I’m having my morning coffee this Labor Day Monday. It appears that the tropical storm that had been heading our way has veered off and left us with a nice day. I’m staying close to the house today, preparing for the semester ahead and attending to a few other tasks. There is so much to get done in the coming weeks; it’s nice to have a day to regroup a bit.

I came across and thought I’d share this Brooklyn Daily Eagle page from Labor Day Weekend 1916. Like now the United States was then in the middle of a presidential election, with the incumbent Wilson running against Charles Evans Hughes on the motto that he had kept us out of war. What struck me about the newspaper one sees here is that Fall 2016 was very much America’s Last Autumn, much in the way that 1914 was Europe’s Last Summer. A difference would be that for Europeans the guns of August came entirely out of the blue, whereas American two years later were cognizant of the stakes and potentiality of their involvement in the war. That’s what makes the newspaper here so striking. I won’t run down the headlines because one can read them readily enough, but it is fascinating to see what Americans, or at least New Yorkers, were thinking about during their Labor Day holiday one hundred years ago.

(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)