Posted on 05/17/2016 5:17:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
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, JPMorgan'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.
Rome about the time of Nero.
Do 'you' want your son or daughter marrying one?
There was no federal assistance (welfare).
No Federal Reserve.
No popular election of Senators.
Give me 1910. It was a much better time. And very, very different from today.
Another factor is that the US had vast expanses of land to be developed. This was a safety valve. People moved there and by their own initiative could excel. Same thing with Australia for England. Today, there’s too much government and too little opportunity for the individual to cut his own path.
I do. I want it completely stigmatized so that a homosexual feels deep shame and seeks the help that is available and needed.
I want my government to stop pretending, because bad things happen when governments pretend:
Governments pretended that black people aren't people.
Governments pretended that Jewish people aren't people.
Governments pretend that preborn people aren't people.
And now, governments are pretending that homosexuality is normal and the problems of that, like the problems of other pretensions, will never end until the pretending ends.
Barone is a fool and a sucker.
He has bought the lie that homosexuality is normal, healthy and desirable. While it is in fact the opposite of all three.
America today resembles the time of czar Nicholas II with the current iteration of Rasputin, Valerie Jarrett, the de facto dictator of government policy, in charge of most administration actions.
They “handled the challenges” by electing Woodrow Wilson.
I’m not liking the comparison at all.
WW was elected by a minority of voters, only because the majority of Americans split between Taft and Teddy R. That's what Mitt wants to repeat, and that is why he must be stopped by any legal means necessary.
For every ‘similarity’ America now has with 1910, there are probably 100,000 stark differences.
A popular weekly dime-novel periodical of the day back then went by the title “Work and Win.” That gives the first clue about some of the differences.
1912 - Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party
2016 - Willard “Mitt” Romney and the Bull Sh*t Party
What a waste of time and words. Just another piece of garbage.
We do a disservice to the truth by not naming it as such.
"...No one today wants to go back to legally mandated and violently enforced racial segregation. ..."
I'd settle for minorities behaving according to normal, mainstream values, but demanding that would be rayciss.
The vast majority of unconstitutional legislation now a part of the U.S. Code and CFR would disappear. We'd become instantly a freer country, and soon a much more prosperous one.
Bull Moose Party? A.k.a. the Progressive Party?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912)
I was a kid during the last part of the '30s and I equate now to then - jobs were tight, hundreds of people lining up for a few jobs, the employer was top dog, the economy was trying to recover. Interest rates on savings were low, but not as ridiculous as now. One major difference was the deflation then compared to the inflation now. Deja Vu all over again.
My long-deceased grandparents were preparing to enter the work force in 1910. Grandma left school after getting her eighth grade diploma when she was thirteen. She cleaned houses to help support her younger brothers and sisters. Grandpa went into the Navy as soon as he was of age to enlist. The two married when he finished his service which included WW I service.
Poll parents, "Do you want your son to take it from behind?" I bet libs wouldn't like the results.
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