I'm delighted that the first picture is of a child being carried in a tote bag, and the website is advertising "Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote" right up at the top.
I don’t know whether it’s “everyone trusted everyone” so much as “everyone expected really bad things to happen anyway.” Like, if there’s a good chance I might lose this kid to diphtheria, or drowning in the river, or whatever, sending them on a trip alone doesn’t feel too dangerous by comparison.
It is unlikely there has ever been a "everyone trusted everyone" moment in human history, but even today we rely on "random strangers" to move children to and fro every single (school) day. Such trust in people isn't out of the ordinary even now.
I doubt parents put their children on the school bus because "something bad is apt to happen anyway", rather "it is just what you do" without any further thought. The postal service carrying humans isn't what we do these days, so it stands out as a curiosity. If it the story was, instead, about a bus line or taxi service, it wouldn't seem unusual at all.
the postman in those days was not a random stranger, he was certainly the son of the Smith from the village next door that your cousin went to school with. And even if he was a total stranger at the beginning of his career, after twenty years of delivering your mails every day, you knew him, you had discussed with him, he was certainly invited to drink coffee or beer during his service by some old retired farmers, so he had acquired your trust.
I have this idea that if one of us were talking to a bill and ted from 2200 or so, one of their questions would be something like "so 40,000+ people died in america alone from car crashes, and everyone knew this and just ignored it???"
For this old timey example I agree, but from like 2000 to 2025, I have noticed a decline in trust in the US. People are also more trusting today in certain parts vs others, or in some other countries, and it's not because of lower standards.
I feel like it's connected to a rise in flim-flam.
The con man has to convince you not to trust institutions and authorities, when those institutions and authorities tell you his product/service/investment opportunity is fake.
when something bad happens now it’ll be all over news broadcasts and social media.
I think it’s pretty well established that fear mongering will skew your perception of something bad happening, but something I hadn’t considered until now is that it can make the bad thing worse. In addition to dealing with whatever tragedy befell you, there’s a layer of judgemental shame piled on top (“how could they be so careless to let this happen? They must be a bad, neglectful parent”)
I think it's more that communities were smaller and more consistent. People didn't move that much. Your neighbors were your lifelong neighbors, and the postman was your lifelong postman, so you knew him, and your neighbors knew him, so they didn't lack trust in anybody—they had trust in their local "social network," both toward specific individuals, and because of the implicit "peer pressure" that kept everybody in line. I.e the postman would have not been able to run away with your child without the whole community being after him.
I have a similar thought re "work sucks"/"nobody wants to work anymore", where actually maybe work and people are the same as ever but being at home is more entertaining than it used to be.
One has to wonder how often things went wrong in the past and just didn't get reported on. Or were just shrugged off.
I don't think people of the 19th century were fundamentally better than they are today. Things like (sexual) abuse happened. There was probably a lot more of it than today: big taboo on anything related to sex, women couldn't even vote, fewer investigative tools (fingerprints, cameras, DNA). Well, it probably wasn't great.
Today if a child would see a friend blow up in front of him people would be talking about PTSD, (life-long) trauma, etc. During the war my grandfather had a friend blow up in front of him. "Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had to deal with it, haha!"
In the past lots of things like this were under-represented. Today they're probably over-represented.
> Today if a child would see a friend blow up in front of him people would be talking about PTSD, (life-long) trauma, etc. During the war my grandfather had a friend blow up in front of him. "Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had to deal with it, haha!"
... and carry that shit for the rest of their lives. A lot of Boomer kids are absolute dogshit parents because they never worked through the trauma they experienced back during their childhood (or during the rest of their lives), and they never learned how to properly manage their emotions (and yes I am talking both about men and women here), plainly because they didn't know better, there was no research, no nothing available. There's a reason why "break the cycle" has become a thing.
Societal trust levels tend to correlate with cultural and racial homogeneity. The erosion of trust within Western civilization reflects this trend, particularly in the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act).
