5 Scientific Research Infrastructure Another important example of information production and application was scientific research and technological invention and innovation. The Germans had been among the earliest—in the nineteenth century—to show the social and economic value of scientific research, most specifically with their research on chemical dyes; and they had developed an elaborate infrastructure for scientific teaching and research. This was brought to the United States, most notably with the founding of the Johns Hopkins University in 1876. In the 1880s and 1890s, science began to be professionalized with the creation of specialized scientific disciplines, scientific societies, academic departments focused on particular scientific subject areas, and specialty scientific journals (often published by research-oriented universities). For example, twelve of these journals were published by the University of Chicago. This scientific professionalization process continued into the 1920s, only with the interruption created by the First World War. By 1920, perhaps 15–25% of college and university faculty were engaged in research—mainly in universities rather than in colleges.79 Americans had independently recognized the importance of research, as evidenced by the Morrill Act of 1862, which spurred the creation of the land-grant colleges that became bastions of agricultural and engineering research. That same year, the federal government created its Department of Agriculture, which provided research and advice on seeds, animal and plant breeding and genetics, planting, crop rotation, and other agricultural topics.80 Research units within the Department of Agriculture, as well as agricultural experiment stations, were created in the late nineteenth century; 78

On Lasker, see Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, The Man Who Sold America (Brighton, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010); and Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 79 Cortada, All the Facts. 80 Federal involvement in agricultural research goes back even further to the 1820s. See R. J. Griesbach, 150 Years of Research at the United States Department of Agriculture: Plant Introduction and Breeding. (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, 2013).

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states began to create their own agricultural departments around 1880. The Hatch Act of 1887 and the Adams Act of 1906 fostered federal-state cooperation on agricultural research, and agricultural research grew rapidly in the United States up until the entry of the United States in the First World War. By 1920, there was a well-established infrastructure and record of agricultural research in the United States, which had resumed soon after the war ended.81 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, companies began to create their own research laboratories. The most notable were General Electric (1900), DuPont (1902), AT&T (1912), and Eastman Kodak (1912), but there were several dozen others.82 Private foundations also created independent scientific and medical research organizations during this period. The most important were the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1901) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1902).83 The foundations supported stand-alone research laboratories instead of funding research at universities because they were concerned that much of the research funding they might provide to universities would be siphoned off for teaching.84 This began to change in 1919, when the National Research Council convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a national program of scientific research fellowships at universities.85 The National Research Council was created in 1916 at the request of President Wilson to provide expert advice to the federal government as it faced the prospect of entering the First World War. This was the first major technology war. It involved 81

See Role and Development of Public Agricultural Research, Chap. 3 in An Assessment of the U.S. Food and Agricultural Research System, https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1981/8106/810 605.PDF. 82 The founding dates of industrial laboratories can be confusing since a company may have already had a major in-house research effort prior to creating an official laboratory. For example, AT&T’s research efforts were organized in 1912, but the Bell Labs were not created until 1925. On these research laboratories, see, for example, Cortada, All the Facts; Mowery, David C. “The Development of Industrial Research in U.S. Manufacturing.” The American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 345–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2006598; D. Hounshell and J.K. Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and L.S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 83 See https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-rel eases/laboratories. Between 1910 and 1920, 16 independent research institutes, mostly in medicine, were formed with foundation funds. See Kohler, Robert E. “Science, Foundations, and American Universities in the 1920s.” Osiris 3 (1987): 135–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/301757. 84 See Geiger, Roger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017). 85 It was apparently more palatable at the time for foundations to provide fellowships than to create research institutes. Between 1908 and 1919 (in chronological order), the following foundations established graduate or postdoc fellowship programs: American Association of University Women, American Scandinavian Foundation, Mellon Institute, Commonwealth Fund, American Field Service, and NRC-Rockefeller Foundation (medicine, physical science). There were nevertheless additional independent research institutions formed with foundation funds in 1920 and throughout the following decade, e.g., the Phipps Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Foods Research Institute, and the Brookings Institute (Kohler, op.cit.).

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heavy artillery, chemical weapons such as mustard gas, wooden airplanes, machine guns, tanks, portable X-ray machines, and other technologies.86 Germany was the largest adopter of technology during the war, but the Americans also used scientific research and technological invention and innovation to advance their war efforts, e.g., in airplane warfare and in armament manufacture (provided first to their Allies from 1914 to 1916 and then for their own use after they entered the war in 1917). The NRC coordinated these scientific efforts in the United States.87 After the war, President Wilson asked that the council be made permanent because of the continued importance of scientific advice in peacetime.88 Thus, an infrastructure for scientific research was well established by 1920.

1.4.6 Consulting Another important information industry active in 1920 was management consulting. Big business first rose in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century.89 The turn of the twentieth century saw a business merger craze in America, resulting in large, physically dispersed companies (e.g., General Electric, Standard Oil, and US Steel) that were hard to manage from a central office.90 These large companies needed expertise in the areas of technology (provided by consultants such as Stone & Webster, Arthur D. Little), accounting (Arthur Anderson, Haskins & Sells, Ernst & Ernst, and Seidman & Seidman), and law (Cravath Swaine, Davis Polk, Sullivan & Cromwell). Companies often turned to outside firms to provide this expertise rather than building the capability in-house. Collectively, these types of experts were known as management consultants. The first management consulting firms, which offered advice on technology, were created by electrical engineers Charles Stone and Edwin Webster in 1889 and by chemical engineer Arthur D. Little in 1894.91 The visionary leading the charge of 86

Rubee Dano, The Science of Destruction: How WWI Drove Development in Science and Technology, Lateral, 3 August 2105, http://www.lateralmag.com/articles/issue-1/how-wwi-drove-dev elopment-in-science-and-technology. Accessed 21 June 2022. 87 See Technological and Scientific Progress During the First World War, Apocalypse: 10 Lives, https://www.reseau-canope.fr/apocalypse-10destins/en/theme-based-files/technologicaland-scientific-progress-during-the-first-world-war.html. Accessed 2 June 2022. 88 National Academy of Sciences, Academy History, http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/. Accessed 3 June 2022. 89 The best-known account of this change is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1993). 90 See Lamoreaux, N., The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 91 On the history of management consulting, see especially Christopher D. McKenna, The Origins of Modern Management Consulting, Business and Economic History 24, 1, Fall 1995 (Business History Conference), https://thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v024n1/p0051p0058.pdf; and Thomas McCraw, American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000). But also see Paul Millerd, A Brief History of Strategy Consulting: 100 Years

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management consulting was Frederick Taylor, who in his book Principles of Scientific Management argued in 1913 that management needs to be treated as “a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles.”92 Taylor and others paid new attention to such issues as cost accounting, engineering optimization, and shop management. Originally, the focus of management consulting was on efficiency in the work of blue-collar line workers; but eventually the focus of the management consulting firms turned to white-collar office workers and decision-making procedures of top managers. Taylor’s ideas were reified in one of the core courses offered at the Harvard Business School when it opened its doors in 1908. Several new management consulting firms emerged from Taylor’s vision, including Booz Allen Hamilton in 1914 and McKinsey & Company in 1924—though business was scarce for the management consulting firms during the recession of 1920–21. The management consulting firms played two important information roles. Most obviously, they provided information (content) and advice to large corporations about essential technology, accounting, and legal matters. However, they also served another function. Large businesses were being increasingly regulated during the Progressive Era, e.g., by the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, as well as by the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Act of 1914; so, these companies had to be careful to not share insider information with one another and being accused of collusion. Management consulting firms provided a legal means for these companies to learn of best practices in running a large business; thus, the consulting firms provided a conduit for information as well as content.

1.4.7 Financial Services Industries The financial services sector—which include property and casualty, home and commercial, and life insurance; banks and credit unions; and trust funds and pension from Frederick Taylor to the “Next New Normal,” StrategyU, n.d., https://strategyu.co/strategy-con sulting-history/. Accessed 25 May 2022; Duff McDonald, The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America, https://longreads.com/2013/10/23/the-making-ofmckinsey-a-brief-history-of-management/. Accessed 25 May 2022. Excerpted from McDonald, The Firm (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013); Jovana Poznan, The History of Consulting, 12 February 2018, https://medium.com/brainsfeed/the-history-of-consulting-fdc73d5a10a0. Accessed 25 May 2022; The 8 Defining States in Management Consulting, https://consulting.wiki/the-8defining-stages-in-the-history-of-consulting/. Accessed 25 May 2022; and American Consulting History, Zippia, https://www.zippia.com/american-consulting-careers-353869/history/. Accessed 25 May 2022. 92 Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911), as quoted in Paul Millerd, A Brief History of Strategy Consulting: 100 Years from Frederick Taylor to the “Next New Normal,” StrategyU, n.d., https://strategyu.co/strategy-consulting-history/. Accessed 25 May 2022. On the history of Taylor and scientific management, see Hugh G. J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Other visionaries who contributed at the time to scientific management included Harrington Emerson, Henry Gantt, and Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth.

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companies, among others—is one of the most information-intensive industries. The overall purpose of these industries is to mitigate financial risk from various causes such as health issues, catastrophic events such as floods and fires, inflation, and major variations in the marketplace. All financial companies are heavily dependent on data and calculation. For example, the life insurance industry makes extensive use of data and calculation to calculate actuarial tables of life expectancy, identify appropriate premiums, score the riskiness of potential customers, and keep track of data about customers and their payments and payouts. The 1910s and 1920s were active times for the financial services industries. The British Prudential company had found effective means early in the twentieth century to use carefully orchestrated procedures and purpose-built buildings to manage their millions of small customers,93 but the Americans more commonly turned to technology to enable their work, e.g., the desk calculators and punched-card tabulating machines that had been developed in the late nineteenth century and were perfected for business use in the first three decades of the twentieth century.94 We do not have space to cover all the financial industries here, so we will focus on only two stories—one about life insurance and the other about health insurance.95 The first life insurance companies in the United States were founded in the second half of the eighteenth century.96 With the exception of a spike in growth around the Civil War, the life insurance industry did not grow substantially during the nineteenth century. Progressivist newspapers did exposés of the business practices of the Equitable Life Assurance Society; and, as a result, in 1905, the regulators who oversaw 93 Martin Campbell-Kelly, Large-scale data processing in the Prudential, 1850–1930, Accounting, Business & Financial History, 2:2 (1992), 117–140. 94 JoAnne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 95 For relevant timelines, see 1900–1924: A History of America’s Banks and the ABA, American Bankers Association, https://www.aba.com/about-us/our-story/aba-history/1900-1924; and Historical Timeline: 1900–1919, FDIC, https://www.fdic.gov/about/history/timeline/1900-1919. html; Historical Timeline, National Credit Union Administration, https://www.ncua.gov/aboutncua/historical-timeline. Also see Richard S. Grossman, US Banking History, Civil War to World War II, Economic History Association, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/us-banking-history-civil-warto-world-war-ii/; Ellis Tallman and Eugene N. White, Why Was There No Banking Panic in 1920– 21, 20 December 2019, 14976_paper_F5KzBh4S.pdf; R. Daniel Wadhani, The Institutional Foundations of Personal Finance: Innovation in U.S. Savings Banks, 1880s–1920s, Business History Review 85 (Autumn 2011): 499–528; Robert L. Clark, Lee A. Craig, and Jack W. Wilson, A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Dora L. Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; partial reprint, https://www.nber.org/system/files/cha pters/c6108/c6108.pdf. All accessed 6 June 2022. One notable event of 1920 was passage of the Smith-Fess Act (Vocational Rehabilitation Act), which provided a disability and retirement (at age 65) fund for federal civil servants; and Gordon (2016), Chap. 9. 96 Sharon Ann Murphy, Life Insurance in the United States through World War 1, n.d., Economic History Association, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/life-insurance-in-the-united-states-thr ough-world-war-i/. Accessed 6 June 2022.

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the insurance industry in New York state created the Armstrong Committee to investigate Equitable’s practices. The Committee found numerous problems such as the creation of subsidiary financial organizations to evade restrictions on investments, excessive expenditures by executives, excessive lobbying, and manipulation of the proxy system to reduce policyholder control over the organization. This led to new regulatory efforts by New York and other states and eventually led to a new-found confidence in the life insurance industry that resulted in rapid industry growth. There were fewer than 100 life insurance organizations in the United States in 1900 but that had grown to over 300 by 1920. Life insurance had become easier to obtain as of 1911, when Equitable began to write group life insurance policies, covering all employees of a company without medical exams or individual applications. By 1919, Equitable had contracts with 29 companies for group policies, the largest one being with Montgomery Ward. The First World War and the Spanish flu also stimulated interest in life insurance policies.97 In 1917, the federal government provided to all active service personnel a life insurance policy and began to sell low-cost term life and disability insurance that became quite popular. From the time the war ended in 1918 until the end of the 1920s, there was unabated growth in the life insurance industry and there were approximately as many policies (120 million) in place in 1929 as there were people living in the United States. Health insurance was a different story. There was virtually no health insurance in the United States in 1900. The move toward health insurance coverage was a follow-on to worker’s compensation—for injuries that occurred at work. Between 1910 and 1915, 32 states passed laws concerning worker’s compensation, under which employers took responsibilities for injuries in the workplace and, if they bought the insurance, were partially protected from negligence suits. These laws were supported by workers because the cost was shifted to employers, but also supported by employers because this approach lessened their legal exposure and overall costs. At first, the medical profession also supported these laws, but when, for example, the mining and lumber industries began to establish health clinics for their workers, the typical private-practice doctor lost business, leading to diminished support among doctors for worker compensation laws.98 Compulsory health insurance, paid for by premiums from the employer, the employee, and the federal government was widely discussed, beginning in 1911,

97

Thomas DeBerge, Thrift in a Time of War and Influenza: American Mutual Life Insurance Companies, 1917–1920, Zeitschrift fur Unternehmensgeschichte 65, 2 (2020), 311–316; Ronald L. Numbers, Almost persuaded. American physicians and compulsory health insurance, 1912–1920. Henry E Sigerist Suppl Bull Hist Med. 1978;(1):1–158; Lester King, Almost persuaded. American physicians and compulsory health insurance, 1912–1920, Journal of the American Medical Association, 1978;240(15):1649. 98 Odin W. Anderson, Health Insurance in the United States 1910–1920, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume V, Issue Autumn, Autumn 1950, Pages 363–396.

