Fancy yourself a soft drink with some powerful narcotics inside of it? Well,
today that sort of thing is illegal- but a hundred
years ago you'd be shocked at some of the things you could legally get away with.
Child Labor
Everyone loves their children, but until only relatively recently you wouldn't be
out of place to suggest that maybe people loved their children a little less than they should.
Life used to be pretty tough for people, and that meant everybody needed to pitch in
just to make it another year. When humanity began to settle down and build communities,
they did it on the backs of the farmers who's job it was to feed everybody. The transition from
hunter/gatherer to an agrarian society allowed for the specialization of individuals- farmers could
generate enough food to make hunters and gatherers obsolete, and freed up a large number of people
from the daily grind of trying to find something to eat. This in turn led to specialization of
workers, and the pursuit of everything from metal working to art to government.
But make no mistake, right from the start children were expected to do almost as much
work as an adult. Life on a farm was especially tough, and one of the main reasons throughout
history to have children was not just to propagate the species, but to help manage a
sprawling farm. The more labor available, the greater an operation a farmer could take on,
and then eventually pass it on to his children who'd repeat the process. But this meant brutal
hours, waking up well before dawn to tend to the various animals. Then it was hours of backbreaking
labor pulling weeds, tilling fields, planting and harvesting crops... it was almost a 24 hour
affair, and the consequences for skipping out on the job were nothing less than total starvation.
But city children didn't have it much better, with most people barely eking out existences.
During Victorian england children were expected to contribute to the family's bread winning, and
some of the ways they did this included dangerous jobs in tanneries, where they would be exposed
to harsh and caustic chemicals, or dredging through the open-face garbage dumps of the age
for valuables worth selling. As the industrial revolution dawned, people's standards of living
improved- but children were at the forefront of the revolution, working in factories as young as
eight years old. Because children were less likely to unionize, could be paid less, and could fit in
tight places that couldn't be reached otherwise, they were a favorite for employees. Many of
these children even lived in dormitories on the factory itself, going home on the weekends, and
it wasn't uncommon for overseers to mete out harsh physical punishments for poor or slow performance.
One of the greatest advantages for factories of the industrial revolution
though was that children's tiny hands could fit into tough-to-reach places on machines for fixes,
and often the machines wouldn't be shut down before said fixes.
In the name of profit and efficency, countless children were killed or maimed,
until finally in the early 1900s child labor laws began to be formed.
Our next thing that used to be legal is the world’s oldest profession.
Prostitution
Everyone knows there's only one place left in the United States where you can still legally
engage in the world's oldest profession, and that's Las Vegas. Except not really,
because prostitution is actually illegal inside of Clark County, where Las Vegas is located,
as many disappointed tourists have discovered. But while today
you can face stiff punishments for either soliciting or prostituting,
it wasn't very long ago that the practice wasn't just legal, it was basically a part of culture.
Sumerian records dating back to 2400 BC are the earliest records we have for the world's
oldest profession. Nobody knows for sure when prostitution began as an official profession,
but it's almost certain that its origins date back to the very first human settlements,
when women realized they could capitalize on men's desire for sex in order to procure goods
and services. To be fair though, the ancient world had its fair share of both male and
female prostitutes, and not only was the practice legal in most of the world, but it was actually
sacred in some societies. All across the near east various cults and religions built temples
housed by holy prostitutes, as sex was seen as one of the best ways to draw close to the gods.
In the Americans, the Aztecs allowed prostitution in special buildings called Cihuacalli,
a word that means House of Women. Religious authorities believed that if women wanted
to work as prostitutes, they should do so only in these pseudo-temples where they could work
under the protection of Tlazolteotl, the goddess of purification, steam baths, midwives, filth,
and patron to adulterers. Their neighbors to the south, the Inca, also allowed prostitution, but
they were forced to live segregated from others and under the supervision of the government.
Fast forward to Europe in the middle ages and prostitution was alive and well.
While technically considered a sin by religious authorities, it was believed that prostitution
helped prevent more serious sins such as rape, sodomy, and masturbation. However,
the good times wouldn't last as massive outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases in the late 15th
and early 16th centuries led to the gradual but inevitable outlawing of prostitution.
In America, prostitution was generally tolerated,
once more seen as a necessary evil to prevent greater evil. It was even acceptable for a married
man to solicit the services of a prostitute if his wife didn't want to have sex with him.
However, as the 19th century wore on and police forces became more professional, attitudes towards
prostitution also changed, eventually leading to the outright banning except in very few select
places in the country. Today prostitution is illegal in all but ten counties in Nevada-
and none of them are anywhere near Las Vegas. Despite countless deaths and maimings,
our next thing that used to be legal took decades to be made illegal.
Drinking and Driving
Today there are few ways to mess up your life more thoroughly than to get a DUI charge.
In the US, a DUI can cost you almost $20,000 in legal fees and penalties, plus a strong
possibility of jail time and suspension of your license to boot. Given the incredible
danger driving while drunk puts you and other people in though, it's hardly surprising that
society clamped down so hard on this extremely hazardous activity- but it wasn't always this way.