But this is hardly unique to the modern era. Consider ancient Rome: as the Empire expanded, it absorbed vast, culturally diverse populations. Over time, this growing diversity--combined with weak integration mechanisms--gradually strained social cohesion and undermined trust in institutions.
It’s a recurring pattern throughout human history.
That seems like a wildly questionable conclusion to draw. 60 years prior to that act, there was a huge influx of immigrants who would have been considered non-white at the time: Italians, the Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, etc. To the people of the time, that was a very non-homogenous period.
True, but there’s a key difference -- those earlier waves, despite being seen as "outsiders" at the time, still came from the same civilizational foundation. Europeans, whether Irish, Italains, Germans, or Poles, shared a common history shaped by Christianity, Greco-Roman influence, and broadly similar cultural norms. The friction was real, but over time, assimilation worked because there was enough cultural overlap to make it possible.
The post-1965 immigration wave brought in people from entirely different civilizations -- with no shared history, values, or worldview. That isn’t just "non-homogeneity," it’s civilizational fragmentation. And unlike the 19th and early 20th century European immigration, there’s no historical precedent where that level of deep cultural divergence integrates at scale -- not in Rome, not in Byzantium, not anywhere.
I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today.
I think the other sister comment makes sense: protecting children had a very different definition back then than it is today.
I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today.
thats not very convincing. you should also show that it wasnt say, inequality that killed the trust
canada is a high trust society because of its ethnic diversity, and the competition between french and englisg culture. europe is in a much higher trust state as the EU than it ever was as a set of competing great powers.
greece has plenty of homogeny, but is very low trust.
keeping racists happy is probably pretty uncorrelated to trust, compared to say, government services rendered, and democratic participation.
It's a recurring bullshit just-so story peddled by people who reject the complexity of actual history, which is why you provide no sources: you have learned Spengler and Hanania are unwelcome in polite society but not why, and there is no one else to whom you could turn. - well, Steve Sailer, I suppose.
I think you can still get a real sense of overall societal trust from such stories. Not too long ago I horrified a relatively-young person by explaining how in the not-too-distant past, people used to have their names, phone numbers and home addresses automatically listed in a large, White-covered book whose Pages were distributed freely to everyone in the city.
Why were they surprised? The fact that it's printed? Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)
Either way, I think trust now and always in the US has been driven more by the urban/rural divide than anything else. Even as this article points out, this was primarily a rural phenomenon. When you know your mail carrier on a first name basis, things are a lot different.
> Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)
This -- while people realize that Google et al. have hordes of personal information about them, they don't expect that information to be available to the general public (thus the horror). Similarly, I expect people would be horrified to find out just how much personal information the data brokers have. There's an aspect of cognitive dissonance at play.
No it wasn't. Famously so. America was a melting pot.
In the 1920s when this happened 15% of the population was immigrants. IE first generation Americans. With backgrounds from all over. Primarily European countries, but not the ones you think. Russia, for example, was a major portion of that number.
America at the time was way more heterogenous than it is today.
A major portion of that homogenation happened due to 1950s era racism and redlining which turned neighborhoods from mixed cultures into homogenous cultures.
Many of the highest crime places on earth are ethnically homogenous. Culture is not determined by skin color. Rather, Japan places a high value on the rights of and responsibility to the collective good. People in the US are culturally much less willing to suppress any rights of the individual, even if it supports a collective good. You can be much more confident that others will do what's in your best interest if society will come down on them hard if they don't.
For me even more interesting is that people found incredibly fun abuses of early mail. For instance using the postal services to deliver heavy goods such as brick. The transported all the brick for an entire bank building in the early days [1].
> Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia.
Is there more to this story? Presumably they didn't actually box up their infant and entrust it to a total stranger!?
given that it was in Ohio, the grandmother lived in Batavia a few miles away, and this was in 1913 I feel pretty confident in saying they probably knew the person they were entrusting their infant to.
the quoted article does not say they knew the carrier, but it does not explicitly say they did not. Reporting being what it generally is I think they imply that he was not known because they cannot explicitly say it without being called out for lying.
on edit: changed undoubtedly to probably, more description.
