Derek Thompson wrote one of the most interesting things I've read lately.

One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are

I'll cherry-pick, for my own archive.

[...] No other country rivaled America’s automotive love affair. According to the historian Bill Bryson, 1920s Kansas alone had more vehicles than France. Car ownership created an entirely new way of thinking about the self in relation to the environment—an “automobile psychology.” Social scientists spoke of the modern “gypsy family,” which seemed to spend more time inside the car than outside it.

Something that still strikes Europeans when they visit US. Americans, and America, has a special relationship with cars. Dreams, habits, infrastructure, cities, almost every aspect of the american life has the car at its core.

It is remarkable to read the report’s analysis of radio’s effect on American life, because it reads so alarmingly modern. Above all, the authors were concerned that radio encroached on individuality by mind-wiring each American to a global monolith of news and entertainment. Mass media organizations created “greater possibilities for social manipulation,” they wrote, and radio threatened to turn the individual into what the philosopher Martin Heidegger in this period called a “they-self”—a being who, failing to achieve authenticity, fully adopts the tastes, habits, and beliefs of the universal crowd.

But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”

[...] In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”

Go read the whole piece: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/america-1926-an-absurdly-deep-dive