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following creation of compulsory health insurance in several European countries.99 This legislation was regarded as a continuation of the worker’s compensation laws that were regarded as a major success of the Progressives. The biggest advocate was the American Association of Labor Legislation, which proposed insurance coverage of both medical bills and lost income for all workers earning less than $100 per month. Between 1916 and 1919, 16 states proposed compulsory health insurance legislation, but none of these bills passed. Employers did not support the legislation because of the cost. Labor unions did not see health insurance as sufficiently important because most medical expenses were low at the time and could be covered by their union members out of pocket; more important to the unions was increasing union member wages. Initial support from the medical profession in 1915 turned to stiff opposition by 1920 as the doctors learned more about the negative impact on their revenue flow from worker’s compensation. The one type of health insurance that did exist in America at the time was sickness funds privately organized by employers, unions, or fraternal organizations. These funds did not pay any medical costs, but typically provided 60% of lost wages while sick. Approximately, 20% of laborers had access to a sickness fund in 1920. During the 1920s, however, the cost of health care increased substantially and the focus in insurance discussions turned from lost wages to the cost of the health care itself. It was not until 1929, at the time of the stock market crash, that the first steps were taken (at Baylor University hospital in Texas) to begin a health insurance program.100 This was the origin of Blue Cross. Other factors affected various sectors of the insurance industry. For example, technological developments led to changes in the insurance industry. Travelers Insurance Company sold its first auto insurance policy in 1897 and its first airplane liability policy in 1919.101 After the American Civil War, foreign companies played a significant role in the American reinsurance industry, which spreads the risk for insurance companies in the face of large losses from a single event such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. However, in late 1917, because of the Russian Revolution, all Russian insurance companies stopped conducting business in the United States; and in 1918, after the First World War concluded, German insurance companies were banned from working in the American insurance and reinsurance industries.102 99

J. C. Herbert Emery, “Un-American” or Unnecessary? America’s Rejection of Compulsory Government Health Insurance before 1930, https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Wor kshops-Seminars/Economic-History/emery-051026.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2022. 100 Michael Morrisey, Health Insurance (2nd ed., Health Administration Press, 2013), Ch. 1; A Brief History of Private Insurance in the United States, 18 March 2022, Risk Strategies, https://www. ahpcare.com/a-brief-history-of-private-insurance-in-the-united-states/. Accessed 6 June 2022; Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, Accidents of History Created U.S. Health System, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 22 October 2009, https://www.npr.org/2009/10/22/114045132/ accidents-of-history-created-u-s-health-system. Accessed 6 June 2022. 101 Andrew Beattie, The History of insurance in America, updated 27 January 2022, Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/08/american-insurance.asp. Accessed 6 June 2022. 102 Swiss Re, A History of U Insurance, https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:36ebe594-097d-4d4db3a7-2cbb8d856e85/150Y_Markt_Broschuere_USA_EN_Inhalt.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2022.

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1.4.8 Office Appliances During the last third of the nineteenth century, the first big businesses were created in the United States. Prior to that, most enterprises were owned by a single individual or a partnership.103 First the railroads, then other companies increased in scale and sometimes spread to multiple locations; ownership and management became separated; and the routine business tasks of running a company—such as writing letters and reports, storing data about customers and orders, and doing financial analysis and accounting—multiplied. Thus, it is not surprising that the last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of inventions and innovations in office appliances. These included, for example, filing cabinets and filing systems, telephones, typewriters, machines for addressing letters, machines for duplicating correspondence, machines for recording cash transactions and storing cash, and machines for calculating. These inventions were subject to continued innovation in the first two decades of the twentieth century, e.g., adding printing capabilities to calculators so that the user had records of their calculations.104 Historian James Cortada describes the nature of the office appliance industry in the first two decades of the twentieth century: American inventors developed a variety of mechanical aids for calculation, data manipulation, and information handling. They emerged simultaneously, but, initially, apart from each other… By the early 1900s, but before World War 1, technologies began merging (e.g., keyboards were used in each segment). Successful firms merged too, offering a growing variety of products through larger, fully integrated enterprises… The industry leaders were overwhelmingly early entrants in their markets. For their part, customers implemented new technologies to reduce labor costs and, subsequently, to enhance control over operations… Early customers were, as later, government agencies and large corporations that had growing armies of specialized office workers and multiple layers of management increasingly dependent on timely data with which to function effectively.105

We do not have space here to follow the stories of all these office appliances, so we turn our attention briefly to those that do calculation and sorting of data. Those available in 1920 included adding and tabulating machines, sold at that time by perhaps a dozen companies—with Burroughs, together with Felt and Tarrant, as the market leaders. These calculators were used—often in large numbers—for carrying 103

See Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 104 On the development of the office equipment industry, see Martin Campbell-Kelly et al., Computer (3rd ed., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014), Chap. 2; James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); JoAnne Yates, The Control Revolution: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); JoAnne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), Chap. 9. 105 James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 87– 88.

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out ordinary business functions. But there was also another important calculating technology: punched-card tabulating systems, which were sold by two firms, IBM and Powers Accounting Machine Company (later acquired by Remington Rand). These tabulating machines had been invented for use in the 1890 US census, innovated for the 1910 census, and used in the early twentieth century by companies for dataintensive tasks such as enabling a railroad to keep track of its rolling stock and do its billing. In addition to the federal government and the railroads, these tabulating systems were used by insurance firms, large manufacturers such as Pennsylvania Steel Company, and large retailers such as Marshall Field. Innovation in both calculators and tabulating systems continued in 1920 and throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The office appliance business was one of the origins of the computer industry in the years after the Second World War.

1.4.9 Communication Technologies 1920 was a transitional year for some communication technologies. The telegraph, which had been developed in the mid-nineteenth century, had developed some business uses (mainly for finance, railroads, and newspapers), but the cost of sending a telegram was prohibitive and the telephone soon supplanted many uses of the telegraph. This pattern of use had stabilized by the end of the nineteenth century. Although the telephone had been invented in 1876, the system for its use was still under development in 1920. As of 1913, one could still communicate only with the other uses within one’s own local exchange, and an exchange might not even cover an entire city.106 In 1915, the first transcontinental telephone line came into operation but calls were expensive (well over $100 per three-minute call in today’s dollars).107 The telephone system was nationalized by the federal government during the First World War (1917–1918) and operated by the US Post Office for a year after the war ended, until finally being returned to the control of AT&T. In 1920, calls were placed through human switchboard operators and most people had party lines with up to ten people on their line; so, privacy and guaranteed access to the technology were in question. It was only in the mid-1930s that most people could dial their own calls and only in the late 1950s that the majority of people had their own private telephone line.108 Although the telephone was used first for business, by 1915 35% of all homes

106

Mary Miley’s Roaring Twenties, https://marymiley.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/how-to-makea-phone-call-in-the-roaring-twenties/. Accessed 7 June 2022. 107 Gordon (2016), p. 185. 108 Phone History: All About Party Lines, Numberbarn, 19 April 2018, https://www.numberbarn. com/blog/phone-history-party-lines/; Greg Daugherty, The Rise and Fall of Telephone Operators, History, 2 August 2021, https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators. Both accessed 7 June 2022.

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in the United States had telephones.109 At that time, the typical American household sent telegraphs or made phone calls an average of nine times per year.110 Telegraph and telephone were point-to-point communication technologies. It was also a transitional time for broadcast communication technologies such as film and radio. In 1920, films were still silent, but there was already research underway to create talkies. The first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer, appeared in theaters in 1927 (while short sound films appeared as early as 1923).111 Nickelodeons had appeared around 1905 to show films to individuals, and they were replaced beginning in 1911 by movie “palaces”—some of which could seat as many as 1000 people in the large cities. Approximately a third of the American population attended a movie every week, and the star system was already well established, for example with Charlie Chaplin and Marie Pickford familiar to almost all Americans. Films were typically preceded by news features. The first commercial radio stations, WWJ in Detroit and KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting in 1920; and KDKA carried the coverage of the 1920 presidential election. The following year, KDKA provided the first play-by-play live coverage of a baseball game (Phillies vs. Pirates). 1920 was also the first time that radio receivers were sold in stores in the United States. The interest in radio grew quickly, and there were more than 500 broadcast stations in operation by 1923. A consortium of General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, and United Fruit Company formed the Radio Corporation of America in 1919, and in the 1920s, it became the largest distributor of radio receivers and later, in 1926, created the first national broadcasting network (NBC). In this section, we have briefly identified nine information “institutions” that were widely active in America in 1920: the print media, libraries, public and higher education, advertising, scientific research, consulting, financial services, office appliances, and communication technologies. They had wide reach—across government, business, and the public. To integrate their stories to a greater extent into the general narratives about American history, and to give greater emphasis to their information content, provides an opportunity for general history and information history to move toward one another and to inform one another. In a recent book,112 James Cortada has shown the way toward another fruitful approach, the concept of disciplining information.113 He has shown how the scholars associated with large libraries began 109

Percentage of Housing Units with Telephones in the United States, 1920 to 2008, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-with-telephones-in-the-unitedstates-since-1920/. Accessed 7 June 2022; also see Fischer (1994). 110 Gordon (2016), p. 183. 111 On the history of film in America, see Gordon (2016); Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (3rd ed., New York: McGraw Hill, 2009). 112 Cortada, Birth of Modern Facts. 113 Cortada does not provide an extended discussion of the epistemological or ontological issues related to “disciplining information,” and this chapter only suggests the issues and does not fully analyze them. Is disciplining information like a lion tamer disciplining a large cat to prepare it to perform in a circus? Information must be acquired, maintained, taught to behave in certain ways and not in other ways that advance the trainer’s goals—all like the poor, subjected lion. In artificial

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1 America in 1920: An Information Microhistory

to introduce the organization of books into topics and subtopics—a means of classifying information to meet their needs. He also showed how government workers and academic social scientists began to create large amounts of new information in the form of statistics, to serve their management and research needs. One can thus integrate the stories of these nine information institutions into a story of information organization and creation to serve societal needs.

1.5 “Disciplining Information”: Research in What was Later Called Computer Science and Information Science It is understandable when one identifies the creation of the academic study of information and information technology with the postwar period or at earliest with the 1930s, through the writings in that decade of Alan Turing on computability as the origins of computer science and of Paul Otlet on documentation as the origins of information science.114 However, this section identifies relevant lines of research— involving engineering, science, mathematics, and social science—that were already active in 1920: punched-card tabulating systems, analog computing, numerical analysis, information retrieval, and information science.115 These are primarily pointers to lines of research rather than detailed examinations because we do not want to get bogged down here in the arcane technical details.

intelligence research, it is not the data that is trained but rather the computer that is acting upon the data, to discover certain patterns inherent in the data set. By speaking of disciplining information in the way that Cortada does, it is implicit that the actor carrying out the discipline is the academic who belongs to a particular academic community, e.g., of sociologists, and who is following the practices that have explicitly or implicitly been established by the sociologists to evaluate whether a piece of data is information and what kinds of treatment to subject it to. 114 Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation. (Brussels: Palais Mondial, 1934). Otlet’s original works are most easily available in W. Boyd Rayward, Otlet, Paul. International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990). The Collected Works of A.M. Turing (Amsterdam: North Holland) are available in four volumes: Darrel Ince, ed., Mechanical Intelligence (1992); P. T. Saunders, ed., Morphogenesis (1992); J. L. Britton, ed., Pure Mathematics (1992); and R. O. Gandy and C.E. M. Yates, eds., Mathematical Logic (2001). 115 One could arguably add to this list. For example, modern statistical analysis was actively under development, but most of the advance was occurring in the United Kingdom, not in the United States, under the leadership of Karl Pearson, William Sealy Gosset, and Ronald Fisher. Operations research had begun in the United States during the First World War in the Air Force under the name “operational analysis” and to some degree in the interwar years by the Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman, but it did not really take off until the Second World War.

1.5 “Disciplining Information”: Research in What was Later Called …

37

1.5.1 Punched-Card Tabulating Systems In 1911, the two main players in the manufacture of punched-card tabulating systems in the United States evolved from contractors that helped the government to conduct censuses, to commercial firms attempting to sell their services and products to commercial as well as government customers. These were C-T-R (later renamed IBM) and Powers (later acquired by Remington Rand). They were active rivals, and this rivalry manifest itself in the form of a series of technological innovations that, between 1911 and the late 1930s, slowly but steadily transformed their machines into ones that were effective workhorses for their customers.116 Both companies employed engineers who worked on these steady improvements to their line of products. There were two general types of uses for these machines: scientific applications such as astronomical calculations and statistical analyses, and commercial applications, especially various forms of bookkeeping. It was the desire of these two rivals to reach an expanding market of companies needing various types of bookkeeping that led to the largest number of innovations in these machines, although the scientific customers also demanded improvements in capacity and speed. Innovations to the punched-card tabulating systems during these years included improvements in the devices that punched the cards, new formats to hold more information in more systematic ways on the cards, punches that could automatically duplicate cards or verify that two cards were punched identically, tabulating systems with capabilities to print intermediate and final results, ability to automatically cross-tabulate (add two columns of numbers together), automatically print subtotals and totals that conformed with existing bookkeeping practices in various industries, and automate processes so that there were fewer stop procedures that involved human intervention in the course of a job, among other innovations. Thus, one can see the punched-card field as one in which innovations by the firm’s engineers were regular and engineering was an important asset to the firm. It is not surprising, then, that IBM was able to build upon this engineering prowess of the interwar years as it entered the computing field during and after the Second World War. The story is similar for the several dozen firms building desk calculators, cash registers, and other office appliances in 1920. There were steady improvements in printing capability, keyboard layout, reliability, and speed in these machines. Many of these firms were smaller than IBM and Remington Rand, and the principal innovator was often the founder of the firm. But some of these firms were sizable; and NCR, the market leader in the production of cash registers, was widely recognized in the interwar years as the company with the greatest knowledge of mechanical engineering of all American firms. 116

On the history of these two punched-card tabular firms, see especially Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and James Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). On the uses of these systems, see P. A. Kidwell, “American Scientists and Calculating Machines—From Novelty to Commonplace,” in Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 12, no. 1, (Jan–March 1990), pp. 31–40; and G. W. Baehne, Practical Applications of the Punched Card Method in Colleges and Universities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935).

