As the new century began, the era of peace with which the old one had ended continued. True, the peace was uneasy. In Europe, the old balance of power was challenged as Russia discarded authoritarianism and modernized its economy with help from a newly united Germany. In the Balkans, the breakup of the old “multiethnic” states had unleashed the horrors of unbridled nationalism and sectarian strife.
China was awakening. Japan absorbed and bettered Western technology. But America was the economic colossus of the age. The Congress in Washington liberalized trade with the southern half of our continent. American technology was far superior to that elsewhere, and Europeans bewailed the new American cultural hegemony. Yet all was not well with the American spirit. Just a few decades after fighting a mighty war that had left the country more cohesive than ever, deep social divisions were evident. There was both an uneducated lumpenproletariat and an upper class that used wealth to buy education and quiet. The cities were a babel of tongues, and nativist sentiment was rampant. The president warned that the nation risked becoming a “tangle of squabbling nationalities.” Culture wars raged as homespun stalwarts of the heartlands, Bible in hand, attacked the vices of the city . . ."
Log off. Click, But hang on. Which century is this, anyway? Answer: both the 20th and the 21st. Every item on the list above happened at the start of the century that’s now ending, and every one of them will likely happen as the next one begins. It’s a hell of a way to mark the coming of the millennium, but it’s true: we’re going forward to the past.
We should have seen this coming. Five years is long enough to get wisdom, and five years after the Berlin wall fell it’s plain that a massive aberration of history has ended. For 75 years, from 1914 to 1989, the world was stood upside down as wars and ideologies perverted what should have been. Russians, well educated and inventive, were not meant to stand in lines for bread –the doleful hallmark of communism. At the turn of this century, the Russian economy was rivaling that of Britain and France, and before too long it may do so again. Had World War II not happened, Japanese industrialists would have made American companies squeal decades before the 1980s. Had China not walled itself behind Maoism, its extraordinary economic potential would long have been a commonplace.
In very large measure, this return to the past is great news. Only a Grinch would bemoan a Christmas in which the billions who once lived under communism taste the prosperity that capitalism can bring. Indeed, historians will doubtless marvel at the global economic boom of the last two decades of this century, as countries that should long since have been rich–like Argentina and Hungary–gain their rightful place in the sun.
But the return to the past is also troubling, especially for Americans. The cold war had its horrors, God knows; it got deadly hot in places like Vietnam, far removed from the heartlands of its principal protagonists. It stunted the lives of two generations of brave East Europeans. It turned Washington, D.C., into an imperial city, its suburbs dotted with the citadels of “national security”–the Pentagon, Langley, Fort Meade.
Yet the cold war was oddly comfortable. We knew our place; knew who our friends and enemies were. Preparing for war meant counting the number of warheads that could whiz from the wheat fields of North Dakota over the Pole to Murmansk. But now nobody knows if the Russians are America’s allies or adversaries. Teddy Roosevelt had the same problem. He first cheered Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (“Japan is playing our game,” he said) and then spent a summer in Portsmouth, N.H., brokering a peace between the two countries that favored Russia.
The global economic boom is uncomfortable, too, just as it was before World War I, when technology and trade integrated the world economy as never before. Then it was Europe that felt the chill as cheap American goods filled the stores. Now many in the United States itself see “globalization” as a threat. “India” used to be a place whose teeming millions sometimes starved, Now it’s a country whose textile industries (and, within a decade, software houses) sell their low-cost goods to American markets. Economists will say everyone gains–Indians get better pay; we get cheap clothes and spread-sheets–but it’s easy to think that trade destroys the jobs that were the bedrock of the American middle class. “I like my VCR,” wrote Lars-Erik Nelson in New York Newsday recently, “but it wasn’t worth losing Brooklyn.”
AH, YES, BROOKLYN. NOW, THERE’S A place that’s rediscovering its past. Not the recent past, those years after 1945, golden in the memory of middle-aged men, when most everyone spoke English. Not “the past” of the 1950s, when, as Labor Secretary Robert Reich says, unskilled Americans could find “good factory jobs at the equivalent of $18 to $24 an hour.” No; Brooklyn will end the century just as it started it, with accents from all over the world, with an economy built not on a job for life but–for many–on a hustle to make ends meet. Just this month The Village Voice ran a story on an asthmatic Dominican woman at a Brooklyn rag-making factor), (now that’s a forward-to-the-past job) who made all of $5.10 an hour.
Immigration’s vital to understanding the United States today. Americans now aged around 50 built their suburban dreams in places like the San Fernando Valley, the heartland of support for California’s Proposition 187. The world of their youth was one in which immigration was rare. Fewer immigrants settled in the powerhouse America of the 1950s than in the 1850s, when the country was sparsely settled and rural. Now the Valley’s 40 percent Latino and Asian, while Quentin Tarantino ends “Pulp Fiction” with some young punk from England robbing a Los Angeles diner. And it isn’t just southern California that’s been changed. Go into a bar in some mountain town in North Carolina–the sort of place where the men have ponytails and the women tattoos-and you’ll probably hear accents from Mexico and Southeast Asia. Just like their predecessors a century ago, today’s immigrants will struggle with the twin urges to assimilate and to remember their roots. Just like their forebears, they will be accused of Balkanizing the country and stealing jobs from “real” Americans.
Can’t we get over this? Can’t we all–immigrants and natives-honor that combination of tradition and change that Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the former president of Mexico, calls his “guiding light”? America did this once before. It built a society that was multiethnic and yet had a common culture. And building such a society, peaceably, was one of the great achievements of the modern world. Can’t we manage it again?
In one important sense, it’s harder at the end of this century than it was at the beginning. For the bedrock has shifted. It’s now plain that what we misguidedly call the “traditional” family is under threat of collapse. For about a hundred years, the Western world was built on an implicit social unit; a man worked outside the house, a wife worked within it, they had a few children who all survived childhood, and the spouses stayed together till death did them part. Of course. the model wasn’t quite as simple as that–if it had been, the undergraduate class at the University of Chicago in 1902 wouldn’t have been more than 50 percent female. At the turn of this century about as many American marriages “broke up” each year as they did in the 1970s (though at the earlier date the overwhelming number of breakups were due to the death of one spouse, not divorce).
Still, American families are now in uncharted territory-economic and cultural pressures have seen to that. Divorce, single parenthood and the rise of working women- and there’s good and bad mixed up in that list-have changed the ways in which we can respond to the world outside. William Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues,” says that if we’re going to combat a trashy culture we need to “reinvent parents.” Not easy to do, when 60 percent of women with children under 6 are in the work force.
The simple point is this: Whether it’s the beginning of this century or the next, a time of great uncertainty demands some fixed points. We need something in our private lives that acts as a shield from the turmoil of the public square. At the dawn of a new millennium, we haven’t yet found the protector that will replace the “traditional” family. (Is it going to be the extended family? Is it going to be friendship, that much-ignored phenomenon that for many people is now more important than family ties?) That’s why, if W. Jefferson Clinton hosted any future multiactive history of our times, he’d offer alternative endings. Either:
As my first wife had long warned, there was a growing sickness in the American heart. There was nothing wrong with our economy; our companies entered the new century as worldbeaters. But somehow, we had lost the ability to transform wealth into human happiness. Our light shone less brightly in a clouded world.
Or:
Americans, as they had done before, found ways of tolerating the insignificant differences between them. We found new sources of pride and cohesion. We remade our country as a “nation of nations,” a model to which the rest of a world in turmoil aspired.
Choose. Click.
