Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 1904 edition. If you click this book’s cover you can see the 1910 Glom.
It always amuses me to realize we’re looking at a book that was leafed through more than a century ago.
In 1910 William Howard Taft had settled into the White House and Teddy Roosevelt was just beginning to wonder what his old friend Taft was doing. Johnny Mercer was born in late 1909 and Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel Prize. That set the stage for a swiftly moving 1910. The Ottomans were losing their grip on empire. The first horror movie, Frankenstein, was released. Halley’s Comet appeared for the first time in 76 years and the first dirigible flew in Germany. The students would have read the news of Mark Twain’s death, but they couldn’t know that Sarah and Harry’s new baby in New York City, Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, would move generations of music lovers. Years later they’d settle in, though, and listen to Artie Shaw playing over their new radio.
There were 92 million people in the U.S. in 1910, an increase of 21 percent over the 1900 census data — a decennial rate, according to Wikipedia, which hasn’t been matched since. There were 2.1 million people in Alabama. Braxton Bragg Comer was the governor. He reformed the railroad system, child labor laws, boosted schools for white students and helped move the needle on state literacy. He did little for black Alabamians. He presided over a big local and state push toward Prohibition. This was a period when it was not illegal to possess alcohol in Alabama, but you could not purchase it.
The main agricultural building at Auburn is named after Comer. It was built in 1909, and rebuilt after a fire in the 1920s. That building is said to have housed more departments and academic units over the years than any other building on campus except Samford Hall. It got its start in a tough time for Auburn, university officials had just beaten back an effort to move the university to Birmingham. President Thach, who has been discussed in this space before, was successful in securing much needed money for the university, and that irked the people across the state at Alabama. It got nasty. And you thought that rivalry was all about football …