Reminds me of a book, Mailing May[1], I read to my daughter and now my granddaughter. A true story of a family on a budget who sent their daughter to see grandma as mail cargo on a train. Cute story.
That book also has drawings that are at least moderately accurate of some of the trestles on that railroad line. They called them "rails on stilts", and that's a fairly accurate description.
Reminds me of this story: https://www.australiantimes.co.uk/expat-life/the-true-tale-o...
John McSorley who helped was a teacher at my school.
I'm delighted that the first picture is of a child being carried in a tote bag, and the website is advertising "Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote" right up at the top.
Presumably the child is not included.
Well, it's like that charity that comes around every Thanksgiving or so. What's it called? - 'Totes for Tots?'
Free tote*
*Tot not included.
A tote without a tot is just an 'e'. :-)
“Totes Not Tots”
Flat Stanley was mailed to California. If I recall correctly, his parents saved on postage because he was flat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley
thanks, i completely forgot about Flat Stanley
They paid mail prices for mail employees to chaperone their kids. Not a baby in a box wrapped up with parcel tape.
This was back when you knew people that did stuff for you rather than it all be automatic.
There's something incredible about how much trust there used to be in society.
I don’t know whether it’s “everyone trusted everyone” so much as “everyone expected really bad things to happen anyway.” Like, if there’s a good chance I might lose this kid to diphtheria, or drowning in the river, or whatever, sending them on a trip alone doesn’t feel too dangerous by comparison.
It is unlikely there has ever been a "everyone trusted everyone" moment in human history, but even today we rely on "random strangers" to move children to and fro every single (school) day. Such trust in people isn't out of the ordinary even now.
I doubt parents put their children on the school bus because "something bad is apt to happen anyway", rather "it is just what you do" without any further thought. The postal service carrying humans isn't what we do these days, so it stands out as a curiosity. If it the story was, instead, about a bus line or taxi service, it wouldn't seem unusual at all.
the postman in those days was not a random stranger, he was certainly the son of the Smith from the village next door that your cousin went to school with. And even if he was a total stranger at the beginning of his career, after twenty years of delivering your mails every day, you knew him, you had discussed with him, he was certainly invited to drink coffee or beer during his service by some old retired farmers, so he had acquired your trust.
I suspect this is more true than we realize.
I have this idea that if one of us were talking to a bill and ted from 2200 or so, one of their questions would be something like "so 40,000+ people died in america alone from car crashes, and everyone knew this and just ignored it???"
It's amazing what you get used to.
For this old timey example I agree, but from like 2000 to 2025, I have noticed a decline in trust in the US. People are also more trusting today in certain parts vs others, or in some other countries, and it's not because of lower standards.
I feel like it's connected to a rise in flim-flam.
The con man has to convince you not to trust institutions and authorities, when those institutions and authorities tell you his product/service/investment opportunity is fake.
Half-baked thought:
when something bad happens now it’ll be all over news broadcasts and social media.
I think it’s pretty well established that fear mongering will skew your perception of something bad happening, but something I hadn’t considered until now is that it can make the bad thing worse. In addition to dealing with whatever tragedy befell you, there’s a layer of judgemental shame piled on top (“how could they be so careless to let this happen? They must be a bad, neglectful parent”)
I think it's more that communities were smaller and more consistent. People didn't move that much. Your neighbors were your lifelong neighbors, and the postman was your lifelong postman, so you knew him, and your neighbors knew him, so they didn't lack trust in anybody—they had trust in their local "social network," both toward specific individuals, and because of the implicit "peer pressure" that kept everybody in line. I.e the postman would have not been able to run away with your child without the whole community being after him.
I have a similar thought re "work sucks"/"nobody wants to work anymore", where actually maybe work and people are the same as ever but being at home is more entertaining than it used to be.
