Going into Independence Day weekend, Nevada faces an uncertain but cautiously optimistic future. Our economy is finally recovering from the effects of the preceding year’s pandemic and political strife. Our state appears to be at the forefront of the newest mineral technology fueling personal transportation. Political partisanship, however, remains tense, and recent fires remind everyone that, Independence Day or not, the summer season remains fire season in this part of the country.

I am, of course, talking about Independence Day 1921 — exactly one century ago.

The world of 1921 was, in many respects, surprisingly similar to our own. The final deadly waves of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic finally exhausted themselves by the end of 1920, making 1921 the first truly normal post-pandemic year. We’re admittedly not quite there yet, but we have treatments and vaccines which are helping us get back to normal a bit faster than 1921’s pandemic survivors.

Additionally, just as we’re only now finally and belatedly wrapping up the War on Terror by withdrawing from Afghanistan, the United States didn’t formally end its state of war with Germany — a state of war which hadn’t meaningfully existed since Armistice Day in 1918 — until the ratification of the Knox-Porter Resolution on July 2, nearly three years after the effective end of the first World War.

Meanwhile, a sharp economic recession — caused by the closure of munitions factories following the end of the first World War, falling agriculture prices as Europe’s farms finally started producing enough food for their people, and the economic dislocations created by the influenza pandemic — just ended, though that wasn’t obvious at the time. In Nevada, the Depression of 1920-1921 showed its effects, among other places, in page-length lists of delinquent property taxpayers in local newspapers, like the Tonopah Daily Bonanza and the Las Vegas Age. By contrast, it took Nevada’s economy growing faster than every other state’s over the past three months just to get our economy back to where it was at the start of the pandemic.

In the world of 1921, just like today, Nevadans celebrated the birth of our nation. Before the Fourth, local newspapers in Carson City, Yerington, and Reno all eagerly advertised the planned festivities for the day, including a mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance — more specifically, one of the competing pledges of allegiance to our flag which were popular at the time. According to the Carson City Daily Appeal, Carson City ultimately chose to recite the Bellamy Pledge, which competed against the more overtly religious Batch Pledge. Americans would eventually combine the verbiage of the Bellamy Pledge with the overt religiosity (“under God”) of the Batch Pledge in the 1950s.

The parades were well-received. People were ready and eager to get out of the house.

According to the Reno Evening Gazette, “probably 10,000” spectators (Reno’s population was barely 12,000 at the time) watched Reno’s Independence Day parade, which featured marching bands, military veterans, and an air show (a novel experience at the time) — plus an unscheduled interruption due to the fire department being called to an emergency while they were lining up into parade formation. The Tonopah Daily Bonanza, meanwhile, reported that Tonopah enjoyed a “safe and sane Fourth of July,” which featured a children’s parade, live music, and a baseball game between Round Mountain and Tonopah — the Round Mountain Golds won, 5-2. Unlike in Reno, Tonopah’s fire department wasn’t “called out on any pretext whatever.” 

The news was, of course, not all good — though much of the bad news remains uncannily familiar today.

The Reno Evening Gazette, for example, published a brief AP newswire story about an international conference on the “white slave” trade — nowadays, we call it sex trafficking, but the details are eerily familiar. According to reports in the Brooklyn Citizen and The Miami Daily Metropolis in 1922, the League of Nations was concerned about women and children being trafficked from Central Europe to cities in South America. Naturally, this trafficking was tied into the drug trade of the time — since Prohibition was only two years old, this meant Latin American bootleggers and rum runners instead of our considerably more modern stereotypically Latin American narcotics suppliers.

Curiously, the number of women identified as directly affected by this trafficking was astonishingly low, proportionally speaking, with the highest estimate of trafficked women being fewer than two thousand — and before you ask, no, neither report included a single interview of one of these “enslaved” women to get her side of the story and confirm she was actually trafficked in the first place and didn’t just emigrate from, say, war-ravaged Budapest to Buenos Aires to live a better, more peaceful life.