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1.5.2 Analog Computing Far less active, but not totally inactive in 1920, was the study of analog computing by mechanical and electrical engineers. Mechanical aids to computation, such as planimeters, had been used since antiquity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin and Torres y Quevedo had shown the value of analog devices for general calculation and important applications such as tide prediction. Two of the major figures in analog computing of the twentieth century, Vannevar Bush and Hannibal Ford, were already familiar with analog computing by 1920 (although it is not clear what they were doing in this area specifically in the year 1920).117 Bush’s first invention was a profile tracer, which he patented while a master’s student at Tufts University in 1912. It was an analog device that employed many of the elements of his more general-purpose devices created in the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1924, Bush supervised an MIT undergraduate student Harold Hazen (who himself became a leading figure in analog computing while on the faculty at MIT) in the building of an electrical analog computing device for testing electrical networks. Hannibal Ford, an engineer trained at Cornell University in the first decade of the twentieth century, created his own instrument company that built analog calculators used by the US Navy during the First World War for controlling the firing of guns. Ford and his company continued to research and build ever better fire control devices during the 1920s and 1930s, even though military research funds were slashed after the war ended.

1.5.3 Numerical Analysis Numerical analysis is a branch of mathematics that tries to find approximate solutions to mathematically stated problems when exact solutions are theoretically impossible or practically impossible because exact solutions would take too much time or expense to figure out. While numerical analysis is a branch of mathematics that goes back to antiquity, it had become much more active in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as astronomers and mathematical physicists had identified how to apply the calculus (a seventeenth-century creation) to various physical

117

On Bush, see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush: Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997). On Ford, see A. Ben Clymer, The Mechanical Analog Computers of Hannibal Ford and William Newell, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, 2 (1993), 19–34.

1.5 “Disciplining Information”: Research in What was Later Called …

39

problems.118 The practical value of numerical analysis was not so much to mathematicians, however, as it was to astronomers and engineers. For example, an astronomer, knowing the position in space and speed and direction of a heavenly body at a given time, would like to be able to calculate the position of that same body at a particular time in the future as various gravitational forces of other heavenly bodies acted upon it. Or a civil engineer might wish to calculate the design of a dam, such as the thickness of the walls, needed to hold back the water behind it. In 1920, a new set of problems faced American engineers. Consider three examples. Electrical networks had first been installed in the 1880s. As the American population and manufacturing capacity grew in the United States, engineers needed to figure out how much power was needed and how it should be distributed on an electrical network to serve the growing mix of industrial, commercial, and residential users. This problem proved to be difficult for engineers of the 1920s to solve using numerical means, so Vannevar Bush and others developed analog computing means (electrical models of electrical power networks) to measure the needs of power companies during the late 1920s and 1930s. Second, the rapid diffusion of the automobile after the creation of the Ford Model T in 1908 meant that civil engineers in the 1920s had to design many new bridges that would hold up to the forces of cars and trucks crossing them. Third, following the flight of the Wright brothers’ airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903, there was a rapid development of first wooden and then metal airplanes. Already by the First World War, there were problems for military engineers to solve to give them the capacity to shoot down airplanes and other rapidly moving targets. While numerical analysis played a role in the solution of this military problem, analog computation was also used here in the form of direction finders attached to large guns, which were able to do the needed calculations in real time. This issue was an important contributing factor to the development of the computer during the Second World War in the 1940s.

1.5.4 The Documentation Movement and Information Retrieval Between the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War, in both Europe and the United States, librarians conducted research on the ways in which to organize the 118

On the history of numerical analysis, see H. H. Goldstine, A History of Numerical Analysis from the 15th Through the 19th Century (New York: Springer, 1977); H. H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); C. Brezenski and L. Wuytack, eds., Numerical Analysis: Historical Developments in the 20th Century (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001); and Michele Benzi, Key Moments in the History of Numerical Analysis, http://history.siam. org/%5C/pdf/nahist_Benzi.pdf. Accessed 28 April 2023. Two textbooks that indicate the state of research in numerical analysis in 1920 reasonably well are E. T. Whittaker and G. Robinson, The Calculus of Observations. A Treatise on Numerical Mathematics (London: Blackie and Son, 1924); and J. B. Scarborough, Numerical Mathematical Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930).

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growing knowledge base, as represented by the rapidly increasing number of books in print. This work was a direct predecessor of research on information retrieval and information science more generally. Three competing systems came into existence: the Dewey Decimal Classification created in 1876 by Melvin Dewey, who spent many years as the principal librarian at Columbia University and later at the New York State Library119 ; the Library of Congress Classification, which built on the classification system created by Harvard University librarian Charles Cutter in 1882120 ; and the Universal Decimal Classification, created by the Belgian lawyer-bibliographer Paul Otlet and his lawyer-colleague Henri La Fontaine in 1904. All three systems were in use around the world, and a scholarly librarian crowd continued to study, refine, and debate the merits of these systems. These efforts, especially those of Otlet, were seriously disrupted by the First World War; and Otlet had hopes—never fully realized—after the war, that these efforts to create a universal system of knowledge would be sponsored and funded by the League of Nations. Once the war ended, the librarians resumed their study of classification systems. For example, in 1924 at a meeting in Geneva organized by Otlet and chaired by Dewey’s son Godfry, there was a unification of Dewey’s scheme with Otlet’s.121 The Documentalist movement of the 1930s continued to be focused on the organization and retrieval of books. In the 1950s, as computer scientists such as Calvin Mooers and Gerard Salton became involved, the focus turned to the retrieval of information.

1.5.5 Information Theory Perhaps the most celebrated theory in information science is Claude Shannon’s theory of information, which provides a scheme for quantifying the amount of information

119

See Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvin Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996); The ‘Amherst Method’: The Origins of the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme, Libraries & Culture 33, 2 (Spring 1998), 175–194. The paper that most people believe started it all was Turing, On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2–42, 1 (1937), 230–265. 120 See Francis L. Miksa, Charles Ammi Cutter: Library Systematizer (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1977). 121 On this history, see Alex Wright, Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also see W. Boyd Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society (London: Routledge, 2008); Rayward, Information Beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Epoque (London: Routledge, 2014); Rayward, The Origins of Information Science and the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID), Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48,4 (1997), 289–300; Colin B. Burke, Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewy Decimals to Alger Hiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); James Cortada, Birth of Modern Facts (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023); and Michael Buckland, Paul Otlet: Pioneer of Information Management, https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/ ~buckland/otlet.html. Accessed 26 April 2023.

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carried in a message. While Shannon published on this theory in 1948,122 this theory had its origins in telecommunications research being conducted at Bell Telephone Laboratories, arguably the strongest research laboratory in the United States between the two world wars. Shannon’s work on information theory was built on the work of two of his older colleagues at Bell Labs, Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. After an undergraduate degree at University of Utah and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, in 1913 Ralph Hartley joined the research laboratory of Western Electric—one of the predecessor organizations to Bell Labs. He worked on transatlantic radiotelephone communication before the war and direction finders during the war. After the war, he worked on an assortment of problems related to voice and carrier transmission. In a 1928 paper, Hartley formulated the law that “that the total amount of information that can be transmitted is proportional to frequency range transmitted and the time of the transmission.”123 After receiving his PhD in physics from Yale in 1917, Harry Nyquist joined the Department of Development and Research Transmission at AT&T—another predecessor organization to Bell Labs—where he conducted research on transmission of voice and images over telegraph lines. Theoretical papers that he published in 1924 and 1928 on telegraph speed and digitization though sampling techniques became important results in communications engineering and were a direct inspiration to Shannon and cited in his theory of information papers.124 Telecommunications research was going strong in the Bell system in 1920 and continued to be so for decades thereafter.

1.6 How the Story Changes When American History is Told from an Information History Perspective Let us consider how this story of America in 1920, as we have suggested it could be told through an information lens, differs from a more traditional historical account of America in 1920. Perhaps the most traditional accounts of this history are those provided in high school Advanced Placement (AP) textbooks, which receive regular, ongoing scrutiny from educators, parents, state boards of education, politicians, and textbook publishers.

122

Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 3 (July 1948), 379–423. On the history surrounding Shannon’s work on information theory, see Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, University, Press, 2015). 123 Hartley, R.V.L., Transmission of Information, Bell System Technical Journal 7, 3, pp. 535–563, (July 1928). 124 Nyquist, Harry (1924). Certain Factors affecting telegraph speed, Bell System Technical Journal 3 (2): 324–346; Nyquist, H. (1928-07-01). Thermal Agitation of Electric Charge in Conductors. Physical Review. American Physical Society (APS). 32 (1): 110–113.

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Table 1.1 US history advanced placement textbooks—selective coverage127 Locke & Wright

Zinn

Tindall & Shi

Brinkley

Oakes et al.

The print media: newspapers, magazines, and books

3

5

7

1

0

Libraries

0

0

0

0

0

Public and higher education

1

0

0

0

0

Advertising

2

1

1

2

1

Scientific research and technological development

0

0

2

5

1

Consulting

0

1

0

0

1

Financial services industries

0

1

0

0

0

Office appliances

0

0

0

0

0

Communication technologies

5

1

2

2

2

To get at this issue, we selected five textbooks commonly used in the teaching of Advanced Placement high school American history.125 (See Table 1.1) We asked how well these five textbooks covered the topics that appear in our discussion of information institutions, industries, and disciplines in 1920 America. We used a crude but simple metric to carry out this examination. We counted the number of pages on which each of the topics we addressed in our discussion126 appeared in each of these standardized textbooks. This count is likely to provide an overestimation of the amount of information-related content in these textbooks because a single sentence on the page would result in the entire page being counted in our tally. Also, we were lenient in deciding to count sentences in these textbooks as covering our information topics; if one of these textbooks even gave a hint of our information topic, we counted it in our statistics. 125

We intended to use the most recent edition available readily available to us—and sometimes did. In other cases, we did not use the latest edition but one that was a few years old. We do not believe this procedure compromises our findings because the content from edition to edition only changes modestly. The textbook publishers have a business model than “updates” their standard textbooks every year or two, even when there is little change. One of the textbooks we examined was in its 17th edition! 126 Thus, we included any topic that came up in background in our discussion, so some of the events we counted occurred prior to or after 1920, not only in 1920. As we checked these AP textbooks for coverage, we examined the chapters covering a decade before and after 1920, not only the textbook pages covering 1920. 127 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, reissue 2017); Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright, eds., The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History, vol. 2: Since 1877 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); George Brown Tindall and David Shi, America: A Narrative History (New York: Norton, 6th ed., 2004); Alan Brinkley, The

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What did we learn from this analysis? Not surprisingly, the first section of our paper, presenting the traditional account of the history of 1920 America, conformed quite closely with the topics covered in these AP textbooks, even though we used more scholarly sources and did not consult these textbooks while preparing our “traditional” account.128 However, the story was quite different when we compared these textbooks to our information-oriented retelling of this history. There was no coverage in the AP textbooks of two of our categories (libraries, office appliances) and only one mention of either financial service or of public and higher education. Presumably, if we had been examining the year 1929, all the AP textbooks would have covered that topic because of the famous market crash; but when there was no compelling event, financial services and education were apparently not worthy of consideration in these textbooks. Advertising received modest attention in every one of the AP textbooks we surveyed, but it generally did not receive more than a paragraph of coverage. Science and technology received no mention in two of the textbooks, passing reference in two other textbooks, and significant coverage in only one textbook (Brinkley). Most of these mentions were of a particular technology such as the automobile or the radio; none discussed scientific institutions. While the print media received coverage in four of the five textbooks we reviewed, the coverage was typically about a single book or newspaper. Never was it about these industries or the diffusion of the media among the public. The most heavily covered of our topics was communication technologies— especially the telephone and the radio. Only in one of these textbooks (Locke & Wright) was the topic of communication technologies discussed in any detail. We conclude, then, that there is very limited coverage of the information industries in these textbooks. The topics we cover in our section on disciplining information are too advanced for a standard high school American history textbook, so we were not surprised to find no coverage of them there. A more interesting question is whether these issues of disciplining information are covered in college undergraduate American history survey courses. This is a harder question to answer because there is less use of standardized textbooks in these courses, and many of the academically stronger universities instead have their students read a collection of articles and chapters, so it is hard to find a good comparison. However, we do have one comparison point. In the 1990s, a group of faculty colleagues from the history of science and technology program, including this author, taught an experimental version of the twentieth-century American history survey course on the main campus of Rutgers University. We did so because we were unhappy that this survey course had been taught for many years without much if any discussion of the ways that science and technology shaped twentieth-century Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (New York: McGraw Hill, 8th ed., 2008); James Oakes et al., Of the People: A History of the United States, Vol II: Since 1865 (Oxford: Oxford, 2nd ed., 2013). 128 Remember that we wrote the standard account using well-known monographs and research papers, not textbooks, as our sources.