People have been putting this in newspapers for hundreds of years.
Everytime I read the phrase I just groan and move to the next thing to read.
remind me of https://xkcd.com/1227/
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/step/
One has to wonder how often things went wrong in the past and just didn't get reported on. Or were just shrugged off.
I don't think people of the 19th century were fundamentally better than they are today. Things like (sexual) abuse happened. There was probably a lot more of it than today: big taboo on anything related to sex, women couldn't even vote, fewer investigative tools (fingerprints, cameras, DNA). Well, it probably wasn't great.
Today if a child would see a friend blow up in front of him people would be talking about PTSD, (life-long) trauma, etc. During the war my grandfather had a friend blow up in front of him. "Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had to deal with it, haha!"
In the past lots of things like this were under-represented. Today they're probably over-represented.
>"Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had to deal with it, haha!"
I can't help but wonder sometimes if that's healthier. Probably better for some people in some circumstances and worse in others.
I think they just called it shell-shock
> Today if a child would see a friend blow up in front of him people would be talking about PTSD, (life-long) trauma, etc. During the war my grandfather had a friend blow up in front of him. "Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had to deal with it, haha!"
... and carry that shit for the rest of their lives. A lot of Boomer kids are absolute dogshit parents because they never worked through the trauma they experienced back during their childhood (or during the rest of their lives), and they never learned how to properly manage their emotions (and yes I am talking both about men and women here), plainly because they didn't know better, there was no research, no nothing available. There's a reason why "break the cycle" has become a thing.
Societal trust levels tend to correlate with cultural and racial homogeneity. The erosion of trust within Western civilization reflects this trend, particularly in the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act).
But this is hardly unique to the modern era. Consider ancient Rome: as the Empire expanded, it absorbed vast, culturally diverse populations. Over time, this growing diversity--combined with weak integration mechanisms--gradually strained social cohesion and undermined trust in institutions.
It’s a recurring pattern throughout human history.
That seems like a wildly questionable conclusion to draw. 60 years prior to that act, there was a huge influx of immigrants who would have been considered non-white at the time: Italians, the Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, etc. To the people of the time, that was a very non-homogenous period.
True, but there’s a key difference -- those earlier waves, despite being seen as "outsiders" at the time, still came from the same civilizational foundation. Europeans, whether Irish, Italains, Germans, or Poles, shared a common history shaped by Christianity, Greco-Roman influence, and broadly similar cultural norms. The friction was real, but over time, assimilation worked because there was enough cultural overlap to make it possible.
The post-1965 immigration wave brought in people from entirely different civilizations -- with no shared history, values, or worldview. That isn’t just "non-homogeneity," it’s civilizational fragmentation. And unlike the 19th and early 20th century European immigration, there’s no historical precedent where that level of deep cultural divergence integrates at scale -- not in Rome, not in Byzantium, not anywhere.
I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today. I think the other sister comment makes sense: protecting children had a very different definition back then than it is today.
I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today.
Maybe it stops recurring when we realize we are all human. Will it take the discovery of an alien race to realize we are one?
Savages.
thats not very convincing. you should also show that it wasnt say, inequality that killed the trust
canada is a high trust society because of its ethnic diversity, and the competition between french and englisg culture. europe is in a much higher trust state as the EU than it ever was as a set of competing great powers.
greece has plenty of homogeny, but is very low trust.
keeping racists happy is probably pretty uncorrelated to trust, compared to say, government services rendered, and democratic participation.
It's a recurring bullshit just-so story peddled by people who reject the complexity of actual history, which is why you provide no sources: you have learned Spengler and Hanania are unwelcome in polite society but not why, and there is no one else to whom you could turn. - well, Steve Sailer, I suppose.
I don't think these newsworthy stories about isolated cases of this happening were in any way representative of society as a whole.
You can today and you always could find instances of people doing unusual stuff.
