How long is 100 years? Historians give a tour of jarring changes that span President Nelson’s life

As the turn of the century approached in 1999, a publication posed a provocative question.
What was more jarring, historians were asked, to fall asleep in 1900 and wake up in 1950, or to miss the following half-century and awake in the year 2000?
The consensus was that the first was the most jarring period of development. A person who woke up in 1950 wouldn’t recognize the world hardly at all. Someone waking in 2000 would at least recognize a cell phone as a telephone you carry with you, or a computer as a typewriter with a screen, said Grant Madsen, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University.
Time travel from 1924 to 2024 would be similarly jolting, according to Madsen and two other historians who provided fun and interesting insights comparing the differences between the birth year and 100th birthday of President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“If you were born in 1924, and I have a friend who was, the world you were born into is incredibly different from the one we’re in now. But that’s always true in American history. We just don’t always realize it because we’re living it,” said Michael Green, chair of the history department at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
The historians took us beyond the typical idea of comparing prices to highlight dramatic social, political, technological changes. Some things may seem surprisingly similar. Politics were divisive and immigration was a hot-button political issue, Green said.
Much is decidedly different. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, had gone mainstream in the mid-1920s and segregation was firmly entrenched.
“The person with a typical 1920s attitude would have a really hard time understanding President Nelson’s worldview 100 years later,” BYU’s Madsen said.
It would be a buzzkill not to take a swift look at prices, especially with current reports of inflation and price gouging. In 1924, a quart of milk cost 14 cents. A pound of flour cost 5 cents.
A single dollar bought 37 pounds of potatoes and 11 pounds of sugar, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That report showed that inflation was an issue then, too. Thirty years earlier, in 1894, a dollar purchased 66 pounds of potatoes.
Food prices were pretty consistent between 1920 and 1929, when the Great Depression hit, according to Reference.com. We’ll circle back later to some other prices that relate to technology.
The distance from here back to 1924 can be measured in humans.
“One hundred years is roughly equivalent to three to four generations,” said J.B. Haws, executive director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
In fact, President Nelson and his late wife Dantzel began a family that now spans — what do you know! — five generations. They have
Haws shared an example including two past church presidents that illustrates, he said, “how quickly we can make connections to the past, between a pioneer generation and President Nelson.”
President Nelson was born in Salt Lake City, which at the time had 128,564 residents. Today, the city’s metropolitan area has a population of 1,257,936.
“Imagine a world where we didn’t have internet, we didn’t have TV and we were just getting radio,” Green said. “Radio news didn’t exist. Radio networks didn’t exist. You didn’t stream. You didn’t binge-watch. You went to silent movies.”
That’s really tough for Gen Z, Green said. The professor hardly needs to go that far back to blow the minds of his young students. He just tells them about the era of dial-up internet and they are “aghast,” he said.
Green might also startle students by talking about a time before American high schools. President Nelson graduated from East High School, which became Utah’s second high school just 11 years before he was born.
“The whole idea of a high school, of a place where teenagers would be unsupervised without parents and get an education, was a relatively new feature in the American landscape,” BYU’s Madsen said.
That’s one reason why the 1920s are more accessible to modern minds than if we look back another 20 or 30 years earlier, Madsen said.
Obviously, the technological advances from then to now are staggering, and the historians say more about them below.
It is the social changes of the past 100 years that are most striking, Madsen said.
President Nelson was born in an isolationist America, a sentiment rooted in the recently concluded World War I, Haws said. The United States refused to join the League of Nations, an effort to deny the new geopolitical reality. Madsen said an “America first” mindset prevailed.
It was the Roaring ‘20s, in part because the economy had recovered and was booming. And John Dillinger and Al Capone were celebrity hero-outlaws. But the decade was dominated by Protestant Christian ethics; Prohibition made the production and sale of alcohol illegal. Politics were conservative.
“Socially, it was a really peculiar time,” Madsen said. “It was the most moralistic era of the century because of Prohibition and fundamentalism.” The Fundamentals, a series of 12 booklets touting conservative Christian fundamentalism, had been issued in the previous decade, but their influence peaked in the 1920s.
“1924 is the year of a very strict, and in the opinion of critics at the time and many since, racist and xenophobic immigration law,” Green said.
Green and Madsen noted the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Madsen called this period “the nadir of Civil Rights” in the 1900s.
“There was a lot of commentary and cartoons that we would look back on today and say, even if we want to restrict immigration or feel strongly about who should be immigrating, we really would not want to say the things they said,” Green said.