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America. The students who were in the course who had taken the earlier survey courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America were somewhat resistant to these topics, preferring a focus on war, politics, and civil rights; we had to work hard both to find relevant readings that the students would actually read and to write lectures that incorporated our new material with the typical topics taught in these courses. With each of us faculty too busy with other responsibilities, we never taught a science and technology version of twentieth-century American history again. But I strongly suspect from this experience that the typical college American history survey includes little not only on science and technology more generally, but also on these more narrowly focused topics regarding the disciplining of information that we discussed above (e.g., analog computing or information retrieval). This suggests an exercise—to teach a survey course or write a textbook that retells twentieth-century American history through an information lens. It would no doubt differ from the standard account by including more about information institutions and industries, but it would also bring out clearly the information aspects of other topics ordinarily covered in such a survey course that would not be regarded particularly as information-rich topics.

Chapter 2

An Illustrated Information History of 1920 America

Abstract This chapter retells the information microhistory of America in 1920 that was told in Chap. 1. However, here the focus is on reading images—mostly photographs but also some artwork. Not only does this analysis provide a different perspective on this information history, it also provides a ready resource to illustrate class lectures or presentations. And what [is] so tedious as a twice-told tale? (Homer, The Odyssey, Book XII).1 Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words. (Arthur Brisbane, presentation at the Syracuse, NY Advertising Men’s Club).2

Chapter 1 provided an information microhistory of America in 1920. In this chapter, we retell the same story through commentary on a set of images.3 By 1

As I was searching for an appropriate epigraph for this chapter, I thought of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales (Lexington, MA: James Munroe, publisher, 2 vols., 1842), which I had read with pleasure and admiration thirty years ago. I found by a search online that Hawthorne took the title from Shakespeare’s King John and that Shakespeare had taken the phrase from Homer. I remembered the short stories in Hawthorne’s work as an example of polyperspectivism. Other examples of narratives told through the differing perspectives of various actors that came immediately to mind were Kurosawa’s famous film Rashomon (1950) and the contemporary television series The Afterparty. With a little further searching, I found that polyperspectivism is relatively common, e.g., Wilkie Colllins’s The Moonstone (original 1868; reprint, New York: Harper, 2013) or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (original 1930; reprint New York: Vintage, 1991). I believe but have not yet developed the “tools” to demonstrate that my Chap. 1 and this chapter exemplify telling the same story from different perspectives. As a colleague pointed out to me, so far, I have simply told a multimedia story and not a polyperspective story. This is a matter that I hope to explore further in later works. 2 Speakers Give Sound Advice, Syracuse Post Standard, March 28, 1911, p. 18. This may be the first appearance of the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”. 3 One of the reasons for choosing the year 1920 to study is that it provides a good opportunity to use photographic images to tell this story. The year is sufficiently long ago that American copyright law allows publication of many photos from that year without worry about copyright infringement. However, it is a recent enough time that photographs of daily life are available. Unfortunately, the costs to reprint photographs has grown steadily over the past few years; and these costs for a richly illustrated chapter can run in to the thousands of dollars. Thus, this chapter relies mostly on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Aspray, Understanding Information History, SpringerBriefs in History of Computing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44134-9_2

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1920, American publications had become so enriched with images (photographs, artwork, and graphical representations), in everything from newspapers to books, that the American public had come to see illustrations as an essential component of the information they digested. As the second epigraph to this chapter, by Arthur Brisbane, reminds us, images convey a great deal of specific and subliminal information. Therefore, we now discuss 1920 through an information lens enriched by visual sources. Not only does one learn new things about this story of information in 1920 America from examining these photographs, but their use also makes this chapter a ready resource to faculty members who might want to illustrate a class lecture, a research talk, or a publication.4 Several comments about the organization of this chapter are warranted. A series of images are given one after another—34 in all—followed by a caption that is longer and more descriptive than the ordinary figure caption. One could, of course, provide a much longer analysis of an image. For example, a famous photograph from 1914 by August Sander led Richard Powers to write an entire novel, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, to try to explain what was going on in this one photograph.5 Many of these descriptions are followed by an additional paragraph, taking a second look at the photograph from a semiotic perspective. The author is not a practiced semiotician, and the reader is encouraged to take this semiotic analysis further than it is taken here. The images presented here represent some of the major themes that occur in Chap. 1: the traditional account of America in 1920, featuring this as a transitional year moving from a conservative agrarian society to a secular urban society, the aftereffects of the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic; the role of technology, such as automobiles and home appliances, in creating a more modern society; the rise and growth of information institutions and industries such as print media, libraries, images taken from that portion of the rich U.S. Library of Congress photographic collection that they indicate have no known restrictions on use. This means that while the illustrations appearing in this chapter are perhaps not the very best set of images available—cost not considered—they do provide a sufficiently large set of images from which the story told in Chap. 1 can be retold. Unless specified otherwise, the photograph is taken from the Library of Congress photographic collection, and the image number given is their official one. Because of the limited selection of usable photographs, some were selected from nearby years and not from 1920. 4 Yet a third way to get at this microhistory would be to see what one can learn about the times through its portrayal in fiction. There are of course the well-known novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald about the Jazz Age: This Side of Paradise (original 1920; reprint, Ballingslöv, Sweden: Wisehouse Classics, 2016), The Beautiful and the Damned (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), The Great Gatsby (Scribners, 1925), Tender is the Night (New York: Scribners, 1934), and his collected stories in Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922). But the literature is much broader, and there are more recent novels about 1920 America. A few examples (far from an exhaustive list here) include Ellen Marie Wiseman, The Orphan Collector (New York: Kensington, 2020), Susan Meissner, As Bright as Heaven (New York: Berkley, 2018), or James Rada Jr., October Mourning (Clinton, MA: Legacy Publishing, 2018) about life in the Spanish flu pandemic; or Laura Moriarty, The Chaperone (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012) or Denny Bryce, Wild Women and the Blues (New York: Kensington, 2021). A useful model for reading information history in literature is Carol Colatrella, Information in the Novel and the Novel as Information System: Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Margaret Drabble’s Radiant Way Trilogy. Information and Culture: A Journal of History 50.3 (2015): 339–371. 5 Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (New York: William Morrow, 1985).

2 An Illustrated Information History of 1920 America

47

and financial services; and the emergence of new ways of studying information and information issues such as research on calculating machines and the nature of information. The grouping of these photographic images in this chapter might have been organized by having all the images of technology in one section, all the images of information institutions in another section, etc. However, that is not what is done here. Instead, we have followed as closely as possible the organization of Chap. 1, presenting images in the order in which these topics appeared there. The reason for the ordering of images in this chapter is to more readily conduct the experiment of figuring out how the story is different if it is told through words or through pictures. It would, of course, be easy for the reader who wants to use these images for a lecture to reorganize the order of images, especially if they are working from an electronic copy of this chapter.

Fig. 2.1 Women’s suffrage

One of the hallmark successes of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was the passage in 1919 and ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing universal suffrage for American women. Prior to this time, some women had been able to vote in some local and state elections, but this amendment provided the unlimited right for women to vote in all American elections. Women were actively involved, including with financial support, in the campaign to pass and ratify the law, as can be seen from the collection box in the photograph. (Harris and Ewing photographers, 1920, LC-DIG-hec-29676).

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Second look: The photograph shows women played an important role in both the politicking and financing the campaign to gain their universal suffrage; it was not something that was just “awarded” by the men who were in control. The woman is not a young upstart, as one might have seen in the cultural revolution in America in the late 1960s, but instead a wealthy, older woman. Fig. 2.2 League of nations

This editorial cartoon, from the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1919, shows President Woodrow Wilson trying to fit the proposed constitution for the League of Nations together with the U.S. Constitution, while Uncle Sam looks on disapprovingly. Wilson was a strong believer in the power of diplomacy, and his Fourteen Points Program for World Peace at the end of the First World War in 1918 led to the creation of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations. Because of Wilson’s political battles with the Republicans, who had taken control of Congress in 1918, the United States never ratified the treaty that created the League of Nations. Wilson’s effectiveness to carry this plan out was compromised by a massive stroke that he suffered while in office in 1919. (Gustavo Bronstrup, cartoonist, 1919, LC-USZ62-30,948).

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Fig. 2.3 Woodrow and Edith Wilson

President Woodrow Wilson standing in top hat while his wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, looks on. Wilson had a successful first term in office, but his second term was less successful in part because of the stroke he suffered in 1919. His second wife, Edith, took control over access to the president and increasingly made political decisions that she believed would be what he wanted. The president’s ill health became publicly known in early 1920 and there were criticisms from his Republican opponents and others about his fitness to serve and the inappropriateness of his wife as an unelected but de facto president. This situation nevertheless continued until Warren Harding assumed office in 1921. (1920, LC-USZ62-32,695).

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Fig. 2.4 Flapper girl

1920 was the beginning of a decade of cultural liberation, the so-called Roaring Twenties, that included “lost generation” writings, jazz, flapper, art deco, and the Harlem Renaissance. Flappers were women who broke traditional conservative norms concerning dress, hair style, makeup, music, alcohol consumption, and sexual behavior. (C.W. Turner, photographer, 1922, LC-USZ62-38,343). Second look: We tend, looking back on the Jazz Age, to think of flappers as being dressed in skimpy clothing. In this image we see that the flapper is dressed provocatively—far outside of the norms of Victorian dress—but the clothes reveal little in the way of sexuality.

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Fig. 2.5 Jazz

Jazz was another important manifestation of the cultural liberation in 1920s America. This musical form had emerged in the late nineteenth century in the African American community in New Orleans. Jazz spread across the world in the 1920s and adopted multiple styles that varied from the original New Orleans style, but all were regarded as a sign of cultural liberation. The original photograph is titled “Genuine jazz for the yankee” and the original caption goes on to explain the setting during the final year of the First World War: “In the courtyard of a Paris hospital for the American wounded, an American negro military band, led by Lt. James R. Europe, entertains the patients with real American jazz, 1918” (US Army Signal Corps, LC-DIG-ds-09800). Second look: This photo reminds us that one of the places where there was a significant mix of races in American culture was in the military, and thus the armed forces served as a conduit for new culture such as jazz. The military was an important way for African Americans to both serve their country and get ahead in their careers; however, the U.S. military was not progressive enough at this time to integrate military units.

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Fig. 2.6 The 1920 presidential election

In the 1920 presidential election, Republican Warren G. Harding, running on the slogan “return to normalcy” after the First World War, and capturing the majority of the women’s vote in the first presidential election in which they were allowed to vote, soundly defeated Democrat James Cox. The first silent newsreel camera was introduced in 1911 by Charles Pathe. These portable cameras were first used in connection to the presidency when a single film was made of Wilson’s presidential inauguration in 1913. The newsreel became a common tool of persuasion during the First World War, and the 1920 presidential election was the first one during which newsreel cameras were commonplace. Harding, who was filmed almost daily during the election season, took time here in Washington, DC on July 3, 1920, to get behind the camera and see how it worked. He was the much more publicity savvy of the two presidential candidates, regularly using newsreels and articles in national magazines to spread the word about him. He also garnered celebrity endorsements from Al Jolson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and others. KDKA, the second commercial radio station, began broadcasting in 1920; and it covered the 1920 presidential election. (LC-DIG-npcc-01957).

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Second look: The photo reminds us that some politicians were more savvy about the opportunities provided by new technologies and new media than others; and that they were able to trade on this knowledge to their political advantage. This image not only points to the value of newsreel cameras in political campaigns, but also to the fact that Harding could gain political value by taking what was an everyday event during the campaign of being photographed and turn it into a photo opportunity for his political advantage.

Fig. 2.7 Terrorism on Wall Street

The American public and politicians were concerned about the Communist Revolution, which had occurred in Russia in 1917. There was heightened concern about immigrant anarchists disrupting the good life in America, especially after the bombing in September 1920 of the J. P. Morgan Building on New York City’s Wall Street, which left 30 people dead and 300 injured. The bomber was suspected to be an Italian anarchist who escaped to Italy before he could be interrogated, but his guilt was never proved. People were also nervous about the disruptive effects of the 3600 strikes that occurred in the United States during 1920. September 16, 1920. (LC-DIG-ds-14520).

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Second look: Perhaps more so than any other image in this chapter, this photograph shows the scale of the carnage and the masses of witnesses to this anarchist attack. It is an image that conveys fear that would have been powerful message to the reader in towns and small cities across America, not just in New York City where it occurred.

Fig. 2.8 Prohibition

Through the ratification of the 18th Amendment and the passage of the Volstead Act, both in 1919, prohibition of alcoholic beverages went into effect in 1920 and lasted until 1933. Prohibition raised various information issues for individuals wanting to consume alcohol, whether they wanted to visit an illegal establishment, such as a speakeasy; find an illegal supplier of alcohol, such as a moonshiner or illegal importer; or find a way to make alcoholic beverages for themselves. There were also information issues raised by prohibition for both legitimate businesses and organized crime. The original caption for this photo read: “Silver City men erect Barleycorn monument, 1920, Tombstone dedicated to John Barleycorn giving his death as January 16, 1920, the date of the ratification [actually, the enaction]

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of the 18th Amendment, on the grounds of the 1711 Club in Meriden, Conn.” (LC-USZ62-136,527). Second look: We often think of prohibition in terms of large cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia. However, one can see from this rural image that the effects of prohibition reached across the entire United States. This image was taken in Meriden, a small town in the middle of Connecticut, known for its manufacture of silver products. Fig. 2.9 Postwar adult education

This 1919 poster (C.F. Chambers, artist) shows the push by the Red Cross and the federal government to offer training to disabled servicemen as they returned from the First World War. Training was also a solution offered by other information institutions at the time. For example, two interests of the American Library Association in 1920 were to promote library access for military service personnel (started during the First World War) and promoting adult education on-site at libraries (which continued as a major interest throughout the 1920s). (LC-USZC4-9737). Second look: The image here, of the man with a crutch, having lost a leg in action, reminds one in a graphical way of the losses suffered during the war and the efforts that were still actively underway in 1920 to recover from the war.

