Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my undergraduate alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 1910 edition. If you click that cover you can see the digital debut of the 1908 Glom.
So check out the 1908 cover, when Theodore Roosevelt was serving in his last year as president. The governor of Alabama was Braxton Bragg Comer, a progressive, who was in his second year on the job. (We discussed him recently.)
In 1907 and 1908 API was fighting for its life. There was a proposal to move the university to Birmingham, but it was ultimately shot down. Ultimately that led to university president Charles Thach securing unprecedented funds for the school. It was to be a time of growth for Auburn, but that meant more squabbles with the University of Alabama. We’ve been over all of this before, as well.
The upcoming census would put Alabama at 2.1 million people, so they’d just broken — or were about to eclipse — the 2 million mark in 1908. The primary industrial cities in that day were Birmingham, Bessemer, Montgomery, Mobile, Anniston.
Cotton remained a top economic driver, both in agriculture and textiles. It was about 60 percent of the total crop values in the state, spanning almost 4 million acres, exceeded the combined acreage of corn, oats, wheat, and rye. The industrial economy was continuing to spool up. In 1904 just under 68,000 Alabamians worked in manufacturing. By 1908 the number was around 80,000.
Students on campus during the 1907-1908 school year might have noted the passenger liner RMS Lusitania’s maiden voyage from England to New York City. Of course no one could know what would happen to her in 1915. They might have read about Guglielmo Marconi turning on his radio and broadcasting for the first time in Ireland and Scotland. In December, 362 people were killed in a coal mine explosion in West Virginia. Two weeks later 239 people were killed in another mining accident in Pennsylvania. The actress Fay Wray was born in the fall of 1907, as was Burgess Meredith and Gene Autry.
In January of 1908 the Eiffel Tower became a broadcast antennae for the first time. The Olympics were held in London that summer. (Euil “Snitz” Snider was a two-year-old in Birmingham in 1908, and no one could know then that he’d be an Olympian, Auburn’s first competitor in the games, in 1920.) Just after the end of the school year was the Tunguska event, believed to be an air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment over Siberia.
Notable births in the first half of 1908 include feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, author Louis L’Amour and actors Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart. Ian Fleming and Don Ameche also came into the world that May.
Anyway, you can walk through all the covers if you start here. For a detailed look at selected volumes, you might enjoy this link. Here is the university’s official collection.
