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The Indianapolis Star, Indiana, October 5, 1924

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Judge magazine, 1921

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“Detractors delighted in linking “the volatile matter” of wood-pulp paper with the “volatile minds” of pulp readers. Londoner W. Coldwell wrote a three-part diatribe, “On Reading,” lamenting that “the noble art of printing” should be “pressed into this ignoble service.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge mourned how books, once revered as “religious oracles … degaded into culprits” as they became more widely available.

By the end of the century there was growing concern—especially among middle class parents—that these cheap, plentiful books were seducing children into a life of crime and violence. The books were even blamed for a handful of murders and suicides committed by young boys. Perpetrators of crimes whose misdoings were linked to their fondness for penny dreadfuls were often referred to in the newspapers as “victims” of the books. In the United States, “dime novels” (which usually cost a nickel) were given the same treatment. Newspapers reported that Jesse Pomeroy, a teenage serial killer who targeted other children, was “ a close reader of dime novels and yellow covered literature [yellowbacks], until,” as was argued in his trial, “his brain was turned, and his highest ambition” was to emulate the violent dime novel character “Texas Jack.” Moralizers painted the books as no better than “printed poison,” with headlines warning readers that Pomeroy’s brutality was “what came of reading dime novels.” Others hoped that by providing alternatives—penny delightfuls or “penny populars”—they could curb the demand for the sensational literature. A letter to the editor to the Worcester Talisman from the late 1820s tells young people to stop reading novels and read books of substance: “[F]ar better were it for a person to confine himself to the plain sober facts recorded in history and the lives of eminent individuals, than to wander through the flowery pages of fiction.””

Adler, Rachel. “The 19th Century Moral Panic Over ... Paper Technology.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 4 Aug. 2017, www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/08/the_19th_century_moral_panic_over_paper_technology.html.

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The volatile minds of these triflers feed upon volatile matter; and over sheet after sheet they skim with a rapidity almost incredible. No pigeon flies quicker; nor in all its atmospheric gambols diverges farther from the straight line. The airy wheels of these fanciers of things are, like the sportive flocks of rooks amidst the ethereal concave, to be accounted for upon no principle but that of whim.

Alas! what do these multitudes of human beings acquire by this vouminous reading? Acquire! what do they wish to acquire? Nothing! Already wise, already great, already independent of science and religion, to acquire ideas is not their aim. What can be their object then in a course of reading? To slaughter an hour--to kill time! The amusement the pursuit affords is their object, viz. to kindle up pleasing sensations in incessant variety, amidst their bosoms, which, like the delirium of the drunkard, leads the man out of himself, and for the moment fills the achiving void which the total vacuity of such minds labour under; and with which they are as seriously afflicted as a patient labouring under a confirmed chronic despair.

Who could have supposed, when printing, in its infancy, was hailed, like light from heaven, divine--a gift from above to chase away the demon, darkness, and lead up men to glory, that it would be prostituted to such a purpose as this? 

But, so it is; there are books of amusement as well as books of worth, over which human intellect is employed, as much to the purpose intended by the Creator, as the limbs of those indolent baskers in the sun are, who loll and stare throughout the day at passengers and lanourers, but are totally inactive themselves. What a spectacle! Men and women--mortals, possessed of immortal souls, born for eternity, employed from day to day in killing time! Yea, until the last moment allotted them on earth flies away, and time kills the body, and launches the soul into the abyss of eternity: alas! perhaps unprepared for heaven, and meet, ah, far too meet, for that place of torment from whence there is no return! 

Can we reasonably suppose that man was created for such a purpose as this? What! To spend a life in cheating himself out of himself--inducing delirium, in order to drown conscience? Monstrous! 

“On Reading.” The Imperial Magazine, Or, Compendium of Religious, Moral, & Philosophical Knowledge, 1830, pp. 225–225, play.google.com/books/reader?id=390RAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PP1.

VIA:

Adler, Rachel. “The 19th Century Moral Panic Over ... Paper Technology.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 4 Aug. 2017, www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/08/the_19th_century_moral_panic_over_paper_technology.html.

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Timeline of Controversial Technologies

Writing

Inexpensive (Wood-pulp) Paper

Leisure Reading

Cold-stored Eggs

Refrigeration

Home-frozen Ice

Recorded Music

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Shapiro, Paul. Clean Meat: How Growing Meat without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. Gallery Books, 2018.

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“SWEEPING across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. 

Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. 

And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time. “

John Philip Sousa, "The Menace of Mechanical Music," Appleton's Magazine, Vol. 8 (1906).

Via http://explorepahistory.com/odocument.php?docId=1-4-1A1

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“At a time when globalization and new food technologies have provoked similar concerns, the cold-storage egg controversies merit attention for at least three reasons. 

First, they help to illustrate how much the very meaning of "freshness" has varied over time and place, and matters more in some foods than others. Eggs alone do not tell the whole story of freshness, but their history reveals some quite radical shifts in how this taken-for-granted quality is produced and preserved. 

Second, these controversies show that mean ings of freshness are often fuzzy, contradictory, and never just about food. Rather, societies' norms and practices surrounding fresh food reflect much broader ideas about their place in the natural world, and about how, through technology and social relations, they should mediate its perils and penuries. 

Lastly, these controversies and their eventual resolution illuminate the moral quandaries accompanying the making of modern food supply. At a time when the industrialized world's consumers enjoyed generally cheaper, cleaner, and more varied provisions than previous generations, refrigeration provoked both dishonesty and distrust, especially when applied to eggs. 

Farmers ultimately found the solution, and hens paid the price.“

The Triumph of the Egg Author(s): Susanne E. Freidberg 

Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Apr., 2008), pp. 400-423 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable 

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27563675 

Accessed: 12-06-2018 16:32 UTC