1 The number of annual traffic fatalities has dropped significantly in the past century. Despite having to avoid infinitely more cars, only 269 pedestrians in New York were killed by automobile accidents in 2010. Deaths by horse-drawn wagon have also dropped substantially.
2 As of 2009, this infant-mortality rate would have ranked between the nations of Zambia and Mali.
3 The Tartarin of Tarascon—“Traveler, ‘Turk,’ and Lion-Hunter”—was the title character of an adventure novel popular during the 1880s.
4 The highest wind velocity recorded in New York City to that point had been eighty miles an hour. At roughly 120 miles an hour, a Weather Bureau anemometer in Galveston, Texas, had blown from its mooring.
5 One infant girl came to have her whooping cough treated and acquired “measles, pneumonia, abscess and possibly erysipelas” as well. A four-year-old boy had been in the wards for more than a year, though his health seemed fine. Doctors diagnosed him with a troubling condition: “no residence, no disease, no friend, no parents.”
6 The previous time that temperatures had fallen so low had been fifteen years earlier, in 1899.
7 The A.F. of L. annual convention, which had just met in Seattle, had brought together the Alliance of Bill Posters and Billers of America; the International Association of Heat, Frost, Insulators, and Asbestos Workers; the Pocketknife Blade Grinders’ and Finishers’ National Union; the International Union of Pavers, Rammermen, Flaglayers, Bridge, and Stone Curb Setters; the Travelers’ Goods and Leather Novelty Workers’ International Union of America; the International Union of the United Brewery, Flour, Cereal and Soft Drink Workers of America; and the International Union of Journeymen Horse-shoers of the United States and Canada.
8 Today, a restaurant “omnibus” would be called a “bus boy.”
9 Rutgers Square is now Straus Square.
10 William Gibbs McAdoo, the secretary of the treasury, was a former police commissioner of New York City.
11 This absurd “experiment” is characteristic of the Mitchel administration’s efforts at social science. Combining minuscule research samples, compromised and biased observations, and outrageously broad goals, its uselessness as a practical solution to the structural problems of unemployment is apparent. Just as an example, the men were supposed to be chosen at random but were in fact “typical” cases handpicked by charity experts. The Binet tests, involving reciting the days of the week, could supposedly measure mental acuity. Here is a newspaper’s description: “The Binet tests used consisted of noting how rapidly or slowly the mind of the examined man worked. The doctors knew just how long it should take a person of a certain age to answer certain questions, to do simple problems requiring thought, or to run through certain formulae, such as the days of the week, the months of the year, forward and backward.”
12 A successful movement: Blackwell’s Island was renamed Welfare Island in 1921; since 1973, it has been known as Roosevelt Island.
13 In Chicago, the arrival of The Inside of the White Slave Traffic was not welcomed. “The New York police stopped it,” opponents argued, “and our police should never let it open here.” In D.C., the mayor himself declared, “If it’s too bad for New York, it certainly should not be shown in Washington.”
14 The chicken belonged to one Ned O’Neill, who had recently been arrested; the bird was serving an indeterminate sentence.
15 Not, it will be noted, the two women that Davis had claimed.
16 The cost of alcohol had risen dramatically as Prohibition approached. Rye whiskey had gone from five dollars a quart in August to twelve dollars in September; by October, champagne was selling for fifty dollars a bottle—ten times its prewar price.