When I was a kid in St. Louis from about June 15 to about September 15 the temperature went up to about 100°F every day with humidity about 100 as well. Night was little relief. The temperature rarely went below 80°F at night.
We did not have air conditioning. My dad considered it an unnecessary luxury. When the sun came up we sealed the house as well as we could, closing the curtains and windows, opening the door for as short a time as possible. When the sun went down we pulled the cooler outdoor air in with fans. It was hot and close but tolerable.
The only people with tans were field hands, laborers, and the rich.
In the winter, say, from December through January, at night the temperature generally dipped below 32°F but during the day it almost invariably rose above freezing. Drivers in St. Louis know how to drive on ice! Temperature very rarely went below 10°F and much warmer temperatures during the day were a commonplace. I knew people who made a tradition of playing golf in their shirtsleeves on Christmas Day.
Where I live now in Chicago in the summer we always have a few days where the temperature rises above 100°F and we always have a few days in the winter when the temperature dips below 0°F. Summer nights are generally very pleasant.
St. Louis is at roughly the same latitude as Algiers. Chicago is at roughly the same latitude as Rome. Algiers and Rome are more temperate than St. Louis or Chicago because of the moderating effect of the sea. For comparison Paris and Frankfurt are at about the same latitude as Vancouver.
Until the invention of the steel plough much of the Midwest could not be cultivated. The turf was too tough, the soil too rocky or, as in Missouri, too clay-ey. You had to be tough and tenacious to wrest a living from the soil.
The people of the United States mirror their land. There is a toughness, a roughness to the people of the Midwest, just as there is to their land. By comparison the Eastern seaboard and the West Coast are much more temperate, much more like Europe.
The most miserable weather I have ever experienced in the United States was in Texas. It’s beastly hot in the summer and either dry as dust or dank and humid, depending on where you are. There is nothing quite as frightening as watching a thunderstorm move towards you across the hundreds of miles of Texas prairie.
I have nothing but respect for the people of Texas. Not only do they tolerate it, they love their native state. That takes a special kind of person.
For practical purposes Florida was unlivable until the invention of the electrical air conditioner in the late 1920s. Swamp coolers (evaporative air conditioning) helped a little but not a lot.
The people of Europe are presently going through a heatwave, temperatures rising above 100°F. They are not accustomed to it. They have my sympathy.
Where I lived in Germany winter temperatures rarely dropped below 20°F or rose above 80°F in the summer. If my experience is any gauge, the climate in Europe is incredibly mild, the land rich and gentle. Europeans cannot understand how rough and hard a place the United States is.
“There is a toughness, a roughness to the people of the Midwest, just as there is to their land.”
True, but the conditions didn’t make them that way. It weeded them out, the ones that lived anyway. Many early settlers went back during drought, or simply died, leaving no mark.