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Fig. 2.10 Modern literature

The cultural revolution that began after the First World War and continued through the 1920s included modernist fiction. Major works published in 1920 included Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise; as well as non-fiction including George Santayana’s social criticism, Character and Opinion in the United States; Lothrop Stoddard’s political discussion of racism, The Rising Tide of Color; John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy; and T.S. Eliot’s book of essays, The Sacred Wood. The cartoon here (John C. Conacher, artist), referring to Sinclair Lewis’s book, reads: “Main Street?: yeh, this is Main Street: now who was the humorous guy told yuh …” (DLC/PP-1950:R4.176). Second look: This cartoon provides numerous visual clues about the modern city of 1920s America: the statue honoring veterans from the First World War, the bustling life on Main Street as the cities grew through movement from rural areas to the city, the wealth shown through healthy commerce on Main Street, the presence of automobiles rather than horse-drawn carriages but the need for a policeman to enforce the traffic flow, the presence of street lighting in the city, and the fact that the town is large enough that two people meeting on the street are not familiar with one another.

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Fig. 2.11 A new musical era

Shown here is Paul Whiteman, leader of one of the largest and most popular dance bands of the 1920s. His repertoire ranged from jazz to popular to classical music. Known as the King of Jazz he was partly responsible for making jazz more mainstream in America. His career as a conductor began during the First World War with the US Navy Band. His popularity came partly through his contact with the new technologies of entertainment. He began a highly successful recording contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company (later acquired by RCA, see the famous Victrola mascot dog) in the early 1920s and later in the 1920s with the national radio broadcast, The Victory Hour. 1922. William Mills and Son, photographer. (LC-USZ62-84,543). Second look: This clearly staged photo provides a strong visual message of the connections between new forms of music, new technologies to popularize that music, and the importance of corporations and their branding in the dissemination of the technology and the content that it conveys.

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Fig. 2.12 Sports and sports journalism

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Sports and sports journalism solidified themselves as an important part of American culture after the First World War. One of the biggest stories of 1920 was the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees so that Red Sox owner Harry Frazee could support his struggling theatrical performances in Manhattan. The National Negro Baseball League and the National Football League were both formed in 1920. Radio receivers were sold commercially in stores for the first time in 1920, and during the 1920s, baseball was regularly broadcast live on radio. In 1921, KDKA (the second commercial radio station in the United States) provided the first play-by-play, live coverage of a baseball game (Phillies vs. Pirates). This photo shows the Monarchs and the Hillsdale baseball teams before a game in the first National Negro Baseball League World Series in Kansas City in 1924. J.E. Miller, photographer. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-18576). Second look: The photo shows the popularity of sports through the filled stadium as well as the close ties between sports and African American culture. It also shows the vibrant life of Kansas City. The 1920s and 1930s were regarded as a period of “economic dynamism,” Kansas City–style jazz, Vaudeville, and the presence of many famous people, including not only African American celebrities such as Satchel Paige and Charlie Parker, but also Ernest Hemingway, Walt Disney, Thomas Hart Benton, Mary Tiera Farrow, Nelle Nichols Peters, and Harry S. Truman. But it was also the time of Boss Tom Pendergast, who ruled politics and the criminal underworld.

Fig. 2.13 Birth control

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Margaret Sanger was actively speaking and writing on contraception in 1920, and the following year she founded the American Birth Control League (later renamed Planned Parenthood). This photo is undated but is likely from the first half of the 1920s. Underwood and Underwood, photographer. (LC-USZ62-105,460). Second look: the 12 women shown surrounding Margaret Sanger range considerably in age from mostly young adults to some middle aged and even older women. They are, for the most part, dressed conservatively, although they range from drab clothing to the stylish dress on the woman just left of Sanger. This photograph conveys the message that birth control is a matter of considerable interest to women of all ages and all walks of life.

Fig. 2.14 The round table

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Dorothy (nee Rothschild) Parker was a leader among the writers who met almost daily between 1919 and 1929 at New York City’s Algonquin Hotel and formed a group widely known as the Algonquin Round Table. In her early adult years, she regularly published in leading national magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Republic. Later in her career she was an award-winning screenwriter in Hollywood. Known for her acerbic wit, she and other members of the Round Table were important cultural critics of American urban life. 1912, Arnold Genthe, photographer. (LC-G432-0206-A).

Fig. 2.15 The farming revolution

In 1920 the United States was amid a farming revolution, even as there was a mass migration of people from the farms to the cities underway. This cartoon is entitled Defense day in Bugville, explaining that “A feature of the parade was the new caterpillar tractor”. Inscribed in pencil at bottom center: Old Hiram Beetle. “I tell you, Ebenezer, these modern inventions certainly do beat all. When we were youngsters the old fashioned horsefly was good enough for farm work but now no place is complete without a dozen or so of these pesky, new-fangled caterpillar tractors. By heck!” New technologies such as modern tractors, innovative crop rotation, synthetic fertilizers, and new laboratory-created seeds drove this farming revolution, and farmers were keen consumers of information about these new technologies. Date unknown, likely 1914–1918. (DIG-ppmsca-50974).

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Second look: The whimsy of this cartoon reinforces certain facts about 1920 America: the importance of farm life as part of the American experience, the newness of farm technology such as Caterpillar tractors, and the importance of labor-saving technologies to the good life on the farm.

Fig. 2.16 Information for farmers and future farmers

The original caption reads: “Forest Kellison, 4 H Club member treating his sheep for internal parasites under direction of Harold Willey, Farm Bureau Agent. 250 of these club boys and girls in the county.” 4-H clubs and the Farm Bureau were part of the information ecology available to farmers and future farmers to learn about new techniques, technologies, and products of modern farming in 1920. This information ecology included land-grant colleges, weather reports, agricultural agents of state federal agencies, extension courses, 4-H and corn clubs, Boy Scout agricultural merit badge programs, vocational training in high schools, sales catalogs, and traveling libraries. Lewis Hine, photographer. 1921, Pocahontas County, West Virginia (LCDIG-nclc-04427).

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Fig. 2.17 Tabulation at the Census Bureau

This photograph shows a tabulator being used at the U.S. Census Bureau in 1920. Punched card tabulating systems, invented for the 1890 U.S. population census, were the most heavy-duty of all calculating technologies in use in 1920. These systems were used at the time in the United States not only by government agencies but also by railroads to keep track of their rolling stock and do their billing, insurance companies, large manufacturers such as Pennsylvania Steel Company, and large retailers such as Marshall Field. IBM and and Powers Accounting Machine Company (later acquired by Remington Rand) were the two main competitors in supplying these systems and routinely provided innovations to enhance their products. (LC-USZ62-23,646). Second look: This photo shows work at the tabulator to be men’s work. Patterns in gendered labor in office work of 1920 is not always easy to figure out. Most secretarial work was well on its way to becoming female work because of the presence of the typewriter (after having been male work for many years), while most accounting work

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was still male in 1920 (despite the growing availability of accounting machines in the office). Fig. 2.18 The application of statistics

Advances in statistics made by important British scientists including Karl Pearson, William Sealy Gosset, and Ronald Fisher had made their way to the United States and were being used by social scientists in both governmental and non-governmental organizations. During the nineteenth century, the federal government had created seven information and statistical gathering agencies (Statistics of Income Division, Bureau of Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, Weather Bureau, Geological Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Interstate Commerce Commission). Between 1900 and 1920 the federal government created nine additional dataintensive agencies (Bureau of the Census, Crop Reporting Board, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Reserve Board, War Industry Board, Statistical Branch, Division of Research and Statistics, Bureau of Standards, Federal Bureau of Information). This photograph shows economist Leifur Magnusson (1882–1960) who worked with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the International Labor Organization. Date unknown, probably 1910–1915. (LC-DIG-ggbain-15566).

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Second look: The glasses, the rumpled suit, the frilly but askew shirt front, the unevenly tied tie, and the pens in the pocket give the image of the professional but other-worldly statistician—much more the academic than the corporate look.

Fig. 2.19 Four Minute Men

The Wilson Administration created the Committee on Public Information in 1917, under the direction of George Creel, to enhance patriotism to support American efforts during the First World War. It was one of the first major propaganda efforts in the United States, and its methods carried over after the war, e.g., into the 1920 presidential campaign. This poster advertises the Four Minute Men, volunteers who gave speeches on topics assigned by the Committee on Public Information in the down time as film reels were changed in public movie houses, which was the most popular form of public entertainment at the time. During the two years of the war,

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approximately 750,000 of these short speeches were presented. H. Devitt Welsh, artist. 1917. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-53577). Second look: The image of Independence Hall in the background strongly conveys the theme of patriotism. The banner “A Message from Washington” indicates that these 4-min speakers have the authority of the federal government. The image of the town crier shows that these 4-min men are the modern version of official communication that had been present in America since colonial times.

Fig. 2.20 Albert Lasker

In his 1920 presidential campaign, Warren Harding employed the advertising guru, Albert Lasker, who was a partner in the major advertising firm, Lord and Thomas, to place positive stories about him in national magazines such as Colliers and in newsreels produced by the growing film industry. Lasker played a leading role in the development of modern advertisement, known especially for his use of psychological techniques, e.g., when he advertised Lucky Strike cigarettes to women with the implied promise that smoking them would lead these women to be more slender. In the photo, Lasker sits on the left, with Harding and New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert to the viewer’s right, greeting some unknown young admirer. Yankee Stadium, 1923 (LC-DIG-ggbain-35841). Second look: Lasker, well-dressed, is seated next to the president of the United States, with the wealthy owner of the New York Yankees, amidst a number of older, well-dressed men. The image coveys Lasker’s success, wealth, and access to power.

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Fig. 2.21 Modernism and the silent film era

1920 was at the heart of the commercial silent film era, which lasted from 1910 to 1927. To break the control of the studio system, in which artists were entirely beholden to movie company executives, four of the biggest stars of the silent era joined together to create United Artists (L to R in front: director D.W. Griffith and actors Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks). This photo was taken in 1919 at the signing of the contract that founded United Artists. The silent film era was a period of great artistic innovation, and it arguably was an origin of several later modern cultural movements, including German expressionism, French impressionism, the soviet montage, and the classical Hollywood movement.6 (LCUSZ62-137,195). Second look: What a well-dressed, beautiful, famous set of revolutionaries trying to break the hold of corporate America. Where else might this happen other than in the entertainment industry?

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Alexandra Santiago, Silent Cinema’s Impact on Culture, 9 December 2019, https://medium.com/ @aasantiago1499/silent-cinemas-impact-on-culture-c4e5ed993952 (accessed 16 May 2023).

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Fig. 2.22 The speakeasy

When Prohibition went into effect in 1920, there was a new market for speakeasies, where people could drink illegally. Speakeasies presented a variety of information problems for potential customers: where were speakeasies to be found, how did one gain admittance, how expensive were they, and how safe were they from police raids or other crimes? Prohibition also raised information issues for the owners and managers of speakeasies: How did they find suppliers that could provide them with a consistent supply of safe, drinkable, not-too-expensive alcohol to serve? How did they avoid being raided by the police and how much would this cost them? How did they interact with organized crime in a way that enabled them to operate yet not lose control over their business? This is a 2015 photograph of a building in Cheyenne, Wyoming that served as a speakeasy in 1920. The original caption reads: “This was once home to the Tivoli, a restaurant and saloon built in 1883 by a brewery from Denver. Ladies, with or without escorts (very uncommon), were welcome. The structure was rebuilt and given two additional floors in 1892. Prostitution was legal in Wyoming till 1938 and the upper

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stories of the Tivoli were well known to many ladies of the evening and their clients. It’s said that during prohibition, there was a popular, fashionable speakeasy in the basement. Wyoming was the last state to ratify Prohibition. Due to disfavor of the dry laws, bootlegging of “hooch” between Colorado and here ran rampant until the amendment was repealed. The old Lincoln Highway ran past this building.” (Gates Frontiers Fund Wyoming Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-highsm-32871). Second look: Rather than being hidden away, with a basement entry down a dark alleyway, this speakeasy is housed in a grand building on a major city street. The co-location of a brothel calls up questions about the relationship between prohibition and organized crime. Also, we think of prohibition in terms of large cities; seldom do we speak of prohibition and Wyoming in the same sentence.

Fig. 2.23 Information for automobile drivers

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The American automobile industry took off in 1908 with the sale of the first Ford Model T automobile. During 1920, almost two million cars were sold in the United States, most of them gasoline powered. The automobile presented numerous information issues concerning which car to purchase, learning how to drive, learning navigable routes when many roads were still dirt and could be treacherous with mud in rainy season, how to change a tire since that happened frequently, where to have one’s car serviced and repaired, and where to find gasoline while on a trip and determine whether it was of good quality. This pamphlet was produced in 1921 for Standard Oil Company by Newman-Monroe, Chicago. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-85787). Second look: The entire message of this pamphlet is focused on information issues related to driving: where can gasoline be located? Will it be of sufficient quality to give one the horsepower needed and without damaging the engine? Do we need to rely on corporate suppliers such as Standard Oli to meet this need?

Fig. 2.24 Learning to drive

Learning to drive was an information issue. In 1920, there were 8 million registered drivers in the United States, including many women who had first learned to drive during the First World War. The first driving schools were created in the United States in 1917, and a form of driver’s education was first offered in the public schools in

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1920. This photo was taken later, in 1935, of a De Soto automobile on the floor of Evans-Palmer, a Washington, D.C., distributor of Plymouth and De Soto automobiles. The original caption reads: “And where does the depreciation hook on? Wash. D.C. Women drivers of the District of Columbia, intent upon finding out why their cars turn right when they signal for a left turn, and vice versa, are attending a driving school sponsored by the D.C. Federation of Women’s Clubs. A few of the class is shown here examining a chassis in an effort to find out why certain things happen when certain gadgets are pushed or pulled. From the left: Mrs. Harry W. Wiley, past Pres. D.C. Federation of Women’s Clubs; Mrs. Frances Golsen, Organizer and Conductor of the School for Safe Driving; Mrs. Ruth H.Snodgrass, Recording Secretary of the Federation of Clubs, and Mrs. Ernest William Howard, Jr., Chairman of Police and Fire Committee of the D.C. Federation of Women’s Clubs.” (LC-DIG-hec-39661). Second look: Apparently, even in the interwar years were women drivers the butt of sexist jokes. However, the wealth and powerful positions of the women shown in the photo indicate that driver education was regarded as an important issue— presumably as part of the equation for women to get ahead in their work and private lives.

