Dreaming of a Slow Christmas

In 1829, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle declared that the world was moving too fast. It was a “mechanical age,” he wrote, one in which “our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside.” It was a time when, “on every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one.”

Carlyle could have been writing from just about any moment in the modern era, about artificial intelligence or computer-aided design, automated assembly lines or mechanized transportation. It’s not hard to find others who had similar worries, long before any of us were born, about the pace of modern life becoming much too fast. A South Carolina politician suggested in 1881 that his constituents read newspapers to keep up with the breakneck “current of events;” New Yorkers in 1904 decried flimsy railroad coaches that “collapsed like eggshells” when speeding locomotives collided; and a Missouri farm magazine observed the youth of 1916 rushing to the movies instead of being “grouped about the piano on a winter night.” Christmas, a time many Americans associated with hearth and home, could seem especially out of pace with a fast-moving, modern age.

Sometime in the mid-1930s, an aeronautical engineer named Henri A. Franchimont and his wife sent out a particularly un-Christmassy looking Christmas card, one that featured a sleek aircraft soaring above a speeding train and automobile, with an art deco cityscape in the background. No decorated trees, presents, cookies, or Santa Clauses can be seen.

Open the card, though, and you’ll find an inscription that’s just a bit subversive, one that acknowledges the era’s headlong changes, but tries to counter them with timeless goodwill:

SO MANY NEW THINGS IN THIS FAST MOVING AGE

MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO KEEP PACE WITH AN EVER

CHANGING WORLD… BUT WITH THE SINCERE EXPRESSION

OF GOOD WILL ENDURING THROUGH ALL AGES, WE REPEAT

A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Was the pace of the modern era a good thing, or was it just inevitable? When the railroads established “speed as a new principle of public life,” as historian Alan Trachtenberg puts it, had that utopian promise ever been fulfilled? Was the modern world pushing us apart or bringing us together, and where were all the travelers on that card actually going? Why not be optimistic: home to their families, let’s say, where they could take a few days to live a little more slowly. And with mantels full of Christmas cards, brought by trucks and railroads and airplanes, straight to their door.

Are you in search of aviation-tinged Christmassy wisdom? Come visit the Manuscript Division Reading Room, and you’ll find more than you might expect. There are hundreds of aeronautical Christmas cards in the records of the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences, spread across more than a dozen oversized scrapbooks, with cards dating from the late 1920s through the 1940s. Until then, best wishes for a slow Christmas.

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“In 1829…” Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times [Edinburgh Review, 1829]” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1859), 188.

“Christmas card…” “Personal Notes of the Members,” The Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers XXI, no. 6 (December 1927), 20.

“Alan Trachtenberg…” Alan Trachtenberg, “Foreword” in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19^th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), xiii.