Margaret Sanger’s World: 1916

The U.S. population was 101,961,000. Today it’s nearly tripled at 300,001,295. Nathan’s Famous was founded nearby in Coney Island, charging five cents a hot dog. Today you can buy one on the boardwalk for $2.50.
 
The Summer Olympic Games and Wimbledon were canceled due to Word War I, but the war didn’t stop a horse named George Smith from winning the Kentucky Derby. Intolerance, a silent film about greed, cost an unheard of $2 million to make. Compare that to last year’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, another movie about greed, which was made for a scant $225 million.

The first issue of The Journal of Negro History was published in 1916, and Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam won the Nobel Prize for literature. He is virtually unknown today, revealing the often capricious nature of this coveted award. Readers that year were also treated to The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Albert Einstein published his paper on relativity, which changed the way the world thought about, well, the world.

What else was going on in 1916? Monet began painting his monumental Water Lilies and the Dada art movement was launched in Zurich. Gifted, prolific writer Henry James died in February, the same month that feminist Emma Goldman was arrested for delivering a lecture on birth control. That spring, The Saturday Evening Post published its first Norman Rockwell cover (“Boy with Baby Carriage”).

Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Brandeis paved the way for Benjamin Cardozo (1932), Felix Frankfurter (1939), Arthur J. Goldberg (1962), Abe Fortas (1965), women’s rights stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1993), and Stephen Breyer (1994).

The summer brought a tragedy that would become a touchstone for future beach-goers of America. Sharks attacked five swimmers along 94 miles of Jersey Shore coastline, resulting in four deaths. Fifty-eight years later, these shark attacks would inspire Peter Benchley to write Jaws, the bestselling novel that an unknown, 28-year-old director named Steven Spielberg would turn into the first summer blockbuster movie.

On July 22, a bomb exploded in San Francisco during a Preparedness Day parade. Ten died, and 40 were injured. Eight days later German terrorists blew up Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. Smoke covered the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan. On September 11, 2001, the Black Tom terror attack was hardly a blip on the radar screen of historians and pundits looking for a precedent.

That October, while Margaret Sanger was opening the doors to the first birth control clinic, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series against Sanger’s home team, the Brooklyn Robins. The Sox won four games to one on Babe Ruth’s record-setting pitching and hitting (a feat unheard of in modern times).

In November, television journalist Walter Cronkite was born. Cronkite’s voice carried us through space flights, the death of JFK, many presidential elections, and the passage of Roe v. Wade. On Election Day Democrat Woodrow Wilson won a second term, and in Montana, 36-year-old Republican Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, out of 435 House members, only 70 are women.

In 1916, Robert Frost released Mountain Interval, which included the poem “The Road Not Taken.” For future generations of women, men, and teens across the United States and around the world, the road Margaret Sanger chose made all the difference.