From the moment that the first automobile was available, somebody was drunk behind the wheel-
mostly because our ancestors used to drink a lot. Up until the invention of the automobile,
the worst a drunk might do is get bucked off a horse, and it was awful hard to be a
significant hazard to others even if drunk while driving a carriage. But the automobile changed
all that, by putting much more killing power in the hands of a drunk driver.
In 1910 New York saw the hazard of drunk driving and implemented the United State's first law
against driving under the influence. California was quick to follow suit, and other states slowly
followed. However enforcement was not uniform, and what exactly constituted “drunk driving” wasn't
really clear unless the subject was obviously stumbling drunk. In the 1930s, national DUI laws
became a lot tougher as the nation's highway system slowly grew and expanded. The American
Medical Association studied the factors that were most likely to lead to an automobile crash or
related injury, and perhaps unsurprisingly drunk driving was at the top of the list.
However, enforcement would need specific guidelines- how drunk did a person have to be to
actually be impaired to operate a motor vehicle? Up until now, police were basically left to decide
this on their own, but as society evolved clear legal limits needed to be established.
While the AMA was doing its research, the National Safety Council undertook its own study
to try and develop ways to test for intoxication, and accurately measure just how intoxicated
a person was. By 1930 the legal limit for blood alcohol concentration was set at .15.
As sales of cars exploded in the 70s though, so did drunk driving offenses. This prompted more
severe penalties for drinking and driving, leading to both the raising of the drinking age from 18 to
21 and changing the legal limit to a BAC of .10. During the 90s, this was dropped to just .08.
Our next thing that was made illegal is the world’s second oldest profession.
Mercenaries
Strictly speaking, the world's second oldest profession was never truly outlawed in most of
the world, it simply fell out of favor. In 1989, the Geneva Convention officially outlawed the use
of mercenaries in conflict, but in 2001 the United Nations Mercenary Convention, a much more binding
agreement outlawing the use of mercenaries, was only ratified by 35 countries. That was
good news for the United States, who was about to resurrect the world's second-oldest career.
Nobody knows the true origins of mercenaries, but they were not only legal for most of human
history, they were downright critical. In the pre-Westphalian nation-state order,
mercenaries were how you went to war. Sure, you could always count on conscripts and
perhaps some standing forces that you might possess, but maintaining a standing military
strong enough to wage wars was simply cost prohibitive for most of history.
Military equipment was extremely costly, and without anything resembling modern
manufacturing techniques, blacksmiths would be forced to labor for dozens of hours
on individual pieces of equipment at a time. Manpower was a serious problem too,
as every citizen pressed into service as a soldier was one less merchant, or farmer,
or artisan, and this not only hurt your economy but could spell disaster in the form of famine
if too many farmers were dragged away from their farms. In fact, for large tracts of human history
war was simply not waged during planting or harvest seasons for exactly this reason.
Mercenaries however were men who made their living from violence,
and thus could be hired without upsetting your domestic economy. What's more,
they brought their own equipment, saving you thousands of hours of labor and exuberant costs.
As full-time soldiers, mercenaries also operated at far greater efficiency on a
battlefield than a conscript, who had to split their time between domestic duties and training.
While a nation could have a small standing army, mercenaries inevitably shored up their ranks
and in many cases, were the very bulwark of a military. Loyalty was also not as great a
concern as one might think, and while throughout history there are examples of mercenaries turning
on their employers after being made a better deal by an enemy, the fact is that mercenary
outfits lived and died on their dependability. A unit known for treachery would find few buyers.
With the rise of the Westphalian order and the nation-state, mercenaries fell increasingly out of
favor. Countries could now afford to economically outfit and maintain their own standing forces,
pushing mercenaries into the peripheries of the world. However, with the US's wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the nearly extinct career has practically exploded back into the
forefront of man's wars. Faced with a critical shortage of personnel to fight two separate wars,
the US needed to either institute a draft or hire mercenaries. A draft would be political suicide,
so instead the US spent billions hiring 'private military contractors'. At one
point there were as many PMCs in Iraq and Afghanistan as rank-and-file US troops.
Today you can once more hire a mercenary outfit to wage your private violence if you wish- though
they really don't like it when you use the M word. Private Military Contractors is the correct term,
and they have been used by countries around the world thanks to a resurgence in popularity.
Not only are mercenaries employed by the US and Russian governments, but by a slew of private
companies seeking to protect their facilities in specially volatile areas of the world.
Occasionally though, nations use them against each other in a way of waging a sort of proxy
battle against one another- and no incident is more famous than the Battle of Khasam.
This battle in Syria took place across two days in February of 2018 in Syria, when around 500
pro-government fighters attacked a small force of 40 American special forces and a handful of
Syrian Democratic Forces allies. Despite denials by the Russian government, it was later discovered
that Russian mercenaries had lead the attack, though the exact number is unknown. The battle
would end with 1 SDF fighter wounded, and anywhere between 55 to over 100 of the enemy force killed,
along with the destruction of a large number of tanks and armored vehicles.
Unofficial sources inside of Russia however claimed that anywhere between 80
and 218 Russian mercenaries were killed in the attack,
with the Russian government denying all involvement in the catastrophe.
Now check out Things You Thought Were Illegal But Are Perfectly Fine,
or click this other video instead!