I think you can still get a real sense of overall societal trust from such stories. Not too long ago I horrified a relatively-young person by explaining how in the not-too-distant past, people used to have their names, phone numbers and home addresses automatically listed in a large, White-covered book whose Pages were distributed freely to everyone in the city.
Why were they surprised? The fact that it's printed? Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)
Either way, I think trust now and always in the US has been driven more by the urban/rural divide than anything else. Even as this article points out, this was primarily a rural phenomenon. When you know your mail carrier on a first name basis, things are a lot different.
> Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)
This -- while people realize that Google et al. have hordes of personal information about them, they don't expect that information to be available to the general public (thus the horror). Similarly, I expect people would be horrified to find out just how much personal information the data brokers have. There's an aspect of cognitive dissonance at play.
From a trust point of view, this isn't any different than a kid taking the school bus, is it?
It is really not that even that dissimilar functionally; both serving to move a child from one place to another.
Huh, today children can trust their parents to not send them through the mail ...
It was way more ethnically homogenous. When that decreases, trust declines. See Japan now as a particularly high trust modern society.
No it wasn't. Famously so. America was a melting pot.
In the 1920s when this happened 15% of the population was immigrants. IE first generation Americans. With backgrounds from all over. Primarily European countries, but not the ones you think. Russia, for example, was a major portion of that number.
America at the time was way more heterogenous than it is today.
A major portion of that homogenation happened due to 1950s era racism and redlining which turned neighborhoods from mixed cultures into homogenous cultures.
War did a lot.
My ancestors spent three generations in America speaking German until WWI made being too German something you didn't want to be.
I imagine a lot of Russian/Eastern European-derived-Americans felt a lot of pressure in the 1950s & 60s to be as generically "American" as possible.
Many of the highest crime places on earth are ethnically homogenous. Culture is not determined by skin color. Rather, Japan places a high value on the rights of and responsibility to the collective good. People in the US are culturally much less willing to suppress any rights of the individual, even if it supports a collective good. You can be much more confident that others will do what's in your best interest if society will come down on them hard if they don't.
“Mail carriers were trusted servants, and that goes to prove it,” Lynch says. “There are stories of rural carriers delivering babies ...”
Plenty of stories about them fathering babies, too.
Some very hairy babies from a very hair baby-maker, or so I understand.
I am reminded of Bukowski’s Post Office.
For me even more interesting is that people found incredibly fun abuses of early mail. For instance using the postal services to deliver heavy goods such as brick. The transported all the brick for an entire bank building in the early days [1].
[1]: https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_2022.2007.1
> Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia.
Is there more to this story? Presumably they didn't actually box up their infant and entrust it to a total stranger!?
given that it was in Ohio, the grandmother lived in Batavia a few miles away, and this was in 1913 I feel pretty confident in saying they probably knew the person they were entrusting their infant to.
the quoted article does not say they knew the carrier, but it does not explicitly say they did not. Reporting being what it generally is I think they imply that he was not known because they cannot explicitly say it without being called out for lying.
on edit: changed undoubtedly to probably, more description.
Reminds me of a book, Mailing May[1], I read to my daughter and now my granddaughter. A true story of a family on a budget who sent their daughter to see grandma as mail cargo on a train. Cute story.
https://www.amazon.com/Mailing-May-Michael-Tunnell/dp/006443...
It is mentioned in the article - I'll have to look out for it
That book also has drawings that are at least moderately accurate of some of the trestles on that railroad line. They called them "rails on stilts", and that's a fairly accurate description.
> "It got some headlines when it happened, probably because it was so cute"
That's one way to spin human trafficking..
I see no rule that says an adult cannot be mailed
Adult birds can explicitly be mailed: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm
That has been done as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Box_Brown
This TIL struck like a laxative!
>Domestic packages may not weigh more than 70 pounds.
https://faq.usps.com/articles/Knowledge/Parcel-Size-Weight-F...
Adults are too heavy.
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train
yeah we've done some unironically questionable things over the centuries.