Madsen said the typical 1920s attitude rooted in that low point for civil rights would struggle to understand President Nelson’s worldview today because of desegregation and civil rights laws.
“Here’s President Nelson as prophet meeting with the NAACP and decrying racism,” Madsen said. “Socially, it’s a huge change in 100-year period of time.”
More social change was coming. The 1920s ended with the Great Depression, which would give rise to nationalism and ultimately, as Green said, a second “war to end all wars.” Those two long, drawn-out upheavals led to a massive transition for the United States, which moved from isolationism to becoming “a global watchdog involved in everything in the world,” Madsen said.
What emerged was a global economy fueled by global transportation, free movement, free trade and instant communication and access.
“(President Nelson) would have been at a formative age when there were cataclysmic things going on. The Great Depression would have informed all of his teenage years,” Madsen said. “Then World War II happened, and he was draft age and getting schooling.”
President Nelson was 17 and a student at the University of Utah when America was forced into the war and turned 18 and became draft eligible in September 1942, as the American war machine was surging to life. He spend the decade earning a bachelor’s degree, a medical degree and Ph.D. before serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Korean War.
“Those two cataclysms spur growth and change in America and the world,” Madsen said. “President Nelson had very early life experiences with global cataclysms. Those are pretty searing events and experiences.”
They gave him perspective that has helped inform his ministry, said Richard E. “Rick” Turley, former Assistant Church Historian.
“Sometimes, people whose lives are short see an event occur and feel like the sky is falling, and he’s always there to assure us that it’s not, that he’s seen it before, and in fact, he has,” Turley said. “He’s born in 1924 not long after the flu pandemic, not long after the First World War, and he’s seen the stock market crash in the United States, the Great Depression that affected not only the United States but the world. He’s seen World War II, he’s had a role as a medical doctor in the military. He’s seen the Korean War.
“His life gives us a considerable amount of perspective.”
In 2020, in fact, President Nelson shared a message of hope, healing and optimism after speaking about his personal experiences with the Great Depression, World War II, the rise of terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic and the deaths of his first wife and two of his daughters.
Trolleys and streetcars trundled along Salt Lake City streets from 1889 to 1945, according to TrolleySquare.com. President Nelson took streetcars to the Salt Lake Library as a boy.
Cars were part of normal life, albeit expensive. These were the costs of four types of cars in 1924, according to Reference.com.
Many of the advances came with new language, such as the phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
“We get both the bread slicer and the cliche in the 1920s,” Madsen said.
The decade also saw the rollout of the first dishwashing machine and electric washing machine, which cost $81.95. A vacuum cleaner was $28.95, according to Reference.com.
The radio was shrinking the world, but there wasn’t one in every home in 1924. The RCA Electric Radiola sold for $495, equal to about $5,000 today.
Airplanes are familiar after World War I, and airmail was common but commercial aviation was in its earliest and very expensive days. Commercial flights were not yet pressurized.
“Widespread commercial air travel begins after World War II,” Madsen said.
Despite the war-weary isolationism of the 1920s, World War I was a part of the inevitable march toward globalization. In fact, Elder David O. McKay went on a global tour in 1920-21 and would become known as the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who catalyzed the international expansion of the faith. In 1925, another apostle, Elder Melvin J. Ballard traveled to South America and dedicated it for the preaching of the gospel.
President Nelson’s life would be swept up in those forces. In addition to living through the Depression and World War II and serving in the Korean War, President Nelson participated in other global shifts that illustrate the changes of the past century.
He was part of the team at the University of Minnesota that developed the first heart-lung machine that made open-heart surgery possible. In 1955, President Nelson performed the first open heart surgery west of the Mississippi River. He went on to train doctors around the world, from India to China to Argentina and beyond. From the 1950s to the 1980s, President Nelson was immersed in medical advancements spread across the world.
In the 1980s, President Nelson was building bridges for the Church of Jesus Christ behind the Iron Curtain. President Ezra Taft Benson assigned President Nelson, then a junior apostle, to navigate the Cold War “to open up the nations in Eastern Europe that are now under the yoke of Communism for the preaching of the gospel.”
From 1985-89, he made nearly 30 trips to Eastern Europe and what then was the Soviet Union. The records of his travel to lecture and teach surgeons in some of those countries helped him create connections. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he had reported to President Benson that almost every country in Eastern Europe had acknowledged the church and accepted missionaries.