Meanwhile, illustrating the heightened political tensions of the time and mirroring a more extreme version of some of our own, front page news in both the Nevada State Journal and the Reno Evening Gazette reported on the kidnapping of Kate O’Hare, a socialist lecturer who was kidnapped in Twin Falls, Idaho and driven against her will to Montello, a small rail town in northeast Nevada near the Utah border. Kate O’Hare was a prominent anti-war activist during the first World War who, like fellow socialist Eugene Debs, was ultimately arrested and convicted for her vocal opposition to the United States’ involvement in the first World War.

Unlike Eugene Debs, however, she was pardoned by President Wilson after the war (perhaps because she and the former president shared similar views regarding racial equality) and had resumed her career on the socialist lecture circuit. Before she had a chance to give her speech in Twin Falls, however, she reported that nearly a dozen men, including two prominent businessmen, kidnapped her and drove her to Nevada with instructions to never return to Idaho.

She wasn’t the only one facing pressure for her political views. The Reno Evening Gazette reported that, two days before Independence Day, Joe Russo pled guilty to the charge of being an anarchist — he was caught donating to an anarchist publication, an example you can follow by clicking here or here. Nowadays, the charge of criminal anarchy remains in Nevada’s statutes as NRS 203.115, even though, as I pointed out nearly three years ago, the law has arguably been unenforceable since Brandenburg v. Ohio established the constitutionality of politically provocative speech in 1969. 

Oh, and yes, fireworks lit California’s landscapes on fire in 1921, too. In a delightful period example of the past exonerative tense, the Nevada State Journal headlined a story about Independence Day fires with the headline, “Approach of July Fourth Causes Fire,” as if the passage of time coinciding with a calendar date spontaneously generated the phlogiston required to burn forests and fields into a crisp. To the story’s credit, however, once you get past the passive-exonerative headline, it’s reported that two city fires in California burned over 14 blocks, while grass and grain fires near Berkeley and Davis in northern California burned through 8,000 acres, including six houses. The Reno Evening Gazette further explained that there were several fires throughout northern and central California that July, many of which caused by a now-familiar combination of premature Independence Day celebrations and a severe drought that year.

Like today’s modern-day lithium rush throughout Nevada, there was a rush for the cutting-edge fuel of the future in 1921 Nevada as well — oil. The Nevada State Journal reported on the building excitement surrounding the development of a possible oil deposit in Fallon, the Mason Valley News reported on an oil deposit found near Yerington, and the Tonopah Daily Bonanza reported on possible oil finds in Fish Lake Valley (west of Goldfield) and Illipah (west of Ely). Along with these reports came breathless ads encouraging investors to put their money into Nevada oil stocks with promises of financial independence and, perhaps, a chance to earn thousands for each dollar invested.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know Nevada’s oil industry would never amount to much, and not for a few decades yet. Though there are parts of the state which naturally seep oil and natural gas, they rarely amount to anything worth drilling for, which is why the first producing oil wells in Nevada weren’t drilled until the 1950s in Railroad Valley, southwest of Ely. Nowadays, there are a grand total of five oil producers in the entire state who collectively extract roughly 267,000 barrels of oil per year. To put that number into perspective, worldwide oil production is approximately 76 million barrels per day, which means Nevada produces roughly 0.000000963 percent of the world’s oil output. 

In other words, less than one of every one million oil barrels produced each day is produced in Nevada. 

Finally, the newspapers of 1921 were filled with what we would now think of as takes that aged like milk. The Nevada State Journal, for example, reported on the seeming absurdity, at least at the time, of possible war between the United States and Japan. Meanwhile, the American Legion in California passed a resolution opposing the importation and exhibition of German-made films to “prevent the destructions of the American moving picture industry,” lest the “economic differences in the cost of production of moving pictures films in Europe and America” put Hollywood out of business.

The world of Nevada in 1921 was not the same world we live in today. There are roughly forty times as many Nevadans now as there were then, for starters. However, it’s sometimes reassuring to look back on the past, see similar challenges to what we face today, and know with the benefit of hindsight that, whether we answered those challenges correctly the first time around or not, at least we got through them well enough to get a second chance.

David Colborne was active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he blogged intermittently on his personal blog, ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate, and served on the Executive Committee for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, and the father of two sons. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].