1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind

What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature

“Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.”

- Octave Mirbeau, French novelist, 1910

About today’s piece: When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.

Welcome back to The Sunday Morning Post!

My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance:

Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.

When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.

No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written.¹ In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 1910², Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.

In today’s TSMP, I want to share with you my favorite passages and lessons from The Vertigo Years, most of which come from the chapter on the year 1910. Great history books remind us that while history never repeats itself, its themes never stop rhyming, and we would all do well to listen with open ears. I’ve tried to limit my summary to areas of overlap between the early 1900s and the 2020s, but I’m not going to press the similarities too hard throughout the piece. You’re going to have to recognize them for yourself.

1. People in 1910 felt the world was moving much too fast

Transportation technology remade the west in a few short decades between the 1880s and 1910. A “bicycle craze” swept America in the 1890s. The Wright Brothers took flight in 1903. The first Model Ts rolled off Ford’s production lines in 1908. In Europe, cars quickly transformed the physical environment. The number of automobiles in France increased from about 3,000 in 1900 to 100,000 by 1914. That year, Ford's factory in Detroit produced and sold more than 300,000 Model Ts.

Model T, Wikimedia Commons

Speed was a physical experience, Blom writes, and cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was unnatural for people to move so quickly through space—women, in particular. A woman on a bicycle was a thing to be feared. She signified a high-velocity freedom that was often associated with moral and sexual deviancy. Physicians warned that "diseases of the wheel" came by "the almost universal use of the bicycle" and that "serious evils" might befall the youth who rode without restraint. Moralists condemned women who “pedaled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers.”

Critics and novelists considered technological speed to be a vice, and they warned that our lust for celerity might turn into literal lust; that cars and bicycles would beckon us into carnal sin. In Le surmale (1902), the book’s hero wins a 100,000-mile bike race and then celebrates with an act of love-making that makes one character exclaim, “This is not a man, but a machine!” The idea that cars, planes, and bicycles were turning people into “machines” was most entertainingly summarized by a 1905 article in the journal Je sais tout (“I know all”), which calculated just how tall a human being would have to be to naturally walk at the pace that our new machines traveled. To equal the speed of a bicycle, for example, it was calculated that a person have to be more than 40 feet tall. Blom:

Comparisons with other forms of transportation showed that in a fast train, a voyager would be effectively 51 meters tall, while the chauffeur of a racing car would almost dwarf Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Technology had created a new race of giants — in both senses of the term — and it changed the experience of space and time itself.

2. Tech change created a surge in mental distress, which was called ‘American Nervousness’

“The growing speed of daily life, of news and work and play was a fetish of artists and industrialists alike,” Blom writes. “Never before had so much social change occurred so quickly.” As daily life sped up, people in the west started to break down.

Around the turn of the century, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the U.S. gradually made its way across the Atlantic. The doctor George Miller Beard had called it “neurasthenia,” or nervous exhaustion. Europeans sometimes referred to it as “American Nervousness.” According to Beard, the affliction was most common among “the in-door classes of civilized countries” and the sufferers could be found “in nearly every brain-working household.”³

As Blom points out, those afflicted tended to be white-collar workers working at the “frontiers of technology,” as “telephone operators, typesetters on new, faster machines, railway workers, engineers, [or] factory workers handling fast machines. One 1893 hospital survey of neurasthenia found that among nearly 600 cases, “there were almost 200 businessmen, 130 civil servants, 68 teachers, 56 students and eleven farmers.” Notably, no manual workers were counted at the clinic. Neurasthenia seemed to disproportionately affect white-collar workers, who were “overwhelmed” by their labor. “Overwork was a common theme in patients’ histories,” Blom writes.

It is tempting to write off this phenomenon as just another case of the “worried well.” But the scale of the west’s mental health distress in this period was striking. Blom:

In Germany, 40,375 patients were registered in mental hospitals in 1870. The number rose to 115,882 in 1900 and 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the proportion of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent. While these numbers include those suffering from many and varied mental conditions, not just neurasthenia, they do not include the huge number of sufferers who preferred going for cures or long stays in private sanatoriums, spas or other paramedical establishments in which a doctor would look after the guests — as in the one described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain.

3. 1910-1913 was also a hinge point in art history

“Artists were fascinated by this accelerated reality and its possibilities,” Blom writes. The novelists, painters, and musicians of the era could not stop talking about the changes they saw around them and their duty to use art to enter into a dialogue with those changes. Blom:

Their view of things was shaped by reading about races in fast machines and in children’s magazines, by over-hearing adult whispers about nervous breakdowns and fast women … their imagination was alert to the fact that an age had ended and a new one — by turns a promise and a menace — was busting onto the scene, visible as yet only in flashes and fragmented visions.

Blom deeply considers three artistic icons of the era: the composer Igor Stravinsky and the painters Vassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. Each sought to make art that felt simultaneously cutting-edge and primal. Each responded to the modern age by reaching for inspiration in the past.

Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:

“During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”

Some music critics now consider The Rite of Spring “undoubtedly the most famous composition of the early 20th century.”

As classical music disintegrated in the concert halls, visual art was undergoing its own revolution, which may have been technological in origin. For thousands of years before the turn-of-the-century, the ability to perfectly represent nature been a rare skill possessed only by the most talented painters and drawers among us. But the Kodak camera (invented in 1888, with sales accelerating into the 1900s) turned the ability to capture realist images into a consumerist trifle. It cannot be a coincidence that the rise of abstract art coincided so perfectly with the proliferation of cheap camera technology that debased the value of perfect renderings of the natural world.

