HBM116: Finest and Most Rotten (Going Forward)

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2019

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mar 21, 1919 - NEW YORK CITY

An anonymous writer for the New York Tribune stands at 154 Nassau. The writer asks passers-by a simple question: “Do you think this is a good world?” It’s just four months after Armistice Day, and on the tail of a flu pandemic that killed 55 million worldwide. The writer publishes five answers, ranging from “damned rotten” to “the finest”.

Mar 21, 2019 - NEW YORK CITY

Producer Ula Kulpa stands at the same spot and flags down passers-by 100 years later and asks the same question, “Do you think this is a good world?” Today, life expectancies are up, yet we still fight wars. We are still sometimes cruel to loved ones and strangers. So, with the perspective of an additional century, what do New Yorkers think about the world’s goodness?

Producer: Going Forward (Julia Drachman, Ula Kulpa)
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Smiles by Lambert Murphy (1918), You Hear the Lambs a-Cryin' by Fisk University Jubilee Singers (1920)

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:07.0	This is Here Be Monsters. Can I ask you a question?
0:15.0	It's really fast.
0:19.2	So a hundred years ago, a reporter stood here
0:21.2	and asked people if they think this is a good world.
0:23.2	Can I ask you the same thing?
0:25.6	It's March 21st, 2019.
0:28.7	I'm in Lower Manhattan outside of 154 Nassau Street, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall.
0:35.0	I've been planning to do this for two years, just waiting for the day to come.
0:40.0	It started while I was researching another project. I found this column in an issue of the New York Tribune from March 21st, 1919.
0:49.0	It was just a small square with five quotes in it. A reporter had stood right here at 154 Nassau and asked people if they thought
0:57.1	it was a good world.
1:00.7	The Tribune reporter was an anonymous writer who went by The Inquiring Collumist, like columnist with a why.
1:09.0	Columnist was a position newspapers brought in during the First World War.
1:14.1	It filled the gaps when the earlier investigative journalism that criticized the rich and powerful
1:18.8	fell out of favor as publishers tried to get the country unified in support of the war effort.
1:24.0	Columists wrote poems and humor and sometimes profiled people in their city,
1:29.0	all the average goings on around them.
1:32.0	The Man on the Street style was born out in columns like this one.
1:36.1	Five answers to a simple question. Do you think this is a good world. My lord smoke is white so sweet.
2:00.0	Two of the answers are similar. A man named Woodman Morrison said,
2:04.0	I don't. I think it's one hell of a rotten world.
	...

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