Barone:
What’s your benchmark? What is the historical era with which you compare life in contemporary America?
For
many astute commentators on various points of the political spectrum, it is
postwar America, the two decades after the United States and its allies won
World War II and before Lyndon Johnson sent half a million U.S. troops to
Vietnam.
Conservatives
look back fondly on postwar America’s high marriage rates and stable families,
few divorces and out-of-wedlock births, low crime rates and widely shared
cultural values celebrated in classic movies and television sitcoms that almost
everyone watched. Liberals look back fondly on postwar America’s high income
equality and labor union membership, its low rates of unemployment and rising
education levels, its high marginal tax rates and its high rates of social
mobility.
Neither
side embraces the whole package. No one today wants to go back to legally
mandated and violently enforced racial segregation. Very few Americans today
want to return to stigmatizing homosexuality.
But
some things have been lost. Books like libertarian Charles Murray’s Coming Apart or liberal Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, which lament the family
instability and economic stagnation of today’s downscale America, inspire a
nostalgia for a time widely seen as the American norm.
But was
it really the norm? Postwar America was the result of unique circumstances –
economic dominance when competitor nations were devastated, cultural uniformity
that followed from a universal popular culture and the common experience of
military service (16 million Americans served in the wartime military; the
proportional equivalent today would be 38 million).
So let
me offer a different benchmark: the America of 1910 or some other year before
the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
I
started thinking about that on a recent weekend sightseeing tour of lower
Manhattan. It’s become a kind of outdoor museum, with few cars on the street
and with dozens of tourists eyeing the massive buildings -- the columned stock
exchange, JP Morgan’s austere headquarters, the massive Equitable Building and
the 60-story Woolworth Building looming over lower Broadway – with their marble
gleaming as it must have when they were newly built 100 or so years ago.
The
America of 1910 was a lot more like today’s America than you might think. The
economy was growing, but fitfully. Disruptive technology was threatening old
industries, creating new jobs but eliminating many others.
Income
inequality was much greater than today, and living conditions more disparate.
Electricity was common in cities but unavailable on the farms where half of
Americans lived. John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford were billionaires at a time
when average annual incomes were below $1,000.
It was
an America even more culturally divided than we are today. Within a mile or so
of Wall Street lived hundreds of thousands of Jewish and Italian immigrants in
the world’s most crowded neighborhoods. Immigration as a percentage of
pre-existing population between the opening of Ellis Island in 1892 and the
outbreak of World War I in 1914 was three times the level of 1982-2007.
The
South was in many ways a separate and underdeveloped country, still estranged
half a century after the Civil War, with income levels one-quarter those of New
York. Even as 30 million Europeans crossed the ocean to America, only 1 million
Southern whites and 1 million blacks moved North despite the promise of much
higher wages.
Marriage
rates were lower than in postwar America, and many young people dropped by the
wayside. Alcohol consumption was much higher than today; prostitution, female
and male, was common. People didn’t like to talk about these things, but you
get hints about them in the novels of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.
The
Americans of 1910 faced terrorism and globalization, too. Anarchists murdered
President William McKinley in 1901 and set off a bomb that killed dozens next
to J.P. Morgan’s 23 Wall Street in 1920. This America was interlaced with the
global economy and, with its growing economic and demographic might, risked
being drawn into any world war.
So,
America in 1910, with nearly 100 million people, was in important ways less
like the postwar America of 150 million than like today’s America of 300
million. Studying how Americans handled – or mishandled – similar challenges
may prove more fruitful than yearning to restore the unique and non-replicable
America of Charles Murray’s, Robert Putnam’s and my youth.
