What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who Americans Are

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…