In the early 1900s, Vassily Kandinsky, one of the great pioneers of abstract art, pushed back against the mind-blurring speed of modernity. Kandinsky drew inspiration from the shamans of the Ural Mountains and the sound of their drums, according to Blom, and his abstraction sought to capture their primary music in images. By turning sound into image, Kandinsky’s art sought to achieve an act of synesthesia that no Kodak machine could ever match. Other art historians are less certain about what inspired Kandinsky’s first abstract watercolors, which he painted around 1910. All that is certain is that paintings like this one reject any effort to depict the natural world as it might be seen through a retina or camera lens.

Untitled First Abstract Watercolor, 1910–1913

Kandinsky is one of my favorite artists. But the critical response to the dawn of abstract painting was about as brutal as it gets. One German review that Blom cites includes the following passage:

Looked at as painting they are the end of art, a prank. But they show a more nefarious side. The modern phrase that the object of art is indifferent, if abused here in a truly malevolent way... What is presented to us breathes the poison breath of the darkest places of vice of the big city and shows the constitution of the artists, which can only be understood in terms of pathology.

Around the same time that Kandinsky was putting his mark on abstraction, Pablo Picasso was pioneering his own rejection of purely representative art, with primitivism. Drawing inspiration from African masks and carvings from West Africa, Picasso’s art “did everything to hide its underlying technical and compositional virtuosity,” Blom writes. Picasso’s 1907 classic Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is “a large canvas of brutal and disturbing bluntness.” While Picasso was indifferent to the actual “significance and symbolism” of the African styles he drew on, Blom writes, critics have said his aim was to represent the “unchanging structure of the human condition” in the face of civilizational change.

Independent of one another, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, and Picasso each reacted to the modern world and “the alienation of the human mind from its own emotions” by pulling pre-modern styles and atavistic images into their art. What we call Modernism today was in most cases a reaction to modernity. It was an effort to excavate something ancient and honest about humanity in an age obsessed with and overrun by novelty.

4. Intellectuals in the early 1900s came up with new influential theories of human nature

Blom closes his chapter “1910: Human Nature Changed” by considering two intellectual giants of the time: the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910. The tension between their theories of human nature are profoundly relevant today.

In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber, a German sociologist, argued that certain Protestant—especially Calvinist—traditions supported habits that aligned with the development of modern capitalism. He argued that the Protestant tradition of northern European worshippers cultivated a disciplined approach to work, savings, and investment that proved valuable in commerce, while the Calvinist doctrine of divine grace “could lead believers to read worldly success as a possible sign of God’s favor,” as Blom summarizes. Weber believed that Protestantism not only encouraged followers to pour their energies into labor (hence the allusion to Work Ethic in the book’s title) but also helped create a culture of trade and investment that supported the rise of modern capitalism.

“It is easy to see how Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s,” Blom writes. To Freud, human nature was at risk of being fully dissolved by capitalism and modern society, like chalk dropped in acid. Beneath the polite masks demanded by modern society, he said, there lurked a more atavistic and instinctual self. Freud saw our psyche as a tug-of-war between the id (our animal urges) and superego (the voice in our head that internalizes society’s rules), with the ego stuck in the middle trying to negotiate an authentic identity in the face of mass inauthenticity. One of Freud’s most fantastic insights was that some people can channel or redirect their most raw and unacceptable urges toward productive and acceptable work. His name for this bit of psychological alchemy was sublimation.

Modern capitalism, in Freudian terms, was the sublimation of self-interest—or, one might even say, the sublimation of greed. “The suppression of natural urges is a necessary precondition for capitalist success,” Blom writes in summary, “but while it is productive for the group and its wealth, such an approach will eventually exact its revenge on the individual.” By this interpretation, the mass anxiety of the early 1900s—whether you call it neurasthenia, American Nervousness, or Newyorkitis—was price of modernity, technological development, and even capitalism itself.

There is little evidence that Freud and Weber ever debated one another. Yet when you set their theories side by side, it’s hard not to hear a conversation that still shapes much modern commentary. Weber wrote that modern capitalism evolved from religious doctrines that fit our nature, while Freud argued that human nature is unfit for a modern world that distorts and represses our basic urges. Are our most impressive inventions the ultimate expression of our humanity, or are they the ultimate threat to it? This is the question that every generation must answer for itself, including our own. It is a question equally worthy of the automobile and artificial intelligence. The troubling answer—for Weber and for Freud; for 1910 and for 2025—is: perhaps, both.

1. By “underrated,” I mean it’s astonishingly interesting, gorgeously written, and deserves to be quoted or cited about 1,000X more than it is.

2. Much of this article is based on Chapters 9 and 10 of The Vertigo Years, which are entitled “1909: The Cult of the Fast Machine” and “1910: Human Nature Changed.” Hence the title of the article. But, naturally, no article, chapter, or book that claims to be about one year will tend to limit itself to events exclusively from that year, so we’re discussing fin de siècle trends throughout the article.

3. Neurasthenia wasn’t the only name offered to describe this phenomenon. In 1901, the writer John Gardner coined the name of a new sickness caused by the biological effects of living around the fast cars and bicycles of big cities: Newyorkitis. Which is amazing.