For your interest: excerpts from the southwest Indiana “Tri-state area” including Evansville, reported in 1983-95. I selected these items from a column by Harold Morgan published monthly in the Maturity Journal, who highlighted events reported from a long-gone newspaper called the Evansville “Journal” and the Henderson, Kentucky “Gleaner,” from which today’s Evansville “Courier and Press” is descended. It was inspired mainly by comments I have seen here on my Facebook “newsfeed” about evil corporations, to say nothing of religious organizations, our court system, etc., and to which I have responded that it is people who are evil, since corporations, churches, etc. are not entities that can act of their own volition, but are merely organizations of human design that have codified and legal existences, in contrast with people who work or operate under that “umbrella” of legitimacy and who really can do the evil deeds that outrage us. Here are some of the things that happened around here about 120 years ago. I have kept editorial content to a minimum. But you can add conclusions or suggest commentary as you like. I supplied my own conclusions at the end. 1. In Madison County, Indiana, orphans were being sold for $35 per head, reportedly a common practice by orphanages of the day (1893). 2. On December 16, 1893, the Big Four Railroad Bridge, under construction across the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky collapsed into the water, killing 21 workers. Two years earlier, 16 caisson workers were killed in two separate accidents while working on the same bridge. 3. A 13-year-old girl was rescued from a brothel on Evansville’s west side, and taken to the Humane Society for refuge. The paper did not report the nature of her quarters at the Society. The child had been “given away” three times already. 4. In March 1894 a child’s body was found beneath a pile of manure at the city library, and a child’s skeleton was found beneath a house being demolished in nearby Newburgh. 5. In a series of related stories, prior to 1894, slaughterhouses were allowed to operate within the city limits, and they simply dumped their waste onto the ground and let it flow where it would. A bacteriological test of the Evansville water supply on May 13, 1895 found the water unfit for human consumption. There were 206 cases of typhoid during the previous three weeks. In 1895 most Evansville residents acquired their drinking and cooking water from rain barrels that collected water that fell on roofs. Roofs had to be cleaned frequently of bird droppings, soot, and dust [the Journal reported!]. The Corps of Engineers began installing underground sewers in Evansville in 1895. The water still ended up in the Ohio River where many citizens bathed and collected water for household use. Ten cases of typhoid, 10 cases of diphtheria, and 18 cases of scarlet fever were reported in the month of October 1895 in Evansville alone. 6. In July 1895, three men were killed in unrelated Evansville streetcar accidents. In November, a gas company worker died when he fell onto a bed of live coals at the gas plant. 7. A bark fire began in late 1894 in a pile of waste bark at a sawmill within Evansville and could not be extinguished, burning for more than two weeks. In 1895 another bark fire burned on Evansville’s city wharf where such trash was allowed to be dumped. Open-air fires were routinely set at the city dump to incinerate the trash, fouling the air with odors and smoke [note: this practice continued until after World War II, and the author of this column stated that as a child he could smell these fires in his neighborhood frequently!]. My conclusion from all this is that human societies can apparently tolerate no end of depraved, careless, and ignorant behavior when no one is empowered to establish institutional responsibility and a collective conscience, and then be prepared to pass judgments having consequences to the people who violate those guidelines. Perhaps this is an answer to a question you might hear about why we have so many regulations and why we need “watch-dog” agencies to make sure the regulations are followed. These reports show that the days before such regulation were not “the good old days.” I think (hope!) that even current extreme right-wingers would be appalled by any such things happening today, and that would show that our society has been able to make some progress since the constitution was written, after all. (Sorry, Rand Paul!)
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:23:20 +0000
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