Human beings are an ever-evolving species. Once, we carried spears and created fantastic works of art on the walls of French caves. Today, we carry smartphones and often get distracted by them. Yes, the human species continues to advance in many ways.
Since the Industrial Revolution, things have changed at such a fast pace that we sometimes forget just how different the world used to be. Things that were once commonplace seem strange or even unusual today, although it’s probably also true that humans who lived 100 years ago would find some of our modern habits peculiar. Sadly, we don’t have any way to actually show an early 20th-century person a YouTube video of someone attempting a modern challenge. But we can at least reflect on the unusual habits of our recent ancestors.
This may sound like fiction, but it’s actually non-fiction. One hundred years ago, in many big cities in the United States, it was illegal to be deemed unsightly in public.
Let’s take Chicago as an example. According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1881, Alderman James Peevey introduced an ordinance to ban people who were « diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object » from the streets of Chicago, where they might make people uncomfortable. If you were deemed too unsightly to be in public, you had to pay a fine of $1 to $50 (which was a decent sum in those days) or go to the poorhouse, which was a place for those in need.
After World War I, when veterans returned home with missing limbs and other disfiguring battle scars, public opinion toward the disabled started to change, but these laws remained on the books and their enforcement continued up until the 1950s. Chicago’s unsightly law wasn’t officially dropped until 1974.
Now we’d love to say we’re way more enlightened today but body-shaming is still a thing, so collective enlightenment is perhaps still forthcoming. But at least body-shaming isn’t written into law.
Before there was Halloween, there was Thanksgiving. No, really. People used to dress up in costumes, run around the city streets making noise, and go to costume parties. On Thanksgiving.
According to NPR, the tradition was so well loved that in 1897 the LA Times reported that Thanksgiving was « the busiest time of the year for manufacturers of and dealers in masks and false faces. » And if that isn’t enough to make your head spin, costumed kids would also march in groups around their neighborhoods and ask adults « Anything for Thanksgiving? » And then the adults would give them candy. Oh-kay.
The custom bothered a lot of people. In fact, New York’s school superintendent, who was almost certainly related to the person who came up with the whole unsightly law thing, complained that the tradition seemed designed to mostly just « annoy adults » and was incompatible with « modernity. » Anyway, it might surprise you to hear that this particular Thanksgiving tradition is sort of still around, only now you mostly only see elaborate Thanksgiving costumes in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Kids really didn’t want to give up the whole candy-getting thing, though, and by the 1930s the practice of going door to door in search of treats became a Halloween tradition, although it was mostly an organized event meant to curtail Halloween vandalism and violence — hence the expression « trick or treat. »