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Newspaper in 1924 writing to historians in 2024 , Casper daily Tribune , 25th march 1924.
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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I'm confused, doesn't the way this is written imply that none of that is true, but rather that their newspapers are sensationalized? why is everyone going "same as it ever was"?
edit: yes I'm aware corruption existed 100 years ago just as it exists today, I was just confused about people ignoring the written words of the post
Except Standard Oil has been broken up 13 years earlier and 1924 was smack in the middle of Prohibition and the illegal transportation of alcohol was called bootlegging. Both the breakup of Standard Oil and the alcohol ban are written down in legal documents, so we can confirm their existence wasn't sensationalized.
Bootlegging would be the only part that could have been sensationalized, but I see how people drink today and I don't think thousands of years of human behavior with alcohol was sensationalized, leading me to a conclusion that we as a society wouldn't just give up alcohol for a decade, bootlegging was almost certainly not sensationalized.
If the contemporary context wasn't the above, I might have agreed with the implication of sensationalization. Due to that contemporary context however it doesn't read like that.
Today's equivalent is the War on Drugs and while there's a ton of hysteria and sensational coverage as well, it can't be denied that drugs are HUGE business. Huge profit margins on cheap to produce, addictive products, with government enforcing strict restrictions on supply? It's the same thing all over again.
We will study the meth epidemic in 100 years and say "how did the government decide this situation was better than the public having access to clean, legal prescription amphetamines?"
Or that the people of 1923 were not as informed as the people of 2023, so they could self delude enough to believe corruption was the exception and politicians were generally well-meaning except for a few profligates.
In 2023 we can actually do some research and see that by far the majority of them are rotten to the core and the few left have to condone it to some degree in order to negotiate with them. Much like law enforcement, in which there are violent, corrupt officers and those who are willing to lie in court to protect them. Everyone else has long since been ousted.
The non-white neighborhoods in the 1923s (including the Irish and Italian neighborhoods) would be able to tell you from experience that the corruption is through and through.