Fig. 2.25 Home economics

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Germs, cleanliness of the house, and protecting the family’s health; or how to properly cook frozen foods in connection with home “labor saving” devices such as the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, and the washing machine were all new information problems for American housewives that were either not evident or not prominent before the First World War. There were numerous magazine articles in magazines targeted at women about these issues. Another information source was lectures given by the new profession of “home economists.” This is a home economics class taught at Howard University in Washington, DC in 1920. (LC-USZ62-26,662). Fig. 2.26 Magazines

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Magazines were a significant part of the information ecology of 1920. They had first been published in the United States prior to the Revolutionary War and became popular in the mid-nineteenth century when they were providing a combination of entertainment and news. Beginning in the late 1890s, Progressivist sentiments worked their way into magazines, and one began to see publications (Collier’s, Munsey’s, McClure’s) publishing serious stories targeted at the middle- and upper-class reader, about America’s ills as well as high-level stories on culture. Some of these magazines had national readerships in the hundreds of thousands. This remained the situation in 1920. This shows the front cover of McClure’s magazine in July 1920. Note the cost of the magazine, about $4 in today’s dollars for a single issue; it was a publication for middle-class and wealthy readers. (Taken from Wikimedia commons, https://com mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:McClures_1920-07.jpg).

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Fig. 2.27 Books

1920 was near the end of an ascendent era for the print media in America. Book publications per household peaked in 1910, dropping steadily until 1940, when the number started to rise again. During the 1920s and 1930, radio became established and cut into the readership and importance of the print media; and after the Second World War, television cut into the importance of both the print media and radio. This poster, published by the National Association of Book Publishers, at some time in the 1920s, promotes reading. Paul Honoré, artist. Date unknown, c. 1920–1930. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-42683). Second look: From this image, reading is for an older couple who have the money to afford a library with well-stocked bookshelves of hard-cover books. The man in the picture is not reading pulp fiction but instead an illuminated, nicely bound volume.

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Fig. 2.28 Public libraries

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One of the most important information institutions in the United States is the library. This has been true since colonial times. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first free public libraries began to appear—as a parallel to free public education, which had widespread public support by this time. By 1920, some of the public libraries were quite large, holding hundreds of thousands of books. Through the efforts of the American Library Association, libraries became a resource for servicemen as they tried to integrate back into society after the First World War. There were many more public libraries in the United States in 1920 because Andrew Carnegie had used his enormous wealth to build, between 1886 and 1919, over 1600 free public libraries in small towns and cities across 39 states. This stereograph shows the New York City Public Library, the most well-known public library in the United States in 1920, located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Keystone View Company, photographers. (LC-DIG-stereo-1s07011). Second look: Designed in the fancy Beaux Arts style, built using large quantities of expensive materials (six times as much marble as the city used in building either the New York Stock Exchange or the New York Chamber of Commerce), and placed in a prime location in Manhattan, the New York Public Library was regarded by the city leaders as an important institution for the well-being of the city.

Fig. 2.29 Higher education

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Higher education was an important information institution. While there was less than 10% growth in the number of higher education institutions in the United States between 1900 and 1920, from 977 to 1041, there was an explosion in the number of students, from 238,000 to 598,000. Teacher colleges and junior colleges were the types of higher education institutions growing most rapidly at the time. The number of Blacks attending college continued to be low. By 1900, more than 2,000 Blacks had graduated from college, and most but not all of them had graduated from one of the 78 Black colleges and universities that then existed. This photo, taken in 1907, shows Chrisman Hall on the Clark University campus in Atlanta. Clark was one of the leading Black universities at the time. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-31163).

Fig. 2.30 Walter Dill Scott and the persuasive advertisement

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There was widespread deception in advertising in the late nineteenth century, especially in the sale of patent medicines. This deception was denounced by the Progressives and led to the regulation of advertising by the Federal Trade Commission beginning in 1914. These deceptive ads were replaced in the first decade of the twentieth century with “reason-why copy [that] contained a vigorous sales argument, crammed with facts and pock-marked with dashes, italics, and exclamation points.”7 These information-heavy advertisements were not particularly effective. With the publication in 1908 of Psychology of Advertising by Walter Dill Scott, a professor of education and psychology at Northwestern University, advertising executives began to think about how to tap the unconscious behavior of consumers, and play upon suggestion and persuasion, to embed in consumers a desire to purchase their products. This movement was consummated in 1920 when John B. Watson, the influential creator of the theory of behaviorism in psychology, left his prestigious academic appointment at Johns Hopkins University and joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he spent the rest of his career managing major advertising accounts such as Ponds cold cream and Maxwell House coffee. This photo of Dill was taken between 1915 and 1920. Bain News Service. (LC-DIG-ggbain-31962). Second look: Although also an intellectual like Leifur Magnusson (Fig. 2.18), Dill is dressed neatly and carefully in clothes suitable for conducting business. The impression he leaves is someone who would interact well with corporate America.

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T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Rise of American Advertising.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 7, no. 5 (1983): 156–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40257575 (accessed 3 June 2022).

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Fig. 2.31 Scientific research

An infrastructure for scientific research was well established by 1920. US government support for scientific research began with the Morill Act establishing land-grant colleges for engineering and agricultural research and with the creation of the Department of Agriculture, both in 1862. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, companies began to create their own research laboratories, including General Electric, DuPont, AT&T, and Eastman Kodak. Private foundations also created independent scientific and medical research organizations during this period, notably the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The National Research Council was created in 1916 at the request of President Wilson to provide expert advice to the federal government as it faced the prospect of entering the First World War. After the war, President Wilson asked that the council be made permanent because of the continued importance of scientific advice in peacetime. The photo shows President Coolidge dedicating the building in Washington, DC for the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council in 1924. (LC-DIG-npcc-11373). Second look: While there are a few women in the general audience, all the people on the dais and in the privileged seating in the front row and along the left side are men. Clearly, scientific research was then regarded as a male occupation. Perhaps the men dressed in military uniforms along both sides, who are saluting, are doing

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so because of the presence of the president. The fact that the president would attend this inauguration of the building is an indication of the belief in the importance of scientific research to the government and the well-being of the nation.

Fig. 2.32 Insurance

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The insurance industry is among the most information-intensive industries. This is true more generally of the financial services sector—which includes property and casualty, home and commercial, and life insurance; banks and credit unions; and trust funds and pension companies, among others. The life insurance industry makes extensive use of data and calculation to produce actuarial tables of life expectancy, identify appropriate premiums, score the riskiness of potential customers, and keep track of data about customers and their payments and payouts. The American insurance industry made heavy use of desk calculators and punched-card tabulating machines that had been developed in the late nineteenth century and were perfected for business use in the first three decades of the twentieth century. There had been fewer than 100 life insurance organizations in the United States in 1900, but the number had grown to over 300 by 1920. Life insurance had become easier to obtain, as of 1911, when Equitable began to write group life insurance policies, covering all employees of a company without medical exams or individual applications. By 1919, Equitable had contracts with 29 companies for group policies, the largest one being with Montgomery Ward. The First World War (1917–18) and the Spanish flu (1918– 1921) also stimulated interest in life insurance policies. This is a flyer from Travelers Insurance Company, advertising their life insurance policies. Date unknown. (LC-DIG-pga-02094). Second look: The image on the front of the flyer is a highly improbably concatenation of steamboat, paddlewheel boat, and sailing vessel on a canal—one that includes a railroad bridge that is too low for the sailing vessel to pass under. The larger geographical setting is also improbable. In the distance on the hill is a mansion, while in both foreground and background are factories. Clearly, rather than intending to show a realistic setting that Travelers might insure against, the image is meant to reinforce the message that the insurance company covers all types of risk, or as the text says “against…accidents of every description”.

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Fig. 2.33 Telephone service

Although the telephone had been invented in 1876, the system for its use was still under development in 1920. As of 1913, one could still communicate only with the other users within one’s local exchange, and an exchange might not even cover an entire city. In 1915, the first transcontinental telephone line came into operation, but calls were expensive. The telephone system was nationalized by the federal government during the First World War (1917–1918) and operated by the US Post Office for a year after the war ended, until finally being returned to the control of AT and T. In 1920, calls were placed through human switchboard operators and most people had party lines with up to 10 people on their line; so, privacy and guaranteed access to the technology were still open to question. It was only in the mid-1930s that most people could dial their own calls, and only in the late 1950s that most people had their own private telephone line. This photo from 1925 shows a Native American telephone switchboard operator at the Many Glaciers Hotel in Glacier National Park in Montana. Bain News Service. (LC-DIG-ggbain-38272). Second look: While it is not remarkable to find that it is a woman operating a telephone switchboard, it is surprising to find that the operator is a Native American woman and that she is wearing traditional native clothing. In fact, if this photograph is not manufactured to provide cognitive dissonance, it is likely only because this switchboard is located within a national park that is the home to the Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai tribes.

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Fig. 2.34 Information by radio

The first commercial radio stations, WWJ in Detroit and KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting in 1920; and KDKA carried the coverage of the 1920 presidential election. The following year, KDKA provided the first play-by-play live coverage of a baseball game (Phillies vs. Pirates). 1920 was also the first time that radio receivers were sold in stores in the United States. The interest in radio grew quickly, and there were more than 500 broadcast stations in operation by 1923. A consortium of General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, and United Fruit Company formed the Radio Corporation of America in 1919, and in the 1920s it became the largest distributor of radio receivers and later, in 1926, created the first national broadcasting network (NBC). This photo shows Smithsonian scientist Fred C. Reed holding the “Tomato Can”, the radio microphone used on November 2, 1920, to broadcast the election returns from the Harding-Cox presidential election. 1938, Harris and Ewing, photographers. (LC-H22-D- 4803).

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2.1 Conclusions These photos show the presence of information issues in work and home life. They show, for example, the need for information to deal with the new farming technologies or to operate an automobile or a washing machine. Through developments related to the First World War, information became an important asset in political life (e.g., the presidential election of 1920) and in commercial life (through the increasing powerful and ubiquitous advertising). Information institutions were well established, which you can see in the rapid spread of public libraries, public schools, colleges and universities, and research laboratories. Data and statistics became a lifeblood of various government agencies and companies from various sectors, including banks and insurance companies, railroads, and large retailers. It is more difficult to capture in images some of the disciplining of information that took place, for example in the rise of numerical analysis, information retrieval, or library classification—even though these were also actively emerging areas of study in 1920. The images demonstrate that the paraphernalia of information had seeped into the living and working spaces of people; in other words, these were so important as to be physically part of their occupied space conveniently, if not essentially, close by—to be used frequently, such as a telephone or a book, or a technology that required lots of organized information, e.g., an automobile. Great care was taken by advertisers and artists, in how they presented an image because, by 1920, viewers were becoming increasingly aware of how images were presented and the underlying social and psychological messages they carried. As we took a second look at many of these images, we saw that there were underlying cultural meanings that can be teased out. But these efforts at semiotic reading of the images just scratch the surface, and various humanities scholars who are practiced with semiotics or other kinds of interpretive reading are encouraged to take this analysis further.8 What these images do is to reinforce the story told in Chapter One that there is an alternative history of 1920—and by extension of American history in general—that can and should be constructed by viewing these events through the information lens. These images leave one with the distinct impression that, by 1920, information and its ephemera had become a ubiquitous and quotidian part of American life. This kind of visual analysis also provides another critical tool as we undertake our metahistorical analysis of information history in Chap. 3.

8

On critically “reading” photographs, see for example Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography, pp. 142–153. (London: Macmillan, 1982); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History – Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Marsha Bryant, ed. Photo-textualities: Reading photographs and literature (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996); Barrett, Terry. Criticizing photographs: An introduction to understanding images (London: Routledge, 2020); Richard Salkeld, Reading photographs: an introduction to the theory and meaning of images (London: Routledge, 2020); or Carey Jewitt and Rumiko Oyama, Visual Meaning: A Social Semiotic Approach in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt, eds., The Handbook of Visual Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004).

Chapter 3

What is Information History and How Do We Study It?

Abstract Information history is still an emerging field, and there are many open questions about its extent, its content, and its methods. This chapter draws upon the findings of the information microhistory of America in 1920 presented in Chaps. 1 and 2 to join the discussion about the nature and theories of information history.

