The year was 1910 and in the United States, it was a census year. As the enumerators went door to door, the U.S. population stood at 92,228,496. Urban residents represented 45.6 percent of the total and 54.4 percent of the population lived in rural areas. Twenty years prior, in 1890, only 35.1 percent of the population lived in urban areas and 64.9 percent lived in rural areas, and fifty years prior, in 1860, only 19.8 percent of the population lived in urban areas as opposed to 80.2 percent living in rural areas.
(Source: U.S. Census Bureau.)
The growth of cities and industrialization was changing society and there was a feeling of inequality. William Howard Taft was President of the United States, which was in the midst of what is commonly referred to as the â€œProgressive Era.â€ Continuing what his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt began, Taft began eighty anti-trust suits, aimed at breaking up large monopolies.
Labor disputes pitted labor unions against factory owners in the Bethlehem Steel Strike, Chicago Clothing Workers’ StrikeÂ and the Cloakmakers’ Strike. In Los Angeles, in the midst of a strike of metal workers, the building of the Los Angeles Times, which had taken an anti-union position, was dynamited and the building caught fire trapping many of its workers. Union activists later plead guilty to the crime.
On a sad note in U.S. immigration history, the immigration station at Angel Island opened its doors in January 1910 in an effort to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.Â It is estimated that more than 1 million persons coming to and leaving the U.S. were processed through Angel Island, including 175,000 Chinese immigrants and 150,000 Japanese immigrants, with some being held there for weeks or even months in horrible conditions. For more information, see the FAQ on the Angel Island website. Chinese exclusion records are available to Ancestry.com members online for San Francisco, New York, and Hawaii.
In other parts of the world, the Mexican Revolution began in November when Francisco I. Madero called for an uprising against President Porfirio Diaz. Six months later Diaz abdicated and Francisco Madero was later elected president.
In Paris, the Seine River flooded the city. Low-laying railroad lines and the unfinished underground Metropolitan railroad filled with water when the Seine rose 8.72 meters and overflowed its banks.
In the UK, suffragettes clashed with police in what is known as “Black Friday” in a protest outside the House of Commons.
NOTE: The gentleman in the photograph isÂ Juliana’s great-grandfather, Raymond Francis Dyer, taken around 1910. Click on the image to enlarge it.
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