For as much as ‘information’ has a problem in terms of its semantic slipperiness, its ubiquity renders information history an ambitious and, for some, an unfathomable field of study.1 Information as a subject, with its various objects and tools, is a rapidly expanding subfield of history. No longer is it just about knowledge, history of the book, or the expanded use of newspapers … the vast supply of information so conspicuous in today’s society, it’s not a new phenomenon; it is, rather, the continuing use, volume, and visibility of codified information that human societies have created for thousands of years.2

Given the incipient nature of the study of information history, many questions are open about what information history is and how to study it. This chapter adds to this conversation by considering what we have learned from the case study of 1920 America that we carried out in the two previous chapters. Let us begin by summarizing what we learned in Chap. 1 when we compare a traditional historical account of 1920 America with an information-focused account. The findings are not all that surprising. Information institutions such as libraries and educational institutions that received passing mention in the traditional account are more center stage in the information history. Similarly, information-intensive industries are mentioned occasionally in the traditional accounts, e.g., the stock market crash in 1929, but otherwise receive little attention. By contrast, these industries, such as insurance and banking, are central to the information history. Because of the arcane nature and the technical terms and concepts, there is essentially no coverage in the traditional literature of the historical events in which existing disciplines such 1

Alistair Black and Bonnie Mak, Period, theme, event: Locating information history in history. Chapter 2 in Ida Nijenhaus et al., eds., Information and Power in History: Towards a Global Approach (London: Routledge, 2020). 2 Review by James W. Cortada of Information: A Historical Companion edited by Ann Blair et al., Journal of Interdisciplinary History, volume 52, 2 (Autumn 2021), pp. 265–267. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Aspray, Understanding Information History, SpringerBriefs in History of Computing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44134-9_3

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as mathematics, engineering, and library and information science provide “discipline” to information concepts through the study of numerical analysis, statistical analysis of information, and information retrieval. Among the information historians, this notion of disciplining information has been explored most extensively by James Cortada in his book Birth of Modern Facts. Technology is an issue that arises in the traditional historical literature, but that literature does not explore the fact that the emersion of new technologies into everyday work and home life drives a new need for information to accommodate the technology to people’s lives and a new round of information-seeking behavior using both existing (e.g., catalogs and conversations with neighbors) and new (e.g., farm agents, corn clubs) information sources.

3.1 How This Microhistory Compares to What Other Information History Scholars Say Belongs in Information History Before comparing this work to what other information history scholars think belongs in this field, let us consider more carefully what we have done in our microhistory. In a thoughtful article published more than a quarter of a century ago, the information scientist W. Boyd Rayward distinguished between two approaches to information history—the synchronic and the diachronic. In a synchronic approach, the “intention is to capture the idea of the historian of information science trying to tell the story of a period, however it is defined in one or many or all of its information manifestations… when, with an emergent technology and new kinds of needs within society, there arises the belief that an information revolution has begun.”3 As Rayward further explains: Here, it is a matter of broad narratives that may well touch selectively on social, organizational, political, technological, religious matters as they bear on the creation, value, and use of information artifacts; on reading, speaking, and viewing; on education and research; on the press and publishing; on records and record keeping; on government intelligence gathering; and on government regulation of speech, printing, and assembly. Especially important in the conditions of any time and place from the “information” point of view is the nature of, and the functionality inherent in, the existing communications technology. This necessarily constitutes an important part of the characteristic “information infrastructure” and what it enables in any historical period.4

Some historians have gone even further in their claims about the importance of information history. For example, Cortada has argued that the role of information in American history is “large enough to place it alongside political and legal institutions,

3

Rayward, W.B., 1996. The history and historiography of information science: some reflections. Information Processing and Management, 32(1), pp. 3–17. 4 Rayward 1996.

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shared social and religious values, and the role of immigrants in shaping American life.”5 This is a goal of our case study: to try to understand 1920 America in a way that highlights the importance of various types of information issues. So, this case study is an example of synchronic history. Nevertheless, the overarching goal of this book is not to better understand what happened in the United States in the year 1920; that is simply a means to the larger end of understanding how to rewrite American history with an information perspective or an even larger goal of understanding better what information history is and how and where it can be applied. Given these overarching goals, this book can also be seen to be written in Rayward’s diachronic style— pointing to an approach that pays greater attention to information issues that appear again and again over time and place, such as the shaping forces of information industries, infrastructures, and institutions, or of established ways of disciplining information, in the telling of history. As Rayward explains: The “diachronic approach” refers to the ways in which the historian of information science can examine developments in key idea or issues over longer periods. Where the synchronistic focus may be characterized as broad and the approach synthetical, here the focus is narrow and the approach analytical. There is a potentially endless range of such “ideas” that can be investigated diachronistically: the changing media of record and their impact on social and organizational memory; the changing forms and relationships entailed in evolving communication networks; changing approaches to “encyclopedia” or the systematic organization and presentation of received knowledge; the changing understanding and representation of the interrelationships of language, ideas and things in classification systems; developments in “information” institutions and the technologies and special media in terms of which they are constituted dash libraries, museums, archives, records repositories, in the offices of business and government.6

In our case study, we have discussed four topics that appear regularly in traditional historical narratives about 1920 America but that can be retold with a greater information perspective: farming, government bureaucratic practices, the Spanish flu, and prohibition. We have also covered nine topics concerning information institutions that receive relatively little coverage in traditional historical accounts: the print media, libraries, public and higher education, advertising, scientific research, consulting, the financial service industries, office appliances, and communication technologies. Finally, we have discussed five contexts in which information is being “disciplined” in a new way. We make no claims about the completeness of these lists of information-related topics; they are intended primarily as illustrative examples. But let us consider briefly just how complete our lists are by considering what other historians of information say about the scope of information history. The nature and content of information history have been regularly discussed by its early practitioners. In one of the first studies of what information history is, Toni Weller argues that there are five key topical areas: “library and book history; the history of information systems and infrastructures; the history of information disciplines; cultural and social explorations of information; and the origins of the 5 6

All the Facts, p. xv. Rayward 1996.

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information society.”7 Alistair Black provides a list of topics resembling Weller’s but slightly broader in scope: The history of information can be broken down into a number of component parts. These include the history of print and written culture, including the history of libraries and librarianship, and the history of more recent information disciplines and practices, namely information management, information systems, and information science. Contiguous areas like the history of the information society, surveillance, and the information infrastructure are also considered.8

In a similar vein, this author has argued elsewhere that there are six moderately welldeveloped subareas of information history (archival history, book and publishing history, communication history, computing history, information science history, and library history)—each with a certain amount of professionalization (e.g., common methods and approaches, an agreed upon core of literature, and specialty conferences and journals) but with little interaction across them. Whereas in mature fields, disagreements about the important readings, methods, frameworks, and approaches appear at the boundaries of the field, so far there has been little agreement across these subfields about what might be core to information history.9 The portion of the microhistory concerning information institutions and industries matches best what Weller, Black, and Aspray identify above as being central to information history. But the microhistory goes beyond these topics to include as part of information history both the academic work on disciplining information and many everyday topics of work and home that are not widely thought of as informationoriented but which nevertheless have an information aspect to them. In reading these efforts to define information history, I am reminded of the historical development of another, somewhat older subfield of information studies: information behavior. The first efforts in this area were built from the inside of the existing discipline. They focused specifically on conscious information-seeking behaviors, e.g., the reference visit to a library or the effort to query an information database. Over time, this subfield expanded greatly, by relaxing the need for the human information exchange to be a conscious one (i.e., a specific, consciously made information query by a human to an acknowledged information source) and a recognition, especially after the rise of the Internet and social media and the recognition that 7

Toni Weller, Information History—an Introduction: Exploring an Emerging Field (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2008). In a later edited volume, Weller gives examples of scholarship on information history covering a wide range of topics over a wide chronological period (Toni Weller, Information History in the Modern World (London: Palgrave, 2011)). 8 Alistair Black, Information History, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 40 (2006), 441–473. 9 William Aspray, The Many Histories of Information, Information and Culture 50, 1 (2015), 1-23. Another example is the edited book by Alfred Chandler and James Cortada, who implicitly define information history by the topics that they chose to cover in their book: printing (newspapers and pamphlets), postal service, telegraph, telephone, railroads and other transportation, computers, office automation technologies, radio, tv, motion pictures—and contextual factors such as international trade, rise of big business, govt. regulation (Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and James W. Cortada, eds., A Nation Transformed by Information, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)).

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information could be found in many sources beyond libraries and databases. Today, there is an interest among information behavior scholars in many different forms of human engagement with information, e.g., overload, fear, unconscious immersion, and information gathered through entertainment, and not just conscious seeking from acknowledged information sources. Also, the range of available sources in one’s information ecology has been recognized to be much larger: not only formal education, libraries, consultation with experts, and databases, but also, for example, casual browsing on Internet and social media sites, watching television, reading the newspaper, or casual encounters with friends and family. My guess is that the scope of coverage for information historians will broaden beyond these information institutions to include many realms of human activity. Then, an important issue will be to differentiate what is information activity from all other kinds of activity. There is, in fact, talk among these scholars of broadening the scope of information history further. Weller points to the comments of the historian Jon Agar, the author of an eye-opening book on the use of information and information technology in British bureaucracy,10 who argues for historians to reinterpret their current research to give greater emphasis to the information aspects that they have already identified.11 Black points to the opportunity to give greater information focus to “work in which social historians have highlighted the existence of past informal information networks.”12 He further notes that “the pervasiveness and intangibility of information renders elusive any normative definition of ‘information history’.”13 He follows this observation with a comment that is at once both cautionary and useful in describing the promise of the scope of information history: A subject field that potentially accommodates the history of communications, of the book, of copyright, of printing, of libraries and librarianship, of publishing, of organizational bureaucracy and infrastructures, of computing, of newspapers and periodicals, of the media, of clerical work, of intelligence, of market research, of propaganda, of professionals and their expert record systems, of manual and automated information technologies and systems, of information science, of accountancy, of knowledge, of scientific dissemination, of information warfare, of administration, of records and archives management, of software development, of Website creation and management, or of information management would be difficult to defend as a cohesive paradigm and might even attract accusations of naivety and scornful laughter.14

Black’s comment reminds me of a quip by Julian Bigelow, the original lead engineer on the Institute for Advanced Study computer project in Princeton. With the 10

Jon Agar, The Government Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Weller (2008). 12 Black (2006). 13 Black (2006). Black also discusses here how this new information history connects to but is different from the earlier theoretical work of such scholars as Michael Buckland and Boyd Rayward. 14 Black (2006). Rayward (1996) makes a similar point: “At one extreme, almost everything could be argued to be information. The history of the universe would then become the history of information processing. The history of humanity becomes the history of information processing within a social context. If everything is information, then not only is all history the history of information, all scientific work is information science”. 11

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promotion of Norbert Wiener and others, there was an unchecked enthusiasm in the 1950s for the seemingly limitless explanatory value of cybernetics. Bigelow was not enthusiastic about cybernetics and claimed that it had “more extent than content.”15 In an extended metaphor, historian Thomas Haigh explains how information technology history is still an emerging field, with an uncertain direction. Although this metaphor was written in 2011 and directed specifically at the technologically oriented subset of information history, it is still mostly true about all of information histories today. In many scholarly fields, the new entrant must work carefully to discover a gap in the existing literature. When writing a doctoral dissertation on the novels of Nabokov or the plays of Sophocles, clearing intellectual space for new construction can be as difficult as finding space to erect a new building in Central London. A search ensues for an untapped archive, an unrecognized nuance, or a theoretical framework able to demolish a sufficiently large body of existing work. The history of information technology (IT) is not such a field. From the viewpoint of historians, it is more like Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century. Building space is plentiful. Natural resources are plentiful. Capital, infrastructure, and manpower are not. Boosters argue for its natural advantages and promise that one day a mighty settlement will rise there. Speculative development is proceeding rapidly and unevenly. But right now the settlers seem a little eccentric and the humble structures they have erected lack the scale and elegance of those in better-developed regions. Development is uneven and streets fail to connect. The native inhabitants have their ideas about how things should be done, which sometimes causes friction with new arrivals. In a generation, everything will be quite unrecognizable, but how?16

3.2 The Scope of Information History Given this potentially large extent of information history, there are open questions about where information ends and more specialized disciplinary history begins. The prescient Rayward anticipated this discussion with several questions: A major question arises for the historian, as for the disciplinary expert, when one discusses the “chunks” of disciplines that might be said to fall within the ambit of information science— cybernetics, computer science, library science, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, general systems theory, linguistics, information theory and so on. How do we know confidently that we are writing the history of information science rather than simply a history of cybernetics, for example? Does it matter? At what point can we say that histories of libraries … contribute to what might be seen as the more general history of information science? To what extent does the historian of information science need to seek roots in the special disciplines and subdisciplines that bear on the study of information in its various definitions? What specialist technical knowledge is needed and must be demonstrated for particular contributions to be recognized and valued as such in the base disciplines?17 15

Personal communication from Herman Goldstine to William Aspray, late 1970s. Haigh, T., 2011. The history of information technology. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 45, pp. 431–487. 17 Rayward (1996). 16

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The magisterial information history handbook edited recently by Ann Blair and others is an artifact of the inchoate field of information history. This handbook is particularly valuable for sketching information history prior to 1870; in fact, the handbook covers topics going back to antiquity, examining, for example, information issues of maintaining early empires and early routes of commercial trading. This contrasts with a commonly held belief that information is a concept only associated with modern society, large government and business organizations, and advanced communication technologies.18 The thirteen chronological essays that begin this handbook provide valuable accounts of information elements in various periods of time, which are hard to find elsewhere. However, these overview essays are necessarily highly selective in the topics they cover.19 Moreover, they do not benefit from integrating the more detailed information appearing in the approximately 100 essays covering narrower topics found in the second half of the book. Another issue is that the chapters have a particular orientation toward the information object—the written word, or perhaps the visual image—as one of the essay authors astutely notes: whereas information theory since Claude Shannon’s pathbreaking work concentrates primarily on processes of communicating information and their reliability, semantic information as discussed by historians emphasizes the content that is transmitted. Notably, recorded information plays a disproportionate role in all historical thinkings. Only records enable us to reconstruct any sense of how the world informed human minds at specific times and places. Written records play a core role in such reconstruction, although information could always take also take place through images, by performances (possibly based on recorded scripts), and in various other ways. A focus on written records internally privileges literate societies such as late medieval and early modern Europe - and literate individuals within them, while also drawing our attention to the institutions that enabled the creation and reservation of written records.20

The Blair handbook can be seen as a political statement, claiming for general history intellectual territories that had been assumed by scholars from library and information science to be theirs. In fact, the handbook does a good job of sending its emissaries far and wide to establish outposts for general history. In fact, the handbook goes beyond that step. In the introduction to the handbook, the editors provide a conceptual scheme for organizing the specialized topics that appear in the second half of the book; and one can argue that this scheme suggests a useful framework (perhaps only one among many) for studying information history. For example, an alternative scheme is given by the Center for Humanities and Information, which has a categorical scheme around the words: abundance, algorithm, archive, bioinformatics, cognition, gossip, index, intel, keyword, knowledge, noise, screen, search, self-tracking, and tele.21 18

Important histories of information in this earlier period include Blair’s own masterful book on early information overload among scholars before the modern era in Too Much to Know (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and several books by Daniel Headrick, especially his When Information Came of Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 19 For example, in its opening paragraph, Chapter 9 explicitly states that it is “highly selective” in its coverage of nineteenth century media. 20 Randolph C. Head, p. 104 in Blair et al. (2021). 21 See Michele Kenerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan E. Abel, Information: Keywords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

92 Table 3.1 Thematic list of entries from Blair et al. (2021)

3 What is Information History and How Do We Study It?

Theme

Examples

Concepts

Information, intellectual property, networks

Formats

Books, databases, newspapers

Genres

Manuals, maps, social media

Objects

Cards, coins, government documents

People

Merchants, professors, readers

Practices

Accounting, censorship, teaching

Processes

Digitalization, globalization, quantification

Systems

Bureaucracy, libraries, telecommunications

Technologies

Cameras, computers, surveys

Table 3.1 provides the conceptual scheme from Blair’s handbook and three examples of each theme (not as many as listed in the handbook, but enough to get the gist) of a topic that falls within each category. The Blair book is best at appropriating territory, at suggesting how topics ranging widely across time, space, and topic can be part of the general historian’s remit as they write about information history. The most significant criticism of this work is the same one that Bigelow lodged against cybernetics as a concept. The handbook is not particularly analytical in indicating what makes for an informational moment in an historic episode. One can identify an information perspective on most any historical episode, so why does information history not appropriate all of general histories? But our goal is not to criticize this handbook, but to learn from it. Most of the microhistory of 1920 America in Chap. 1 was written prior to having access to Blair’s handbook and its conceptual scheme. So, how does this microhistory fit with Blair’s conceptual scheme? • While the microhistory does discuss information as presented in the Harding election and in the Committee on Public Information created during the First World War, it does not cover information networks, though it would be possible to do so in a longer study of information topics of 1920 America. The microhistory does not cover issues of intellectual property or privacy, which were emerging information policy concerns. For example, 1920 was a watershed year as it moved away from the weak copyright enforcement that had benefited the nation when it was largely an importer of foreign-authored books and began to strengthen copyright laws to protect the emerging American book industry. • The microhistory extensively covers several formats, including books, magazines, and newspapers; and, along this dimension, the microhistory fits well with the Blair categorization of information history. • The microhistory is less successful in covering genres, although it does mention examples of several genres that contributed to the new culture of the 1920s: “lost generation” writings, jazz, flapper, art deco, and the Harlem Renaissance. • This microhistory does not particularly focus on information objects (if one ignores the books, magazines, and newspapers mentioned above), but it does

3.2 The Scope of Information History

•

•

• •

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discuss in passing information objects such as decadal censes and government circulars on various agricultural topics. By “people,” Blair’s categorization refers to people engaging in occupational roles such as merchants or professors. The one place where the microhistory matches with this category most closely is in its discussion of consultants. However, a longer version of this microhistory would include, no doubt, other information occupations such as librarians, archivists, museum curators, and book publishers. Blair’s categorization is about larger processes such as globalization and digitalization, not the specific processes that define professions or occupations. There is occasional mention in the microhistory of the ongoing American debate on whether to play geopolitically on a world stage. This topic is not well developed in the microhistory, but it might be in a longer information-oriented history of America in 1920. Blair’s category of systems appears in the microhistory in the form of the creation of the radio communication system and the rise of data-driven bureaucracy of the federal government. Blair’s category of technology is well covered in the microhistory, which discusses communications, home and office appliances, and the automobile.

It is clear from Blair’s conceptual scheme that there is a much richer history of 1920 America that one could spell out and which one should undertake to write a comprehensive information history of America in 1920. However, the question raised by Rayward above, regarding the boundaries between information history and other types of history, as they relate to America in 1920, is well taken and not addressed adequately in the Blair handbook. Cortada has been working toward building a foundation for information history, which in part would address Rayward’s issues. Cortada has identified his own set of questions that all information historians should address in their research (see Table 3.2). He has also developed and given examples of the application of the concepts of information ecosystems, information infrastructures, and information flows and identified various facilitators and restrainers of information diffusion in American society.22

22

James W. Cortada, All the Facts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); James W. Cortada, Shaping Information History as an Intellectual Discipline, Information and Culture 47, 2 (2012), 119-144; James Cortada, 2016. New approaches to the history of information: ecosystems, infrastructures, and graphical representations of information. Library and Information History, 32(3), pp.179–202; Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). In the same vein as Cortada on professional development of the field of information history, Weller has prepared a literature review identifying some of the most important publications on information history in the decade ending in 2010 (T. Weller, 2010. An information history decade: a review of the literature and concepts. Library and Information History, 26(1), pp. 83–97.).

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Table 3.2 Cortada’s fundamental questions for information historians23 • What vessels were used to collect and store information in many different societies and times? • By profession, job, or other human activity, what information was collected, used, and shared? • What were the patterns of adoption and use of information over time? • How did the use of information affect the work and lives of specific individuals and then of groups? • What other historical discourses should be viewed as information history? • What are the intrinsic features of facts themselves and how did those affect the creation and use of other facts?

In a thoughtful essay, Alistair Black and Bonnie Mak have also identified some of the ways in which an information history approach can be beneficial to historical practice.24 Examining information provision, organization, and access can help the historian to reconsider issues of progress and periodization. Focus on information practices and performances can help the historian to compare different times and places, thereby avoiding ahistoricity. Tracking paperwork or structures of information management can enable the historian to track issues of power—again with sensitivity to time and place. An information approach can help the historian to look beyond a particular technology and see the larger socio-technical system in which it is embedded. The information historians, as they try to define the issues and boundaries of their field, have not yet come to full terms with other academic disciplines that have examined information in society. One example involves a group of economists who have tried to understand the nature of knowledge production. They include Fritz Machlup, Jorge Reiner Schement, Marc Uri Porat, and others.25 For example, from the 1950s through the 1970s, Machlup tried to identify and quantify the sources of knowledge production in the American economy. In the 1970s, Porat conducted an extensive study of the various sources of information for the US Department of Commerce. These studies take a careful look at the various occupations and industries involved and may help information historians to decide about the actors, actions, and boundaries of information history.26 23

Cortada (2021) See Chap. 1. Alistair Black and Bonnie Mak, Period, theme, event: Locating information history in history. Chapter 2 in Ida Nijenhaus et al., eds., Information and Power in History: Towards a Global Approach (London: Routledge, 2020). 25 See, for example, Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy: Definitions and Measurement (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, May 1977, OCLC 5,184,933); and Jorge Reine Schement and Terry Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions in the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995). 26 There are also a number of famous economists who have studied the economics of information in a more abstract and theoretical way, including Kenneth Arrow, Friedrich Hayek, A. Michael Spence, and George Stigler. It is less immediately clear that the information historians can learn from them, but it is worth consideration. James Cortada has examined this latter group of economists briefly 24

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Another body of scholarship that the information historians might draw upon is the academic analysis of the information society. An excellent place to start this examination is with the sociologist Frank Webster in his Theories of the Information Society.27 He argues that information societies are defined typically in terms of (1) the introduction of technologies, (2) an economy that is highly dependent on information and information technologies, (3) changes in the nature of work and the number of workers involved with information and information technologies, (4) the emergence of information networks that cut across traditional geographic boundaries and change relations of space and time, or (5) the ever-presence and tangibility of information as a part of the culture.28 Webster presents and reviews the analytic lenses of many leading scholars from the humanities and social sciences on the information society: post-industrial society (Daniel Bell), network society (Manuel Castells), advanced capitalism and information (Herbert Schiller), the public sphere and information (Jurgen Habermas), reflexive modernization (Anthony Giddens), and others. These lenses of the information society scholars are useful to the information historian as she conceptualizes her work. Another source of input to the information historians is the work of computer scientist Anthony Oettinger and his Program on Information Resources Policy that flourished at Harvard University in the 1970s and 1980s but is not widely remembered today. The program produced some 500 book-length reports. One paper from this program, in particular, comes to mind as worthy of consideration: by John McLaughlin and Anne Berenyi on “The information Business” (see Fig. 3.1).29 The main diagram from this paper shows that different kinds of information businesses can be positioned on a two-dimensional graph, depending on the degree to which the business is a product or a service, as well as the degree to which it verges from being about conduit or content. This tool provides the information historian with yet another lens by which to examine various information activities. For example, in their report, they take snapshots at different points in time, using this two-dimensional graph to show, for example, which parts of the information business fell under direct government regulation and how that situation changed over time as the regulated communications industry came increasingly into contact with the mostly unregulated computer industry.

in his study of the disciplining of information by economists in Chapter 8, Birth of Modern Facts (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2023); and he has studied in more detail the work of the former group of economists, particularly Machlup, in The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 27 Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (4th ed., London: Routledge, 2014). 28 See William Aspray, Information Society, Domain, and Culture, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2015; and The Many Histories of Information. Information and Culture, 50.1 (2015): 1-23. Also Isabel Alvarez and Brent Kilbourn, “Mapping the Information Society Literature: Topics, Perspectives, and Root Metaphors,” First Monday 7, 1 (2002). 29 From: John McLaughlin with Anne E. Birinyi, “Mapping the Information Business,” Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, 1980. This report was a favorite of Oettinger

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Fig. 3.1 Mapping the information business

One final point about doing information history is that it is all too easy to ignore the quotidian elements of information in everyday life and focus instead on the exceptional or the flamboyant rather than the representative but commonplace features. As the writer of a book about 1920 stated, “Unfortunately, too many historians … began the long, gradual process of distorting the truth of the year. The extraordinary became the norm, the norm too dull to be newsworthy.”30 We have seen in this book that, looking at 1920 America from an information perspective, one would give more attention to a multitude of topics, including among others: the print media, libraries, public and higher education, advertising, scientific research and technological development, consulting, the financial services industries, office appliances, and communication technologies. We also saw that some of the traditional coverage would be altered. Farming, which is often treated as the occupation from the pre-modern era, is reframed as a vital, information- and technologyintensive activity. The focus on information and information technologies allows one to better understand the growth and effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy in the Progressive Era and during the First World War—a watershed in making government work data-driven. One can find many information parallels between the Spanish flu and today’s COVID, e.g., the numerous myths that circulated about causes and (personal communication of May 2023 from James Cortada, reporting on his conversation with Oettinger in the 1980s). 30 Eric Burns, 1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar (New York: Pegasus Books, 2015). This comment from Burns refers to the striking photographs of flappers, who, as he says of the photographers and journalists of the time, “could not resist one of journalism’s fundamental principles: blowing the atypical out of proportion to attract readers and viewers”.

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treatments, and the checkered record of government in informing the public about the disease. Viewing the prohibition through an information lens, one gives greater attention to the information-seeking behavior that is involved by all stakeholders (the public, bar and restaurant owners, speakeasy owners, smugglers, moonshiners, and organized crime) to provide the American public with the alcoholic beverages they desire. This microhistory is of course merely a case study that suggests how an information perspective can be used in telling a piece of American history, or any history. It would have taken a book, or a whole shelf of them, to provide adequate coverage of the information history of America in 1920. But we hope that this case study points the way toward this kind of scholarship. It seems that many of the early scholars in information history have been marking territory as relevant to their field. Clearly, certain information industries, institutions, and occupations belong in an information history. However, it is clear that there is value in taking an information perspective to historical events that are less clearly about information. There is an information take on farming, not only on librarianship, for example. The first generation of information historians has been less concerned about and made less progress on the boundaries of information history—when to cede discussion to a more traditional disciplinary historical account. While this microhistory was too abbreviated to fully answer these questions of what is information history, it is clear that abstract debates over definitions and boundaries can find resolution in the treatment of these issues for a particular time and place.

3.3 Further Reading For further reading on information history, see the suggestions in Table 3.3. This a selective rather than exhaustive list of books and it does not include the journal literature.

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Table 3.3 Further reading—a selective bibliography of key books in information history *William Aspray, ed., Writing Computer and Information History: Approaches, Connections, and Reflections (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2024) *Alistair Black and Dave Muddiman, The Early Information Society: Information Management in Britain Before the Computer (Routledge, 2007) *Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) *Ann Blair et al., eds., Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021) *James Cortada, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States Since 1870 (Oxford, 2016) *James Cortada, Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems and Infrastructures (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) *James Cortada, Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments, and Businesses (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) *Irene Farkas-Conn, From Documentation to Information Science: The Beginnings and Early Development of the American Documentation Institute-American Society for Information Science (Greenwood Press, 1990) *Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard University Press, 2009) *Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2002) *Dorothy Lilly and Ronald Trice, A History of Information Science, 1945–1985 (Academic Press, 1989) * Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) *Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy: Definitions and Measurement, U.S. Department of Commerce, May 1977, OCLC 5184933 *Boyd Rayward and Mary Ellen Bowden, eds., Conference on the History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems (Information Today, 2004) *Jorge Reine Schement and Terry Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions in the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995) *Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (4th ed., London: Routledge, 2014) *Toni Weller, Information History—An Introduction: Exploring an Emergent Field (Chandos Publishing, 2008) *Toni Weller, The Victorians and Information: A Social and Cultural History (VDM Verlag, 2009) *Toni Weller, Information History in the Modern World: Histories of the Information Age (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) *Toni Weller et al., eds., Routledge Handbook on Information History (Routledge, forthcoming 2024)